skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why so much impatience on the STEM communities?
this is more of a rant than 'news', but anyway...

Why are online communities-particularly those centered around STEM matters such as stack exchange, reddit, and wikipedia etc have a tendency to be so impertinent to newbies, or those not up to speed? These intelligent people want to create communities but seem to have little patience those who don't meet their lofty standards or fit in with the clique. For example, the stack exchange series of sub-forums have a habit of closing questions that are deemed 'off topic' and rule like a dictatorship where appeal isn't an option. In my own experience I've posted technical questions to only have them closed without even an a link to a resource. This was after an exhaustive google search on the subject matter. On reddit I see people post non-trolling, helpful replies to science/econ/math boards and get 5+ more down-votes because the intelligentsia overclass didn't like the answer. Maybe they could take 2 minutes to elaborate what was wrong with instead of down-voting? I can understand angst ridden teens downvonting a troll on an lolcats board, but not smart, educated people acting like jerks to well intentioned people.
>They're so good the treasury department buys them because they're better than the best systems out there.

This phrasing is gold. "Our product is so good, the government buys it because it's better than the best thing out there." :)
You can not have universally improved quality of living while lowering productivity, unless you getting money from outside of the system. Lowered productivity means the system has less resources, thus overall sum of the qualities of life is less. Which means to make your quality of life better, somebody's quality of life must suffer. In order to do it not only for yourself but on any kind of scale, somebody's quality of life has to suffer massively, or on equally large scale. Who would that be and why do you think they won't fight back and make your quality of life suffer instead?
I made this over the past hour and figured I'd submit it. My goal is to do at least one 30 day GitHub commit streak this year. I built this little app to remind me by email (towards the end of the day) when I don't already have commits for the day.
PostgreSQL In-Memory Column Store
Docs: http://www.garret.ru/imcs/user_guide.html
Wanted: Time travelers forecasting on social media
"Asimov imagined that humanity would decide to distribute the wealth accrued by the automatons" - why would one think that this will ever happen?
They were recently acquired by Maker Studios. I wonder if this part of some sort of migration or shutdown of the service.

http://allthingsd.com/20130821/maker-studios-buys-blip-and-a...
how much did it cost for the 300,000 uniques on wpengine?
Ask Revolution Ventures’ David Golden’s Predictions For 2014
This time really is different. :)
In the OP situation this could play out like this:

1. Have a broken laptop (item #1)

2. Buy a new laptop (item #2)

3. Return item #1 with item #2's receipt

4. Have a working computer.

note: I'm not condoning this and it's unlikely to working in the OP's case because stores are usually smart enough to check serials on bigger ticket items.
"It is filled with Evan Spiegels, brash young white men who have the world at their feet and have never known the problems of others. This is partly "

This statement is inaccurate at best, more than 1/2 of start-ups in the valley and 25% nationwide are by immigrants (overwhelmingly Asian). So to say it is "filled by white men" is to ignore that a growing bulk of founders are foreign-born and non-white.
It's commonly done in memory allocators at various levels. You inherently want to manage pages, and you'll carve out the start of the page itself to hold its own data structure.

You can see an example of this technique here: https://github.com/scotts/streamflow/blob/master/streamflow....

This bit of code executes when a call to malloc() could not find any free memory, and it has to request more memory from the operating system. The function supermap() allocates a large chunk of memory from the kernel. We then write the meta-information to keep track of that chunk of memory directly to itself - that "meta-information" is the pageblock_t struct. In malloc(), we then use that chunk of memory to find a sub-chunk inside of it to return to the user.

Note that internal to malloc(), we will maintain lists of these pageblock_t structures, and they will all be page-aligned. So, anytime we want to search for free memory among the managed pages, we're going to access page-aligned structures.
Generating NSA codewords
I read somewhere it is kind of impossible to implement Clojure without the JVM...

I would really like to see a Clojure on LLVM project though. Maybe speed won't be better, but memory usage and boot times might.
I know the feeling! Living in Puerto Rico is a double edge scenario. I might be fully treated as an US customer with all the benefits or they just don't consider us a US Territory. Sometimes we are another country somewhere in the Caribbean, sometimes we get confused with Latin America and then the options for services just becomes close to none.
Those are all name servers published by the top level domain, like `SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM`. When you do a whois search for `facebook.com` it searches for any name server records beginning with `facebook.com`.
You should never assume that any piece of information is not enough to uniquely identify an individual.

You are thinking from the point of view of a database administrator, whose job it is to make it easy to uniquely identify an entity.

In security it's about making it as hard as possible to deduce even the slightest of information about a person, increasing the k-anonymity as they say.

For all intents and purposes, that a phone number resolves to only two people, and they're also conveniently located geographically near to each other, and are probably very distinct in a whole range of other things, makes it the perfect key for any security adversary.
That was a non sequitur, and basically HN's equivalent of a Reddit meme. Stop that.
I'd be interested in seeing studies that look at this sort of thing for a variety of different software types. My completely-unsupported-by-evidence hunch is that different lengths and types of software project do better or worse in silent environments (although I also suspect that the largest variance is from personal preference).

By way of personal anecdote, when I'm working in the games industry, coding teams tend to be very small and very cross disciplined, and the smaller the teams the more frequently code changes touch other devs because you're often changing several systems across the engine throughout the day. In this environment myself (and co-workers - I did ask :) find non-silent, "noisy" environments work well. Incidental conversations and cursing are actually quite good ways to add interesting fluff to the games as they are being created, and cursing is a damn good barometer indicating that some of the APIs for my code is rubbish to work with.

Conversely, I've worked on more traditional things where I'm deeply involved in a rabbit hole of my own burrowing, and in those cases less noise does seem to help. In those cases I'm general solving very narrow and specific problems, and the APIs I'm offering to other devs (if there are APIs) are far more formally defined.

However, I'm likely biased. Unless it's a very specific and very hard problem I'm trying to solve, I like some level of background noise to keep the useless parts of my brain occupied while the code bits do their stuff. The more boiler plate the code, the louder I like the noise so that parts of my mind don't get bored and drift off into more interesting thoughts.
Yes this is a real problem. Being "paranoid about privacy" is not a yes/no decision for people to make. Different people have different things they would like to be private about and to different degrees. Some people may not want it to be possible for anyone to ever know anything at all about them. Those people don't use phones of any nature. Maybe some other people only trust phones that they build themselves. Other people are willing to trust open source software and the communities around it. Some people only care about making dragnet surveillance difficult or expensive. Others need perfect assurance of privacy because their lives are in danger. Others don't care if anyone listens to their calls.

But what you are saying is like looking at football players, seeing that they could still get hurt when they wear lots of padding, and deciding either no one should play the game or we should all play inside giant airbags.
The question is: why the difference?
A neat little trick I learned here on HN is to add ?share=1 to the end of the URL to bypass that.

http://www.quora.com/Node-js/Why-did-Koding-switch-from-Node...
MacStadium: Dedicated Mac Pro Hosting and Colocation
The demand is for ultimate freedom of expression. (which is how the "sexting" meme happened)
I love that story.
:-(

I saw the Xcode requirement but I had hopes it would work on Linux.
Now it makes sense. Every closeted gay Republican senator and aide knows the NSA has dirt on them, so they shut up.

(We all have stuff we don't want others to know, but few seem as common or career destroying as gay-bashing senators being in the closet)

Relevant: "Apparently to the homophobes running the NSA, chickenfuckers were a-okay — the security threat came from gays."
http://pando.com/2013/12/29/snowdens-biggest-revelation-we-d...
If you decide to go with something in the Lisp/Scheme spectrum, you might find the book Lisp in Small Pieces to be helpful.

If you decide to go with a non-Lisp language: are you allowed to use tools like bison/yacc and lex/flex (or analogs for non-C languages)? Those can cut down the amount of work by a lot. Making it self-hosting over the course of semester is still going to be challenging, I think, especially if you have no previous background in compilers and/or low-level code (there are a lot of other issues there, such as the need to write or otherwise obtain an I/O library).

If it were me, starting from ground zero, I'd either go with extending an existing compiler or writing something in Scheme.
How would that be an improvement over text messaging?
Yes, I know. No, I can't tell you.
That $4B is about potential, not scale. Growing by 15% does not increase the value by 15%!
This kind of complexity and the esoterica involved is exactly what terrifies me about Python.
The processes still have unfettered access to an interface that exposes a few million lines of C code running in ring0
In Unix & Linux, you don't need to setup users, you can just run the processes under different uids (most process managers support this). Adding a user to /etc/passwd is only needed if you want them to have an username and password.
With policies like these, companies account for the % of times abuse is likely to happen. Retailers and manufacturers spend millions analyzing buying and returning patterns and factor that into prices.

So "abuse" over time could cause prices to increase by a small amount. However, not hassling people over things that rarely happen increases loyalty, which increases volume, which increases the discounts a retailer can get from a manufacturer...

The vast majority of people don't need to benchmark video cards or want to "rent" products - they buy things because they need them and that's why good customer service exists.
One of the interesting details in this article that I had not previously seen was that JSTOR had blocked MIT's access owing to repeated bulk downloads, which led to an investigation by MIT police. So this presumably went a bit beyond routine high jinks, and it presumably at least inconvenienced other users.

The fact is that — much as we may sympathize with him — Aaron killed himself.
I remember swinging by Home Depot just before a big winter storm. One of the sales guys mentioned that they didn't have any generators in stock because people would buy them, leave them in the box, and return them if they didn't lose power during the storm. Presumably, they wouldn't return the generators if they were actually used due to a power outage. I seriously doubt that Home Depot wanted their customers to do that. Large companies do sometimes keep track of how many returns people rack up over time to identify bad actors (that's much harder with "no receipt" or "no questions asked" policies).

On the other hand, Kragen advertises that they have a loaner tool program. It's essentially a liberal return policy, as long as you don't break the tool while trying to repair your car. I have used that, when I had a functioning tool to return when I was done with the job.
It sounds like they raised ~$200k in private funding.
And this is where you're wrong. Most detectors use a PIN diode or a phototransistor. Both work just fine with the SVM.

Again, the security given in these detectors is SO good that even if I were to give you complete knowledge of the system, you can't beat them. I can't admit to having made counterfeits, but I can say that I've seen _all_ of them, and they do not work.
Had to check that: it is NOAA data (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/isd/), not NSA data. The NSA tries hard to be a one way street; it reads a lot, but does not publish much.
Yes they do but 1) most people are more comfortable dealing with usernames compared to public keys, and 2) distributing the public keys themselves can be tricky if you don't already have a trusted connection set up (just look at past abuses of Certificate Authorities for examples of this).
Don't ever try to become an entrepreneur.
How can I achieve this with my Pebble?
I've forgot about this one, thanks for pointing it out!
Probably because SnapChat fixed that half a year ago.
As far as I can tell the argument in this article is:

> Snowden exposed what the NSA was doing, and most of it is bad and everybody is glad we found out, but some was good! So he should be hunted down for the rest of his life.
I've had bad experiences with Toshiba refusing to honor warranties before. After hours on the phone it turned out that the reason they wouldn't help me is because they had recorded my date of birth as the date of purchase and vice versa. Apparently no one there thought it strange that the laptop had been out of warranty for more than two decades... The one manager that did understand the absurdity of the situation still insisted that no one at his call center had the authority to make the obvious correction. Like the OP, I will never buy another Toshiba product, and I tell all my friends the same.
There are usually prizes, sometimes quite large. But some have accused them of making the industry worse by not hiring actual data scientists and outsourcing their work to people who are willing to do it pretty much for fun, and not all the prizes are enough to make up for the time and effort put into these competitions.

I sort of agree, but it's kind of ironic considering this is the field automating everyone else's jobs
EDIT: Just re-read the post, and neither of my side projects is "successful," so ignore this, or by all means, click through...

I have two side projects, and rarely promote them at all - the occasional plug on HN or r/startups where its relevant. The lack of promotion would explain why neither has any traffic! One - nerdy bookmarking at http://linkthing.co and Two - I'm working on a feed reader, you can see its output in action at http://techwatching.com

I've always like the Reddit "SYS" tradition - a monthly thread where anyone can post whatever their doing in blatant self promotion without the usual guilt & karma penalties.
I loved it. Beyond pure technical chops, Russ Olsen is a great writer which makes his books stand out to me from other programming books I've read. In Design Patterns in Ruby each chapter handles a different pattern with a simple example that's easy to understand. And at the end of each chapter Olsen points out where that pattern is used "in the wild" in popular ruby projects if you'd like to see a larger example.
You're right it isn't realistic, but it's the only way to fully know that the application is secure. Otherwise you're putting your trust in something/someone.
What better measure is there for selling ads than the number of ads you sell?
If you look at the picture below "Made in Oslo".. you'll see a cr2032 battery.
Retailers also plan on a base level of shoplifting and employee theft, referred to as "shrinkage". However that isn't an excuse for that sort of bad behavior.
Many church clocks used to chime every 15 minutes and could be heard throughout the town. I think the idea is to replicate a similar experience.
Yep. . . by a lot.
Is that common to present yourself as employed? I've never heard of it.
Perhaps also for forensics in case of other crimes as well.
Show HN: Hackendo::Integrate - A wearables + externals expo and hackathon
They could all shout "red". 0 is finite.
Syrian Refugee Tech Startup Finds Sanctuary in London
What resources did you use to re-learn the programming languages you used?
What bothered me in the other thread where I first learned this is that while I have always understood that I don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy on the Internet, I feel dirty as shit when I realize my computer determines when something is legal or not for me to do.

Slippery slope, this one.
Read the article. The Senator defines spying very specifically. So specifically that it's already clear the answer is "yes".
The only dependency to the JVM would be the advantage of integrating with the Java ecosystem.

When compiling Clojure to native code, you won't be able to use Java libraries, unless the native compiler can also generate native code for .class files.
I completely understand that OP isn't a fan of their current democracy. But let's be honest and not hyperbolic about what the situation really is. Again, I can't speak for every nation, but in America our democracy undeniably has its flaws and shortcoming but there is nothing I've ever heard of that is realistically stopping a movement with enough political will from making a change.

But instead of disagreeing on semantics about "real" or "pseudo" democracies, what "real power" is, etc., I'd be interested to know how you, OP, or anyone else would answer these two straightforward questions.

1. What is it about the current democracy you live in that would need to change for it to become a "real" democracy?

2. If enough people were to work together to make that change a reality, is there anything that could realistically stop that change from happening? (And I don't just mean, you might get out-campaigned, I mean no matter how hard you tried nothing could be done.)

Not being able to change what is wrong is I think a fairly simple starting point for defining something that is not a "real democracy".

The fact is, at least in the US any criticism of government that most people have is something that, if there is enough political will from the electorate, if you, me, and anyone else will knock on doors, talk to our neighbors, find candidates, run ourselves if necessary, can't be stopped.

I know people often phrase questions as backhanded insults on discussion forums, but please know I'm being genuine when I say I would be excited to hear you or anyone else describe specifically what needs to change in government, and then explain specifically why it's impossible for those changes to take place.

I believe any changes are definitely possible if the political will is there.
I guess he didn't get the memo. It's a dragnet, senator, they spy on everyone.
Norman Foster unveils plans for elevated 'SkyCycle' bike routes in London
Color me impressed.
SF event for hackers by hackers thinking and developing for the future of the world around us. Let me know if you have some ideas you might want us to host. dan at techendo dot co

[edit]

Here is the official press release:
http://www.techendo.co/posts/hackendo-san-francisco-wearable...
The OP was asking about process isolation in particular. You still get to see memory usage and CPU usage globally. Not being able to see the host filesystem is not a huge security benefit, again your pid should not have any significant access anyway, so this should not be a security enhancement.
With my blogpost, I didn't mean that you should put work before your family and friends (or at least didn't want to mean that).
I didn't mean that playing a good videogame is a waste of time if that makes you feel better.

I try to always be aware when I'm not giving enough time to my family and friends (building relationships). Some times I do stuff like, taking a random trip to somewhere in the woods just to see what happens or what nature has to show me, without any goal in mind.

BUT, I do understand that you think that I don't do this. I understand why with this post I seem such a workaholic. (Maybe I am, but not as much I seem to look in this post.)

AND, even though I spend a good time with my family and friends, I'm not saying that I shouldn't spend more. Maybe I should. (I'm just thinking out loud.)

My point here is that we should strive to try to work on something that's aligned with our life goals - and those may include spending time with your family, traveling or building a charity institution. This way, work would have other meaning to us.

Thank you very much for the article and your thoughtful response.
By monetize you mean make $100 or so a month right ?

With RPM's around a few dollars for AdSense isn't that the most he would be looking at in revenue, or am I missing something ?
Ha - sorry - it was a phone typo!

yes - NOAA.
I would be very curious to understand the runtime implications of imposing immutability on an Objective-C program. Presumably porting that was a lot of work.
That seems quite high, though those people do need to make money somehow. The other businesses aren't really comparable because they have a much, much more money flowing through them and can afford to tax a smaller percent to stay competitive.
>The only reason they are living paycheck to paycheck is because of the lifestyle obligations they've chosen

It sounds like you think someone that chooses to have a couple of kids and a stable household deserves to be in perpetual servitude.

Open your eyes. It's not like that elsewhere.
Also, BTW, UV doesn't work on banknotes. If you wash a banknote with detergent, the paper absorbs the UV frequency bending stuff in modern detergents and corrupts the note. However, your thinking isn't far off.
If SnapChat is out of business in two years was it still the right decision? Based on your interpretation there are never any wrong decisions, just different ones. I don't think this holds up in the real world.
Amazing Trick with a BIC Lighter
There was TED talk[1] a few months ago about some guys using the exact same tech to build a "matternet" in africa and south america to combat washed out roads. Their estimate was that to move a 2kg load over 10km would cost roughly $.24. This includes fuel, initial purchase price of the drone (3k or so) and wear and tear.

In their system, they use elevated platforms where the drones could drop off packages/change batteries. If feasible, this solves the distance problem. They estimated that to cover a 140km square area, it would cost 900k, require 50 towers and 150 drones.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/andreas_raptopoulos_no_roads_there_...
Nine things to know before smoking pot in Colorado
I'm confused by this. I thought this was already established fact based on declassified documents?

http://www.theshillongtimes.com/2013/09/27/nsa-spied-on-us-s...
Just FYI, I believe that by default, binaries compiled with the standard Go toolchain do link against your system's libc (which is probably GNU libc on Linux). However, I believe that can be disabled by compiling the Go toolchain with `CGO_ENABLED=0` set. But you might lose some functionality.[1]

[1] - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang-nuts/H-NTwhQVp-...