skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Kickstarter advertisement to email in HN profile
I just got email an email from someone I don't know advertising a Kickstarter project that I'm unfamiliar with:

Hey,

Long time fan and HN reader here...mostly lurking...

I thought you might like to check out my
project. It's hardware with an API and it's awesome!

Let me know what you think,

-Laura
@Female hackers meetup.

I think it was sent solely because I have my email listed in my HN profile.

1) It mentions being an HN fan, but offers no personal details.
2) It mentions being an HN reader, but offers no corresponding username.
3) It's self-addressed, likely to hide the multiple recipient list.

While I guess this could be considered "creative self promotion", it feels like unwanted spam to me.

Did others just get this message? What do you think? Is this an appropriate means of mass mailing to advertise a fundraising effort?
> Citation needed. I take it you have not read the Quran. The accounts of the Battles of Badr, Uhud, as well as others are sufficient to disprove this claim.

My comment was written today, yet talks about things older than 2 centuries. How exactly does mentioning historical events prove the age (aside from maximum age ?).

> Again, citation needed. I speak, read, and write Arabic fluently, and this is the first time I ever hear such claim. Quran 12:2 and 39:28 are enough to disprove that. Not to mention all the manuscripts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kufic is a good basic introduction. Please note that obviously the quran itself is not a valid source on the origin of the quran, for obvious reasons.

Your arguments are about as solid as claiming Star Wars was written in a galaxy far, far away.
Note the (also very old) opposing argument: http://marc.merlins.org/netrants/reply-to-useful.html

Personally, I've almost never wanted to privately reply to a mailing list posts (and I'm under the impression that doing so in most contexts is vaguely rude), but redundant CCs in reply-all chains are ugly, so I prefer munging Reply-To.
I am recommending it as an existence proof that one can construct a usable crypto library in a performant safe language.
This is incredible. The linked circles perfectly illustrate how complex functions can be constructed from many superimposed sine waves. I'm very happy with this new knowledge! :)
That was one year and 3 months... I don't do much else!
Another reason is that the OS itself has an incentive to push apps because they make so much money off them.

I hate the "walled garden" environment that's developed around mobile apps. That said, I think native apps are superior in some cases. You can use them offline, they typically get better performance, and they are top-level, right on your home screen, rather than having to go through a browser and search for them. There are some mild other advantages like being able to have alerts and other interactions with your OS, or getting rid of the browser UI clutter entirely.
Slightly formatted (you can put spaces in front of lines to fixed-width them):

MERCURY VENUS EARTH MOON MARS JUPITER SATURN URANUS NEPTUNE PLUTO
0.38 0.95 1 0.27 0.53 11.21 09.45 4.01 3.88 0.19
0.33 1.33 1 0.33 0.67 13.33 11.33 4.67 4.67 0.33
The "absolute immunity" for prosecutors was established in Imbler v. Pachtman (1976). The logic is that if prosecutors could be sued by people they accused but failed to convict,
that "would cause a deflection of the prosecutor's energies from his public duties, and the possibility that he would shade his decisions instead of exercising the independence of judgment required by his public trust."

(http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?q=Imbler+v.+Pachtman&...)
I'm sure it would be easier if I had a mentor or at least a friend...but I'm a loner so I'm taking my lumps the "hard way". It's been cool I love learning this even at my advanced age.
Sounds like this field could use some crowd sourcing.

What kind of data would be the most useful for learning? Would it be the same phrases read by different people, single words or is any text good? Do we need lots recordings from a single person or many smaller samples from different persons?

I'm thinking of a web site where people could contribute to the project by joining and then reading out phrases the system shows them.
My first thought too was Ada, it's easily callable from anything that can call C afaik, and has infinitely better support for catching these sorts of bugs than C or C++ do. It's basically made for this kind of project, and yet no one in the civilian population really cares; it's a real shame. Not only does Ada make it easy to do things safely, it makes it very hard to do things unsafely.

I've been advocating Ada's use on HN for a few years now, but it always falls on deaf ears. People seem to think it's old and dead like COBOL or old FORTRAN, but it's really a quite modern language that's extremely well thought out. Its other drawback is that it's pretty ugly and uses strange names for things (access is the name given to pointer like things, but Ada specifies if you have say a record with a 1 bit Bool in it, you must be able to create an access to it, so a pointer is not sufficient).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_the_Great_in_the_Qura...
Grab the scroll bar?
UPDATE: I've found one! Shouts to the venerable FiloSottile!

https://github.com/FiloSottile/Heartbleed/blob/master/bleed/...
Enterprise Customers Support for Windows XP ends
I think John Kemeny, co-inventor of BASIC, was a pretty interesting guy. He worked with computers under Feynman during the Manhattan Project. He argued for widespread computer literacy in the mid-1960's. He's worth reading about, for sure.

I happened into a copy of Kemeny's book "Man and the Computer" (http://www.amazon.com/Man-Computer-John-Kemeny/dp/0684130432) sometime around 90-91, and it fascinated me. I've gone back and read it since and, while many of Kemeney's predictions didn't hold up, the tone of the book is definitely inspiring.
Yeah. Voyager 1 blows my mind. I wonder about some future travel tours people will be taking where they take a faster than light tour bus to go see V1 continuing on its trip.
US Navy plans to convert sea water to fuel
Ask HN: How to create an online self-hosted anonymous dead-man's switch?
Yeah, I'm mostly just complaining about their holy war against WP, I was kinda looking forward to trying out Google Now for myself, so it was something of a let down to learn Google still had a personal vendetta against me :P
LLVM used to have a backend that could convert its low-level bitcode to portable C.
Your question is essentially "why is there a difference between theory and practice?".
Lawyers, accountants, the biomedical industry, real estate, the potential for tapping those markets are there. I've interacted with a few, and from what I've seen, they're loathe to try anything new if what they have works. Uber will have some creative marketing to do to reach out to these potential customers.
Jed Prevor
I disagree. I've had Yahoo reject my emails completely silently (didn't arrive in inbox OR 'spam' folder, even though Yahoo's MX said the message was accepted). Yahoo was entirely unresponsive about this issue. We didn't have the same problem with any other provider and it was resolved immediately upon switching to a third-party email delivery service.

Additionally, Yahoo has a huge amount of abuse and doesn't seem to have an abuse handle either; you have to fill out some form buried deep on their site. On the other hand, I've reported abuse incidents to Hotmail before and have gotten an actual reply from a human (a rarity when submitting abuse reports; most places act on them but don't bother responding).
That can false-positive, for what it's worth, in servers with fixed TLS heartbeats (instead of removing them).
I have come across that page before. Unfortunately it is full of false information (I researched it). For instance, the Alexander romance incidents that match the Quran were actually copied from the Quran, not the other way around.

Furthermore, note that even what is mentioned on that page is speculation from certain Islamic scholars. There is absolutely no authentic Hadith (or even non-authentic as far as I know) that mentions Alexander by name. All that is mentioned in the Quran is the "Two-Horned One", which could be Cyrus as mentioned on the wikipedia page, or it could be someone else completely.

One last point, the person in question here was never declared to be a prophet in the Quran as you claimed, but just a righteous king and person.
SSL itself is a tiny fraction of the CPU load on a normal webserver. The idea that it's expensive has done more harm than many other things.

It wouldn't cost anything except on accelerator boxes.
Pascal gets a bad rap, but that's due to the limitations of the original "pure" language. Something like Turbo Pascal which took features from Modula-2 is actually be a very good alternative to C for systems programming.

- Stricter type checking than C, (e.g. an error to add a centigrade value to a Fahrenheit value without casting)

- Bounds checked arrays and strings

Turbo Pascal added:

- Selectively turn off bounds checking for performance

- Inline assembler

- Pointers and arbitrary memory allocation

I don't think there's anything you can do in C that you can't do in TP. For example, it was easy to write code that hung off the timer or keyboard interrupts in MSDOS, which is pretty low level stuff.

The important thing is that the safe behaviour should be the default, you have to mark unsafe areas of code explicitly. This is the opposite to how it works with C.
Scary what the implications of this will be for OpenVPN traffic that has been captured and stored over the past 2 years.
The Buccaneer is a bit of a crooked sell.

The Kickstarter: Yay it costs $347!

Shipping: Oh yeah, about that, it's another $50... (or another $150 if you're not from the land of the free).

After the Kickstarter: Well, now it costs $497

And shipping now?: A mere $100! ($150 to the UK)

And after the pre-orders? "Retail price of the Buccaneer will be significantly higher than the pre-retail prices when we release it in the months ahead."

Sorry, but no. That's not affordable and the marketing is reprehensible. And it's definitely not going to be sub-$500.
> mandatory minimum applied

I’m not familiar with mandatory minimum for contempt. I would believe it fails to match the point, that is to allow the judge to operate his or her courtroom reasonably.
I think if you develop from the ground up to be a mobile optimized web app you can achieve good performance.

I recently built this as a side project using Bootstrap and it feels similar to an app (or faster) on iOS 'saved to my homepage': http://moneytrackr.ca/

Then later I found out about the Ratchet framework, so I think the potential is there.
I use SessionBuddy to manage this.
I'd like to see this combined with GPL/Creative-Commons style infectivity. Some sort of charter that makes coops prefer buying from or selling to other coops, charge non-coops more for their services, etc.
As a large application, it is too complex to make responsive. It will make bad UX. Instead of making large web application responsive., it is better to have mobile version of web or mobile app.
Completely relevant point, I would say: I assumed ‘rouge’ meant ‘red’ in that context, a.k.a. presumed socialo-communist, a.k.a. a prosecutor trying to redress economic and political injustices, going after the rich and powerful and ignoring petty crimes, like several prosecutors have been accused of doing in France and Italy. That made the original common odd.
Using a tablet's built-in camera for gaze tracking is a pretty neat hack :)

I wonder if you could make a game which incorporates looking (or not looking at things) in some way?
Well, I was interested in actually testing it out in code. I got it working with the pyOpenSSL bindings (I had to expose struct ssl_method_st, SSL_get_ssl_method, ssl_write_bytes and rebuild cryptography for pyOpenSSL.) Fun times.
Well, one way is to brute iterate through every potential 256-bit string you dredge out of the canal against the known public key.

If you can dredge up 64kB of fresh data every time, that's 511,744 tests per shovelful which is quite a bit to sift through from a performance perspective but it's also a trivially parallel task.

Additionally, folk might know of even better ways to narrow that down. For example, the data representation in memory might have easy to grep for delimiters.
You stated that Kufic is a dialect of Aramaic, which is completely false. Kufic is a script used to write Arabic, which people still write in to this day for your information.

The way the Quran uses language is very intricate. It would not be possible to achieve the same effect by translating from one language (Aramaic) to another (Arabic) as you are claiming. If you were to listen to recitation of the Quran that might deliver a clearer picture, even if you do not have a command over the language. I'm talking about how certain Ayat ("verses") sound (phonetically) -- this effect is hard to preserve across languages for a small body of text, let alone an entire book. (Example: http://tanzil.net/#100:1)
Shoot me an email james@grooveshark.com. Love to chat!
Given that Americans live under a (generally) two-party system, which forces us to make a lot of "lesser of two evils" type choices, I don't think it's fair to hold anyone to all of the beliefs of political candidates that they support.

Edit: Also, we may not know about all of the political actions of those candidates, rather offering support based on their stances on a the few issues we currently think are most important.
Big Joe is a retail trader trying to move 1-2 lots. His order can be entirely filled at a single exchange. Changing standing orders on other markets is only an issue for big players trying to move many lots.

You are correct that the financial markets are complex and I can't possible cover every topic. Even if I had the stamina I don't have the knowledge.
Yes, there is a net capital inflow. If you're building a lot of oversized houses and financing a trillion dollar annual budget, you need to import everybody else's savings. I don't think financing these unsustainable things will be a good investment in the long run.
It's hard to measure complexity and predict network usage. Centralized systems are also a lot easier to design and implement and make fast. Making good decentralized systems is a real research project, and often flat-out impossible. Often, decentralized systems push down their complexity to the user of the system -- see the decentralized key-value stores that push conflict handling down to the client.
Not sure if you noticed this yet or not, but it is possible to comment all code following an allowed block by leaving an open "/*". This allows the player to write their own code to overwrite what should be uneditable.

not sure if you would want to disallow this or not, but i find it allows for some interesting hacky solutions.
It's not terribly shocking to learn that OkCupid's obvious publicity stunt against Brendan Eich was merely a publicity stunt.
Me too - dependency on Chef Server is instant no-go.
Regarding the #1. Size. I really like how tiny it is. I think it will be a perfect gift for my girlfriend that is into 3d stuff. Maybe she can 3d print some miniature models as a hobby and for entertainment. Not necessarily for practical use.
I appreciate the intent to use random citizens to hold power, but prosecutor might be the position where years of professional training matters. Remember what Churchill said about five minutes with the average voters? Well, there is one bigger scandal in any democracy (it is actually mentioned in the article) and that’s how much someone accused of anything, specially if he happens to be unattractive, socially isolated, poor and male, is presumed guilty. This is far worst for ‘random people’, and allowing non-experts to choose who to prosecute without consequence would lead to spectacular injustices.

That’s why it is the jury who is made of inexperienced citizens selected at random: prosecutors now have the burden to convince them all, including those who empathise with the accused. They are judged over their career by how their prejudice leads them to bad cases, and prevents them from winning cases.

If prosecutors saw acquittals as failure on their part, and need to re-consider their world-view, that would work. I believe the article and the judge see the problem as them seeing such (rare) events as abuse of the system against them, personification of the innocent defendent public, and that’s the source of the issue.
>Similarly the H1B cap seems to have an assumption that there are some fixed number of STEM jobs out there and if Indians fill it up, somehow the Americans will not get it. I would assume a higher concentration of Engineers in USA would only lead to more innovation, more engineers trying to earn more money by being far more creative and so on.

So you are assuming the opposite? There are unlimited STEM jobs here? You are quite misinformed.

In the United States, nine percent of computer science graduates are unemployed, and 14.7 percent of those who hold degrees in information systems have no job. Graduates with degrees in STEM - science, technology, engineering and medicine - are facing record joblessness, with unemployment at more than twice pre-recession levels. The job market for law degree holders continues to erode, with only 55 percent of 2011 law graduates in full-time jobs.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/11/surviving-p...
Totally exactly the same thing. Candidate whom is anti-gay === targeted anti-gay legislation
Physicists create lightning in the race to develop quantum technology microchip
TLDR (from article): "OkCupid's co-founder and CEO Sam Yagan once donated to an anti-gay candidate. (Yagan is also CEO of Match.com.) Specifically, Yagan donated $500 to Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) in 2004, reports Uncrunched. During his time as congressman from 1997 to 2009, Cannon voted for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, against a ban on sexual-orientation based job discrimination, and for prohibition of gay adoptions."

So donating to a campaign for a constitutional ammendment prohibiting gay marriage is the same as donating to a politician with a broad array of other policies? Anti-republicanism aside, how is this even remotely the same thing?
Hollywood Boulevard : Orlando Bloom décroche une étoile
Découvrez l’étoile d’Orlando Bloom sur le célèbre Hollywood Boulevard. Le comédien sera bientôt à l’affiche de Hobbit : Histoire d'un aller et retour.
Cached:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:v794NTc...
This outlines the absurdity of what happens when you have to take down leaders just because their entire world view doesn't outline with yours.

Is it hypocritical of Yagan? Sure. Does it mean he's unqualified to do his job? Probably not.

This post from Arrington's original article is on point

> 5. Is it absurd to judge Yagan as a person based on a single donation, years ago, to a politician well known for waging war on gays? Yup. But that is precisely what Yagan and OkCupid did to Eich...How can a man orchestrate and support a boycott of Mozilla over Eich and yet donate to a hateful politician like Chris Cannon? How do you square that?
Here's the original post unearthing this from Uncrunched - http://uncrunched.com/2014/04/06/the-hypocrisy-of-sam-yagan-...
Correction: he donated to an anti-gay candidate. Also, people care more about your current position than what you believed half a decade ago. Obviously OkCupid's CEO has come around on this position (if indeed he ever was anti-gay). Or he is putting on the public appearance of having come around, which for activism's purpose is sufficient.

If Eich had come out in support of gay people during this fiasco (for example, saying something as simple as, "I was wrong, I'm sorry, if I had it to do again, I would not donate to that campaign"), I'm willing to bet that the calls to remove him would have dropped in volume by a substantial margin. This isn't apples to apples, and it's not even apples to oranges. It's apples to pick up trucks.
He donated to an anti-gay candidate, not to a campaign specifically against gays. This is akin to saying somebody an Iraq war supporter for paying US taxes.

Still, Cannon sounds like a reprehensible person, and I would be interested to hear Yagan's reason for helping to re-elect him.
DRM isn't effective. Sooner or later the businesses involved are going to discover this. DRM doesn't actually inconvenience me (I'd be taking a backup anyway) so I don't mind publishers wasting their time pushing it.
If DRM was effective and got in my way then I'd pirate their books; not really from an ethical stance, but purely because of convenience.
Eventually the penny is going to drop and they'll realise that DRM causes piracy instead of preventing it and they'll stop using it.
> The per-request execution model can be played as an incredible strength, but the moment some framework comes along, starting off by loading all of its code, then instantiating a myriad classes, subclasses, traits, and other crap just to serve a simple request - that's where slowness and bugginess comes from.

Really good point, never thought about it this way.
I'm not sure I should fear or applaud Apple's TouchID. They just made a massive Sapphire investment: how long until every Apple Device comes with TouchID? How long until third-party devs can target it as an API?

Apple's fingerprint integration is convenient enough to be dangerous: once you enable it, it is hard to go back.
You can't tell how software/architecture built today will be used in the future. You do your best to pick a method, but you operate on imperfect information. Sometimes you get it right and things work well, sometimes you get it wrong, and things still work well. Sometimes you get it right, but things change and it no longer works well, and sometimes you get it wrong, but things change and it becomes a good solution.
It's remotely the same thing because it's about him supporting politics that many sharply disagree with.

It shows the hypocrisy of grabbing pitchforks and torches and pushing out a brilliant mind just because you disagree with his views on marriage which are the same as 51% of all of California.

My proposal: put down the pitchforks, pick up the coffee cups and talk and reason instead of pressure and bully.
For progressive libertarians, hasn't Chris Cannon has been on the wrong side of many social issues, and on the right side of many privacy and internet issues?
I'm not sure if you're intentionally sidestepping my point or not.

We're always going to need people to do tasks that don't require education. Being a janitor isn't punishment for not "working hard enough". We're always going to need janitors and other workers. They're valuable members of society who help make civil life possible.
Your brand need ways of curating social media posts
surprisingly accurate portrayal of SV, and hilarious
"There's a sucker born every minute"

You have just been pwnd by Barry Diller and Sam Yagan.
I was going to disagree, but a Google search for Chris Cannon finds a site calling him a RINO (Republican in Name Only - the term extremists use for moderate Republicans) for his softer immigration stance.

He's in fairly safe electorate, so his main challenge is winning pre-selection. Those donations could have helped keep a Tea Party candidate out of Congress.

I guess it just goes to show you shouldn't start attacking people over a single headline.
When I sell something on eBay I don't have any expectations that I'm an eBay employee. The Google Play and Apple app store are both apt analogies as well. Selling goods or services on a marketplace often comes at a cost per transaction, but it almost never comes with an expectation of employment.