skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Genetic algorithms for detecting Single Point Of Failure
I've always been curious at the level of sophistication of the simulation tools wielded by our peers in other natural sciences like physics. It appears that they are able to really simulate a multitude of complex interactions and consequences through both mathematics and computational models. Perhaps I'm being extremely naive, but I'm yet to come across a comprehensive enough tool (or set of tools) that can model a "perturbation" (request, input etc) rippling through an entire software system that could ultimately cause some severe failure. This failure would be the result of some hidden Single Point of Failure or a result of a congruence of multiple side-effects that end up in a system-wide halt or performance degradation, and it could be modeled by initializing a sense of "state" per component of your system (ex: When my web server is servicing 5000 requests, AND my message queue has applied some backpressure and is 80% full, AND there's some heavy asynchronous processing happening in a few other machines for crunching matrices, AND one of my DB's has gone down and my Read replica is going to stand in its place temporarily, AND there's some arbitrary network jitter -> BOOM!)

I understand that architects try to think through these cases on their own, but as you add more components to your system and interface with more open source software that you may not understand as deeply as its authors, it appears that there needs to be a more scalable way to 'discover' hidden weaknesses. Could we use genetic algorithms to model each of these subsystems' "state" and throw some kind of perturbations (requests) its way to see how our system reacts? Is there much value in doing this, and if so, then why haven't we had our computers simulate computers and subsystems in the realm of software development and architecture?
Nice! I saw the one for Ubuntu and thinking we needed one for Mac, thanks again!
You could use an transferable typed array buffer instead of copying an array of integers from the worker thread. Looks like the array is under 4mb, so copying doesn't take very long, and you only do it once, but if you're going to use a worker you might as well.

http://updates.html5rocks.com/2011/12/Transferable-Objects-L...
As an aside, OpenCV seems to have the same problem. Widely used and at least a std deviation away from OK.
HaD recently launched hackaday.io, a place for people to document and discuss their hardware projects. One of the conditions of winning the prize is using hackaday.io to document everything.
Question for self-driving car aficionados. When I'm driving and encounter a strange or dangerous situation these days I often try to think if a robocar will be able to handle it properly. One situation came up the other day that made me nervous. I was driving on a relatively empty highway at high speed (70mph) and there was a piece of debris in one of the lanes. I spotted the debris far ahead and safely changed lanes.

For an autonomous car, the car will a) need incredibly far range to see this debris in time and b) will need incredibly precise lidar/radar to see the debris if it is small. At a far distance, a small piece of debris covers a minuscule solid angle on the sensor. At high speeds, you have a twofold problem that tests the limits of the onboard sensors and collision avoidance systems: objects approach rapidly, and small objects can cause catastrophic damage or cause other collisions. In the case where other cars are on the road, the problem seems straightforward since the robocar can probably see all the other cars ahead of it changing lanes in a pattern. On a deserted highway however the car is in trouble unless it can spot the debris from a very far distance, it seems. Any thoughts?
Pedestrians, bicyclists & mass transit reduce the number of cars on the road, making the gas taxes that you pay go further. And since buses & bicycle lanes are a lot cheaper than widening the road or other measures that allow more cars on the road, as a car driver you should be happy that gas taxes go towards bicycle lanes.
We don't need mining of rocks for a human Mars mission.

We probably need in-situ resource production of fuel from the Martian atmosphere. Which this mission is not providing.

In retrospect it's pretty clear what this is:

1. NASA wants to do an asteroid capture mission (Planetary got so much press, we can too)

2. NASA leadership says their goal is Mars

3. A bunch of post hoc reasons to say that this is moving us towards Mars.

If you were designing a Mars mission, you would never put "let's go capture an asteroid and bring it into lunar orbit" into your schedule anywhere.
> software [is] an order of magnitude more complex to reason about than e.g. a bridge

I think you're trying to flatter our profession. Software is not more complex; it's just that we don't know what we're doing well enough to have useable, reliable components. Like arches. Or even just rivets.

To stretch the bridge analogy further (probably almost to its breaking point), it's as if I'm about to start work on the Hoover Dam Bridge, but I have to start by getting some rivets. So I first go out and pick up some pieces of iron ore, and start trying to figure out how to build a smelter that can introduce just the right amount of carbon into them to make decent steel. Knowing a bit about smelter designs, I decide to use a Japanese tatara furnace. I still don't have rivets, but I figure that in a few weeks I'll have enough steel to start making them. (After I make the buy-or-build-build decision on the furnace, that is. I'm not allowed to reuse the one I made for my last project of building music stands, and the commonly-used open-source design has been known to mysteriously turn iron ore into lead instead.) The rest of the bridge has yet to be tackled...

Point being: this is not a "we know enough, it's just complicated" problem. We know almost nothing and our tools are appallingly primitive. To quote some classic hacker humor: "I was taught assembler / In my second year of school / It's kinda like construction work / With a toothpick for a tool." Assembler and Haskell have much more in common than a toothpick and a Caterpillar D9.
Underscoring your sentiment is the origin of the term jaywalking http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-invention-of-jaywalking-w...

Although, to be sure, with the speeds of modern vehicles, it makes sense that people's paths be predictable since vehicles are much less able to be nimble and swerve out of someone's path.
#IAMNOTCHINESE
Try Nimrod. Or Julia.

I haven't tried them yet, but it looks like their fun.
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It should end when XP's market share is vanishingly small. Given that as of a couple weeks ago it still has 27% among Windows users [1], we are nowhere near that point. Microsoft should do everything they can to help customers, especially corporate users, upgrade to the current version. Presumably they're already doing this, but in the meantime they should continue at least providing XP security updates given its sizable user base.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/08/windows_xp_istilli_h...
"Coolness" factor varies, but most German internet companies (with the notable exception of 1&1) have no official US presence.
That's a very important distinction that the "easy-mode" metaphors don't really take into account. A good word for it is "intersectionality" (though please note that many people will define intersectionality as only applying to marginalized groups): it's the various ways all of one's "labels" (gender, class, ethnicity, race, etc) interact, and it's something to keep in mind while having these discussions.

The reason is that there isn't one axis along which we can measure "more" or "less" oppressed or disenfranchised. Men tend to lose custody battles more frequently, for instance.

That said, you can still look at a group of people and say something along the lines of "in such-and-such context, members of the first group tend to be more successful at this goal than members of a second group". Phrasing it this way, I think, tends to deflect the "us-vs-them" or "men-vs-women" mentality that crops up fairly often in these discussions (especially when they take place online, where anonymity and lack of non-textual clues make it more difficult to have a civil conversation).

The point of all this is this: if you are a man, you are more likely to kill yourself or be homeless, and that is a HUGE PROBLEM. If you are a black man, by some accounting, you are more likely to be raped than a white woman (because black men are disproportionately sent to prison), and that is a HUGE PROBLEM. But neither of these problems make the discrimination faced by women in the STEM fields less of a problem, it just means that we have many huge problems on our hands.

When you are a member of group A, and group A tends to be more successful than group B (so, male programmers as group A and female programmers as group B), I think it is your obligation to ask _why_ there is this statistical skew, and if the answer is "systematic discrimination due to power imbalance", work to correct it, irrespective of how your group fares in other such comparisons. That doesn't mean that your group faring poorly in these comparisons is not unfair, because it totally is. It just means that there is a complex web of privileges* and disadvantages that we _all_ need to help untangle.

(*You didn't think I was going to get through five paragraphs about identity politics without whipping out the P-word, did you?)
Authy Brings Two-Factor Authentication To The Desktop
Now the math only argument is a bit of an anti-straw-man, ain't it?

2+2 == 4, always, so the underlying math is sound. But two bikes, a car don't make!
As someone who writes both Lisp and Go (and enjoys both), I find it odd that this article uses Lisp and Haskell as points of comparison.

> programming in Go isn’t “fun” in the same way that Python, Haskell, or Lisp is.

Yes, writing Lisp is much more "fun" than writing Go for me. But writing Go is much more productive and maintainable (both for solo projects and for larger groups).

In fact, this is almost an intentional "feature" of Go: http://aerokode.com/blog/go-is-boring

> The idea is that there’s simply no way that any group of designers could imagine how people will want to use their language so making it easy to extend solves the problem wonderfully.

On the other hand, there's no way of making a language so easily extensible while also maintaining relatively uniform idiomatic, design, and style conventions across a language community. Go very heavily favors the latter.

> In Lisp, CLOS (Common Lisp Object System) was originally a library. It was a user defined abstraction that was so popular it was ported into the standard.

CLOS is actually very similar in some ways to Go's structs. Both emphasize encapsulating data inside an "entity" (object/struct), and separating the notion of behavior from that entity. To quote one of the language authors from GopherCon[0]: "Interfaces separate data from behavior. Classes conflate them."

Lisp was "designed" (if you can call it that) around the principle that extending a language should be as easy as writing a program in that language. Go was designed around the principle that there should be only one dialect of the programming language, for the sake of cohesiveness. It's a stronger assertion of the Pythonic motto, "There should be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do it".

[0] https://twitter.com/chimeracoder/status/459827405386162176
Yes, I do agree.
Do you mean Firefox ESR?

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all/

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/
Ask HN: How did your revenue-generating side project come about?
The recent side project for sale thread got me thinking about how each particular side project was started. Some people are from the "scratch your own itch" camp, others from the lean/customer dev line of thinking. In short, I want to work on a small project that could potentially earn a few hundred bucks per month, but am having trouble choosing an idea.
I still think that the best application for computer controlled cars is to have humans driving and computers handling the safety, braking when they detect danger, stuff like that. Lots of accidents like hitting pedestrians, cyclists or other cars could be avoided, and it's not as high level and difficult as what they're currently trying to figure out.
Maybe, if the library support is there. Right now HATEOAS seems to mean replacing your domain-specific action tags with boilerplatey <link rel=...> and not a lot else.
but I only need management tools with browsers to control IE-specific settings like trusted sites, compatibility lists, active-x settings, etc and only for IE-only websites that use that junk.

Other browsers "just work" as they're build on universal technologies that really don't need a "trusted sites list" or a 3 page document on a very specific active-x setting list to make some ridiculous feature work.

Fix your web apps. This culture of IE-only built apps only causes more security woes and more administrative headaches than needed. Sadly, its still 1998 in the corporate world.

/your company's sysadmin
The mechanisms of evolution have also been attributed to the development of different religions. One guess to the reason why there are so few religions with no obvious reward system is that it's more difficult to convert people to these, compared to major religions like Christianity and Islam where there are great, clearly defined rewards and punishments.

I guess, at one point in time, there were a lot more religions with neither reward or punishment system in place or just either one of these, and adopting more feedback systems to a religion at the time greatly boosted its breadth and penetration across populations.

I don't remember where I heard this, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was true.
No. It would behoove all the XP users who have been warned for the past god knows how many years to move on, to, you know, move on. I know it's a loose analogy, but Heartbleed got everyone to upgrade their services overnight. Perhaps this security hole will get people moving off XP faster.
That's pretty cool I guess.
In my experience, FaceTime's quality has surpassed the others as of recent. Partly due to the new retina screen and HD iPhone camera.
Sure, but what proportion of the packages in maven central are?
The agreeableness of Python is the reason I settled on it after experience with a bunch of other languages. I was starting to find software engineering to be a chore and was losing interest in it until I started using Python. No language is best at everything, and all the ways python isn't the best have been worked around without much bother.

Go did not strike me as a language I would enjoy writing, despite the strengths it surely has in some areas. I would just be giving up other strengths I prioritize more highly.
I imagine that allowing multicast resolution system-wide is fraught with security problems, and most Android phones are whored out to random wifi networks all over the world.
Very few bicyclists just use a bicycle. Most, including myself, own a bicycle and a car, and choose the bicycle for trips where it makes sense(single person trip, short distance, safe route, no cargo).

I would be willing to bet that people like me put less wear and tear on the road since the effects of bike on asphalt are negligible.
I can confirm with this screenshot (http://cl.ly/image/2Q2e3k1w0g25) that imgur does indeed do some sort of compression that makes this solution break with an imgur link for Mathematica 9. I may investigate a bit further. I had previously tested with an uncompressed image, and the same technique did produce the expected results from the answer on Stackexchange.

UPDATE: Changed the correlation value from .12 to .2 and the compressed imgur image has some interesting results (3 circles, one of them is on Waldo): http://cl.ly/image/0Z3k150S2z10
Two observations:

First, setting vm.swappiness to 0 does not have the beneficial impact that people say it does, and yet it's religious dogma to set it that way on MySQL servers. To my knowledge there has never been a single article published that clearly demonstrates its benefit under a controlled test. The evidence of any benefit is anecdotal at best.

Second, you can easily exclude any process from being killed by the kernel's OOM killer: "echo -17 > /proc/PID/oom_adj"
So how long before the courts argue that NON-US cloud providers are also subject to US search if they hold US citizen data?
I think the book "Speech and Language Processing, 2nd Edition" from Prof. Daniel Jurafsky is very good http://www.amazon.com/Speech-Language-Processing-Daniel-Jura...

You can also check out the great online NLP course taught by the author and Prof. Chris Manning from Stanford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfoudtpBV68&list=PL6397E4B26...
There are actually many peaceful uses of nuclear weapons, both the US and the Soviets experimented with using them to dig big holes, and the Soviets also used them for geographic surveys (like that "thumper" at the beginning of Jurassic Park, but much bigger ;)) and a few other things. Unfortunately all of these uses are politically untenable.

It would be great to use them in space though; it would probably be much easier to convince the public to go for that.
Things in lunar orbit do degrade and crash into the moon. NASA has put a lot of stuff into lunar orbit over the years and they all eventually crashed. There's essentially no atmosphere, but the Moon is not a perfect sphere and there are mascons that perturb orbits.

It's a question of how high it is, too.

NB: I didn't know this until I asked /r/space about it several years ago.
He will be in a book by Mary Roach soon..
I don't think this issue has much to do with Red Hat kernel specifically - that commit has been in the mainline kernel since 3.5.
Since we're talking verbiage, the headline is slightly wrong. US-CERT recommends using EMET, but they merely ask you to consider an alternative browser until the issue is patched.
Does anyone actually use CLOS? It's always held up as this great example of language extensibility, but my impression is that since it's not part of the core language Lisp folk tend to create their own abstractions instead.
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An Untold Startup Story
Yeah, I'm pretty sure the site you linked is wrong too, and I think the author doesn't realize it, because he says:

> My last post was about using Kruskal’s algorithm to generate random mazes. This article is about using another minimal spanning tree algorithm to do the same: Prim’s algorithm.

But his implementation is NOT the same! (His implementation of Kruskal's algorithm does look correct.) Extracting elements at a random index is not equivalent to assigning random weights to elements and extracting the minimum-weight elements.
Here is a review [0] by Bob Carpenter of Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing [1].

[0] http://www.amazon.com/review/R2FUAZHGUOERHV

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Statistical-Natural-Langua...
Alternatively for file syncing, peer to peer? If a company doesn't have your data in the first place, they can't give it up. It does require the user to supply their own always-on internet-connected device, but that's increasingly becoming a thing that people have (for modestly sized files, even a smartphone would do)
I'm aware of who Piketty is. That's why I'm so surprised that he wrote such a voluminous tome with so little point. Last week before I read the book, I assumed it was just vapid reporters misunderstanding him.

If he has a paper which clearly and succinctly summarizes the point book, please point it out. Cause the book doesn't even contain a hint of that.
I just wanted to point out that the author of this article is a high school student.

http://jozefg.bitbucket.org/about.html
Ask HN: Leaving startup, what happens to the code?
I joined a startup as the the technical founder a year ago. I also was/am the only dev on the team. As such, almost all of the code written and being used on the product today was written by me.

I'm leaving the startup for a number of reasons, which I won't get into here. But what happens to the codebase? I never signed any paperwork of any kind when joining (I'm not even on the cap table officially).

If the startup continues to use my code, what are fair leaving terms I should set?
You have been warned about XP's end of support date for several years, on top of it corporate customers can buy updates directly from MS. I'm not seeing the problem, other than the public being irresponsible, which no corporate policy can cure. We can extend support another 6 months and be in the exact same place. There's no winning here.

I also find it hard to believe those old XP machines aren't compromised already. Worst case scenario is that they leave one botnet and join another.

Also, those stats are from web user agents, many bots use XP user agents, so we really don't know how many XP machines there are. I imagine most are corporate for compatibility reasons and are receiving patches. The rest are irresponsible people unwilling to upgrade and probably aren't running updated AV either.

At the very least this can be an opportunity to scare people into upgrading or at least switching to a non-IE browser and making sure their AV is up to date.

tldr; can't save the world and you can't save people from themselves
Shanghai is a different place than Shangri-La. For starters, the former exists.
Not only should you include a client, you should write the client first.
That's a good point. There aren't a lot of GC languages that let you control structure layout. Not a problem I face, but interesting.
Why can't you leave go? Haskell may have a steeper initial learning curve but I can't think of any environment where go is usable and Haskell isn't.

(To me OCaml seems like a better replacement for a lot of what people are doing in go, but admittedly it doesn't have the same concurrency support)
Ask HN: Easiest way to make a mobile app into a website?
We are growing company that develops clinical decision support mobile software. We have chosen the mobile first route. We are now getting requests to make our software available on browsers. Is there any easy way to make an iOS or Windows 8 app into a website? The iOS app is native and the windows 8 was built using (xaml, C#). I am aware of systems such as app.io, however I am not sure this would work for day-to-day use. We are looking for something that would give us an end product like this - https://carmacarpool.com/desktop/. I am sure a lot of mobile first companies have this problem so there maybe an opportunity here??
It's not just XP, though. This bug applies to all IE versions.
> "Collapsed while hiking." The only way that can happen is with an interruption in blood flow, which means a clot or a bleed. If you want, I can go into details, but with his butter and his omega habits, he was putting himself at risk for both, contradictory as that may sound.

This is not science. You are drawing a conclusion to support your own preconceived medical notions based on incredibly limited evidence.

The world does not need more armchair coroners, claiming they've determined causes of death in comment threads hours after someone has passed.