skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Am I the only one who feels like they were teleported back to the early 1990s upon seeing these text files with code intermingled everywhere?

I am not bashing markdown and friends, as I understand there is a use for these tools in some cases, but I am surprised they are so widely embraced and loved.

To me they just evoke the days of typing an essay on dad's 386 with Word Perfect 5.1 installed, and having to hit "reveal codes" to figure out what is going on. MS Word won against WP when they completely did away with these codes.[1]

Now it's 2014 and we're loving building tables by hand-crafting ASCII art.

Am I the only who thinks we can do better?

[1] http://www.theoligarch.com/microsoft_vs_apple_history.htm
to view the description html page:
http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://raw.github.com/douglas...
Those machine gun turrets are quite unusual on the K7.

It took a while for planes to become big tubes with wings on them, with the jet engines in pods. Economics is the thing, it is down to cost per mile, that is it for passengers and freight (fresh vegetables). The era of experimentation is over. Tilt-rotors, Spruce Gooses, Harrier Jump Jets, Concordes, twin-boom P38s - history.
It's not interesting really, it just takes the page number and generates the keys for that particular page on the fly. Google will most certainly never find anything, if nothing else the CPU of the server is a severe bottleneck when you're talking about 2^160 keys. You could load pages on that webserver until the sun becomes a red giant and consumes the earth, and you wouldn't have covered even the smallest percentage of the keyspace.
They probably hardcoded it in as a stopgap when they were getting pushback on mononyms.
TLDR: By the 1980s, they had missiles fast enough to shoot one down.
Slightly different Q :

Say I have a private key with some money. All I have to do is type 'importprivkey <private key>' in a new client and the money shows up (am I missing something)?
If everyone randomly starts entering a couple of completely random combinations, is there a finite possibility that someone might simply steal a wallet? Is it like spinning a wheel of fortune?

Found a very interesting analogy here : http://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/1uhuge/wha...

"Imagine you hide some money in a hole in the ground, and take note its GPS coordinates. Now imagine someone publishing a list of all valid GPS coordinates on the planet, down to 10cm resolution. In that list, there will be also the position of your money."
Or handily also http://dec64.com
Oddly enough, the website brainwallet.org which is used to create most brainwallets seems to be in itself malicious. nullc on reddit makes an interesting comment about it.

> "Yes, the creator of Brainwallet.org got his start with password based private keys by cracking them. Here is an old IRC log extract I pulled out for someone else who didn't believe this: https://people.xiph.org/~greg/brainwallet.txt*

More recently he really was in IRC asking for information on faster cracking mechanisms, right after whining about needing money. But uh, he might have just been trying to further convince himself that brainwallets really are secure and that it's really the users fault (or a MITM on the site) when they get robbed.

I'm less inclined to assume malice, and more inclined to assume that he's clueless— both of the insecurity of these schemes, the acceptability of blaming the victims when users inevitably choose poor keys, and how scammy his own actions look. But thats just my own impression.

When you choose to use something like that you should start with the assumption that the creator is malicious and ask yourself why its safe to use anyways. For the Bitcoin reference software you can point to the large amount of open public review, processes which prove the binaries agree with the source, etc. For brainwallet.org? Not much.

So if ever you find the prospect that the creator of something might be a bit black-hat and this concerns you thats potentially a red-flag."

Probably more concerning, the first "random" key the website displays is "correct horse battery staple", which people get their funds stolen from almost constantly.

http://blockr.io/address/info/1JwSSubhmg6iPtRjtyqhUYYH7bZg3L...
Two questions:

1. If a developer co-own a patent with his former employer (IBM), does this developer have the right to use his patent technology later at Google? I don't know how IBM handles patents with his or her employees.

2. Developer does not own any patent but being the person who invented the technology does he have the right to invent a similar technology like his earlier invention at Google? People carry knowledge with them!

Regarding #2, since I really have zero idea how companies handle patent (except patent filing process), I think maybe patents have something to do in this deal (http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3906310/the-no-hire-paper-...). Maybe, maybe 1%.
The example given is PHP (and also my forte), and do have to elaborate again. This is not my style if I start an entire project from scratch. I would probably pick Symfony2 if the need would require.
But I sometimes get these tasks where a client is hosted on shared host, my only option is PHP. I don't even get a shell to run console commands.
I might not even have the budget to setup GIt/deployment strategies and have to work on FTP....
This means I will probably cowboy everything in to one file, and test it on there, instead of messing around with folders and files in a GUI. I've had occasions where i'd just want to open something something borked and gone were some important other production files..

Luckily in these cases you will often find improvised version control systems in place (e.g. /site_old site_old123 /site_new2 /site :D)
Looking at statsmodel Google Summer of Code 2013,

"Google Summer of Code 2013: We have had two students accepted to work on statsmodels as part of the Google Summer of Code 2013. The first project will focus on improving the discrete choice models, adding, for example, Conditional Logit, Nested Logit, and Mixed Logit models. The second project will focus on time series analysis, including regime-switching models such as SETAR, STAR, and Markov Switching models."

These are basics that I would expect any decent statistical language to have. I can see potential, but not for many years do I see the kind of support that I'm looking for in python.
That's really not true. There's boundless, practically unlimited energy all around us, and we're increasingly able to capture and utilize it. We should plan for more novel methods of utilization, not less.
Interesting. So they do have a reward system built in for employees as incentive to submit these 'drafts'. In addition to management routinely asking/encouraging this practice. Not surprising I guess, but nice to bring some specific details to light. Good on you.
It's true that CL's huge feature set promotes implementation bloat, but that doesn't completely rule out having a compact implementation.

In fact, mocl can run with only a few megabytes of memory, and has options to control the heap size.

If this seems unbelievable, feel free to stop by the mocl office in Redwood City, and I will explain it :)
Aviation week on HN continues in full swing.
Home Tweet Home: High-Tech Solutions for House and Apartment
Lyft Funding Official: Documents Filed for New $150 Million Round
A period as last name is the way to enter a mononym of Google+, hence why that is supported. (The period will be dropped when the name is displayed.)
Not sure Twitter had a choice here. IBM is the largest recipient of patents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_United_States_paten...
Right idea, but 4 is not enough.

echidna:~ gwillen$ wc -l /usr/share/dict/words
235886 /usr/share/dict/words

You get something like 17 bits of password strength per word, depending on the size of your dictionary. (The relevant xkcd estimates more like 11 -- which makes sense because /usr/share/dict/words has a lot of obscure words, shitty words, and alternate forms of words, that you would probably exclude when generating a password.)

So if you want a passphrase that's secure against brute force, you'd want more like 7-12 words.
Researchers Create Computer Virus That Spreads Like a Cold
yes and no.

there was only really 1 type of missile that had a chance to shoot a blackbird if it was fired under very specific and tight conditions and timings.

a radar lock is one thing, a kill is another.

as the comments on the article cite, the best probability of a theoretical kill on a blackbird was accomplished by Sweden using Viggen interceptors. Theoretical because they didn't fire.

The USAF acknowledge this with a congratulatory fax to the Swedes.
I had an interesting bug combining InstantClick with Clicky.com (a GA stats tracking alternative).

Clicky dynamically adds a JS file to the header so it's asynchronous. It does the same every few minutes to poll and indicate someone's still on the page.

When used with InstantClick, the first tracking request worked fine. But when I clicked - the first AND second Clicky tracking request were sent. Another click meant 3 new requests were sent.

It puzzled me for a minute, before I realized. Clicky's JS didn't have InstantClicks' data-no-instant attribute, so all previous tracking scripts were being re-loaded with every click.

The fix is to push the tracking requests to Clicky manually via InstantClick's on change callback. Then I used JQuery to add the data-no-instant attr to all the clicky script tags in the head:

InstantClick.on('change', function() {
clicky.log(location.pathname+location.search, document.title, 'pageview');
// now stop any clicky scripts from being re-requested each time the page is insta-reloaded, to stop wasted tracking requests
jQuery("head script[src*='clicky.com']:not([data-no-instant])").attr('data-no-instant', true);
});

The same might happen with Google Analytics if you're using it asynchronously, but I've not tried that.

Hope this helps someone if they see the same weirdness.
There's 2^160 different public keys, the chance of hitting one of this accidentally is so vanishingly small that it doesn't even warrant thinking about it. The improbability of this event is literally the basis of all cryptology; big keyspaces are difficult to bruteforce without unlimited resources and unlimited energy.
Just like with the stock market, watching gains and losses with too fine a granularity will make you tense up and "buy high and sell low."

If you're "going long" on your productivity, collect all the data you like--but have a smoothing function between that input and the resulting metrics. That way, 20 minutes spent to gain 3 hours will look like the slight-dent-and-sharp-rise it is, not a scary better-stop-this plunge.
It can provide very fast performance on integer values, eliminating the need for a separate int type and avoiding the terrible errors than can result from int truncation.

What! I do not see how making a float fast on integers should ever eliminate the need for an int type. Ints and Real-approximations like Dec64 are simply different things entirely.

It's annoying enough that this happens in Javascript.
[Citation needed]

The few times someone has been pulled out of a plane due to decompression has been because they were stood right under the panel that failed( Ahola 243 ) or have been sat right on top of the cargo door that failed (aa96 and Turkish 981 ). I'd love to know how decompression unbolted a seat.
Google's Eric Schmidt: 'let us celebrate capitalism'
Problem is I view any email I did not opt in for as spam with the only exception being service changes and/or disruptions, monthly bills and the like.

Unless I invited you, you're not welcome.
> The SR-71 had a turning radius of about 100 mi. at that speed and altitude, so I wasn't even sure what state we were going to land in.

I wouldn't have guessed the Blackbird has better handling than the modern Ford GT40.
This would benefit from a better comparison with IEEE 754-2008 decimal64; he dismisses it as being too inefficient but I don't see much other discussion about it, which is too bad since at least it's already implemented in hardware on some platforms.

Also, it's worth mentioning http://speleotrove.com/decimal/ as a great repository of decimal float info. I hope it will be updated with some discussion of this proposed format.
I don't like his post because he needlessly implies Google engineers are malicious when it's obviously not the case.

>staff are either incompetent, or racist. I hope for incompetence. Either is bad, but racism is much worse than incompetence.

>protected characteristic

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/section/4

http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and-guidance/new-e...

Does that include names?
The framerate is visibly slower on drag to select.
Opening a window takes forever.

The two major improvements for me are package management, and actual support for making GUIs.
Great share, thanks!

Note: the 'NotebookCloud' tag near the bottom (in section: 'IPython HTML Notebook') points to a 404 page (http://notebookcloud%20.appspot.com/).
Not sure what you mean by between Scheme and CL, but if there's one Lisp that'll catch on to today's practical needs, it's probably Clojure (and ClojureScript).
>But Windows 8? I suppose there are people who would want this, but I don't really see the appeal.

For the same reason you see the appeal of an Android and iOS device, other people might see it for Android and WP8.
Trivia sensation QuizUp launches on Android
I would assume there were quite a few people of Japanese or Chinese origin utterly annoyed at the generation of computers that only had ASCII character representation.

... of course, that era was a long time ago. :)
I guess if you are using the protocols for different things you can have different blockchains for every application - so that segments the effort.

This is a major problem though.
Is this intended to be used in a future version of JavaScript?
This is also why quite a few programs have bugs when running on Turkish phones if they use locale-default case changes. Always specify a US English locale if you need to send along a certain code in uppercase, or process other inputs in ASCII. Internationalisation is tough. My favourite part is when systems don't allow last names with "special characters" including spaces, hyphens and periods.
People should really understand the part "phrase" in "passphrase". Can't really have any sympathy for people who are apparently computer savy enough to create a bitcoin wallet and then protect them with "blah"
Pandas + Statsmodels for linear regression / GLM / Discrete Choice, ARMA / ARIMA, and various non-parametric ops.

For GIS: Fiona (Python OGR operations); Shapely for geometric object manipulation, analysis, and set-theoretic operations; RasterIO (self-explanatory); Descartes and/or Basemap for drawing; PySAL for spatial analysis.

GeoPandas (an unholy, massively useful combination of most of the above) is also under heavy development.
Hardcore python user here. It sounds like you haven't used R. The OP is a social scientist and researcher. These things are vastly easier and more comprehensively implemented and documented in R. (upvoted you accidentally in the android app...) statsmodels is WIP and has an emphasis on econometrics.
Slice has always been a painful adventure for me. I always forget that [1:3] is not all inclusive. It's actually just range from 1 to 2.

I believe in 2.7 zip is still returning a list rather than an iterator (izip in Python 2, zip in Python 3+).

Another unappreciated stdlib is definitely functools. mock is also another awesome stdlib.

functools, collections and itertools are definitely useful to make things faster. Also check out the list of stdlib. http://docs.python.org/2/library/
more importantly it's wrong - the iteration order of .values() and .keys() is not guaranteed to be consistent
Yeah, makes sense, TWC has improved their high speed offering, guess that will need to hold us for now.
Bitcoin as is, is more like a cloud service - you need the whole chain to be updated everywhere. You can do that P2P but you need full consistency. That's not a great property if you only have weak connections between nodes.
Because Barthworks is pretty much down due to load, here's another version of the pilot's story on Jalopnik:

http://jalopnik.com/5951233/this-is-the-man-who-made-the-fir...

tl;dr - the plane disintegrated around him before he had the chance to eject, and he floated to the ground thanks to his parachute. Copilot, not so lucky.
What's with the recent uptick of military aircraft stories? Not that I have anything against them, but seems just bit curious.
If you analyse it as probability it makes a lot more sense than intuitively thinking about it. A login & a password combination can also be seen as a unique string combination and so is 2FA i.e. a 3 string combination. Not really multiple levels of security mathematically.
Mozilla Stops Developing Its Persona Sign-In System Due To Low Adoption
How does that site work which has every bitcoin address listed. Does it just generate those on the fly based on the page number?
Powerful RSS feed reader
On #1, the answer would be yes if they really did co-own it and had no other contract regulating terms of their co-ownership (unlikely). Under U.S. law (not true everywhere!), co-owners of a patent each have an independent right to exploit and/or non-exclusively license the patent, without consultation with the other co-owners, unless they've entered an agreement providing for other terms of co-ownership. This is also true for copyrights on jointly authored work, incidentally.

However, companies usually just get the patent assigned to them by the employee, in return for some token compensation (varies, sometimes it's really token, like $1, other companies will pay employees $100-$1000 per patent).

One place where it can sometimes come up is that a co-inventor who was omitted from the patent application can later try to get him/herself retroactively added. Trying to dig up such people, get them added, and then buy a license from that person is one strategy for defending a patent lawsuit. E.g. if IBM bought a patent from a university spinoff, you could try to dig up a grad student who can document he/she co-invented the relevant technology but wasn't listed on the patent, get them added, then license it from them. Since they now co-own the patent with IBM, you only need to license it from either them or IBM, so IBM's suit fails. I think doing this successfully is pretty rare, but there's a fairly famous case: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8929550350181055...
Yeah, what's up with that?!
Is this Air force News now? :P
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Holocaust/black.html
From the author of the book of the same name.
Last night I ate a computer-generated meal. It was fantastic.
Yes, I think so.
It just couldn't have generated the list before, it's just not feasible.
It's too early for anyone to say whether this concern is a real problem, but here are a few points that you should analyze further:

1) ASICs. In the early days of Bitcoin, one of the biggest concerns was: "Now that computational power is worth real money, aren't malicious hackers going to become rich and powerful by harnessing botnets? And more normal people's computers will join botnets as hackers are directly incentivized, by bitcoin mining, to exploit users more often."

With the rise of the Bitcoin-specific ASIC, that suddenly became a total non-issue. It's completely worthless for a normal desktop PC to mine for bitcoins now: their total computational power, as measured in SHA256 hashes per second, is a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the high-end ASICs that are mining today.

Problem solved.

Though governments will try to get involved, and no one can definitively predict the winner in advance -- I believe it's most likely that private industry, incentivized by Bitcoin's mining rewards, will create the most advanced specialized chips for Bitcoin. They're already pushing much lower nanometer processes than general purpose CPUs!

2) Energy expense of current monetary system. People, computers, ATMs, POS's, paper, time expenditure, inflation/hyperinflation, uncertainty, economic/debt crises, counterfeiting, unemployment - all problems that could be reduced or eliminated by Bitcoin.

3) Future technology. Before cars were invented, one of the biggest concerns was: "How are we going to get rid of the horse manure that's piling up in the world's densest cities?"

Infrared radiation isn't the only way to release heat to space. And even if it were, no one could say that it's not possible for humans+technology to amplify/improve this process.
One difference is with non-numbers. IEEE 754 defines several infinities (positive, negative) and several NaN values. DEC64 seems to simplify things to a single NaN value. That seems more practical for the average use case.
Yes, I think there is a market for things like this, but I'm a Google user so even putting ethics aside it wouldn't be a great long-term move!

On the flip side, without the bounty programs a lot of people wouldn't be as motivated to dig around to find such bugs.
Good thing 'public agreements' aren't binding.
This is semantics. Difference only in question you ask. If asked "Statistically, does this person has 30% of chance to defaulting this year?" [0] the answer becomes very clear yes or no.

[0] Problem definition states that in 2% selected accounts are indistinguishable , thus question is identical to: "Does this account belong to 2% population that statistically had high default rate?" which is what author uses.
IBM also have a library called decNumber which has decent high level functions as well as 32/64/128 bit types.

http://speleotrove.com/decimal/decnumber.html

Have used this for a number of years for financial calculations.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. This definitely helped in making documentation clearer.

Comparisons, benefits and how it is different from common approaches, must be highlighted well.
When everything is racism nothing is. For example, assuming Google is mainly white, mainly male, mainly white male when it's not. They go out of their way to ensure diversity in their organization.
This is by far the best Google Reader replacement.

PS: I've got no relation with the company that builds it.
"A later revision of IEEE 754 attempted to remedy this, but the formats it recommended were so inefficient that it has not found much acceptance."

IBM put hardware support for the IEEE 754-2008 Decimal Format in their POWER architecture. The POWER7 clocks 5 GHz. Decimal floating point is only considered slow because Intel and ARM do not have any support for decimal floating point in hardware. Lack of acceptance probably comes from lack of support in standard libraries rather than inefficiency inherent in the standard.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER7
Mobile World Congress 2014, Firefox OS Success, and Yet More Web API Evolution
They might cache the first n pages, too.
I like ReST as well.

It's more powerful and looks much cleaner

// e.g. how do you write footnotes in markdown? And how do you do this in markdown?

+------------+------------+-----------+
| Header 1 | Header 2 | Header 3 |
+============+============+===========+
| body row 1 | column 2 | column 3 |
+------------+------------+-----------+
| body row 2 | Cells may span columns.|
+------------+------------+-----------+
| body row 3 | Cells may | - Cells |
+------------+ span rows. | - contain |
| body row 4 | | - blocks. |
+------------+------------+-----------+
Interesting list, thanks for the link. Note it's steadily increasing each year, with nearly 18 patents per day in 2012. That's a crazy number for me.
How much should be spent in a territorial dispute between a $30 billion company and a $200 billion company?
It's more like a Yagi, as currently I feed only one of the "antennas" and the modulation is very limited.

But messing with the phases should be possible.