skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
in the current state of technology it's impossible to determine what is derived data that can be easily recomputed and what is essential data without which the current state could not be recomputable.

Can you elaborate more on that statement? I see it as an expensive problem, but not impossible.

If you have a completely deterministic VM/instruction set, you can recompute any function output from any set of inputs. If you have non-deterministic input (network, input devices, randomness, etc) you can store those inputs to replay at a later time.

I don't know if it's always necessary to store non-derived data. Do you need to save all keystrokes? All mouse moves? All network packets? Probably not. If those network packets just result in displaying a graph on the screen, they can probably be thrown away. Maybe you can throw away the headers and just compute based on the packet data. Or maybe you can simply store the fact that a stream of data that matches a cryptographic hash was received. It depends on what function receives that non-derived data.

So I think the difficulty would be designing a system that would isolate derived data and replayable/recomputable/refetchable data, and the processes that compute that data -- and do so with reasonable efficiency. I think this could be done at the process level rather than the instruction set level (though you would have to have a restricted instruction set -- i.e. limited floating-point).
See the authors comment above. The library does do a lot more than topology, but the see the sections titled: joins, measurement and transformation. These are all topological functions.
Meet LandID, the "anti-selfie app"
Sort of a sidebar: The term "atom" doesn't seem to have the same meaning in all languages.

Atoms in Clojure are reference types, and they are mutable in a controlled way (they can be changed to refer to another immutable value).

In Erlang, an "atom" doesn't refer an immutable value, it is the immutable value. An Erlang atom by definition cannot ever be any other value.
Thanks a lot :) I cannot imagine that the web will ever work on this OS.. How do you implement a mutable system (JavaScript) with an immutable core? So it's definitely not for everyone.
Thank you for taking the time to scope this out. Out of all the posts on this thread, very few people have taken the time to do the research, could be the language barrier of course.
When I worked for a university in the UK as salaried Research Associate they "forgot" to pay me one month - didn't even apologize. They gave me a cheque that I cashed in the universities own branch and cycled to my own branch to deposit the money before my mortgage payment came out.
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/25630/major-mathematical-a...
Or a fake ID... opening an untraceable bank account is one of the major use cases for identity theft. It's very likely that the money was moved into a bank account opening with a stolen or false identity, and the person will not be caught.
Hero by Enrique Iglesias (now playing) – Last.fm
Concurrent refresh for materialized views is also pretty cool!
You are wrong. It's not the press pass it is access to the "unnamed high ranking official" that "leaks" you stories that sell your paper. Not only do you not have breaking stories you don't even have sourced stories. Imagine if WaPo had to write things like "the NYT is reporting...". That's a death knell.

And what do you complain about? That the government is not leaking you information anymore? That anonymous sources aren't taking your calls?
How about running a company-internal community for you and your employees just by copying 2 PHP-files onto your webserver. You do not need any database or other components. Use every shared host or one of your local (l)a(m)p-servers. Aktually you just need an php-enabled server. No MySQL, and it does not need to be linux. Maybe you just install it on your working-Windows-machine using XAMPP.
It would be nice to have an example that is viewable from the markdown/on github. I think it would make people more likely to build it.
While you can't get root on App Engine, you can get root on a Google Compute Engine instance, and you can use Cloud SQL for a standard data backend. You don't have to use a keystore deal like the old days anymore (pre-2011).

Disclaimer: I'm a dev on Cloud SQL.
Haskell's generational garbage collector is able to use some tricks to take advantage of the fact that values in Haskell are (almost all) immutable:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/Memory_Management
The partnership that owned msnbc.com ended last year, but the cable channel is still around.
Doesn't matter. In an immutable model, the old copy is guaranteed not to change, so you can safely copy it non-atomically. (That's one of the big benefits of immutability.)
If you say:

> The interview has been intentionally blocked from the US public

You need to present some semblance of evidence that that's the case. I will grant that it's interesting that this hasn't been covered in the US, but this article is a suspicion being presented as a proven fact.
> This is a classic example of poor scientific journalism and I believe it became so popular due to widespread deficits in scientific literacy. You don’t have to be a neuroscientist to see that there are huge problems with his story. You simply have view this story objectively have a healthy dose of skepticism without quickly deferring to the authority figure. There are simple questions which are never addressed here. What experiment was being done during each PET scan? If the psychopaths and Dr. Fallon were both completing a morality task and they both had low activity in certain regions, THEN that would be something more tangible. This is simply showing a brain picture and not asking questions. We know that people are much more likely to believe something if there is a brain picture associated with it and this is further proof.

-- http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/pseud...
I would like a "favorites" or "saved links" page. The front page changes rapidly enough that if you don't bookmark pages that you want, a few hours later they can be hard to find if you don't remember the exact title to use with search.
My theory is that male behavior and attitudes are so repugnant that most women just stay away.
Ah, thanks. When I said EDN, I meant Fressian :)
Google Refuses to Remove Links to Tarantino's Leaked Script
Ask HN: How do I explain Tor to my Mom?
When I start talking cookies, privacy, security she thinks oatmeal, tightens the grip on her purse and whispers: "why, what, wait, who's listening?". Keep in mind that this is a 60+ lady who's getting along well with Ubuntu; however, all she does is power up, click-open a browser and plays online.

Point is: with most of today's computing done in a browser and most users being non-techie: is it even possible to spread proper secure/private browsing? A simple click-install-go solution?
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/bibrefs/Doligez-Leroy-gc.ht...
dont forget http://indoo.rs/

yeah he is right - your cell phone imei mac, all those data points are recorded at each cell tower as long as it is on.

I mean they can still use this marketing data to see if you are a iphone or android user and decide on application and marketing initiatives for mobile on the short term.

I don't really think its something to be implicitly scared of from my analysis, but I think one should maybe keep an eye on having your cellphone wifi on all the time so your data doesnt pass thru open networks you arent aware of.
What someone says about you after the contract doesn't work out matters.
Yes and a lot of very talented people would not be able to focus on doing what they currently do full time (and love to do) as they'll have to worry about making money.

OR

As a content consumer, you'll have to pay for the content directly which is currently available for free.

Yes, I know everyone hates ads and I'll probably get downvoted here too but - You should punish publishers who serve malware, popups, JS & other bad stuff BUT you don't punish ALL the publishers - many of them don't do that and are just fine.
There are 2 classes of services on AWS: infrastructure and platform. It's important not to confuse them. Infrastructure includes EC2, S3, ELB, and things of that nature. Platform includes Beanstalk, Dynamo, EMR, and things of that nature.

In general, Amazon's infrastructure offerings are explicitly trying to be commodity, and compete as such. E.g. lower cost, minimal lock in. If you configure servers using chef or other configuration system, and if you wrap all your service calls, it's not challenging to move between vendors on the infrastructure level. Check out fog which helps you do just this: https://github.com/fog/fog

Amazon's platform offerings are pretty explicitly trying to build lock in -- explicit in that they're often free (Beanstalk) and really just trying to sell more infrastructure.

Microsoft, and specifically Windows, pursue a platform strategy. Them offering Linux is actually very novel for them, but it's still called WINDOWS Azure, and the word "Windows" has traditionally been synonymous with platform lock in. You write a program for Windows, it runs only on Windows, and you have to pay for Windows.

I'm excited for MS to get fully into the infrastructure business, but I see their offerings as reactionary to Amazon. Big corporate, windows-based companies are needing to do things in the cloud, and have been going to Amazon. I see Microsoft as trying to offer services to prevent them from leaving by letting them buy what they need from MS.

It's hard for me to imagine good reasons to actually start on Azure, though. They're not a price leader (dropping prices always seems reactionary to AWS price drops), they have limited selection of services (vs. AWS), limited people using them (weaker community support), and always seem clueless about the internet (SSL cert outage, anyone?). Unless you're a Windows only developer and can't work on Linux, I really don't know why I would choose them.

PS. Amazon has a startup program you can get in to. When we started on AWS, they gave us $10K in free services. I know $1K is pretty standard, but if you can get validation (investor? incubator?), they'll go higher.
Falcons in the Sky
The press seems more than happy to engage in bear-poking as shown with the prior administration and others in the past. There must be some other explanation.
That's not true. In the brief four months between being published and the author being revealed as a pseudonym it sold a respectable number of copies (8,500 across all formats - that doesn't sound like a lot, but it was at the time only published in the UK, and for a hardback book that is actually a large amount). By publishing industry standards it was commercially successful.

JK Rowling herself has said the number of copies the book sold in its first three months corresponds fairly well to the number of books she sold under her own name when she was initially published.
I'm not trying to be funny. People already known to the victim is the sane place to start any investigation.

edit - my edit earlier was going from 'pissed off' to 'argued with' as I realised that 'pissed off' can often imply intent to piss off.
The source urls are broken. Seeing Spain as sixth and Mexico as fifth leads me to believe that it is total water use over total population, as opposed to average water use per household. These are two very different things, and food exports must be taken into consideration if we are going to be using these values.
> Also, the blockchain might require terabytes after a decade.

Imagine saying "the blockchain might require gigabytes after a decade" in 2004. Here in 2014, you can get 64 GB on something the size of your smallest fingernail for $30-$40. Terabytes after a decade won't matter a bit.
I didn't realize how much people were consciously trying to get in on a bubble. It's like people are offended that the developers are trying to create a viable currency rather than a ponzi scheme.
Chess is deep but it's not complex. Starcraft is both deep and complex. Candy Crush is shallow and simple. I can't think of a game off the top of my head that's really complex and really shallow but whatever it is it's definitely not on a mobile device.
I would guess the main problem with your idea is that unless you can find a way to cover customs logistics you are effectively encouraging people to break the law. How will you cover people needing to pay import duty and taxes on the goods they are bringing into the country?
I'm curious how they're going to deal with dust/a very large blockchain
There already is a good app store for Windows, and has been for a couple of years:

http://allmyapps.com/

You can download apps directly without using the installer, but the installer will update apps for you as well.

There's also Ninite, of course, but AllMyApps has over 16,000 apps.
Interestingly enough, flight attendants wear a lot of dry-cleaned clothes which has been directly correlated to breast cancer.

http://www.webmd.com/cancer/news/20100209/dry-cleaning-chemi...
To Succeed, Growth Hacking Has To Focus More On Product Than Marketing
That's not how mining works. More miners = higher difficulty = lower rewards. Plus 4th gen ASIC scrypt in 2015 when there's only one now and no more coming for many months? Unlikely.
Creator of Facebook Ads is matching P2P microloans at Zidisha (YC W14)
Valve also had a virtual monopoly on digital game sales, billions of dollars of alternate revenue and huge teams of engineers and artists to build that Steam market and make the initial bunch of items.

Valve is incredibly unique yet people keep telling tiny companies making mobile games that they should be like Valve.
Do you mean screenshot of opened manpage?
Awesome! You should have a look at Urbit: http://www.urbit.org/
If the interview casts Snowden in a positive light then the government would probably be unhappy to have it highlighted in the media.

The government uses implicit threats of retaliation as deterrence.
Ideally, the money supply grows at the same rate as the economy. In this case "the economy" is the segment using Dogecoin.

If you can't get it right, most people consider it better to have a bit of inflation rather than deflation. This may just be a consequence of people being more used to inflation and able to deal with it. For example, people don't mind prices going up as much as they mind their income going down.
At the process level there are already plenty of programs that work this way and it's exactly the kind of thing the Clojure ecosystem is geared towards.

That's why the Purely Functional OS is essentially a thought experiment in what it would take to extend this to the entire operating system.

When I said "impossible given the current state of technology" I meant exactly what you said in your last paragraph though: impossible without designing an OS that isolates derived data.

I believe such a system will come in the form of persistent data structures coupled with reactive programming but, while I believe it's inevitable in the long run, extending that concept all the way to the OS will be quite the challenge.
I wrote an operating system in a purely functional dialect of Lisp; http://losak.sf.net

There are a few things I learned in the process that I think are relevant here:

1. Forget garbage collection in the sense of any variant of mark-and-sweep. For an operating system latency is more important than through put, so you really want real time memory management. If you use reference counting, then there is a lazy variant that gives you just that; no pauses due to reclaiming free memory. The downside with reference counting is that it doesn't work with cycles in heap-allocated memory, but if your data is all immutable then you can prevent cycles from being created in the first place.

2. Treat mutable memory as a form of I/O. Even if you just want to use memory mapped I/O, you will need some way to read and write to (some portion of) memory. Set aside a fixed block of memory (say, for instance, the first 10 MB), and only allow that memory to be read and written in an imperative fashion. Keep the managed heap completely separate from that mutable block, and don't allow any direct access to the managed memory.

3. You can actually perform preemptive multitasking entirely at compile time (or at program load time for apps not included when you build a binary for your OS). I've done this for both my OS and for Scheme (https://github.com/ojarjur/multischeme). It works extremely well and winds up being much faster than using the native primitives usually used for building multitasking support. For more details on exactly how to do it see the link to my Scheme implementation.

4. The biggest difficulty the author will hit, and the most likely cause for performance issues, will be in code generation. Since the proposal is for a new bytecode, the author will have to implement their own interpreter and/or JIT compiler for it, and writing an efficient one is an extremely large chunk of work. I've built an operating system and a programming language, and the language is by far the harder project. This is why I went from working on a new OS written in a new language to re-implementing my compile-time multitasking technique for Scheme; it allows me to take advantage of all of the hard work people have done to make compilers for that language which produce fast code.
As far as I can tell, the "bad rap" is mostly from people who haven't used it at all, or haven't used it for very long. (Typically XP users who are extremely averse to change.) The Windows 8 users I know personally like it a lot, though that doesn't stop them from complaining about the parts they don't like....
From the top comment on: http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/19twt9/el...

"Let's say I want to access the website that's located at this server. My computer connects to another computer in the Tor network, which connects to another, and so on. Eventually, one of them will connect to the server, which can send back information using this pattern. However, none of the computers in the Tor network know who is getting what. The computer that you connect to isn't the same as the one that connected to the server, so it's very anonymous."
Based on what I've seen of the quality of video captured by most in-store surveillance systems, they are going to have to be upgraded quite a bit.

Every time the local newspaper publishes an image from a bank or convenience story robbery, the quality is so poor you wonder why they bother at all. About the best you can do is say "white man, about 6' tall, wearing something red."
Wow. That would be great to have UPSERTS, as mentioned at the end of the post.

I've been lugging my RULES/Trigger functions for this feature for years.
mindblown.gif ...I had no idea a regular person could open & collect funds from a bank account that was fraudulently opened and actually get away with it.
Kudos for the named funs.

Care to provide some "marketing" about what they allow for? (besides and in addition to what is already in the eep-0037(?))

Why are they important? How will they support developers in writing and understanding erlang code? Do they provide even some internal/resp performance benefits?

Reg. the piping syntax: how is your proposition making the "transformation" more obvious for the reader of some application code?

To me it seams partial appl. is the more powerful feature for sure. Together with a rather "simple" |> operator it could provide the fun piping functionality. It looks like a map function is needed to wrap other functions taking part in the piping, right? Is that the "make it obvious" part you mentioned?

The piping syntax from elixir (from the joe blog above) on the other hand binds the |> operator to a more specialized, less flexible "fun call" transformation providing fun piping only, right?

Anyways, thanks for insights and again really kudos for the named funs.
The Hungover Games (2014) – Top Movizs
I went to a developer bootcamp.  This was my experience.
If you're wondering if it's a good move for you to quit your job and enroll in a developer bootcamp for 2-3 months, I wrote a blog post on my experience this past winter in a developer bootcamp at App Academy. I hope it helps you get an idea of what it would be like.
I realize that central Michigan has a fairly low cost of living, but that seems surprisingly low for a tenured professor.
What is wrong with table inheritance, given it makes for a good partitioning mechanism? Is it being misused in other areas?
Why make the system language a Lisp instead of a language that is by default immutable? I'd think Haskell is a shoe in for something like this and you'd have a head start with House:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_(operating_system)
in other news UK is on the verge of passing legislation tomorrow which will allow Police to SEIZE Journalist notes/files/etc. WITHOUT ANY due process... blatant censorship.

If this bill passes there won't be news to blackout.

http://rt.com/news/freedom-seizure-journalists-bill-512/
Is there a list of research / alternative operating systems anywhere?

I don't know how an OS would qualify to get on the list other than not DOS, Windows, OSX (or any of the Apple OSs), Linux (especially not 'ubuntu with a different DE'), or the BSDs (i guess there are exceptions if they're on a toaster).
Yeah but that is most probably more due to her already existing contacts and thus she started a completely different place than others have to.

Luck does play quite a large part in this once the initial vetting for quality is done.
Code coverage in Play 2
Author here. The language is the part I also dread the most, and is also the part that will be the least unique and the least interesting to "re-invent".. I'll look into finding an existing language that runs on bare metal and that has (or supports) immutable values.
My recommendation would be to modify an existing OS, like MINIX, to have two types of processes: mutable and immutable.

That way some (not all) of the potential advantages can be tested without having to start from scratch.
Kidnapper hears phone vibrate... reads text... responds "yes".

Don't most people have their phone locked?
Email delivery headaches
That would require destroying coins during a recession.
Worth it just for this:

git rev-list --all | xargs git grep '<YOUR REGEX>'
My serious business cryptocurrency names it after a silly internet picture
No, Women Don’t Make Less Money Than Men
The question I ask myself is do I think that if Snowden were an enemy of an enemy (a "good" guy) of the US that this would have the same minimal media exposure?

I think "I'm terrified of being assassinated by Russian/Chinese authorities" from a major dissident asylum seeker would be getting much more play.

In any case I don't think this isolated interview is very significant in itself.
Investing in _anything_ productive is the opposite of hoarding. Hardly anyone in an advanced economy hoards large amounts of physical paper money; banks keep it to satisfy customer demand, but would much rather have the money in their central bank deposit account. A couple of central banks in Europe are experimenting with tiny negative rates on these deposit accounts precisely to encourage them to lend it out.

If you _invest_, you're either buying a productive asset, or storing something valuable for a period of time, or giving money to some other business to spend on equipment, employees etc. in the hope of future return.
I use Mixpanel. It's really powerful and has a nice free tier from which you can test things out.
Karen Franklin had an interesting critique of his book, as well: http://www.amazon.com/review/R28SZH62Q6Y6AD/ref=cm_cr_dp_cmt...
Not many, but a few. Gender aside, nobody would think of Emmy Noether as anything less than one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived.
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." - H.L. Mencken
Good point. What if it is restricted to items bought in duty-free shops? Eg a nice scotch bought in a duty-free for a friend. Is that still encouraging to break the law? [serious question]