skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have the same problem with raise.com - they refuse to sell me anything.
...what? I as a consumer would not trust handing over any identifying information to some paid-by-hour/contracted schmuck in a internet cafe in Asia.
Yes, but immunity has many definitions, including 'to fight off'.

Since it's essentially teaching the immune system, why does this not work when the patient is already infected.

I thought there may be some difference between this and traditional vaccines as well.
"does anyone seriously have a problem with this?"

Yes.

"there isn't really a domestic/whistleblower angle"

As if Chinese goods don't get sold within the US[0].

[0] http://www.huaweideviceusa.com/
I'm going to put on my math hat for a second, because this blog post was a bit confusing for me at first. I had to read through the post a few times to understand what the "homophony group" was.

For this comment, I don't want to dive into this post from the perspective of someone who's never studied abstract algebra before, so what I'm about to write won't make much sense to anyone who hasn't. If you know a little bit of group theory, though, you should be able to follow along.

In math-ese, the group under consideration is

<a,b,c,...,z | knight=night, ad=add, arc=ark, ...>

Defining a group this way is called a "group presentation". The symbols to the left of the | are called "generators" and the symbols to the right are called "relations." For example, one presentation of the integers modulo 4 with mod-4 addition is

<x | x+x+x+x = 1>

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentation_of_a_group for the gory details.

Anyhow, the blog post confused me at first because the "homophony group" is a kind of mathematical double entendre. In algebra one often omits the group operation explicitly, writing "xy" instead of "x.y," where "." is the group operation. This implicit understanding is what makes the "joke" work.

So, on the one hand, we write down the relation "ad=add" in our presentation because ad and add are homophones in English. On the other hand, in group-land, we mean a.d = a.d.d, where (again) "." is the group operation. In group-land, however, there's no sense that "a" is anything special. The 26 symbols "a" to "z" are arbitrary and we could easily write, say,

<σ,b,c,...,z | knight=night, σd=σdd, ...>

or use any other 26 distinct symbols for "a" to "z." The generators tell us what symbols we have at our disposal and the relations tell us how we can reduce combinations of those symbols to the identity element.

Math jokes. Oh buddy.

For the CS folks among us, there's a computational problem called the "group isomorphism problem" which asks, "Given two group presentations, are they isomorphic?" This problem is provably undecidable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_isomorphism_problem This means you can't write a single algorithm which takes two arbitrary group presentations as inputs and correctly determines whether the groups as presented are isomorphic.
> If you've used Java or Python, you'll probably be familiar with the idea that some types of data behave differently from others when you assign them from one variable to another. If you write an assignment such as ‘a = b’ where a and b are integers, then you get two independent copies of the same integer: after the assignment, modifying a does not also cause b to change its value.

This is incorrect when it comes to Python. a and b will be two different names for the same integer object, which is stored in a single memory location. The difference is that Python guarantees that integers are immutable.
The friend who wrote this says he doesn't give a fuck.
The design certainly sounds elegant and intriguing. I'm going to have to buy one. I used to be an avid wargamer, but my tolerance for convoluted rules has been sapped (ASL was the end for me).
This counts as a wanton act of hostility toward every server vendor in the x86 space.

Is this payback for all of the PC players adopting Chromebook and Android, or is this the tipping point where MS has decided not to care about selling Windows Server and instead cares only about driving down its own costs to deploy Azure and O365?
Assuming you aren't trolling: No, absolutely not.

My experience, at two companies, is that what you save in development costs, you quickly pay for (and then some) in management overhead, and low code quality. Some of the code we got was simply not salvageable. (And of course, it consumed time on our side to review the code, reach this conclusion, and document the suckage.)

If outsourcing has any chance of working it is for rigorously specified requirements. If there is any wiggle room, or even if you expect common sense to apply to fill in the gaps, you will be disappointed.

Why is the reality so bad?

- You have little choice about the actual developers you work with. Would you hire your own development team by phoning up a headhunter, asking for a half dozen developers, and then taking whatever the guy sends over? Of course not. Why should this work any better from an outsource agency?

- Any marginally competent developer at an outsource firm gets moved into management quickly. (At least in the companies we worked with.)

- Distance sucks. Do you really want to schedule meetings with 10-13 hour time differences? Deal with any required travel to and from India? Really?

Outsourcing is a clueless executive's idea of how to get software written. It was a new business trend in the early 2000s, (so long ago that I wonder whether you're trolling), and it was weird: I kept challenging the decision to outsource, and the rationale kept changing. Basically, it was a trend, so the executive making the decision wanted to do it, reasons be damned.
Simple. Enjoyable. I just found several dozen places I want to travel to.
#1 suffers from the critique I mentioned above. The peptide(s) you are using are designed for H2d. Do you have evidence that their human analogs* are immunogenic?

#2 I assume now you are using the human version of the peptide? I'm not sure why you're doing this in vitro when you can now do it in vivo. Why not (a) infect the mouse with HIV, (b) look at viral titers w/ and w/o pre-vaccination, (c) look for specific CD8 T cells that have developed against peptide-HLA complexes.

I'm not sure I understand your in vitro experiment. Are you planning on mixing CD4 and CD8 T cells together in vitro from vaccinated/non-vaccinated mice and looking for increased killing of the CD4 cells (as estimated by decreased p24)?

*I assume it's mostly anchor changes here
It's because the annuity's figure is the purchasing power of those winnings at that time--the value you see as a jackpot is based on an annuity over a period of years. You're buying a lottery ticket to win a $XM dollar Y year annuity, with an allowed early exit (with penalty).
Thanks for the insight -- that makes a lot of sense. I guess you could forge a driver's license with a skilled Photoshopper on the team, since those are hard to validate. (as a consumer, it's still frustrating though.)
Alex from FC here. Good feedback, we'll work on this.
That's a lot of words just to be pedantic. What a heap allocator does in its bookkeeping is not necessarily "storing the length of the array" - and whatever it does isn't sensibly available to the running program. Yes, the size of a static array is known at compile time, but it's length is still not available to the running program unless the programmer explicitly arranges for it to be.
It's just to save money. Microsoft has been designing their own servers for years and Open Compute designs have also been available for a while, so any damage to the server vendors is well underway. ODM server sales increased 45% last year (granted, from a small base).
Howie from the Immunity Project here. Thanks for your question! We're really just focusing on the preventive aspect of this vaccine as we head into our Phase I human clinical trials.
Oracle Reports Exploits Release – Full Disclosure
correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't you just generate every possible combination of brackets and "assign" to each participant the top most statistically likely combinations?

or is this precisely what they're doing?
that's exactly what i was thinking about - thanks for the post.
How the heck is the BBB supposed to force their management to answer? All they can really do is try to shake down Square for a fee.
Great explanation, thanks for posting. It cleared up a few things for me.
The most recent post explained, without comment:

https://www.blogger.com/profile/04569990405409070244
Yea, I don't think there are too many "highly likely" brackets anyway--the first couple rounds are brutal. There are definitely "highly likely" Final Four's, but just one very minor upset on day 1 will ruin a perfect brack.
Having worked with a number of Indian firms since 1998 and having friends there this is my take.

It is no different then the US, some suck, some are good, some are awesome.

The problem isn't India vs US, it is distance, communication and numbers. And the reality is it truly boils down to a numbers game, if you don't know someone, you are more likely to have nothing but headaches. Also the time difference seems minor to manage at first, or even an advantage, but you soon find out it is a pain in the ass.

Overall, even knowing there are great people in India, I won't use it as a primary source of development for anything. Too many times I have had issues, so I just won't do it. If a friend that lives there has some spare cycles, I will do that in a heartbeat because I know they can/will deliver.

Also, as a whole, we pick up more failed projects from eastern areas than anywhere else. My 2 cents is this isn't because they aren't capable, but the communication isn't clear, and people are trying to seek out the lowest cost person/firm. Seeking the lowest cost to me, means no matter where you are at you are not getting quality, but what you paid for.
Arguably, to a user of the language, these are imperceptible from independent. Changing one cannot change the other (except perhaps through some exotic double-underscore-prefixed function with which my vague knowledge of Python is unfamiliar)
Just out of curiosity, are they paying Nginx Inc or Nginx contributors?
Poker absolutely isn't gambling for skilled individuals, any more than a casino is gambling by offering games of chance that have a house advantage.
Lottery prizes in excess of 100M are pretty routine these days. Why would you think that something like this would be any different?
> Starting with 0-249

I'm puzzled why it's not 1-249 with 0 being a different group. So this law basically means that as long as you send less than 250 requests to a single company you're fine.

Might as well start sending 249 requests to every company they can think of.
Windows Server isn't like the PC OS, it's mostly sold via Select and Enterprise agreements.

Microsoft's pricing model is ingenious -- pay a couple of thousand bucks per socket for the OS + half that for the entire system center suite. HyperV in 2012R2 is pretty sweet... it will become increasingly difficult to justify additional investments in the VMWare stack.
Just FYI, blog is unreadable on iphone.
I saw the censored fuck and immediately couldn't see anything else.

Fucking have a goddamned fucking opinion, or don't. Who is the author trying to impress with censorship? Asterisks won't get you more retweets.
Does anyone know the process that took this leak from the Snowden dumps to Schneier's site? Did Schneier seek consensus from the the other recipients that he should release this particular information? Did Schneier unilaterally decide to release this?

Regarding the article, I think it is fascinating proof of the lengths that state-level actors will go through to backdoor their targets.
This kind of comment always makes me smile. Half-assed complaints that people make because no one gives a crap about what happens in the world unless it personally affects them. In my opinion it's as simple as "do you think it's good to spy on people?". And if you truly care and your answer is no then you will go out of your way to make it stop. Half measures don't change anything.
Forget about promises, use harvests
Harvests: From now is possible to call asynchronous functions in a declarative way and to get almost the same experience as with synchronous code. https://github.com/salboaie/harvests
I'm the same. Given a choice between two comparable apps I'll choose the one that has a single, one-time price every time. I am not averse to paying for increased functionality at some point down the line, but I will not pay just to make a game "better".
> I think this is a great explanation of a lot of the obvious pitfalls with "basic" TDD, and why so many people end up putting in a lot of effort with TDD without getting much return.

If you have the cash, spring for Gary Bernhardt's Destroy All Software screencasts. That $240 was the best money my employer ever spent on me. Trying to learn TDD on your own is asking for a lot of pain, and all you'll end up doing is reinventing the wheel.

There are a lot of subtle concepts Gary taught me that I'm still learning to master. You learn what to test, how to test it, at what level to test it, how to structure your workflow to accommodate it.
Shhhhhh! If you let them know how fun it is then everyone will want to be C programmers :-)

I got to use my crufty C knowledge to useful effect when I discovered that there is no standard system reset on Cortex M chips. That lead me to trying to call "reset_handler" (basically the function that kicks off things at startup) which I couldn't do inside an ISR because lo and behold there is "magic" in isrs, they are done in "Handler" mode versus "Thread" mode and jumping to thread mode code is just wrong apparently. C hackery to the rescue, hey the stack frame is standard, make a pointer to the first variable in the function walk backwards on the stack to return address, change it to be the function that should run next, and return. Voila, system reset.

The whole time I am going "Really? I have to look under your covers just to make you do something anyone might want to do?" As a respondent to one of my questions put it "ARM is a mixture of clever ideas intermixed with a healthy dose of WTF?"
It's difficult not to get caught up in the excitement around Deep Learning. The unsupervised nature of it at its best really does seem to approach human levels of learning (if not intelligence).

Also, I thought this was hilarious:

In a 2011 interview that predated DeepMind, co-founder Shane Legg said he gave only a 50 percent chance that human level-machine intelligence would exist by 2028.

ONLY?!? By 2028? That is a pretty radical prediction. Indeed, Legg says there is a 10% chance of human level intelligence by 2018, and 90% by 2050[1].

Legg has multiple papers published in the field of measuring machine intelligence, so I guess he has a pretty good view of the field.

If that 2028 prediction is even close to correct then I think setting up an ethics board now probably is the correct thing to do. (the notion that DeepMind asked that Google create an internal ethics board as a condition of the acquisition, as reported by The Information, had some AI researchers griping)

Edit: Legg's posting on his blog in 2011 deserves to be read:

I’ve decided to once again leave my prediction for when human level AGI will arrive unchanged. That is, I give it a log-normal distribution with a mean of 2028 and a mode of 2025, under the assumption that nothing crazy happens like a nuclear war. I’d also like to add to this prediction that I expect to see an impressive proto-AGI within the next 8 years. By this I mean a system with basic vision, basic sound processing, basic movement control, and basic language abilities, with all of these things being essentially learnt rather than preprogrammed. It will also be able to solve a range of simple problems, including novel ones.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/691/shane_legg_on_risks...

[2] http://www.vetta.org/2011/12/goodbye-2011-hello-2012/
You have edited your comment from its original statement, no?
Sounds like typical NSA/US gov modus operandi: accuse others of stuff they're already doing.
That is a somewhat confusing picture. It seems to imply that the CPU loads the OS and the OS loads the BIOS!
Sounds like that's what they're doing.
Thanks. Nice.
I didn't down vote you, but I would like to take a moment to respond to your statements.

The survey is due to some people such as library makers using this feature to make really advanced, complex, rule-breaking things in Java. It wasn't intended to get out, but it is. So Oracle, and by extension OpenJDK, want to know what would happen if they got rid of it. Presumably they would replace it with a more open API.

Now as to encapsulation and types not being used, I've seldom seen that be the case pretty much ever. Normal developers will use casting, yes, but probably not reflection directly. They will use libraries that will use reflection, sure. For example, few on my team use reflection directly (I know, we've talked, they've been confused because they've never done it). I'm the team lead. I use it a lot. We have data parsers. That data needs to get mapped into a canonical model. My code, the mapper factory, uses reflection and naming standards and code generation to automatically pick the proper mapper based on the inbound parsed object. So my code really does have an API of "interface Converter:public Object mapper(Object)". Behind the scenes, using the reflection API, the first step is to determine the parsed object's package. Replace a keyword in that package to find another package for the mapper and the reflectively load the mapper that implements that interface if it doesn't exist. Thus the SingletonFactoryFactory of Java!

But following that scant 50-100 lines of code is about 15k of plan old, getString->setString, auto-generated mapper code. Boring, encapsulated, typed. And all of that allows me to know if the mapping documents the BAs created are good. If they compile, they're good. If not, got to talk to the BAs.
https://github.com/salboaie/harvests

harvest.let('father', loadPenguin, 'MrPenguin');
harvest.let('mother', loadPenguin, 'MrsPenguin');
harvest.let('family', loadPenguinFamily, wait('father'), wait('mother'));

The above call do 3 calls without then or declaring ugly callbacks!
As someone who swore off c after a college class and an experience with perl (three cheers for memory management), this was a great intro article to the idioms of c.
I hear this sort of claim over and over again. Yet whenever I've had to optimize Java code that does heavy math (particularly work with vectors, matrices, complex numbers, etc) the number one optimization is to more or less maintain my own small object stack, or manually put aside and reuse objects within individual functions. We're talking 10x speed improvements by making sure that garbage created per-iteration is near zero as opposed to just making a mess and letting GC sort it out.

These are objects that have basically no-op constructors, and never stay live for more than a method call, which makes me think that the observed speed boosts must have something to do with GC. Am I missing something?
It must be nice living in not-California.
Yes like Cfront [1]. I used that back in the day, the pain of it caused me to rewrite all my C++ in C though :p Call me a coward!

[1] -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cfront
I care deeply about what happens in the world and I also think countries having intelligence agencies is ok. This may seem contradictory to you but I don't think it is. I recognize that there are people who do not believe spying is ok, a sentiment most famously summed up by "gentlemen do not read each other's mail." Based on how that doctrine worked out, I simply can't support it. I'm willing to have that debate though.
I think you're spot on here - TDD is great as long as you're not too obstinate about it. It's a trade off, just like every interesting problem.

One point I'd like to draw out. If you don't have a clue how you want to build things, TDD isn't going to help.

This is exactly right. If you find yourself completely unable to articulate a test for something, you probably don't really know what it is you're trying to build. I think that's the greatest benefit to TDD: it forces you to stop typing and think.
sounds like it's time for an eye tracking experiment
Setting up a remote team of developers anywhere in the world purely to save on costs isn't worth it.

You should hire remote because you simply don't have access to the talent locally, or can't assemble a local team quickly enough. And you should have at least one seasoned technical leader who's worked with a distributed team before to guide you through the process.

Hiring remote devs halfway around the world because you can save 80% on wages is a pennywise and pound foolish decision.
Be nice.

The language immersion market is big enough for quite a few companies to co-exist. Time will tell.
You are quite literally one in seven billion. You could spend all day every day thinking about a given person and it would still be absolutely true that people in general do not give that person a second's thought on average. You could object to any general truism with "it depends who and when" — that is true, but not insightful. There are babies for whom mother's milk is deadly, but it's still a biological fact that babies benefit from nursing.
This is exactly the problem I was talking about. In every definition I've read there was strict condition that set of all possible states Q is non-empty (and finite). But there is difference in definition of set of final states. In [1] there is a comparison - in columns labeled "Peter Linz" and "Wikipedia" F is defined as subset of Q. This implies that it also could be empty, although in column labeled "Michael Sipser" there is a special state q_accept that explicitly exist in Q, therefore F is not-empty. Unfortunately there is no information if q_accept has to be reachable from start state.

But consider this:
How one could say that this machine is actually writing "TM" every two cells? If you investigate tape states while machine is still running it might change (on meta-level you my expect that this is actually true but you might for example make some bug that you're not aware of). The only way to be able to see that "TM" has been written is after the machine halts.

[1] http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~matuszek/cit596-2012/NewPages/turi...
I like how they use a huge picture of a snake for the article, even when Python isn't named after the animal, but Monty Python.

More on topic: Even when Python is one of my favorite languages, this article is plain horrible. Biased, and without any sort of point to compare it to.

Python is great for many tasks, but it's just retarded to pretend that it's the best tool to go for everything.
It's time for us to understand that Square is the bare-bones bottom-of-the-market provider. Just because they seem slick and high-tech doesn't mean they're Apple. They want to be the Wal-Mart of payments, driving down their costs at every turn. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's something that we, as potential customers, have to be clear about.
Ah yes, I forgot about state taxes. If you're unfortunate enough (in that regard) to live in CA that's another 12.3% knocking your haul down to 240.5M. Could be a little bit less than that in some cities as well I suppose.
If you're programming in C, it's not unreasonable to be pedantic about stuff like this. :D
How are you guys different from apptimize? http://apptimize.com/
And your users, they'll surely surprise you!
Good to hear! I am looking forward to seeing it.
There was a period of time when the tap mechanic was used by nearly every collectible card game but they all had their own name for it. The mechanic was the same (rotating the card slightly to show it had been used that turn) which I would have thought was what a patent protected against, rather than protecting the name which would have been copyright.