skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Stop being so paranoid. Nobody's interested in reading your emails.

Besides, they're only collecting metadata."
This seems to be about what is better known as the doomsday argument: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
Julia is definitely going to be the winner. I've been using it for a few weeks and it is just so natural for scientific/technical computing and effectively covers a wide range of use cases. The type system and syntax allow for code to be expressed in terms of the domain's natural objects and notation, without having to do awkward translations between the math and the code. It has the mathematical features of MATLAB without compromising on speed (Python) or expressivity (C and FORTRAN).
A 24 minute read is not "medium" length.
Censoring P2P “piracy” is useless. And trendy
"Scientific computing" is such a broad term that it's not terribly useful.

For numeric computing, Fortran, C, and C++ will likely remain at the top for years to come.

For statistical and exploratory data analysis, R has long been king (and closed-source tools before R), but Python is rapidly coming out on top here. Clojure could challenge here, but it's far from having the popularity of R or even Python right now.

For machine learning, Matlab along with its open-source analog Octave, have long been de rigueur, but Python is rapidly gaining ground here, too. I think here is where Julia is hoping to gain ground, at least initially.

So it's a bit odd to lump different areas of scientific computing together, but even odder to neglect the one language that has a chance of topping more than one of these areas. And I say that as someone who is moving from Python to Go and Rust for a lot of my software (but still stay with Python for data exploration).

Nonetheless, not a bad introduction to the languages in question.
How can I explain SQL injection without technical jargon?
The site provides

* A build system for creating SCLs.

* A centralized hosting location for community developed SCLs.

* Developer documentation and templates for developing SCLs.

* A developer mailing list for packagers and developers depending on or creating SCLs.

http://developerblog.redhat.com/2014/04/08/announcing-softwa...
Complaining about downvoting is the archetype of off-topicness in HN comments. Please don't.
I would have loved some explenation what Media Source Extensions are at the beginning of the article, the link to W3C doesn't help because I have no idea what I need to read there.
Where are the Meteor.js users?
> What incentive does Comcast have to, say, push standard bandwidth to 100Mbit while being paid regulated, low margin rates as a dumb pipe provider?

To be more explicit: Mozilla's proposal solves this. ISPs get to charge whatever prices they want to consumers, which covers the cost of 100mb bandwidth and technological innovation, but to companies they have to act like a dumb pipe and ensure equal access. This means Comcast has an incentive for innovation even in a monopolistic situation—They can charge users more money.

I'm not sure if this would solve the problem with BitTorrent though...
Incidentally, a big part of my thesis was studying DNS parsers and how network vulnerabilities can be expressed and tracked. It turns out to be an interesting language design problem. One of our papers, "VESPA", the "vulnerability signatures parser", proposed a DSL-like design for describing vulnerabilities using a minimal C++ syntax.

This is a very rich area of research and one I'd like to apply some of my recent high-scale stuff I've done at work on. bro was doing event-based processing in pure C++ long before node.js existed (some 10 years ago) -- these guys are really, really smart.
Skeptophilia: Deepak Chopra and the attractiveness of nonsense
Being among the most zealous to worship at the altar of Kernighan and
Ritchie, I, nevertheless, over the years, have come to appreciate the
positions expressed in this fine, albeit often humdrum, collection.

Concrete examples of the insanity of Unix might by now be largely
obsolete (none of the csh- or symlink-related showcases work anymore),
but the basic, deep annoyance of the Haters seems to me ever-valid:

"Unix evolved; it was not designed".

This holds true even in the age of the beautifully engineered surfaces
of MacOS and Unity. Underneath, Unix lurks with all its idiosyncrasies
and peculiarly half-hearted assumptions and informs all of the
interfaces and paradigms above.

No one who ever saw a Genera machine at work or appreciated fully the
depth of Smalltalk's world view, will be able to dive into Unix and come
back with the same deep sense of enlightenment.

Unix' only redeeming, rather: defining, feature is this: relentless
adaptability. Unix, as an ideology and an ever-changing set of tools,
works precisely because it refuses to be held to any standard of aesthetics.
OSSCDN is using jsDelivr as origin and jsDelivr API for the website
That Oracle-Google Appeal
Thanks for the catch on this :)
Nevertheless, consider watching Gates' Comdex keynote videos.

Have you seen the WinFS trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ_4p5iUc88

You can try out BeOS open source successor that comes with a BeFS compatibility called HaikuOS. I suggest you to read the BeFS book written by the main developer who later developed the Spotlight search engine for MacOSX 10.4+ and later iOS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HaikuOS , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeFS , http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(software)

Both NTFS and the newer ReFS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS ) offer almost equal capabilities to BeFS. And it's a real shame that Microsoft hasn't been able to come up with a decent GUI. Even Vista had a better advanced search dialog integration than the successor's Windows 7 and 8.x
> Most of the cost is in building infrastructure, not delivering bits.

But there's significant cost in building infrastructure that can deliver more bits.

> Further, I don't want to live in a nickel-and-dime world where every single thing I do has the cognitive overhead of worrying about metered usage.

So stop worrying about it. How much cognitive effort do you spend factoring in the cost of electricity, gas and water when you're making spaghetti?
MDIL is mostly native machine code (e.g. ARM or x64 instructions). Transforming MDIL back to source code would require significant analysis and effort. It would be more like to transforming a compiled C++ application back into C++.

Also, note that end users wouldn't be trying to transform MDIL back to source code. MDIL goes through the 'binding' step that transforms it to native machine code.
California Senate approves smartphone 'kill-switch' bill
snort, last time I checked, operated on much simpler primitives like regular expressions and static strings.

Bro, on the other hand, is less of a product and more of a framework (think RoR) for studying protocol design and parsing. It's written in pure C++ so it's fast, and a lot of research papers have been written exploring things like programming paradigms for processing network data (functional vs. stream vs. imperative vs. OO), the best way to express exploits and vulnerabilities, efficient ways of tracking and storing protocol state, etc.

I think they're trying to commercialize it into something usable without tons of tuning. A good goal, as it's not that usable for out-of-box IDS/IPS ca. 5 yrs ago.
I stopped reading when I read this:

> His first step is defensive: the creation of a software shield that will hide his identity. He boots up a computer containing a version of Windows that’s cut off from the rest of the machine. It’s a digital Russian doll, a computer within a computer. His sleuthing may attract attention, but any hacker who penetrates the inner realm would probably never know there was a larger doll wrapped around it. And when it’s all done, Mike will delete the hidden computer and any unwanted software that may have slipped into it.
How A Lawsuit Over Hot Coffee Helped Erode the 7th Amendment
Was having problems with the Postgres install from Homebrew. Finally kicked it away and rebooted to have more of a fresh start. So last week.
It was worth reading. These type of scammers piss me off too. I wish we could generate thousands of fake leads a day and make their lives miserable. Since law enforcement only cares about national security, and only barely ordinary people being ripped off, there has to be a technological solution.
> Why would I ever want to start a million dollar business if I knew the majority of my earnings would be taken from me by the government to support people that didn't need to do anything??

Our time to actually get on with better lives is running out while you capitalists poison the planet and quite literally work the human race to death. Climb the Hierarchy of Needs to higher levels, or we will drag you up there by force ;-).
>People don't have a right to exist.

Uuuuh, says you?
See also: Erlang on Xen (http://erlangonxen.org/).
US Navy Orders 10 Virginia-class Submarines at a Record Cost of $17.6 Billion
Evlilikte ilk gece korkusu
How much of the structures are formed from the cover slip interacting with the liquid on the slide? The fractal-style patterns can be made easily at home with toothpaste pressed between two sheets of acrylic.
I was missing R and Python in the article.
And who says we need a king? Maybe the rich ecosystem of many coexisting languages is better?
Julia appears to be to slow for a lot of large real-world uses - this is where the power cost of running the cluster becomes important.

There is a job posting outstanding near me for over a year looking for some one to port CFD Fortran to C++ - I have never had to stifle giggles when talking to a recruiter before.

They would better of training their new staff in Fortran after all that's what I did at BHRA.

I suspect its ARA out at twinwoods - one would hope my old employer isn't so silly.
I'm sorry that you missed out on the meat of the article, which talks about the lead generation industry and how leads and contact info will get continually re-sold to attempt to extract as much value from the knowledge that someone is looking for something specific which has a high profit margin (or is likely to fall for some specific scams, as the case may be)
Okay so why can't we get any reporting with any numeric literacy?

How many people does the average person make contact with in a 5 year time span? Let's call this number X for hop 1.

How many people does each of the people in X then make contact with in the same 5 years? If we assume that on the whole people know ABOUT as many people as others, we can also call that number X for hop 2.

Now of course there's going to be overlap, out of X people somewhere between 0% and probably 70% might overlap between any one person of interest, hop 1 and hop 2.

Let's say that on average there's a 40% overlap. And let's call the Sweep(X) the number of people that get caught up in surveillance as a result of a single suspected terrorist.

Sweep(X) = 0.4 * X (first hop) x 0.4 * X (second hop)

Sweep(X) = 0.16 * X ^ 2

That's quadratic and as anyone who knows math, and especially people who know about Big-Oh notation, it's bad because Sweep(X) grows much faster than X does.

But how big is X? Well we can look to Dunbar's number to give us somewhere to start. Wikipedia says that it's between 100 and 250 but most people use 150 as a reasonable approximation. Of course that's STABLE relationships, not acquaintances, friends-of-friends, or anything like that. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume the 150 number and then assume that you probably make contact with one random person every week. Over 5 years, that's another 250. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

So if we assume that X is 150 + 250 = 400 what do we get?

Sweep(400) = 0.16 * 400 * 400 = 25,600 let's just say 25k for short.

Now there are around 300 million people in the US. 300mm / 25k = 12000. That means that the NSA need only find 12,000 people (on average) to get all the call records for everyone in the US for the last 5 years.

It gets worse, though. What happens if you make contact with TWO random people every week? Then X = 150 + 500 = 650

Sweep(650) = 0.16 * 650 * 650 = 67,600. 300mm / 67k = 4477 people suspected of nefarious deeds in order to gain all call records.

As you can see this gets really out of hand really fast. And that's why I'm a bit upset that nobody's doing the math around the "two hops" argument because I assure you that the folks at the NSA aren't rolling over and giving up. This is something that SOUNDS reasonable but in actuality means little/no reform whatsoever.

EDIT: wikipedia link
Seems like a fair (if a bit dramatic) description of a virtual machine for a non technical reader.
The author of the article is aware of the article you linked to and wrote a response: http://lee-phillips.org/lispmath. The problem with the closed form is that once it exceeds the built-in data types, it no longer takes constant time to compute, so it's not actually always faster than doing it iteratively.

Apparently, the ideal method is "none of the above" but to use matrix exponentiation (or a formula derived from it) instead: http://nayuki.eigenstate.org/page/fast-fibonacci-algorithms.
>Why would I ever want to start a million dollar business if I knew the majority of my earnings would be taken from...
>you could even live in the woods on berries...

It's not necessary to go as far as berries - in most of the developed world you can not work and be supported automatically by the government. But it's boring! Most people would much rather be building million dollar businesses even if the pay was much the same. In fact many people working for corporations build multi million dollar businesses where 99% or so of the value goes to the corporation but you don't see them complaining much.
Julia will really take off when some of the libraries and toolkits available on MATLAB get ported to it. From what I've heard, very few people genuinely like MATLAB. It's just that MATLAB has toolkits with optimized functions for almost everything under the sun, so if you need to get results quickly, you're better off sucking it up and using a MATLAB toolkit that does half the work for you than reimplementing everything from scratch in a less insane language.

AFAIK, this is why Python has caught on so quickly in numerical computing circles. NumPy isn't up to the level of MATLAB's toolkits in terms of having functions for specialized applications, but it is a comprehensive numerical computation library with fast C implementations of a wide range of common functions.

That's the core lesson that I think the article misses. What matters isn't the language itself. What matters is the collection of libraries available for that language. Research and scientific computing is not like typical software development. In "normal" software development, the maintenance costs of a particular piece of code will easily swamp the cost of writing the code, so it makes sense to write the code in a more maintainable language. But for a research project, once the paper is written, it's fair to say that the code will never be looked at again. The situation is changing, slowly, as things like software carpentry and more data-driven research projects spread modern software engineering principles into the research computation community. But, by and large, research computing is still defined by one-off projects where the speed of initial implementation (which directly affects the time to publication) matters a lot more than the long-term maintainability of the codebase. It's this tradeoff, which is radically different from commercial software, that explains the persistence of FORTRAN and MATLAB in scientific computing.
If you find binary reverse engineering fascinating and want to go deeper into the formal aspects checkout http://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/smf4u/re... and https://github.com/turnersr/turnersr.github.io/blob/master/t... .
IAS?

The large number of "think tanks" which are often funded through a diverse set of grants (RAND, MITRE)

ISI? (the one at USC which invented a lot of the Internet, not the one funding Al Qaeda)

Cheap access to grad students and assistant professors, as well as access to USG funding (and easy visas), probably pushes a lot of this into university affiliated or university departments.
In theory, they're not called patent examiners for nothing. In practice, you can patent a white background.
It's "short," then? I assume you can't possibly mean "long," since I can't imagine applying that to anything that takes less than a full day to read.
Seems hard to believe how leading edge the military used to be with computers.

The Navy, for instance, adopted all-digital fire control systems in a concerted push to adapt to masses of Soviet planes equipped with anti-ship missiles... in 1961, years before IBM would even announce System/360. At a time when Air Force tracking computers filled entire buildings, the Navy's fire control computers had to fit on individual ships (an issue which hampered earlier Canadian efforts using vacuum tubes).

This system also could communicate with similarly-equipped ships in range wirelessly, so that ships detecting aircraft could quickly update the computer memory (and display) of allied ships.
These seem to basically be install everything in /opt

Nixos approach is a lot nicer, if less practical.
Certainly you can't expect every article to be written for a tech-literate audience?
I think the argument is that there's nothing about that tradeoff that's "fair", because it doesn't reflect reality. Unlike electricity, gas, or water, they aren't creating bits, storing bits to ensure supply, or depleting their supply of bits by transmitting them to you.

Charging by the bit would just be a good way to increase telco revenue.

Now, if you think it would be a good bargaining chip for getting them to accept being dumb pipes, that might be a good argument, but we should call it what it is if that's the case.
If you're going to call an examiner out, why don't we see if you can do a better job? Here are the rules if you want to prove the patent invalid (the examiner does not make them):

1. Read the claims. Of the thousands of comment this has generated, only a miniscule fraction have even mentioned the claims. The scope of the patent is defined by the claims, so that is what you must invalidate. The broadest claim is conveniently quoted for you here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7725200

2. If you want to prove non-novelty, find one documented reference that covers or even suggests using the exact combination of elements in the claim. Of course, the documents must be published and clearly dated before the priority date of this patent.

3. If you cannot do that, you may try to prove obviousness, in which case you need to find a combination of the documents above. How many documents you need to combine is not specified, but a rule of thumb is, anything fewer than 3 - 5 references. Anything more makes it difficult to prove obviousness.

4. If you cannot do that, try to prove it invalid as non-statutory patent eligible matter. That is tough, because broadly speaking, anything that has the least bit of industrial utility counts.

5. Another option is to show that the language of the claim is ambiguous. That does not mean “obfuscation” or “patentese”; this language is like plain English to those who read it every day. What it means is, for instance, if the language of the claim refers to one of many elements, but it is not clear which element it refers to. In NLP terms, it is a case where co-reference resolution is not definite. These types of invalidation are rare because they are easy to catch and typically examiners catch them pretty quickly.

6. One last option is to show that the specification does not have enough detail to support whatever is claimed. If the claim requires 10/3 lighting ratio and the spec does not mention it anywhere, that's an easy invalidation.
Pointing to online comments from a thousand people and so-called “tech journalists” who do not know what claims are, and who can claim without any documented basis that “it's been used for ages”, does not count as a reference.

If you have any relevant prior art, you can post it to askpatents.com, and someone has already conveniently started a thread for it here: http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/6543/photography-...

It'll probably not get any attention because 1) it's already issued, so no examiner is looking for prior art for it, and 2) nobody will infringe or otherwise care enough to go through the hassle and cost of a re-examination. However in case somebody does decided to do so, askpatents will be a good place they might look at.

So go ahead, put your money where your mouth is, and go find prior art. That will be more constructive (and enlightening) than making uninformed comments on forums read by nobody that makes policy decisions.
> Use Links ("docker rum --link") to interconnect containers, for example your frontend to your database, etc.

What's the current best-practice to interconnect containers running on different hosts? Is Docker going to add this capability itself, or will this always be something built on top of Docker by e.g. CoreOS?
Tabula – Liberate data tables trapped inside pdf files
Gee, way to cherry-pick. How about you go back and read the two sentences that come after the one you quoted.

Is that really how you have discussions with people? Blow up and scream bloody murder when you see something you remotely think is objectionable? It's very disingenuous.
Every time I'm about to go through custom's X-ray machines.
I'm not sure why, maybe just coincidence, twice my previous Dell XPS stopped working after going through airport xray while in sleep mode.
Still reading it, but so far I don't quite like how the following paragraph could make it easy to find Mike's home, 25-foot walls, sushi restaurant and so on:

MIKE LIVES IN Fremont, a trendy district north of Seattle’s downtown that’s known as a haven for alternative types. Even there, though, he doesn’t quite fit in.

Take his apartment: it isn’t one. From the street, a glass door opens onto a concrete retail space with 25-foot high walls. The windows are covered by blinds. Ceiling-mounted halogen tubes cast a low glow that leaves the corners dark. Delicious smells from a neighbouring sushi restaurant occasionaly fill the space, but Mike’s own kitchen is rarely used; obscure electronic components and dismembered gadgets crowd the counters. The floor is covered in random detritus: a single white sock, a piece of fuzzy green string.
Androids and Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Myth
Could someone explain like I'm five? This is fairly technical for anyone not familiar with telecom regulations.
I've been using devtoolset (one of RedHat's SCLs, I think the first one) for almost two years. It provides the latest GCC and other tools for developers. Using it on RHEL 5 gives well optimized and portable binaries (glibc is backward compatible).
It's fantastic that RedHat provides RPMs with the latest tools for older systems.
Regarding the scl tool itself from user's perspective, it's a step back from Environment Modules that has been around for 20+ years. Some admins even replace the scl command (which just sets a couple of env. variables) with modules.
Isnt some of this still left in BSD (designed) vs Linux (evolved)?
Bright Explosions on The Moon being Monitored – NASA –
There is an also sdb - simple string based key-value database with support for arrays and json, and based on CDB https://github.com/radare/sdb
The implications of this concept have been discussed in Stephen Baxter's Manifold novels[0], particularly Manifold: Time[1]. Well worth a read if you're interested in things like this principle and the dark sky paradox. I'm also convinced they heavily influenced the writing of the Mass Effect games, though I have no concrete evidence.

[0] Three books set in a multiverse where each represents a different narrative that could have taken place, involving the same characters.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Manifold-Time-Stephen-Baxter/dp/034543...