skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While one could say that this is about savefiles for games, I would say it's implications could more be about savefiles for software projects. If you are building the game in LUA, of course LUA is going to be the preferred way to save your game in since you are already using LUA objects and interpreting files in that language will be easy to integrate.

If you ever used maven xml configs, java object marshalling or c# xml you would understand the pains of using xml as a file format for software projects and data representation. You have to find a solution that is language agnostic, neither LUA or JSON is.
But in 'meat space', it is way harder and more expensive to do evil against large numbers of people. For example, phishing as done electronically (throw a very, very wide net, and hope) doesn't make economical sense if one had to do it manually.

Also, if, for example, cars and airplanes and banks and nuclear submarines would accept executable code as input, some people would do damage on a gargantuan scale.

Clearly, being liberal in what you accept must end somewhere. I argue that it should end very, very soon. Even innocuous things such as "let's allow everybody to read the subject of everyone's mail messages", if available at scale and cheaply, would entice criminal behavior, for example by those mining them for information that you are away from home.

Does anybody know how RMS thinks about passwords nowadays?
If you want to further your understanding of network protocols, there's an excellent open textbook available here: http://cnp3book.info.ucl.ac.be/
> How well maintained and diverse are the GambitScheme libraries?

The library situation in Gambit is.... very bad. Last time I tried it (~6 months ago) you had to compile from a different branch to get Blackhole to work.

Chicken Scheme has a much better ecosystem. It also compiles to C and is fast. Gambit is known for its speed so I won't say Chicken is as fast but it is "fast enough" and the ecosystem is worth the difference IMO.
Surprised nobody has posted this: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/
How James Bond Introduced the CIA to 1950s America
I always forget that

It's called redshift-gtk on Red Hat based distros.
I'm not sure that the "need" you're talking about is a practical one, though. Maybe it's an ideological "need", at best. More than enough people and websites seem to be getting by just fine without using Persona.

I think if there truly was a pressing need for Persona, we would have seen it get adopted rapidly and quickly. That's exactly what happened with Firefox. That's also what happened with Thunderbird, although to a lesser extent.

Openness is ideal, but it also requires some demand for that openness. Open systems that aren't adopted are really quite useless.
I have to agree here. General Turing-completeness was known from the beginning to imply undecidable questions -- about it's structure, running time, memory and so on. I don't think this has a place as the 'data'.

Abstractions exist for a reason -- this is analogous to source/channel coding separation or internet layers. They don't have to be that way, but are there for a reason.

Someone could change my opinion, though. Provide me a data format which proves certain things about it's behavior and that would be a nice counterexample.
Why not sqlite or sexpressions? Linus states that databases can't hold previous state but that's not really true...

I'm not sure why git is the best tool for the job in this case, even after reading the post & some of the contents.
U.S. Drops Most Charges Against Journalist Who Linked to Leaked Documents
William Gibson himself invented a better story:

https://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/441766075005276160
https://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/441767131605000192
"And Mozilla has the billions to make it rock."

Really? What do you base that statement on?
Some people do compete for speed or score in single player games. Arcade games have always had scoreboards, modern "arcade-style" games have online ones, and a community can turn any solitary activity into a competitive one:

http://speedrunslive.com/

http://speeddemosarchive.com/

Speedrunners are an exceptional case, but I think everyone gets a little annoyed when they look at a leaderboard and all the top players have scores of UINT_MAX or times of 0 seconds.

Obviously cheaters will find a way regardless of whether you give them the source code or not, I'm just saying dfc's concern is not totally ridiculous.
the compiler works fine with node-stable (v0.10.26),
but if you wan to use "nice functions", "yield parallel map", etc, you'll have to run the compiled .js with node >= v0.11.9 with --harmony flag, to enable "yield"
> Only by examining a long sequence of its results could one gain any confidence that it isn't backdoored

Actually, you can't. A properly backdoored RNG is indistinguishable from a non-backdoored RNG. Imagine a backdoored RNG that is simply a counter encrypted with AES. The output looks completely random, but it can be completely broken by the holder of the AES key.
Shift Happened – Part 1: More Productive Not Using Productivity Tools
C:\TAD\Text\WORD2.TXT

Mariner!
For death will be his doom.

Strong is the current; but be mild,
Ye waves, and spare the helpless Child!
If ye in anger fret or chafe,
A Bee-hive would be ship as safe
As that in which he sails. 110

But say, what was it? Thought of fear!
Well may ye tremble when ye hear!
--A Household Tub, like one of those
Which women use to wash their clothes,
This carried the blind Boy.

Close to the water he had found
This Vessel,
It's again this time of the year on HN where avalanche of aviation stories eventually leads to the great SR-71 articles. I love it.
It might be a few years too early for this to be an easily accessible option, but if you are worried about mega-term storage you can encode your text in DNA. If stored properly, this method is far more persistent than magnetic plate or (current) solid state storage.

This will potentially preserve the information for millions of years. Plus, you'll save on hosting.
Nobody is really ignoring the reality of it. These are weapons of war. Not everyone reading HN shares the same outlook on the morality of war. I am personally an anti-war veteran, but that's a personal outlook that comes from some careful deliberation after observing how and why we wage war, and being fairly dissatisfied with both.
Awesome! Just request a code on the Xplode registration screen and we'll send one your way: https://xplode.iddiction.com/registration
It's ACH - there are some FAQS on knoxpayments.com/about.html
There's a link to the SR-71 manual, where I found this gem, in the takeoff section:

"The tires may skid with the brakes on at high engine thrust."

That is not a problem you have to deal with when flying a Cessna 172.
So now we agree that money is protected speech?
> under load a system using /dev/random might block

The most interesting thing I've learned from this discussion is a comment of Dan Bernstein's, quoted by the OP:

> Cryptographers are certainly not responsible for this superstitious nonsense. Think about this for a moment: whoever wrote the /dev/random manual page seems to simultaneously believe that

> (1) we can't figure out how to deterministically expand one 256-bit /dev/random output into an endless stream of unpredictable keys (this is what we need from urandom), but

> (2) we _can_ figure out how to use a single key to safely encrypt many messages (this is what we need from SSL, PGP, etc.).

> For a cryptographer this doesn't even pass the laugh test.

If I understand this correctly, what DJB is saying is that the idea that reading random numbers from /dev/[u]random decreases the amount of entropy in the pool is ludicrous. So the real bug here is that: once the pool reaches a threshold level of entropy, even /dev/random should never block again, because the entropy in the pool is not decreasing.
Rainforest QA (YC S12) Is Hiring Full Stack Engineers and Sales
Well as I understand it there has been a pendulum swinging problem. Some people were getting locked up in the loony bin merely for being eccentric. Obviously we've gone too far in the other direction and psychotics are roaming the streets homeless.
Ah yes, the scheduled trolling of payment companies by Aaron. Wouldn't miss it for the world.
Launching your FREE online Web-store with AvactisNext
Surprisingly pleasant. Maybe you'd like to get rid of the donation button for now, it may drive people off?
Hey there! Sorry I missed this comment earlier, but if you see this, please feel free to ping me via email (my email is in my profile!)
This is a very readable online book on networking and sockets:
http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/output/html/multipage/index.html

Talk about understanding the sockets API ;-) here's the content section for chapter 5:

5.1. getaddrinfo() — Prepare to launch!
5.2. socket() — Get the File Descriptor!
5.3. bind() — What port am I on?
5.4. connect() — Hey, you!
5.5. listen() — Will somebody please call me?
An MBA with a focus in Statistics. Irrationally hating on MBAs for no reason doesn't make your point stronger.
And yet, the silicon valley is a broadband wasteland. Google Fiber can't come soon enough.
A lot of them don't. I like the idea, but it's weird to not show the straightforward method of dealing with a csv. Some other toy problem would demonstrate opening files and a little parsing.
Integrated cache invalidation for better hit rates
I use Mongo to store entities. I front that with a relational database to a. map entity locations and b. hold associations. That lets me track entities by device/application/users (one item can be shared bu multiple apps and multiple users, each using multiple devices). I want to be able to disable devices and user accounts. Only the creator of an item can hard delete an item, and so on. My code is custom too, because there's nothing out there I could find that does that.
You very much already rely on that.
What happens if a statistician gets an MBA? Are they all of a sudden disqualified to talk about statistics? In what way is a Data Science class taught by an MBA bullshit?
I love PyGal. I went looking for a simple chart generator that looked good for a simple program I wrote a year or so ago and all the usual directions in got pointed in were far too heavy weight for what I wanted. This makes really nice looking SVG charts very simply.
This wasn't a ridiculous legal action. EFF raised money to challenge this company's patent, and the company wanted to know who donated to that campaign. Its not like they asked for EFF's donor list out of nowhere. The speech issue is implicated, sure, but on the other side also the right of litigants to know who the opposing party really is.
Jeez, junior programmers should get better work conditions. Oh ..
Well it is pretty self-evident that non-leaky abstractions don't exist -- or I haven't really seen one in all these years. Take functions in functional programming: if tail recursion matters that is one leak; if strict or lazy evaluation matters that is another leak; if you want to share intermediate results well that springs a big leak; etc. Engineering is about trade-offs. We are there to judge what matters to us and therefore "leaks" and abstract away details that may not matter to us (at the level we are working on). Yes fundamentally I do see this as the barrier to complete automation.
I guess with this line of thought, the US has 50 different militaries.
The first question here is why there's a maximum speed you would like to be going. If you keep accelerating, you'll get there even faster! It's also not inherently unsustainable to make ever increasing amounts of money, because the economy can grow with you; it's not a zero sum game.

That said, you're right that a lot of companies totally bone themselves trying to grow unsustainably, letting the stability of their company (like customer happiness, employee retention, that sort of thing) fall apart in the meantime, and then collapse under their own weight. While I think the parent is wrong about how it applies to Quark, they're quite right that the incentives for short-term growth are driven by how the stock market works. It may have even tilted our whole business culture to worship growth regardless of context.

Here's how it works. Let's assume a simplified version of the stock market in which stocks are priced based on the current performance of the company [1]. So let's say I buy stock at IBM today for $188/share. IBM makes fucktons of money, which is great for IBM but useless to me. It's useless to me because that's what determined the price in the first place, so if it keeps on making the same number of fucktons then the price is going to stay at $188 and my money is just sitting out there doing nothing for me. What I need to happen is for the stock to be worth, say $200 so I can sell it and make some money. So I need IBM to grow. As much as possible. In fact, it's the only thing I care about, because after I sell the stock I don't care what happens to the company. So I vote to put people on the board who want to grow the company and they hire executives with that mandate (who are anyway paid in part with stock and thus have the same incentive) and the whole corporate culture aspires to growth at all costs. If they said "well guys, this year growth isn't really going to work and will probably just sink the ship, so we're going to spend our time making our customers happy and pocketing our billions in profits" everyone would sell the stock, the board would be fired, etc. So that's why you have to grow. [2]

[1] That's not really how it works; expectations of future growth are baked into the current price. Sort of. The relationship between a company's performance, growth, dividends, and the overall economy is complicated, but it doesn't really change the point much, which is that as an investor, you want the stock price to go up, and to do that, you need as much growth as possible.

[2] Following on from [1], there's the argument that in a world with perfect information and rational actors, if the expected future growth is priced in, then sacrificing long term sustainability for short term growth wouldn't raise the price. But we don't live in that world.
Okay, spammer...

> Persona " can't offer the same [as Facebook Connect] incentives (access to user data)"

That sounds like a feature. Gathering ever-creepier amounts of personal information to serve marginally-more-effective ads is a losing game.
Maths people always complain about the fact that cross product is reasonable only in 3D, but from a physical point of view this may be an argument why the universe has 3 spatial dims (;
Medium was founded by Evan Williams (who also founded Twitter and Blogger.com): https://medium.com/about/9e53ca408c48
Do you want them to listen to you or be frantically writing? It is A LOT easier to annotate a PDF while pondering the concepts. Too many lectures are like a firehose...
Document cameras like this work very nicely, but there is one small downside I've noticed: their framerate tends not to be very good. That's usually not a problem at all, but I have a couple of physics demos where I roll things around on an overhead projector, and the document camera often can't keep up with quick motion. Simple analog light and shadows obviously have no issues with that at all.
I'm surprised people find this still an issue. Almost all of the popular apps in the store seem to scale great on large displays these days. Notable exceptions are the official apps from Facebook & Twitter.

I just checked my tablet: Pocket Casts, Flipboard,Kindle, Pocket, Cal, Timely, Expedia, Skype, Imdb, Hacker News 2, Pinterest, Flow,... All have special layouts for large screens.
I do ... software development? ;-) There isn't really any particular category for what I do, though I tend to do more of the lower-level/backend stuff of projects, and knowing how the stuff that you build on works internally certainly is useful in optimizing and debugging.

As for getting an understanding of how TCP/IP works, I think Stevens' classic TCP/IP Illustrated still is a good book to get started, even if somewhat dated in some details (no IPv6, in particular), but the general principles still apply. Though maybe there are newer equally good books around that I just don't know about?
"Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson
I love Numberphile too and recently stumbled on Computerphile. The style is the same for both shows -- a passionate person explaining something reasonably complex. For instance, I like Computerphile's video on the evolution of character encoding and why UTF was developed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MijmeoH9LT4
> Learning is simply better when you have to write things down.

If the pace and level of a lecture is such that you can both listen and write things down, then yes, I'd agree that having the extra check is helpful. When you re-create an argument or diagram on paper you force yourself to work out the wrinkles and pay attention to the details in a way that you never do if you're just staring at a slide. However, not all lectures work that way unless you consistently take classes below your level. Sometimes you get hung up on a concept and you're forced to do two things at once:

1) copy the text & diagrams verbatim

2) understand the material

where #1 is significantly more cognitively demanding than reproducing an argument that you already understand (unless you have photographic memory, you look back and forth and back and forth) to the point that it inhibits #2, which creates a further need for #1 in a spiral of uninterrupted misery and needless failure.

This is where premade notes shine. They don't have to be a .ppt (I'd prefer if they were TeX sheets or a book chapter, assuming the book chapter actually corresponds to the same material) but they have to be there if you want students to be able to occasionally focus 100% on what you're saying.

Looking back on my LiveScribe archive, I notice a paradoxical trend: I took significantly better notes in classes that had support from solid permanent materials. Why? Because I was able to stop taking notes, focus, and fill things in later when appropriate as opposed to trying and failing to do #1 and #2 at the same time.
If you liked this, you'll love Flying the SR-71 Blackbird: In the Cockpit on a Secret Operational Mission http://www.amazon.com/Flying-SR-71-Blackbird-Cockpit-Operati...
I've probably seen this story posted a dozen times in various places, but each time I can't help but read it again.
To be fair, a lot of the "We're too cheap to fly >Mach 1" comes down to the fact that door-to-door travel time doesn't really come down commensurate with the increased costs of faster-than-sound travel.

When the airport is outside town, and you have to arrive 1.5 hours before the flight takes off, taking even a large % of the flight time off doesn't make a significant dent in total travel time.
How so? Isn't "Featured dataset cannot be downloaded" an error not an editorial?
Soon! Want to drop me an email? ay@stripe.com
If you use terminal full-screen (like myself), you can also invert screen colors[0] whenever you switch to it in Darkroom mode.

This makes your dark terminal background, that became light thanks to Darkroom mode, dark again.

It's a little bothersome to invert colors every time, but I guess I'm settling on this for now. I use powerline in tmux and vim, and there doesn't seem to be a quick way to configure it with light-background colors (and changing terminal color scheme doesn't affect its looks).

[0] Inverting colors is toggled with ^⎇⌘+8 by default. You may need to enable this shortcut in keyboard preferences.
Yeah, I wouldn't use pickle for anything where backwards or forwards compatibility is important. It is however very convenient for 'I want to send/store this data for a bit' tasks.
I'm not saying that scams in "cyberspace" don't present a greater threat than scams in "meatspace". I'm just pointing out that if you cannot protect people from themselves in "meatspace", then doing it in "cyberspace" is futile. You can fight it and cut back on it, but you will never actually win that fight. Technological problems to what is ultimately a sociological problem only go so far, and we should be careful to not obsess over them to a fault.
What I see as pretty good is the usage of touchscreens. Thinkpad tablets are very popular, but also huge (24 inch and bigger) monitors installed permanently. The presenter than can display a powerpoint presentation (usually it's actually Beamer and consists of mostly white pages) and write directly into it. There is some structure given (and displaying Images and video is much better), and yet the advantages of the cardboard remain. It's even possible to flip back and forth.
We loooove ArduPilot. Using ArduPlane and ArduCopter (firmware versions of ArduPilot) as the primary platform for our LTE-Telem box.

The current software for configuring ArduPilot boards has tremendous depth, but I think the UI could use some work. Especially for non-hobbyist users.
There are mediums (pun not intended) where you can make the equivalent of a blog post without much effort (Medium, Quora, I'm sure there are others). And link-bait is more about the marketing used to get people to click on the link (e.g. editorializing), isn't it?

I don't want to get into semantics, so let's consider this a minor detail, because the more important matter is that you're editorializing. HN has a pretty clear (and helpful) set of guidelines on posting:
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead.

I'm not trying to harangue you or anything; you make a good point but it's hamstrung by a length-limited title section.
My first SXSW, day 1: I already met lady Arya Stark and the director of SXSWi
Temple City Sheriff's Station confirms comments made by Dorian Nakamoto
I did not realize there was a limitation on Pennies as legal tender. Good to know.

However, your second point agrees with what I was trying to say. The fact that a business does not accept change below a certain amount has nothing to do with whether a denomination is legal tender or not. Legal tender only has to do with cancelling out or paying debts.

From the child post:
>>Yup, one of the common misconceptions about money. There's also no legal requirement to give change.

This also has nothing to do with whether a coin/denomination is legal tender or not.
> That sounds like a feature.

Its not, really. Its more the absence of an undesirable cost -- which is an advantage to end users, only if they get the benefit, which is access to services. But if the services don't adopt it because alternative log-in schemes that offer them more (both in terms of pre-existing user base and data from that user base) then what it really offers users is a "single sign-on" with nothing to sign on to.
The continued selfless statements of Snowden stand in stark contrast to the blathering bureaucracy he addreses. Shame on Europe, Australia, the UK and the rest of the world for not standing up to the US. The sad truth he highlights in this address is that they're all in the game, none of them are willing to admit it's immoral, and none have the guts to offer asylum to law abiding journalists clearly under reactionary persecution by the US and five eyes intelligence communities.

Little known facts: SWIFT was founded by a Belgian whose entire career had been spent in the US and whose previous role was head of international settlement for Visa, after sucking in 100s of banks from 10s of countries SWIFT's first 'international center of operations' was founded in Virginia (ie. next to the CIA), and the opening was officiated by the governor of Virginia, the European Union's own Data Protection Supervisor has confirmed that the US has taken all SWIFT traffic for all EU citizens since at least 2001 in response to FOIA @ http://www.asktheeu.org/en/request/information_on_financial_...
Credible Sport Test YMC 130 H Footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSFjhWw4DNo