skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just blew my motherboard by updating the bios via one of dell's software updates and corrupted my bios. The board doesn't have a dual bios configuration so its corrupted so I can't pull the battery or reset the CMOS.

All of my research showed that most people just pony up and replace the mobo for $200. Unwilling to give up I kept researching and found that you can turn your Raspberry Pi into a flashrom to restore your bios. http://flashrom.org/RaspberryPi

Waiting on female to female GPIO connectors to come in mail before I can hook my raspi up to the SPI sockets on my mobo and reflash the bios. Got my fingers crossed, if this works it will be a great win!
According to the wikipedia page[1] that's a valid way of displaying lowercase theta.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theta
Is free Windows forever in Microsoft's future?
> It's very hard and expensive to transmit signal on a single frequency. And very easy to pollute everything.

FM transmitters for MP3 players are cheap and work well (within a very short range, but that's their use-case), see for example http://www.amazon.com/FM-Transmitters-MP3-Player-Accessories...

So surely it can't be that hard or expensive - unless it changes when you try to broadcast to more than a few feet away?
What does Prezi offer that would make it an advantage, and how are you supposed to use Prezi in such a manner that it's adding to your message rather than making it fluff?

I've never seen a Prezi presentation where the Prezi stuff wasn't a bunch of whiz-bang that distracted from the message, rather than adding clarity.

In some of them, the presenter baked all these weird Prezi transitions into their presentation and would actually pause speaking while things were spinning and zooming around on the screen, so we could all admire this stuff Prezi was doing.
I'm curious what property owners rights will be for private drone overflight. What altitude will they have to be? I also wonder if I put a 70ft radio tower (amateur radio) with guy wires for support, will the amazon drones be smart enough not to run into my equipment when overflying my house.
Good driving involves always being aware of safe exits if you need to make an evasive maneuver. It's a habit that comes well in handy as you say.
I'm sure you're students appreciate it, even if they don't now they will later.
This looks very cool. I like the focus on plugins, it would be pretty awesome to have a flexible static site generator with an active plugin ecosystem.
Not if you paid me. It's one thing for me to hop in a car with a stranger; it's quite another to hand my child off to a stranger. My risk aversion is completely different in each case.
Show HN: My perceptual robot amazes the crowds at Mobile World Congress 2014
Thanks for providing some clarification and color to my very hazy brain dump.

I do remember my parent's "climate controlled" filing room and filing system for client artwork and other sundry. It was basically a big storage room filled with racks of old paper shipping boxes and large grey envelopes. The customer order would get written up on triplicate carbon free paper (customer, contact info, type of job, ink, references to artwork, due date etc), one color for the front office, one for the "lookup" catalog (organized by customer name) and one would go on the front of the envelope. All the artwork, disks, negatives, proofs, a few final samples and other assets for the job would go in the envelope and get organized onto a shelf.

Every job generated a new job number that was something like yearmonth-sequential# so a job coming in today might be 201403-38 and jobs folders were roughly organized by the 201403 part.

If a customer came in and said "I want another 10,000 of that job I had you print lat Oct" we'd go to the catalog, lookup their name, find the 201310-# job and go pull it from the shelf to review. It usually took just a few minutes to find something. I think every 7 or 8 years we'd go through and purge old files just because there simply wasn't the physical space.

They'd also use the job # part of the serial, when writing up jobs, to keep a rough estimate on business volume. Since every month the job # started back over at 1, and you knew that you'd on average do 600 jobs a month, you could get a feel if the month was slow or fast just be seeing what the next job id was going to be on a given date.

The job id's were then used in scheduling. For a long time my father drew up the schedules by hand. He had a grid printed up on large format paper, and I remember him coming home every day with a stack of the front office carbon-free copies for the day and drawing up the production schedule on the grid.

I think the hours of the work day were along the top of the grid and the equipment operator was along the side. He used some kind of color coding system (with the full job # and a legend) to trace the job through the work-day as it moved through various pieces of equipment and such, and he'd use some known metrics for how long it'd take to do that kind of job on this or that equipment, and budget it out. There was quite an art to it. Especially for big jobs that spanned multiple days that needed to be kept track of.

It was kind of a Gantt chart, but a little different. And it provided a clear visualization of all the production going on at a glance. He'd make a couple copies and one would go in the production room so any operator could go check it for their next job, or to see if they were on schedule (sometimes they didn't agree and they'd go make their case for a schedule adjustment).

Sometime in the late 90s he finally got a computer and reproduced the entire thing in Excel, which meant he could do all the scheduling at work instead of at home. When they finally sold their company, the new owners were impressed enough with the system that I think they adopted it for their business.
>Of course parsing is something thats very important if you are making your own DSL.

Writing a DSL was my original motivation for learning Haskell beyond it being just a toy. About a day after I really got going on my parser I decided to abandon the idea of a DSL and just write it as a monad.
This whole thing strikes me as a tone-deaf whine from someone who wants more attention paid to them in lectures.

I've seen exceptional presentations that stand on their own as documents to learn from; these are very valuable.

Nobody likes having a presentation read to them. This does not mean that we should make "slideshows" useless to force presenters into a different style. What the presenter says or does is ephemeral; the slideshow document lasts.
How to Succeed in Software Without a CS Degree
The original Java code for bucket fill is very fast, sub-second fills in most cases however after converting the code to JavaScript the performance gets worse in some specific cases (Bezier offsetting/flattening combined with Boolean operations for non-closed or transparent shapes). There are some advanced math and algorithmic tricks used in the Lasso tool to speed up exactly the same class of problematic cases in JavaScript. Bucket fill is however more complex which doesn't allow straightforward reuse of these algorithms; additional algorithms are currently being developed to deal with it.

Good luck with your nice paint app! ;-)
Yes! So glad you saw this!

I had trouble getting the server based repl working, so here's the in-game repl I ended up implementing as a Quake-type dev console: http://imgur.com/J6ozzT6

(Obviously disabled in the App Store version.)

I may be getting ahead of myself, but I think it's a GREAT language for writing games, and is going to take off at some point.
"... Exchange rates are skyrocketing, prices on import products (majority of them) rise accordingly, banks put limits on access to debit cards and extreme limits on credit cards. In our biggest bank you literally can't spend more than $20 per day from credit card (and this, combined with higher prices, put strain to people with low income)."

Evgenuiz;

Are you, or have you news, if bitcoin, or other e-currency, is being used, becoming popular as an alternative to your
"...you literally can't spend more than $20 per day from credit card", etc?
Because it should present the whole story.
I'm confused. /dev/random is not in fact more secure than urandom. Can you restate your argument here?

Developers use bogus userland libraries because the man pages tell them (wrongly) that urandom is unsafe for cryptography, and when they use /dev/random, their application randomly hangs. Exactly why would you ever recommend that a developer attempt to use /dev/random?
abrasive != asshole

The rough tone on lkml (supposedly) reflects the gap between people who want to make something that's nontrivial and used by many people and the smaller number of people who are actually able to do so. Setting yourself up as this kind of gatekeeper means you have to be non-likable towards a lot of people even if you're a perfectly nice person.

Conversely, someone can be an asshole while showing spotless behaviour to the people they meet.
Some Tips for Developing Firefox Extensions in Emacs
News Flash: Dozens of protesters gathered at a Mountain View treatment plant to protest Googler's sewage as a threat to traditional California values.

Somebody who appeared to be the leader was quoted: "These capitalist pigs are dumping all their GMO feces into our taxpayer funded treatment plant." His solar-powered megaphone began to die out as a cloud passed over head, but that didn't keep him from starting a chant... "Hell no, you can't go! Hold it in till you're about to blow!"

... </satire>

seriously, if these guys get their way, Google won't be allowed to Carpool, Meditate, Recycle or anything else.
Even more obscure: the open firmware song.

http://www.openfirmware.org/1275/misc/ofwsong.au
Oh sure, the FAA wouldn't mind that at all. ;)

Besides, the various utility companies would surely not be pleased by the theft of energy.
Building bowser – A password cracking story
It appears this issue is exactly what the decision addressed. At issue was whether the definition of "aircraft" applied to the model aircraft that Mr. Pirker was flying. You're correct in stating that every aircraft, as defined under the regulations, must have FAA approval (in most cases, a COA). The judge concluded specifically that "aircraft as defined in 14 CFR Part 1, Section 1.1 does not include model aircraft.[1] The conclusion to be drawn is that the FAA approval process does not apply to model aircraft. This finding was in addition to finding that the FAA policies on model aircraft - including the ban on commercial use - are not legally enforceable.

[1]"Neither the Part 1, Section. 1.1, or the 49 U.S.C. Section 40102(a)(6) definitions of "aircraft" are applicable to, or include a model aircraft within their respective definition."
Shoudn't your comment have been a point of order? :-)
Google Newsweek and "Hitler diaries."
Google Newsweek and Quran and retraction.

They're one of the most inconsistent publications I've ever seen. Lots of great work that stands the test of time. Also some past accuracy problems that were big enough to make headlines.
The issue is the example being set. Trappy is definitely one of the best, but his videos don't demonstrate his hours of experience, or safety considerations, to a novice pilot. The affordability of the machine plus some examples of fancy flying are sure to put dangerous machines in the hands of idiots, and that's best avoided. Remember - these things fly out of the box with no training.

Trappy also has access to many more multicopter spares than the rest of us. This may have something to do with his reckless flying!
It is easily possible to "guarantee" that /dev/urandom is seeded; just seed it from /dev/random. It's a 1-line shell script, or 10-or-so lines of C code.

I think it's a rubber chicken security measure, but if it makes you feel better, that's fine.

What's not fine is relying on /dev/random as a source of entropy for your application, as opposed to seeding urandom.
I wonder if there were similar complaints when Buddhism entered China:

"Buddhism appealed to Chinese intellectuals and elites and the development of gentry Buddhism was sought as an alternative to Confucianism and Daoism, since Buddhism's emphasis on morality and ritual appealed to Confucianists and the desire to cultivate inner wisdom appealed to Daoists. Gentry Buddhism was a medium of introduction for the beginning of Buddhism in China, it gained imperial and courtly support."[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Buddhism
In more recent events, I would posit that Ubuntu's push for the desktop along with giving away free CDs (and free shipping) helped move desktop Linux into a more mainstream conversation.
You're missing my point (which I suppose I really didn't make, so my bad). A child raise by machines is likely to be one seriously emotionally messed up child.
Fundraising for Dorian Nakamoto
Any chance you'd write a technical article on your algorithms? I'm in love with puzzle manipulation code. Seeing the sort of things you're doing would be a lot of fun.
Michael Seibel of Socialcam (YC W12) just backed my campaign
I got a bit less far than that.

I feel like this lecturer is recognising that lecturers appear to add more value if they deliberately hinder students from accessing resources outside of their lectures. That's not a good thing.

All the conclusions seem bad if you set learning as the goal: I disagreed with the suggestions that the slides shouldn't make sense and that students shouldn't be able to read ahead.

If the students are reading ahead, they are better able to interact with the material ahead. That's a good thing.

The goal of the teacher is to help the students learn the subject matter: it's not right to think that they can only do that by paying close attention to your every entertaining word at the time you elect to say it.
> Time and time again, ignorant and lazy human beings are the enablers of security breaches. You can blame humans all you want, but if systems aren't designed with such human factors in mind, they simply won't work in the real world.

This same statement, however, underlies my argument in the other direction: that ignorant and lazy human beings build systems that don't have entropy pools that fill fast enough at boot to make /dev/urandom secure for the things they are running there. If the software were using /dev/random instead, it defends against the systems integrator making this mistake by blocking until the system has enough entropy.

Now, it also will potentially block later as well, which sucks: however, this is going to happen to a subset of users building systems under heavy load. Rather than letting the user run rampant, profiling the code, finding /dev/random to be the bottleneck, and replacing it with a file of hardcoded "random numbers", how about giving the user a setting "if you are reasonably confident you are not using this during boot before the entropy pool is ready for /dev/urandom, turn on this non-default setting and the software will never block"?

Under the assumption, however, that this somehow has to be a black/white "choose one, only one, no options, no workarounds" issue, defending against the ill-informed system integrators seems like a much more reasonable position than defending against the downright-idiotic system integrators. The downright-idiotic system integrators probably also left a bunch of other holes in their systems: let's help out the ill-informed ones a little, and use defaults that are more difficult to break.

> > Look: that just isn't always possible. I say this not from theory, but from the trenches of information security.

> I'd have to say that you're confusing "not possible" with "hasn't been done yet."

The argument in that paragraph involved an Android device. If my Android device doesn't sufficient entropy when I go to run the software I downloaded from the Android Market at the moment that software attempts to generate an encryption key I need, it is "not possible" for any of 1) me (most devices have locked bootloaders), 2) the developer of the app, 3) the developer of any cryptography libraries the developer used, to fix the problem.

> The security field needs to start using some of the same pragmatic strategies the NTSB uses to prevent plane crashes. We can't just stand around wishing programmers know more about crypto and security. We need to put measures in place that actually work.

I agree: how about someone makes it so that Linux itself has the FreeBSD behavior of blocking /dev/urandom until the entropy pool has reached the critical mass required to make its randomness generation secure? ;P Alternatively, how about someone gets it into all the common init daemons to read enough data from /dev/random at boot to guarantee work around this kernel limitation? It sounds like everyone is just asking for mistakes by encouraging people to write software that uses /dev/urandom to run on systems that have a known-limitation in the usage of /dev/urandom.
Terminus at 16pt - http://i.imgur.com/cHk7yUE.png

I spend my life in idea IDE's on Linux and thanks to the shonky font rendering in swing apps on Linux the only two that I can standard are Deja Vu Sans Mono (which is nice) and Terminus at 16pt which then looks like Terminus bitmapped.
I wonder if debian's systemd adoption could fit there.
for HTML5, check out Cordova, even Adobe offers a free iOS / Android / Win8 compiler
A brief history of databases
Ojass Live Hacks
Fundraiser to help Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto
we are really looking forward to GWT 3.0. thanks for all the work you put into it!

but we are really sad devmode will be gone really soon :(
The same advisory that puts a 400ft ceiling on model aircraft also requires the operator to contact and get approval from ATC if they're within a 3 mile radius of an airport.
But the article didn't talk about his values (because he wouldn't talk about them).

It was just a tabloid exposé of a private individual.
"One question begged of Big Data has been – is anybody actually handling data big enough to merit a change to NoSQL architectures?"
Nope. I just installed the windows version myself, the new features sounded cool. Looks like the ability to even set "this is when I wake up" is still missing from Windows F.lux
I live in a mostly original (at the time I purchased it) 1950s home, and I can assure you that doorknobs and window assemblies do not last indefinitely.
If the slides do not convey the material that is being taught, then the slides are useless. Students generally do refer to slides after lectures, and usually end up staring at a load of incomprehensible nonsense.

The instructor-expert can add flavour and understanding to the slides, and expound upon the points being made, but the slides should also stand alone as a resource.

A lecturer should appreciate that it's impossible to absorb a complex topic during a lecture, and provide resources that later complement what they are saying.
I guess the complaint is that Java-like languages would let you write the type declaration as

Double exp(Double base, Double exponent)

while the Haskell syntax for types doesn't provide a place to write down names for arguments. Perhaps a nice fix would be to add Agda-style syntax for arrow-types, like

exp :: (base : Double) -> (exponent : Double) -> Double

At some point we will want to add dependent types anyway. :)
Code Guide by MDO
And the actual description is here: http://lists.hohndel.org/pipermail/subsurface/2014-March/010...
Just getting Stubby going (https://github.com/jkassemi/stubby) - and it could use some more love.

It's a suite of tools that focus around declarative configuration of various project environments. For instance, the Stubfile.json can contain the references to your staging and production servers, and you can swap your system to view either staging or production from the command line. Additionally it supports stub packages, so you could theoretically write a GitHub API stub (think pre-configured and packaged webmock stubs) and distribute to other devs over github.

My company's building this out to assist with dev/QA and a migration to docker, so there's some semblance of a team.
Yeah. And I do.
Ironically that has already been reinvented in the form of Cap'n Proto: http://kentonv.github.io/capnproto/

(other than that I agree it's a good solution)
You don't even need to code custom drivers though, you can just present the keyboard as multiple keyboard devices to the host.
probably better. I was thinking everyone would just be data rather (a list of people or something) rather than a quantifier function.
Does anyone have suggestions on their favorite static site generator for building a standard html/css/js website? Looking for basic templating and file formats sublime will understand how to work with.
I like that static site generators are basically the Cups And Balls of our craft.

It's so well understood and constrained of a problem domain that we can now ignore the practical considerations and go all-out with the art itself. I feel like this design and api is a great example of that, much like Penn and Teller's Cups and Balls with clear cups[1] - wonderfully creative innovation within a completely and totally solved problem domain.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_n3Zb3bW3g
What if certificates and SSL weren't guaranteed to work properly "on cold boot" and the industry expected OS implementers to know this and take appropriate steps to "do it right?" This wouldn't make any sense at all. Yet CSPRNG are pretty foundational to cryptographic tools across the board, and the programming field seems to have this kind of hair-shirted attitude about it.

We as a technical community and we as a society need to start using the same stances and strategies that governments and agencies like the NTSB use to prevent accidents. When planes crashed in the wooly pioneering days of aviation, people probably stood around sadly tsk-tsking someone's failure to recognize a stall. Today, the NTSB conducts root cause analyses and the industry takes concrete steps to prevent future mishaps. (Like equipment that detects stall and warns the pilot.)

In this case, why don't we simply have classes of devices that are expected to implement crypto for end-users, and require them to be built with generous entropy pools? (To head-off the expected smart-asses: Each one gets their own unique one, of course.)

(EDIT: An analogy: What if you knew that pilots all had conflicting opinions on how to fly and maintain a plane, with constant acrimonious debates, and where some large swathe of all pilots simply were operating on misinformation? Would you fly? Would you expect lots more crashes? Now ask yourself what the situation is like with computer security, where knowledgeable people expect security to always be broken.)
Gentrify, 1 Percent... Just one more politically charged word in the title and you've got yourself enough clicks to fund your corporate bonuses, Salon.
I was just struck by the improbability of using "nothing made by an asshole."

Drive a Volkswagen? Or a Daimler, Chrysler, BMW, or Mercedes Benz?
What would that prove? Anyone with internet access and a small amount of resourcefulness and cash could easily find a willing partner in Japan to take that picture for them, while being nowhere near.
It's a matter of timing. A callback function could be called immediately and you need to be ready for that, so you need to define the callback before passing it in. With a promise, you can call the then() method after the function returns; if the value is ready earlier then it will automatically be cached until you pick it up. The looser requirements on timing result in better decoupling; like any other value, you can put the promise in an arbitrary data structure and pick it up any time later, or perhaps not at all.

If you want to do this with callbacks you'll need to implement a way to cache the value and the result will be equivalent to a promise.
And this is why anyone sane who doesn't live there hates your smug filter bubble, and why Android is still a pain to use once you go out of signal range.