skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In comparison to a future where ominous mind control is possible through AR/VR, or a virus is created that not only renders you a vegetable but also transcends virtual reality (and is wielded by a vengeful psychopath that has an atomic bomb attached to him that triggers upon his death), or basically any other classic cyberpunk dystopia, I think it's fair to describe Ready Player One's Easter Egg hunt as Disney-esque... almost like comparing Aladdin to 1984.

But since we're nitpicking anyway, "the main company" you're speaking of had nothing to do with the creation of OASIS; that was simply an external multinational corporation that controlled the global ISP and sought to gain control of the virtual world by finding some treasure left by the initial creator.

More importantly however, my main point is that Oculus's position now is more along the lines of the evil mega-corp owner in Snow Crash, who monopolized (and was probably the first to commoditize) the optical framework with which to access the virtual world. This form of dinosaur-seeks-survival-through-any-means-necessary scenario is not only plausible, but I believe that Stephenson meant it as a prophetic warning for those who are responsible in bringing about the virtual age.

And given the sudden shift in Oculus PR's public citations of sci-fi influences, I suspect that they realize that in context to Stephenson's novel, they are actually starting to walk down the path of the evil dictator, not the benevolent enlightened one.

In any case, I firmly believe that our virtual world should be ushered in as decentralized and hacker-friendly as possible. Open-sourced with a blockchain perhaps, and localized open-sourced hardware to boot.
List comprehensions actually don't tend to get used very frequently, so I would not point to that as a good example of what Haskell code looks like. It's hard to point to one example, as different parts of the code look very different. That is, pure functions look very different from monadic functions, which both look very different from datatype declarations and typeclass instances. I would recommend poking around a whole codebase, one example of which can be found here: https://github.com/xmonad/xmonad

This post may also be useful: http://blog.ezyang.com/2011/11/how-to-read-haskell/
He didn't have a hunch, he just knew that the standard comprehensive test was skipped, which is why the standard test procedure only detected a problem, and he had to end early and go off book in order to reveal the doppler problem.
There are some comments on the Gist claiming Python or Ruby is a one liner. My response: https://gist.github.com/kosta/9777932/#comment-1199293
This is a weird situation. Sometimes when a product goes ultra-mainstream as FB is likely trying to do with Oculus Rift, it doesn't matter a huge amount if it losses its first supporters.

But Oculus Rift is losing the core of the gaming community here. And that is its target demographic for both early and medium term adoption, it isn't a small fringe community. (It isn't just early supporters who are mad, it is the core of the gaming community that was excited about this.) If I was in management at FB or Oculus Rift and cared about its future, I would be freaking out and trying to figure out damage control strategy (which I haven't yet seem arise, although maybe I have missed it so far.)

This really open up the space for competitors to take a large bit out of what seemed to be a clear leader.
I strongly disagree. Tribalism is what allowed humans to survive into the modern age, and is a force that in this era of individualism keeps societies from unraveling. Humans will be tribal, it's just a matter of how tribal lines are drawn. In the era of globalization, tribal lines are increasingly being drawn along lines of wealth, class, and education which is in my opinion worse than drawing them along geographical boundaries.

In practice, the alternative to geographic tribalism isn't some broadly-inclusive egalitarianism. It's relatively wealthy and educated folks like us receding into circles with other relatively wealthy and educated folks.
Things to Do With Internet of Things
Also you have to get to an USB port, seems like attackers know for some ATMs where to cut a hole in for that. But the real problem is that the machine isn't isolated well enough through hardware design. Just imagine you could access and replace the HDD. While it may use an XP exploit, that's not the real problem.

Since the life time end of normal XP (not even the embedded version), those "XP will doom our money" news spawn everywhere for no good reason.

TL;DR: It's primary a hardware design issue.
Because configuring SMB on each machine is hard and takes time.
>why aren't there limits on lottery ticket purchases, or casino gambling,

Because they're profitable to the state. There have historically been blanket bans on both of these things at all wealth levels in the US. I still know of no private lotteries.

Both exist to exploit people who don't understand probability, and are essentially voluntary regressive taxes. When it comes to these two, now is the dumber era.
They want their beer back :)
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/mar/25/star-trek-warnog...
A great way to validate certain ideas, namely "things people would search for on the internet and click on adverts for". If you had an idea for a product that, say, gave developers a better way to do debugging like Mozilla's new "rr" tool, I don't think this approach would validate it at all (based on an assumption that developers are unlikely to click internet ads for debugging tools).

There isn't a one-size-fits-all approach to idea validation. You need to pick the technique that best suits the product.
That mangles binary data.

$ printf 'binarydata'|awk '{ print }'|hexdump -C
00000000 62 69 6e 61 72 79 64 61 74 61 0a |binarydata.|
0000000b
Past armor used plates and links because the threats were arrows and swords and spears and junk. Today's primary threats are bullets, and I believe they have more luck stopping those with sheets of flexible, fibrous materials. Current 3D printing technology cannot create those.

I doubt that older designs would help with losing a leg to a roadside bomb, either, but someone more qualified than I am would be in order to answer this.
I am sick of the media saying "Hacker" when they mean "Black Hat"
Hopefully everyone realized that this article is from 2004 and Huygens completed its descent onto Titan in January 2005. The problem discussed in the article was successfully fixed, saving the mission, but an unrelated problem (also with the telemetry) means a modest chunk of data was lost:

> Huygens was programmed to transmit telemetry and scientific data to the Cassini orbiter for relay to Earth using two redundant S-band radio systems, referred to as Channel A and B, or Chain A and B. Channel A was the sole path for an experiment to measure wind speeds by studying tiny frequency changes caused by Huygens's motion. In one other deliberate departure from full redundancy, pictures from the descent imager were split up, with each channel carrying 350 pictures.

>As it turned out, Cassini never listened to channel A because of an operational commanding error. The receiver on the orbiter was never commanded to turn on, according to officials with the European Space Agency. ESA announced that the program error was a mistake on their part, the missing command was part of a software program developed by ESA for the Huygens mission and that it was executed by Cassini as delivered.

>The loss of Channel A means only 350 pictures were received instead of the 700 planned. All Doppler radio measurements between Cassini and Huygens were lost as well. Doppler radio measurements of Huygens from Earth were made, though not as accurate as the expected measurements that Cassini would have made; when added to accelerometer sensors on Huygens and VLBI tracking of the position of the Huygens probe from Earth, reasonably accurate wind speed and direction measurements could still be derived.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_(spacecraft)#Channel_A_...
I think the importance goes up a lot if the rings are made of water as conjectured in parent. Getting access to water in space without dragging it out of a gravity well would make asteroid mining much easier. There's water in comets but their availability is not nearly as reliable.
Http redirects to https, which is awesome. Except they don't support any 'new' ciphers. So I can't connect.

Site only supports

TLS_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_MD5 (0x4)
TLS_RSA_WITH_RC4_128_SHA (0x5)
>The open source movement arose when developers realized they could create software in a community-driven environment, letting everyone add knowledge in return for sharing in the collective product.

The author is simplifying history here to serve his own purpose. The open source movement was born out of the free software movement that had been around for 15 years prior. This rebranding was done in order to market free software to businesses by removing the ethical and political arguments and replacing them with technical ones.

>The tenet of open source has always been to give away the “open core” for free, and then charge for additional features.

I disagree. I don't see many admirers of "open core" model. The community was so happy that MySQL became "open core" that distributions have started switching to MariaDB.
Does anyone have recommendations for affordable ( < $300? ) multi-function printer manufacturer/models that don't suck? Good driver support on OSX is a bonus. Thanks!
Testing is Human Nature
If you're worried about the set-top box or FiOS router on your LAN, set up a router with two different LAN networks. My setup has a pfsense box connected to the Internet with a "LAN" and "DMZ" network behind it. The set top box and FiOS router (among other things) are in the DMZ and my PC, etc are in the LAN. Devices in the DMZ are prevented from communicating with LAN devices. I don't know if DD-WRT supports something similar, but I like the general solution.
As I read on and on, my mind was increasingly blown. The possibilities that Wolfram Language enables are staggering.

There are so many levels to this:

1. An elegant and flexible way of combining, aggregating, manipulating, visualising and doing statistical analysis on data from a huge range of domains. That's already pretty cool.

2. Built-in connection to the real world through the vast knowledge base of Wolfram Alpha

3. Interpretation of natural language input to create entities representing things in the real-world (like people, places, events, etc.) on the fly

4. Built-in algorithms like classifiers that just work on whatever input you give them!

5. Built-in connections to APIs for things like social media services and I'm sure a lot more coming

6. The ability to create a UI, publish, deploy on the fly using the same kind of symbolic manipulation as everything else in the language

7. And most stunning of all, that it's all wrapped up in a single elegant framework so that all these different things can be manipulated in similar ways and connected to each other.

And this is just the starting point. Imagine what will happen when a community can contribute to it and we can build on each other's work.
As good as sort is a good example of real world problem.

It does give you a broad idea, but does not in any way show what a complex program looks like.
You mean, just like it is right now?

At least I get to chose the goons I hire. Presumably those with poor negotiation leverage and -skills would go out of business rather quickly.
Disagree with your point about nationalities, not "American" per say.

Here's an example: look at the coverage of the missing Malaysia airlines plane.

Every single article I've read starts with this: "[insert nationality] experts have [insert what they've done]".

EDIT: Of course, that's necessary for journalism. It's information. How else are you going to distinguish between experts?
>> Kickstarter is a platform where people invest in future of some geeks

And then those same backers complain loudly when those geeks succeed at business. Oculus just sold, before launching a product, for a quarter of the value of Electronic Arts (revenue: $3.7B). Perhaps Oculus (the business) was too successful for its backers, but there's not a lot of teams that would have turned down a deal like this.
The Wikipedia's page on it has an interesting origin[1]:

The Oxford English Dictionary has published references going
back to 1718 for “perfect storm,” though the earliest citations
use the phrase positively, as in a “perfect storm” of applause.

It also notes that the phrase,

is nearly synonymous with "worst-case scenario," although the
latter carries more of a hypothetical connotation.

The phrase is relatively rare in normal British English usage, and it's usually used in the ``worst-case scenario'' sense. To me, the word `storm' brings with it a negative connotation, but I suppose it's logical enough, albeit a little strange, that it could be used to describe a positive set of circumstances.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_storm
So, so many bizarre porn-related domains.
Which is what they were told they would get.
Show HN: Mogo Chat – open-source team chat app written in Elixir and Ember.js
Money is not control. They sold the control they had for money.

Whether that works out for them or not is all up to Facebook now.
If the government let it, every small company or utopian project would sell stocks, not empty dreams, to believers in the internet.
Many of the super programmers at google have PL research backgrounds! Like Jeff Dean. Most of the others are in systems, which are fairly aligned, and often both. Such PL enthusiasts are the last ones to try and switch the language being used.
HP 4200 on eBay for less than a hundred bucks USD with just 20-30,000 page count is easy to find and will last a good long time.
Wacky Wednesdays 03/26 by The Wacko Network | Entertainment Podcasts
I think that's a bit extreme for an example - I'd go for the following version, which is less concise but easier to read:

quicksort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a]
quicksort [] = []
quicksort (p:xs) = (quicksort lesser) ++ [p] ++ (quicksort greater)
where
lesser = filter (< p) xs
greater = filter (>= p) xs

So, what's going on here? First you have the declaration of the function - in this case, you have a list of items of type A which can be compared to another one (Ord means "I can use <, <= and so on over this element"), and you'll return a list of type A.

Then you have the base case - if the list is empty, you'll return an empty list.

After that you have the case "item++[list of items]" (note that the second one can be an empty list), where you return [list of smaller items]++item++[list of larger items] (the two lists are defined under the "where" - filter removes elements from a list).

Note however that, instead of "(lesser) ++ item ++ (larger)" you have "(quicksort lesser) ++ item ++ (quicksort larger)" - this will call the algorithm recursively over smaller lists, but I bet you already knew that.

Both pieces of code do the same thing, but I think mine is what you'd expect from a typical piece of Haskell code - the one you have is closer to "see how small I can make this function".
Google Glass – Translating Cat Meows
Chester Bennin is what the website says. Click his picture in the upper-right corner, you'll be then taken to the page where it says his name is 'chester Bennin.'
You are conflating big with rich. It is possible to dislike the former and yet support the latter.

Often, when companies get big, the motives change from "making a great product" to "milking the user for more money".
sharefest and rtcopy suffer of complexity suckage, please hurry :)
Also, Space X not only stands on the shoulders of giants at NASA, who were all publicly funded, but half of its funding has come from NASA pre-payments on launch contracts. Musk is a great example of the current American approach to R&D working: use public funding and subsidies to get technology off the ground, then transition to the private sector once it attains a certain level of maturity.
It's a good example of how quickly you can express an algorithm, but in terms or readability, some additional whitespace, and possibly some better naming would make it nicer.

Once you understand what bits like "p:xs", "++" and "[x|y,z]" mean though, it will make much more sense.
The notion that Chris Christie could under conceivable circumstances win the Republican nomination--let's forget Fort Lee, pretend it never happened here--is plausible only to persons within Christie's reality distortion field. Romney wouldn't pick him to run as VP, because of concerns his staff had about the baggage he brought.
Their server software is proprietary and they have a feature which will allow users to store their private key with them. If you can't see it, it has NSA inside.
Two things.

First, constantly having to write implementations like this introduces a ton of friction as compared with reusing existing implementations. Languages do have an influence on that.

Second, languages vary in "expressiveness," determining how much code you have to write in order to make an implementation like this. In one language, copying stdin to stdout fits into a natural idiom which also handles other cases naturally. In another language with less care for ergonomics, every task might be equally un-idiomatic.

In other words, a language can offer its own "higher order domain languages" for the core tasks that everyone is doing over and over again as part of their general programming.
Or it can choose not to do that, because what it offers is already Turing complete. But then the ergonomics are bad, and it makes a real difference.

It seems wrong that when I am paying for things like long JIT warmups and stop-the-world GC, I am still writing piles of functions with low-level idioms that are no more expressive than C's.

If Java ships with a 'copy from one stream to another' primitive then I'd find that a much more compelling argument than that I can treat myself to reimplementing things like stream copying, sorting and basic data structures on a regular basis. It's unbelievably tedious and wasteful to do this, there's just no reason.
I agree, this looks terrible. It seems every discussion about static vs. dynamic typing on HN ends with the following realizations, spread over multiple comments:

- its hard to safely refacture without static types (and the help of the IDE that often comes with it)

- dynamic languages must compensate the missing type checking support from the compiler with additional unit tests, negating the productivity gains

Sometimes it would be nice to have both worlds in the same language, but the way Clojure does it does't appeal to me at all.
To me it doesn't make sense for FB to buy Kickstarter. FB wouldn't gain any particular advantage by buying Kickstarter. It isn't in the social space and there is little Kickstarter can do to disrupt FB (unlike mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp). Also FB can afford to buy successful projects that Kickstarter kickstarts like they did with Oculus.

Now if they buy a company like GitHub, that'd be a game changer but I hope that the GitHub founders hold on to it and never sell because from what I can tell GH are already profitable with a nimble team and already have investors like a19z if they need more funding. Besides the only reason to sell would be for founders wanting to become instant billionaires, and I hope that they recognize GH as something that they can work on their entire lives as inherently more valuable than a billion in the bank.

GH is the only social network that has the most developer mind share and is likely to be worth 1.5x or greater than WhatsApp from my perspective.
>4) a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system

>This is the last one because it is the least accurate and has been created only in recent times by the media.

By recent times, you mean since the mid/late 80's when hacking sort of got known in the mainstream after phreaking?

>"Anyone that takes a look at a goal and a given set of resources then figures out an unconventional way to achieve that goal"

I want to be rich! therefore I choose to rob a bank (my unconventional way of achieving that goal), does that make me a hacker too? (Like a bank hacker)

Awesome article nonetheless!
Someday, All Planes Will Be Drones
It is brilliant on Facebook's part. They know they are widely loathed among internet users. They can use this Oculus acquisition to show the world that they aren't just some evil creepy web site with no regard for anything but their own profits.
An SRE does not immediately mean you have the access needed to spy on email. I'm not saying that SREs don't have the access, but it is conceivable, and likely, that within the SRE field they have higher level clearance for some employees. The response from Google in that article even points to this being the case.
Having root on the device is irrelevant when the device uses a network that someone other than you controls.

Just about every company in America will assert the right to do whatever they want with the traffic from any device you use on their network.
Je Baby Kamer « Alles voor en over je baby
Because you need to buy them from a regulated seller (stock broker).
Bartosz Milewski: C++17: I see a monad in your future [video]
They categorically denied this: "that Google opened email messages in [Michael Arrington's] Gmail account to investigate a leak,"

They went on to say this: "While our terms of service might legally permit such access, we have never done this [opened email messages in Michael Arrington's Gmail account to investigate a leak] and it’s hard for me to imagine circumstances where we would investigate a leak in that way."

> Who are you going to believe?

Technically, neither contradict the other. Considering who they are and what they are, technicalities matter, I think.
Your Python code is just wrong. I'm not sure what you think it's proving when you write explicitly wrong Python code, and then show that the output is wrong.
Using cabal sandbox'ing helps avoid this issue.
I share the general feeling of disappointment about this. I was previously planning on ordering one of the new Oculus dev kits and excited about its possibilities. Now I want to avoid Oculus.

The good news for Sony is this makes their VR suddenly the best hope for gaming.
Caprica holobands with advertising.
Got Bitcoins? Here’s how the IRS says to report them on your tax return.
This is my worry with Python. Its a good language, but it is too easy to learn.
Are you absolutely certain that nobody has used Python in high scalability, fast applications?
Any Brother multi-function laser. At that price you'll be black only for printing. Be sure to search out how to fool the toner out sensor as they lie.
This is upsetting because it means Facebook is building the software platform for the Oculus, not enthusiast developers or hundreds of independent startups. This has economic impact, and it's personally disappointing for anybody who gets excited about building VRUI.

Or, yeah, angst.
Whoa! I guess the big news here is that rings around such a gravitationally weak body would be a rare occurrence in nature... indicating a high possibility of an artificially designed / constructed structure.

Edit: Not sure if I am being downvoted for stating the obvious or the incredulous :)
Not sure if this has the maturity or feature set you're looking for, but a pretty interesting development on top of Sovereign's federated roll-your-own cloud platform:
http://sneer.me/project.html

There are also some interesting papers if you search for 'peer to peer CPU resource sharing'.