skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a problem often not discussed about the utopia of a world filled with self driving cars... its very hard to make an AI that can handle 85 MPH on a crowded interstate

Aging is a much harder problem than getting self-driving cars to 85 MPH.

In fact, 85 MPH would be pretty safe with (a) high-quality cars on the road, (b) low speed variance, and (c) efficient lane use (German-style, no passing on right, no camping in the left lane). 85 isn't safe in high traffic under current conditions, but that's because there are enough cars that can't handle it, and your 85 + someone else's 60 = speed variance (which is more dangerous than raw speed).

The superior reaction time and efficiency of self-driving cars could easily get to the point where they can drive faster than typical humans can safely go.

One note (that has nothing to do with driving speed) is that any society that can prolong life will be technically far ahead of where we are now. I think this is an important note. You'd be insane to want to live for 500+ years in current conditions, with economic scarcity and plenty of unsolved, rare health problems-- one of which would inevitably take you down. Immortality is completely undesirable without humanitarian advancement; the question is whether it's desirable with the extreme technical advancement (and, one hopes, political progress) that it would require.
PHP 4 and PHP 5 weren't compatible either. How come migration was so much more successful over there than Python 2 to Python 3?
> "How to Build a Mind - Artificial Intelligence Reloaded" http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2013/30C3_-_5526_-_en_-_...
False dichotomy. We're social creatures: we can live together or not live at all.
Simple 2013
Running, bouldering, gym, several times a week. Marathons and mud runs (e.g. Tough Mudder) now and then for fun.
Thx for the link to the better demo.

I like all the graphical add-ons like the data flow graph: you have an expression graph so why not show it to the user...

This file is very interesting:
https://github.com/osnr/cruncher/blob/master/src/jison/parse...
How would one have to change the grammar to allow for things like sin(30°) in the equations?
Whenever I come across a green-screen ATM running decent old software I practically leap for joy. Why? I can get my money in 5 seconds. The new ones, that I guess are running Flash on top of MSIE on top of WinXP, are unbelievably slow.
The problem is that reasonable unicode support is a non-issue in many areas were python had a strong competitive advantage over other languages (e.g. data analysis, scientific python).

I don't know much about unicode myself, but some people I trust like Armin Ronacher have showed how some python3 are still heavily broken w.r.t unicode (http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2013/7/2/the-updated-guide-to-unicod...).
You should check statistics only for under age 30.

Also the accident rate in previous years is the wrong thing to check - you want to check the accident rate relative to the non-accident rate.
The size of the set k may be exponential but if you have a decision function D(C) == 1 iff there exists a path of cost < C you can use that function to do a binary search over all k's in polynomial time because binary search is log time.

Each call to D should give you 1 bit of the solution and with n bits you can represent numbers from 0 to O(2^n).
Given the stochastic nature of a lifespan, I believe the statement,

"We haven't really doubled our longevity, we just took care of some things that lead to a lot more [younger people] reaching [an older age]."

is, and will remain, true.
Nobody expects Perl 6 to be widely used yet. The Python community seems to expect Python 3 to be widely used by now.
I really like this model and framework - most people underestimate the impact of transaction costs, and I think it's partially why many companies overestimate the value they'll get from outsourcing.

But in the real world, I've worked with dozens of leaders and professionals, and I don't think I've ever seen someone with an over-delegation problem, where they had handed off too many tasks that they should have been doing themselves. Most have the opposite problem: mistakenly believing that delegation will take longer, or will result in lower quality work.

Delegation doesn't just help the person delegating, it helps the person receiving the work as well. It gives other people the opportunity to handle new challenges, feel ownership over their work, learn new skills, and apply what they're good at.
The foundations of our building are crumbling, causing all the wood beams to fall out of place.

Do you use a hammer to right them all?
Another question: what happens to a brain that stores so many years of memories? If there are serious complications, and I'm pretty sure that there are, chances are that they're going to be next to impossible to solve, unless some serious alteration (more brain capacity or memory erasing) happens.

I'm also assuming that any life expanding treatment would tackle senility issues (maybe with brain-repairing nanomachines? Who knows). If not, it would be far, far less useful.
"What's the point of being a human walking around the moon?"

The exact same thing as you walking around your neighborhood. Why not just send a little RC car with a camera? We exist in the universe, and it' as large or small as we make it.

I like big.
Another vote for hiking. Its awesome for socializing. The sights can be spectacular (depends where you live, I guess). I either hike or "just walk around" almost every day.

Snowshoeing is hiking on snow. Big fun, I love it.
Mags have a significant presence in enterprise these days.
I have about a year of industry knowledge working with ATMs. NCR and Diebold hold a huge portion of the North American ATM market and likely European too. All of the NCR and Diebold machines I worked on were running locked down Windows XP as of a couple of years ago. The PC hardware is fairly standard. Most of the peripherals like cash dispensers connect via USB to the PC in the ATM.

I haven't had a chance to look at the exploit but I'd assume it didn't necessarily use auto-play. The OS images that are loaded on these machines are highly customized and would likely prevent auto-loading a usb driver. However, either it auto-loaded or they exploited some other USB bug in Windows.

Once they could load code then they would have been able to manipulate the cash dispenser using an XFS app[0]. This would let them dispense bills from the safe to the customer facing throat. However, once the machine was restocked the bill counts would be off and the banks backend should detect the tampering.

Based on the story it sounds like they were able to load code into the banking application to allow activating their hack from the pin pad. To me that seems to indicate either a former engineer of NCR/Diebold or someone who got their hands on a used ATM and spent a lot of time reverse engineering the application software and chassis.

I've also made the assumption that this was done on a free-standing ATM[1]. Wall mount ATMs that you see at most banks are mostly behind the wall and would be extremely difficult to get access to a USB port.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEN/XFS
[1] http://www.diebold.com/products-services/atm-self-service/te...
As a Linux user, I'd like to believe that Linux distros enjoy this kind of influence, but I honestly can't see how.

How many people are still on Windows? How many are on OSX? How many are comfortable in 2.x and couldn't care less about new features?

Python 3.x may be better in some ways, but it just doesn't look better enough.

I wonder how long it will be before the 2.x community goes its own way like Perl 5.
no doubt - thanks for pointing that out! i thought i had accounted for that, but maybe i didn't do so clearly enough!

that said, you train hard every day? respect, but jesus, better you than me ;)
Do you know any other scenario that results in distibution of this kind?
Your point about sequencing is a good one, but this is the only area of biological research clearly improving exponentially...

Without being too argumentative, I'd put the odds of increases in computer power leading to biological breakthroughs at much less than 100%! I'd be surprised if it was as much as 5-10%.

What areas of biological research are fundamentally limited by computer power? I can think of a few where more power would be nice to have, but none where that power would be transformative.

The possible exception is the example you mention---DNA sequencing--but the problem there is that the rate of growth of sequence information is greater than More's rate; slightly ironically, this field really needs computer scientists to help develop new algorithms much more than it needs computers...
I'm looking to learn Python, so it's a pitty that there's a schism of sorts within Python.

This sort of reminds me about PHP 6: a project with initially high momentum and various ideas to clean up the language. But over time it became clear that upgrading from the land of magic quote and register globals (PHP 4) to PHP 6 would have been too much of a jump.

So instead they slowly started deprecating and making improvements within the PHP 5 stream, and bit-by-bit PHP has moved on.

The change from Python 2 to 3 doesn't look dramatic, but I can understand why there's an air of lethargy regarding the upgrade.
... and "recreational use" of a vehicle above 10MPH should be regarded as de-facto evidence of insanity.
Because Google doesn't have a monopoly on search. If you don't like the results, don't use Google. However, if you don't like your ISP, generally your only option is to move to a different city/state.
The question is "How can we build a house on a solid foundation that helps us live free, happy, healthy lives."

Hammers may be a part of the toolset, but they won't solve issues like siting it on the edge of a sand dune, or that the septic tank is currently in the master bedroom.
The great thing is that the author doesn't seem to understand the distinction. He states in his update that he has a decision problem of finding the tour of minimal distance.
Thanks! Thats brilliant, I'm very wary of freemium myself and have tried it in the past. I just don't think its for me.
Though I'm going to give it a go next year with one or two apps next year.
Started crossfit 3x a week 2 months ago. I was a bit trepidatious given the horror stories online, but I had a few back and forth emails with the gym owner about my concerns and he was on the same page as me. I was also worried that since I haven't really been in shape since highschool, 20 years ago, crossfit would be a bit much.

It was definitely a challenge, but I am now able to get through the workouts, feel great after and constantly look forward to the next one. I feel better than I have in years. I wish I had done something sooner, but it was admitting that I can't stay self motivated for long periods that finally caused me to seek out a group/instructor led program.
Would love to see some code examples. Has any surfaced yet?
> any old coffee shop wifi operator could essentially bug your machine with Google analytics

... also whenever people use all those CDN-hosted jquery and other popular JS libraries. Which is - unfortunately - also widespread practice these days.
Linux Distributions Store Wi-Fi Passwords in Plain Text
Is BSDM a new furk? ;)
Salesforce1 Platform Developer Guide[pdf]
NP is a class of decision problems - the solution has to be "yes" or "no". NP-complete problems are a subset of NP, so only decision problems can be NP-complete.

TSP, the optimization version (what's the shortest path?) is an optimization problem therefore it is NP-hard, not NP-complete. TSP, the decision version (is there a path shorter than K?) is NP-complete.
They should have sent a poet... then we'd have one poet less.
Awesome job! Keep it up. Keep firing!
> The rate of new drug approvals is decreasing (and costs are rising); we are appallingly bad at turning biochemical knowledge into medical technology.

Why should we measure medical technology at the rate of new drugs developed? What about the speed of DNA sequencing advancing faster than Moore's law? What about Organovo's recent claims on 3D printing organs, with vascular system in place, by next year? What about advanced prothesis that can provide touch senses to the user? Or even visual or audio prothesis, made possible with advancements in brain-computer interfaces?

Your argument basically boils down to saying that the rate of CPU clock speeds developed in recent history is indicative of an overall slowdown in computer science. Clearly there are other paradigms that need to be explored before we can say that Moore's law is no longer relevant, let alone all of computing.

Yes, the average of all medical tech is going to always lag behind computing for ethical reasons. And that of course, there are ways we can improve medical testing using stem cell research. But to say that we're at risk of moving backwards because one or two particular areas are in serious need of optimization is a bit far-fetched.
AS others have pointed out, this glosses over the distinction between the decision version of the problem and the optimization version. But the reason that it often gets glossed over is that it doesn't make much of a difference when it comes to the complexity class of the problem. In this case, the decision version of the problem is: Does a path exist shorter than K? But once you have a solution to that, you can use binary search to answer the optimization version of the problem: Find k such that there exists a path = k and no path < k.

But when it comes to the question of verifiers the distinction does matter. because NP is only concerned with decision problems the OP is incorrect when he says that there's no poly time verifier, because there is one for the decision version of the problem, and that's all that matters.
Michael Hayden 'Drifting' Toward Calling Edward Snowden A 'Traitor'
No wonder so many jobs are being outsourced!
This doesn't really have anything to do with my point. Even if you later edit commits before pushing them, it is still the case that any partially-staged commit that you do ultimately push will reflect a filesystem state that never existed in your working directory (unless you manually checkout the intermediate commit later as a "detached head" and test that).

Maybe some people don't care that every public commit can actually build and run tests, but any broken intermediate tree will break git-bisect or similar tools.
people could be proud of their lack of exercise as well
Your examples are talking about something quite different - they would be relevant if we were talking about Apple and Samsung and Nokia sitting down and agreeing to set prices together. But we're not.
Is there any serious effort to port, say, the top 1000 most popular/important packages to Python 3?
That's all after you've scheduled the interview. I was talking about getting to that point.
Interesting.

Jumping to the worst possible conclusion / interpretation of someone's words seems to be a hallmark of this style of 'activism'. Which leads to especially aggressive debates and misunderstandings, especially when people are on Twitter and constrained to <140 characters.
Dress Code (1998)
How to Brew Your Own Conductive Ink
I could definitely see it being easy to write bugs where verification code assumes that nominally read-only devices always return the same data for two subsequent reads of the same location, and then getting up to mischief by taking advantage of that assumption.
There is a chance someone will correct me here, as I'm not an expert. Take this with a grain of salt. Or a handful.

The second claim, that it's not in NP, is what this article is talking about. The optimization problem, as usually given, is not in NP because optimization problems are, by definition, not in NP. NP is for decision problems.

That's why this is regarded by some as simply a technical nit-pick, but continues to be a major source of confusion for those unwilling or unable to reason in nit-picking detail.

Certainly the decision problem "Is there a path of cost less than K?" is in NP, is NP-hard, and is therefore NP complete.

This can then be leveraged up into a solution of the optimization problem. Use a lower bound of 0, an upper bound of #(E) * max{ e in E: cost(e) }, and do a binary search for the optimal cost.

Does that help? With that information, you now need to re-read other sources.
I may be wrong, but I think Rails has a way higher percentage of total Ruby use than Django does of total Python use.
> The idea is that you do not give intermediate broken commits to things that you do not want to have broken commits.

But how do you know if the intermediate commits (aka the ones you want to actually publish) are broken or not? If you partially staged them, you don't know because the tree you committed never existed in your working directory. The only way to know at that point is to checkout every intermediate state later (aka after the commit) and test it then.
Why did this get flagged off the front page? This is an excellent post with technical examples and reflections on good code design.
I'd love to use Python 3, but missing library support is definitely the killer for me. There's a list of py3-compatible/incompatible libraries here: http://python3wos.appspot.com/.

If we can pick off a few of those top py3-incompatible libraries, I'd be willing to bet that a shift to py3 would follow. Many of the libraries have long-standing py3 port branches if you'd like to help the effort. For example: https://github.com/boto/boto/tree/py3kport/py3kport.

As far as I'm concerned, there's really very little in the way of me using Python 3. But what is in the way matters. Starting a project without being able to use boto, fabric and gvent would be tough. I like the idea of being able to import Python 2 libraries until they're finally ported over to Python 3 a lot.
Let Postgres Do The Work
Even the demo doesn't work for me in Chrome dev.
Usually 3-4/week.
If I'm really motivated then I take that up to 6-7/week but this remains on rare occasions.
Ask HN: Recommendations for JRuby and MRI development
Hey HNers,

Im in the process of upgrading our rails application right now to rails4, and while Im working on all the gems, etc. I was hoping to be able go ahead and make it JRuby compatible - on the bet that it could be useful sometime down the road.

Well, I was hoping some of you Java/Ruby/JRuby expert hackers could give me some recommendations, links, really just any help would be really appreciated.

Heres some of the concrete problems Im having

1. How to deal with C-Ext Gems, If no alternative exists, this means I've gotta completely build a new one for JRuby, or is there a way to check RUBY_PLATFORM in the C-Ext Gem and require different files accordingly, whats the usual "best practice" here?

2. How to make Gems JRuby and MRI compatible. (should it be done in one Gem or should they be split into 2 gems?)

3. Best Practice for creating a JRuby & MRI supported Gemfile in the Rails app.

4. Dealing with Background Jobs / Concurrency. (big subject I know, but basically, are people using Resque with JRuby or just doing it with the threads provided by the JVM)

Also anything else you might have had problems with would interest me too.

Thanks in advance!
I'm of the opinion that sending frail probes to take grainy pictures and scrape rocks to get small samples for limited onboard labs would do far less science in a year then six guys with shovels and a pocket camera in a month.
Haven't done any specific lifting for years. Having children means spare time disappears (not that I'm complaining; I just look back and wonder WTF I did with all my spare time before having a kid).

There is a bench at the work gym but there's rarely anyone else around when I use it so I'd be wary of doing anything but light weights; with no-one to spot for me I'm not going to try to get back to benching something near my own weight.

But, as I said, a 17kg 4-year-old is a semi-resonable substitute for proper lifting.
> How many people are still on Windows?

Windows doesn't ship with an OS-default version of Python and doesn't include OS features that depend on the OS-default version of python, so its not as influential in that regard. But, in that regard, the inclusion of the multiple-install-compatible python launcher in the basic Windows install of Python 3.3 probably improves the Python 3.x story on Windows, since it eases the multiple install pain and makes it easier to work with Python 3.x while having some Python 2.x software in use on Windows.
This is kind of silly, but the main thing keeping me on Python 2 is the print statement.
The pen/pencil thing has the weakness that pencils release small particles and are thus kind of sketchy in low-gravity environments.
Depends on the ARM CPU. Some variants of ARMv7 architecture have an integer divide function.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Arithmetic_in...
2014: The Year of Results
You also need to understand "zero values" to understand what a freshly created object looks like (all of its instance variables are initialized to zero). So I don't think it would make Objective-C any easier to learn if messaging to nil would throw an exception.

Personally I find that the nil behavior provides a useful base guideline for API design. When defining a method signature in Obj-C, you have to ask yourself if it's clear to the user of the method what happens when the method (inevitably) gets sent to nil. In that way, you have to think about the circumstances of the API's actual use, rather than just the ideal case.
People get angry at Glass. They get angry at you for wearing Glass. They talk about you openly. It inspires the most aggressive of passive aggression.

I'm genuinely surprised at how controversial these glasses are.

Soon we'll see news reports of people getting into scraps because someone refuses to remove their google goggles. (Hell, I'm keeping them on, I can send the video to the police and have your arse slammed in jail.) Talking about the cops, they will probably be wearing them soon. In Russia, a lot of drivers have cameras in their cars for resolving responsibility in road accidents (another potential use). If the cops in your area are unsavoury, and you are a Glasshole, keep 'em on when they pay you a visit. If they complain, use that old saying "you got something to hide, eh?".

How about Google Gloves, when you punch someone and break their glasses (and their nose) the gloves' internet connection automatically contacts a lawyer.

There is a lot of potential for mischief with these glasses, I'm all for it.

I am far more concerned with the ergonomic and ophthalmic issues.
Shameless Plug: New Year's Eve Party Conversation Topics
> Your post still doesn't explain why a deflationary currency will cause a person to stop consuming.

I never said will stop consuming. It will consume less. It makes sense, a consumer will spend whatever has bigger Y% of having LESS value in X time, not more!

Secondly: Have you tried buying/selling bitcoins? If you use a bank it's a pretty straight forward process but has huge costs.

Thirdly: Do you buy products using bitcoin? Do you think that people uses bitcoin to buy products online? Because all the transactions I'm aware off are either illegal (hard to track) or perceive bitcoin as an asset.

Central manipulate currencies in order to adjust the economy of a certain group, which is under their authority, as far as I know.

The distinction I make between currencies and assets come from ~ 300 BC (at least, probably way back) and I don't understand why even is a topic of discussion. BitCoin is treated by 99% of it's users as an ASSET not as a CURRENCY. No one is buying services in Bitcoin, if does not want to hide. Isn't it weird that while Silk Road used BTC as it's main currency, Amazon, eBay, Apple and every other big player, doesn't even care? You think it's out of spike or anything?

I'm not making any assumptions here, I'm stating facts. It's you who are suddenly re-writing 2000 years of economic history by assuming that buying with Gold (bitcoin) is the same as buying with FIAT.