skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I smiled and said, "No sweat, I'll train you. The first command you learn is HELP" and proceeded to type it in on the console terminal. So the data center manager, the shift supervisor and the eight day operators watched the LA100 buzz out the usual introductory text. When it finished they turned to me with expectant faces and I said in an avuncular manner, "This is your most important command!"

The shift supervisor stepped forward and studied the text for about a minute. He then turned with a very puzzled expression on his face and asked, "What do you use it for?" Sigh.

This feels like every time I've tried to explain some bit of technology to a non-techie.
Quemador de Grasa
la propia comida es la mejor solución al problema del sobrepeso

El sobrepeso existe por 3 simples razones:
No se come la comida correcta.
No se ingiere la cantidad correcta de calorías por día.
No se come en el momento correcto.
Las dietas que se conocen complican demasiado las cosas, lograr bajar de peso no tiene nada que ver con pasar hambre o hacer mucho ejercicio
I first read about this work a few years ago, but had I encountered it before college, I think I might have majored in statistics. Such powerful results - feel like magic.
It was a rhetorical question. The point was once you have a definition of intelligence - yours is one of many fine definitions - you can refine that into a metric for comparing different intelligences, and then you have a way for a comparison function given two program descriptions to determine which is "more intelligent".

Building artificial intelligence then reduces to undirected search, assuming infinite CPU and RAM.
Sorry, I didn't mean you should be ashamed about using old software. What I meant was that we should be ashamed that other people are using old software.

I am helping my girlfriend to learn Javascript, and it hurts inside that every once in a while she gets confused with something I have to explain her it's because the author of the language made rookie mistakes/dumb decisions 20 years ago.
Hmmm... I guess since you don't use a public profile pic or take selfies this is a bad product idea. Or maybe, just maybe most people don't really care.

Maybe your point was that you won't use this particular product? Are you the person who also posts negative reviews on Yelp for restaurants you've never been to because you don't like that style of food?
"The word that comes to mind is playful. This is a book for 5 to 7 year olds. You want it to be playful to capture children's attention and imagination."

To play Devils Advocate, the video was not intended for children. Unless even the kids in the Bay have their hands on fat stacks of cash.
Come on! I am writing LuvvieScript a compile-to-javascript dialect of Erlang.

This is a list of compile-to-javascript languages:
https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/wiki/List-of-lang...

Is any developer going to give every language on that list the same consideration?

No. Not possible.
How and why Mt.Gox should walk away
What do think of using HDF5? You can also store pandas tables in them.
I haven't laughed this hard in days:

The fire alarm klaxon went off and the siren warning of imminent halon gas release was screaming. We started to panic but the data center manager shouted over the din, "Don't worry, the halon system failed its acceptance test last week. It's disabled and nothing will happen."

He was half right, the primary halon system indeed failed to discharge. But the secondary halon system observed that the primary had conked and instantly did its duty, which was to deal with Dire Disasters. It had twice the capacity and six times the discharge rate.
You don't just connect the two in series :-) In fact the best practice is not to switch from your backup supply back to mains automatically just in case the power goes out again.

How its should work is mains or your gas turbine are used to charge the batteries the power is always coming from your battery room.
> Sun and AT&T were going to work together to jointly build one true standard UNIX

Which worked, but technically everything was SysV-flavored afterwards, which in many regards was a huge backward step IMNSHO. Sun OS was a joy to work with before that, not so much after.

Also it was sad to see NeWS go -- and speaking of pain: motif.
TekSavvy ordered to hand over names of movie downloaders
About the security content of iOS 7.0.6
Go Ahead, Let Your Kids Fail
I've noticed that the 11greatoaks.ca.ibone.comcast.net router(s) (Equinix SV1) are typically the ones that fail / have large latency issues. Hopefully if this has happened then they've increased overall capacity through this bottleneck.
The person who can't be bothered to find something they don't know exists. Seriously?
I think that's understood
I do not agree with the first statement - it supposes that men and women will, given an option and without external pressures, always choose the same thing in equal amounts. I don't think that is a settled question. But it is worth looking into, as are any external pressures that may be keeping women out of 'Tech'. Does a representative field such as you suggest exist? Genuine question. I'm thinking retail/service?

In regards to Congress, it kind of makes sense to me they would be overwhelmingly from a law background - after all, the ones who know law best and are interested in law are most likely to want to have the ability to change it.
I use Amazon. I found Zinc here yesterday. I rolled the dice, ordered ~$100. My CC gives 5% cashback on amazon, 1% normally. The Zinc advantage over the 4% difference was slim, but I'd rather someone else use my points than me. In fact I'd rather take the cash benefit right now, before I even spend the money.

Anyhow, I'm posting now because I just got half the order, sitting at my door when I got off work. It was delivered in probably 16~20 hours. I don't have Prime. This is amazing. It's about Zappos-level impressive from a customer standpoint.
Despite the title, there are some positive points for Canadians in this decision:

- Voltage is required to pay TekSavvy's legal fees and overhead for getting the information.

- The court must review the language in Voltage's letter to alleged infringers.

- The court will also likely tend to reject damages much over the minimum $100.
I'm currently "ignoring" a similar effort in my lab (~20 workstations). I don't think they've broken a MHash/s yet out of an estimated potential ~2-3MH.
From the README of my "Cuckoo Cycle" Proof-of-Work at https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo :

Mining is generally considered to be inherently power hungry but it need not be. It’s a consequence of making the proof of work computationally intensive. If computation is minimized in favor of random access to gigabytes of memory (incurring long latencies), then mining will require large investments in RAM but relatively little power.

Cuckoo Cycle represents a breakthrough in three important ways:

1) it performs only one very cheap siphash computation for about 3.3 random accesses to memory,

2) its memory requirement can be set arbitrarily and doesn't allow for any time-memory trade-off.

3) verification of the proof of work is instant, requiring 1 sha256 and 42 siphash computations.

Runtime in Cuckoo Cycle is completely dominated by memory latency. It promotes the use of commodity general-purpose hardware over custom designed single-purpose hardware.

Other features:

4) proofs take the form of a length 42 cycle in the Cuckoo graph.

5) it has a natural notion of (base) difficulty, namely the number of edges in the graph; above about 60% of size, a 42-cycle is almost guaranteed, but below 50% the probability starts to fall sharply.

6) running time for the current implementation on high end x86 is under 24s/GB single-threaded, and under 3s/GB for 12 threads.

7) making cuckoo use a significant fraction of the typical memory of a botnet computer will send it into swap-hell, and likely alert its owner.
Oh, I wasn't saying you can completely stop them from reading a page or individual pages. But there is activity, than can be detected as irregular. Here is a true example I know about someone who wanted to scrape their competitor's client listings. The competitor had a map with points of their customers with random user IDs and no where was the entire dataset visible. The person just built a scraper/bot, to hit every single possible ID of over 10,000 numbers. They hit a ton of empty pages, and that company should have recognized an IP incrementally crawling their data, especially empty pages...This activity should have been recognized and resulted in an IP ban.
To Hustle or Not to Hustle
I don't have the math (or time (or ambition!)) to confirm or deny this, but I think that it's not really meant to stand up to serious scrutiny - just enough for someone to glance at an invoice or a URL or a receipt and being more impressed/less wary. (See fecak's reply to my comment.)
If anyone happens to be interested, I have a PoC OTA deployment solution I built when I got tired of being asked for regular app builds. It's a Web service designed to run on a Mac and pull from a GitHub repository, run xcodebuild, package the IPA, and let you install it on your device.

I abandoded this because I longer have access to a Mac since I stopped iOS development a while ago, but ping me if you're interested and you want to try to get it to work. It doesn't come close to the features of something like TestFlight, but was designed for in-house use by a team who needs access to bleeding edge builds without developer intervention.
Change the name. I wrote the card game Ambition and strongly object to sharing a name with a stack-ranking app. I had it first, by 11 years.
It's not so much that governments have less control over us, but rather that technology has enabled them to be more discreet about it. If you've ever read up on the history of intelligence gathering, psyops and unethical experimentation in the U.S., you'd be shocked by how much civil rights have been violated throughout history, even in the supposed land of the free. However, the old adage holds true: out of sight, out of mind.

It's true that in general we have more liberties now than ever, but it's on the surface. The trade-off is that behind the scenes, you're worse now than ever.

As for technology enabling Snowden to leak more than he could have without digital methods, that's correct. The Pentagon Papers were still relatively large, though. 7,000 pages out of over 20,000 source material, IIRC.

Your example of the public uncovering a photo manipulation isn't really all that impressive, though. Just one propaganda piece dismantled, but it's not like things like this haven't been exposed before the advent of widespread digital photo manipulation. At best, the public may have a better eye for such deception, but in the long run these are all trivial issues anyway.

Sousveillance is an excellent thing, but ostensibly it has no major effect on police conduct. Simply having citizens film officers is not a deterrent, since the police as an institution are fundamentally overpowered and not given enough oversight. They're state auxiliaries. It doesn't faze them.

Widespread cryptography is a great thing, but at the moment it's inaccessible to most people and an arms race. Things will improve in the near future, but how practical will it be at deflecting bulk surveillance states is beyond the breadth of this post.

On your last point, you're right about the Church Commission publicly exposing NSA and FBI malice. But ultimately, the only effect it had was some formal legislation that essentially did not hinder the agencies from performing clandestine and unlawful operations any bit. This is your fatal error in reasoning. You're expecting some surface legislative reform to solve much deeper structural issues. Remember Total Information Awareness and how scandalous it was in 2003? Did public outcry end it? Ostensibly it did, but in reality the agencies just learned to practice better OPSEC and moved to the same goal, but under different names, and more modularized.

Can we avoid a surveillance state dystopia? Maybe. But probably not with your solutions.
There is being energy intensive, and then there is being CPU intensive.

You could imagine a hypothetical coin that somehow uses proof of data storage and retrieval instead of proof of work. Producing and running tons of harddrives would still require power, but it would be a less.. direct.. requirement.
I haven't used or looked at Erlang, but bear with me.

* no package manager

This is _huge_. For example: I currently work very heavily with node.js. I understand all of the many, many problems with javascript. NPM single-handedly makes up for all of them put together, in my eyes.

Which is to say - an amazing package manager can make a poor language. A decent package manager (pip, for example) allows a nice language to shine, but won't make or break it. Lack of a package manager could probably kill just about any new languages these days (and Erlang - correct me if I'm wrong - appears to have the popularity of a pretty early-stage language right now).
If anyone is interesting in helping, I'm going to spend my evening trying to implement this here: https://github.com/ConceptPending/proveit

My email is in my profile, and I'm happy to Skype chat with anyone who wants to help.
Traditional paradigms of banking might have to change when each person can be his or her own bank.
Yeah, I've been in talks with my accountant on what would be take to interest accounts. Quickbooks has a neat feature where they package up all the postings and send them to the accountant.
Awesome to hear Sam! You were the influential voice when we were fundraising and always pushed us in the right direction. Congratulations!
For me, a good rule of thumb is that if you feel you need to hide what you're doing from your landlord/employer/etc, then you're probably doing something wrong.
Haha, thanks roel. I'm so glad to be relieved of the duty to try to improve things you use...

And let me extend my apologies in name of all the authors of software whose extra features and nice bug-freeness you enjoyed at the terrible cost of going through the gruelling process of having to upgrade your software.

Perhaps all us developers of modern software could get together raise funds so you could get a refurbished pink iMac G3. Before all those pesky Apple people started their code purity fetishist backwards compatibility breaking migration to a BSD+Mach based OSX.
Remote Lisp (and Prolog) hacker is available
Dear all,

In case you were looking for highly qualified hacker I'd like to offer you my expertise!

I shine at attacking "uncharted waters".

Be it whiteboarding math of the first innovative bookmaking solution (and later implementing it in tight Common Lisp) or implementing Common Language Runtime in Prolog in order to mine software vulnerabilities

My previous projects also include more down to earth DSP programming in mix of C and distributed Erlang (FHSS) and other things

I'm not planning to relocate right away so we could discuss options

I'm in GMT+4

In my spare time I study and program natural language semantic (keywords are FOL, DRT, and logic programming of course)

As you see I don't have much time keeping my public profile
I'm low profile type

Drop me a line at me@ysz.name

I deliver idiomatic code with supporting documentation (and methodology documentation if the problem is particularly hard)

My LinkedIn is at http://linkedin.com/in/yakovzaytsev

Have a nice weekend!
Bram shows no interest in these sorts of things. Frequently, devs post to the vim mailing with a month or two of work on some new feature with no comment from the BDFL.
This is great. ShareLatex is an excellent service and they are always improving. They're the only company I can think of that sends useful, interesting emails that are for my benefit and not just theirs. Keep up the good work!
We recently received an email about our Comp Sci labs (300+ GPU-equipped workstations) being used for bitcoin mining at night.
Chimpanzee doesnt damage itself while having more strenght using same muscle mass as weaker human.
> the $2,160,000 dollars of Bitcoins that come into existence every day, that's also about $2,160,000 of electricity used.

You lost me. What?
I am not going to enter into a syntax argument I have already given my views on that here http://rvirding.blogspot.se/2014/01/erlang-syntax-again-and-... . My main point is that the syntax is simple and that it fits the semantics much better than anything based on an Algol like syntax would, even one which uses ';' in the "normal" way.

And one reason it works is because it has built-in those features for building fault-tolerant systems which, for example, Go lacks. Borrowing from NASA "Failure is not an option".
That was the entire appeal of Notes/Hypercard, people could throw together a small database application and it wasn't any more difficult than creating a spreadsheet. (The big difference was that Notes apps were automatically network client-server.) I think it's rather cynical and elitist to say that something which empowered users "destroyed IT capabilities", and it's not like many of those small orgs really had IT capabilities.

But like HC, the Notes designer software was turned into an added-cost product, and after that both Notes and HC became the domain of 'IT experts' that knew how to work around the limitations of a rinky-dink platform.

This was all long ago, for most people now Notes is just a terrible email application.
Short answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
If that is all you need and expect from a replacement for LaTeX, why aren't you just using LibreOffice?
That's the way to own it! I identify with this life philosophy and own it without feeling guilty that I haven't mastered one specific domain. I do work on learning more and stay current in my areas of interest.
Hmm I wasn't aware of that when I named the product. I was going more for Stock (as in inventory) and Operating Room.

I'm in talks with a designer for a dinosaur themed logo though since something about the name sounds like Raptor and I think that might be kinda neat.
You may know this, but the author of Javascript was under severe time pressure, and wanted to just implement Scheme but got overruled by management.
How much are we supposed to tip for delivery?
Just because you won't get caught doesn't make it right.
> That a system such as Bitcoin has value does not intrinsically make a bitcoin have any value.

Correct, but that Bitcoin has gained the size it has gives it that value. Metcalfe's law. Bitcoin has the liquidity that none of the alt's could dream of.

>The question is whether it is any worse than traditional/national currencies in this regard.

No, that is not the question. Traditional currencies are not payment networks; bitcoin is not just a currency, it's a technology that includes the payment network and currency inextricably bound. The question is whether bitcoin as a payment network is better than existing payment networks like Paypal or Visa or Wester Union.

> At the moment the speculative /bubble behaviour is dominating and volatility is too high compared with any national currency except those undergoing a massive crisis

Bitcoin is not simply a currency, such a comparison is simply wrong from the start. Bitcoin's competitors are not other currencies, rather it's other payment networks. What currency those other payment networks use is rather beside the point.

Bitcoin is not a stable currency and will likely never be a stable currency due to its deflationary nature. It is however a payment network and such a network does not require much currency stability; if the price is stable for a matter of minutes and there's enough liquidity to handle large transactions that's enough to make it an invaluable payment network capable of putting the likes of Western Union out of business. Bitcoin could easily come to dominate both large and small international money transfers.
There's source code, a BSD license and the README describes their rationale right up front. In light of just the superficial information on github, your comment seems hyperbolic.

My interest in the project is in something with a design similar to Sublime Text that works remotely in an SSH session. There's also some exotica about wrapping Python in a Go process which I find interesting and terrifying.
This reminds me of https://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=9
The wiki article mentions estimations being done from parts from broken tanks, in which case internal numbers wouldn't necessarily help.
We as developers in the Open Source community should be ashamed people are still using Vim to write LaTeX in Bash running on terminal emulators.

What?! You can take my vim+bash+tmux+urxvt when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!
I'd never thought of Harold and the Purple Crayon as related to programming. How is that? In perhaps the broadest sense the crayon gives him the power and freedom to create in the same way software might, but that's a pretty big leap.
I wonder if the energy spent moving/securing bitcoin is more or less than the energy we spend moving/securing cash/credit. Driving armored trucks full of cash and coins around isn't free. Nor is it free to keep the regular banking system's electronic infrastructure running.
Sam, it would be great since you are the new President of YC if you could update the How to Apply to Y Combinator[1] page with your views on what a successful application looks like and your typical thought process when reviewing applications.

Also, congratulations!

[1] http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html
"once you've strayed from the safety of Java/C#/etc., it seems like you might as well go all the way and get into Haskell"

This is exactly what has led me to Haskell. I was doing Python but got interested in Go for Channels and Static Typing. It turned out Go's static typing was a little to weak for me, so it's unsurprising that I came across Haskell shortly thereafter.
Homeless to hacker: Marc Roth wants to help others leave poverty 
Marc Roth’s story is one for the books: He fought his way out of poverty using nothing more than a TechShop membership, perseverance, and a little help. Now that he’s sorted out his future, he’s trying to raise money to help other homeless individuals do the same through TechShop training.
Why is encryption weak due to the simple pattern of increasing numbers? Encrypting increasing numbers is how CTR and GCM mode work; those are arguably some of the best modes of operation we have commonly available.
Ha! This sums me up completely. Well except for the 'jill' part. I've found while its a real pain to get a job, that once you have one people want to hold on to you. Someone that can jump from doing some carpentry, to administering a server, to working a job fair is really handy to have around.
A short route doesn't necessarily mean good bandwidth
Assuming there is a next startup and it's anything like the current startup, then I'd probably go with Groovy again. Groovy has worked very well for us.
Came here thinking he was running for public office.
Doubly funny (in a dark way) due to Michael's turbulent relationship with YC via HN.
Nothing left to say? The decline and fall of blog comments
It’s fair to say that blogs like this one have experienced a dip in comments of late. Social media shares remain high, emails still bulge in our inboxes, subscribers continue to sign up for newsletters, but the comment section of individual articles is conspicuously bare.
Ask HN: what actually happened in January 1, 1970?
UNIX timestamps.. Why January 1, 1970.
We're talking about timezones. The whole article is about timezones. The map has no purpose except to show timezones. I cannot emphasize enough the point that timezones are the relevant unit of measurement in this article.
The search for Special Unit 2, for some reason pegged an episode of "The Unit" for Ep1.

A way to tag a show/episode as incorrect would probably be helpful.
maybe they'll integrate itc into testflight instead. :)
Understanding iOS7 UIDyanmics