skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Inflation just means that the value of a currency goes down.

There are many reasons why the value of a currency might go down. Printing too much money (increasing the supply) is one of them, but it is not the only possibility. Decreasing the demand is just as effective.

Imagine that someone just found a critical flaw in the algorithms used by bitcoin. Everyone wants to sell and move to dogecoin a.s.a.p. But nobody wants to buy those bitcoins anymore! Bang, that's inflation right there.

As long as there are alternatives to bitcoin, the fact that the total number of bitcoins is limited cannot prevent inflation from happening.
thanks for this, its a great resource. I'll be shaeing it around the office
The Flip Side of Med-Tech Innovation
I used to have an issue with lisp syntax until someone pointed it out to me like this.

In c and java like languages, you invoke a function like this:
f(x)

In lisp, just move the paren before the function name. What's the big deal?
(f x)

Similarly, f(g(x)) becomes (f (g x)). All we did was move the paren before the function name.

The syntax is extremely consistent and it makes the lisp syntax trivial to learn. In nearly everything you do, the function name comes first the arguments come next.
(+ 1 2)
Here + is a function, and you are giving it 2 arguments. There are no special operators or syntax to learn. Just functions!

The mind blowing part comes when you realize that this consistent syntax combined with the fact that the code is really just written in lisp datastructures, is what makes lisp macros so powerful.
Assuming llvm-3.2-dev refers to Ubuntu package of the name, it is already stripped of debug symbols.
Continuation Servers [2005]
I think this is a common attitude today in all walks of life. We seem to be incapable of thinking for ourselves now, whether when using a computer or crossing the street. I'm amazed that we're still allowed to drive cars.
Ditching symbols makes reciting passwords easier for telebanking.
I work on our DNS server, but I don't have a copy of the email that Matthew sent to the PowerDNS guys, but DNS is fundamental to what we do and so the ability to modify the DNS server was pretty important.

I think we got to the point where we just said "there are N features that we want" and decided to build our own. The result is that we've been able to do all sorts of stuff that's CloudFlare-specific: bear in mind that we handle two different sorts of DNS queries: external ones (that might or might not serve a CloudFlare IP that is proxying for a customer site) and internal ones (that need access to public, non-CloudFlare IPs). We also recently introduced a CNAME-flattening feature: http://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cname-flattening-rfc-...

There are other things we want to do to be fast in two ways: fast to respond (http://www.solvedns.com/dns-comparison/2014/04) and fast to update (which means integration with our replicated, global settings databases).

We also have all sorts of special things that we do to deal with attacks on our DNS infrastructure that include the DNS server talking directly to NICs for filtering and packet handling. We're also generating bpf bytecode directly for specific filtering activities.

Bottom line was that DNS is a core technology for CloudFlare; it made sense to totally own it. I don't think this says anything bad about PowerDNS. Note: HTTP serving is a core technology. If nginx weren't so configurable (especially through OpenResty) we could easily have been having this discussion about a web server. But equally agentzh (who wrote OpenResty) works for us.
This is false. Properly optimized rasterizers (like Adobe Flash's, for example) can deliver vastly superior performance for simple animated scenes like that, and have been doing so for over a decade.

Cut's renderer would be much faster if it were designed in a GPU and CPU-friendly manner instead of the naive graph traversal it does right now (I'll post about this in detail outside this thread)
Fifteen.
Armenian Dinner
Armenian Dinner presents a portrait of the culture, the traditional ceremonies and the eating habits of the Armenian people. It presents the underlying gastronomical, energy and healthy-life themes developed by generations of Armenians.
Easy way to come up with Crowdfunding Ideas
OFF-TOPIC FOR ENGLISH-AS-SECOND-LANGUAGE:

For HN'ers who are still learning the finer points of English this title shows one of the many weird inconsistencies of the language.

Normally, when trying to say 'a thing' where the thing starts with a vowel we change the 'a' into 'an' so 'a axe' becomes 'an axe', 'a umbrella' becomes 'an umbrella'.

However this is a notable exception: when pronouncing 'user' there is an unwritten 'y' e.g. it is said 'yoozer', thus we wouldn't normally add another consonant here so it should be 'a user' not 'an user'. If you say it out loud you can hear it (and hopefully feel the extra tongue work that, traditionally, we try to avoid).

Another common exception is 'Hotel'. It takes 'an' rather than the expected 'a' as for some reason we drop the 'H'. For me it rolls better off the tongue with 'an' but this may purely be due to conditioning.

'Herb' is a difficult one as in the US it's pronounced 'erb' while in the UK it has a hard 'H'. Thus in the UK we use 'A herb' — I assume the US says 'an Herb' — correct me if I'm wrong.

It's nonsense like this that makes me pity you brave fellows who attempt to master our pidgin of a language!

Edit: change 'pigeon' to 'pidgin' :)
Financial company I use apparently shares the same password between their web site and their automated phone system. So in addition to a max length of 10 or 12, you can't use anything non-alphanumeric since you wouldn't be able to enter it with a phone keypad.

Also rules out stored a hashed password, too. Terrible idea all around. (Edit: ok, I guess they could convert the PW to the phone key version when initially setting the PW, and then store both the hashed text PW and hashed phone key PW. So not "rules out". I just doubt they do it.)
The alternative strategy of parking a three or four miles away and taking a taxi is pretty common in San Francisco. Sometimes we don't even look for a spot, and just park at the Sony Metreon Lot, and head across town.
>it's inflation safe

It isn't inflation "safe"; there's no inflation. And that isn't necessarily good. The money supply needs to grow as the demand for money grows (yes, the demand for money changes over time and circumstance).

>no corrupt bankers or politicians can manipulate it (easily)

They sure will, as will corrupt vendors, hackers, salesmen, etc. Corruption is a human trait, not confined to "bankers or politicians".
Adblock Plus for Safari released
I think you failed to understand the second point you quoted.

A 250MB password should be perfectly valid (if a bit foolish on the customer's part). That 250MB password will be run through scrypt by javascript running on the browser. (That may take a while, and a large amount of memory, but this is part of the CUSTOMER'S stack, not the server's.) Some amount, perhaps 512 bits worth, is then passed to the server. (Where it is run through another hash and then stored.)
Also, I have yet to figure out how to run multiple experiments on the same page (rather than multivariate single experiments). Usually frowned on, but when you're testing a new search box site-wide and different CTA buttons, they're discrete tests.
I was hoping the Target CEO firing/resignation due to security issues would spark a little bit of security interest from other companies, too.
It will take these organisation years and lots of money to rebuild their reputations when their security malpractices catch up with them.
To complain that the only reason you gave someone bad support was because you didn't know who they were is pretty tone deaf.

Would you want to dine somewhere that got panned by a restaurant critic and then wrote an essay saying, "Well, we'd have been a lot more careful with his food if we'd known he was an important critic!"?
> There were three main challenges. First, PowerDNS when under large in-bound DDoS loads would consume excessive resources and occasionally fall over. Second, and more insidious, because the version of PowerDNS we were using did not have abuse detection and rate limiting, we were increasingly seeing attempts at using CloudFlare authoritative DNS network to launch reflection attacks against others. And, third, it was very difficult to extend PowerDNS and add any sort of application logic which kept us from doing interesting things... like adding Easter Eggs.

Source (was linked in article): http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-story-of-a-little-dns-easter-...
Scary Monster For Your Next FPS Game in Three.js
Clearing Up HFT Confusion
Features, performance and, later, social network. I used standalone readers but they were poorly suited for casual use – fire it up, wait minutes for every feed to be checked, etc. – and they require a lot of local storage + CPU to do things like store history, determine whether an item has substantially changed or had only cosmetic corrections, etc.

Reader used Google's infrastructure so it was always running and your feeds were up to date when you opened them (unlike most desktop readers, they also adjusted the schedule automatically so frequently updated feeds were polled more frequently), and they stored everything with first-class search for history, which also came in handy if a popular site was overloaded since the cached feed content could still be viewed.

Finally, the real jump in usage happened when they enabled social features. Being able to see who else had publicly shared or commented on an item was a great way to find people with similar interests and there were many great conversations to be found. See http://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network for a rundown of just how popular Reader's social features were. I believe a key reason why Google+ never went anywhere was because Google actively killed the Reader network and a large percentage of early adopters, journalists, writers, etc. got the message that you should never invest more than transient time in a Google product.
I make heavy use of a similar thing in PHP. I have a function "lookup" which lets me say:

lookup($foo, array('bar', 'baz' 15, 'quux'))

This is equivalent to any of the following:

$foo->bar->baz[15]->quux
$foo->bar->baz[15]['quux']
$foo->bar['baz'][15]->quux
$foo->bar['baz'][15]['quux']
$foo['bar']->baz[15->quux
... and so on

It's useful in Drupal when the required data is often at the end of a long chain of objects-containing-arrays-containing-objects-....

I've been a bit naughty with its types for the sake of convenience: if a non-array is given as the second argument, it's wrapped as a singleton array, ie.

lookup(array('foo' => 'bar'), 'foo') === 'bar'

Also if any of the components aren't found, it returns NULL, ie.

lookup(array('foo' => NULL), 'foo') === lookup(array(), 'foo')

It would be theoretically better to return an empty array on error and a singleton array on success, since they can be distinguished, but in practice that's so far down the list of problems with PHP that it's not worth the effort of adding such wrappers at the moment.

A really nice thing about this function is that it curries nicely:

$find_in_foo = partially_apply('lookup', $foo)

$get_blah = partially_apply(flip('lookup'), 'blah')

$find_in_foo('x') === lookup($foo, 'x')

$get_blah($foo) === lookup($foo, 'blah')

Actually, my argument-flipping function is already curried, so I can just say:

$get_blah = flip('lookup', $foo)

This currying is great for filtering, mapping, etc.
Fully agree, these were the same things that popped in my head when I saw it. Though I have to say autocomplete for !commands is an excellent addition.
[PowerDNS] Backends in detail: PipeBackend
Attach this to code dynamically with `sys.settrace()`
>who talks about spending?

Spending is the purpose of money. It's a means of transaction. It isn't an asset, and there is no need to hoard it. How is that productive?

>IRS may as well starve to death waiting for me to spend them.

Well, if everyone thinks like that, that's a terrible monetary system. If I want to trade my car for Bitcoin, where do they come from? I have to keep bidding them up until I find someone to sell them to me? The advantage of cash is that it's abundant.
No, limited transactions on your bank-account are secured by a physical token (i.e., your debit card) and a 4 digit "password".

Your card is not a service to be secured, it's part of multiple layers of security (that don't end with the code or the card).
I don't want to use a standalone RSS reader any more than a standalone email client. There's a reason everybody [1] switched to webmail.

In any case, a web RSS reader that I run myself (tt-rss or similar) is a pretty good compromise.

[1] Yes, person who is about to reply, I know you personally didn't.
We built a jackson extension to offer this sort of friendly filtering automatically with JAX-RS endpoints: https://github.com/HubSpot/jackson-jaxrs-propertyfiltering
> an herb

Yep.
Thanks for the tip. I almost refused their online banking service because of the short password length.
I wouldn't be so sure about the 'an' before hotel. That may be regional as well. I'm from the southern US and use 'a' there. However, 'an' would be used whenever the 'h' isn't voiced, which in my case would be words like honorable and honest.
> Another common exception is 'Hotel'. It takes 'an' rather than the expected 'a' as for some reason we drop the 'H'. For me it rolls better off the tongue with 'an' but this may purely be due to conditioning.

I'm not sure about the rest of the world, but in Australia I don't think I've ever heard 'an hotel'. It's always 'I'm going to a hotel'

Saying 'an Hotel' makes me pronounce 'Hotel' in a very uncomfortable way.
Google announces the first Android Test Lab in Paris
Good point, but I believe you mean "pidgin of a language"!
If you're hashing it who cares if someone wants to submit a 250MB password? They'll only be slowing their own session down - what I store in the database is always 256 bits either way.
Interesting. As I said - my view is from the UK - I should have put 'often' or 'sometimes' before it (although I was taught 'an hotel' at school).
Interview with Ignite incubator on failed startups, side projects and pricing
You're spot on about how we say "an herb" in the US. Interestingly, it seems "hotel" is the exact opposite... I've never heard someone in the US drop the "h" . We say "a hotel".

EDIT: Wow, five overlapping replies in two minutes, all correcting the "hotel" thing... Just goes to prove the aphorism that the best way to get help on the internet is to post an incorrect answer (perhaps Cloudflare should have tried that...)
Indeed I do. Bloomin' autocorrect changed all sorts of words I missed that one :)
Thought of submitting this when another PowerDNS submit came up.

The pipe backend is a very interesting one since it allows you to hack up a custom DNS resolution mechanism very easily. For instance I built a simple backend that synthesizes DNS records from LDAP items for much easier domain management.
Bitcoin does not meet the requirements for being money (neither does the US dollar or Euro or Yuan, etc). It definitely has the potential to change the future of currencies and banking though.
No, it could have just been random. They've reduced their keyspace massively by doing that. Six characters, all numbers, no ascending or descending. 123849 is invalid as an example, as is 954391.
Europe debate over ‘Robin Hood’ levy is taxing reality
Yeah, this is a mostly American hyper correction. You see the same thing with "an herb". I'm guessing it's a relic from people who spoke French affecting the same pronunciation in English. You occasionally even see "an history"
No it's not. Most big websites (hello google!) don't do this.

Why do you think it's standard?
Our Drone Wars Are Just Beginning
Or a Maybe functor http://functionaljavascript.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/functors....
It's pretty standard in the UK
6 Reasons Why You Must Check Your Website’s Backlinks
I doubt the autocomplete browser feature applies to password entry. It would freak people out if their browser started suggesting the password as you typed.
It does apply for the username/email field, though.
Take a look at this repository (start from the oldest commit) to see the workflow. It is pretty straightforward for designers.

https://github.com/petehunt/react-one-hour-email/commits/mas...

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#%21topic/reactjs...
Hoarding is productive because if you're incentivized to hoard (as with Bitcoin) that means you will only most likely invest in projects you truly want to invest for some reasons: either because people really need the product you are going to produce and will pay money, making this whole enterprise profitable or because you always wanted to be an innovator and do something amazing. However, since you no longer have to spend simply because you fear inflation will eat your money, this means you're not going to invest in useless projects of digging holes or buying useless luxury things for yourself. Deflationary currency incentivizes healthier lifestyle free of consumerism.

Spending is not good and isn't the point of currency. The point of currency is to allow people to BOTH do transactions and save. I guarantee you that if the US removed all regulations on currencies, Bitcoin would take over in a couple of years as a national currency, making it obvious that USD is forced upon us.
Thanks for sharing. Made a great start to my day. I just the callers don't starting asking why we allow it!
Cambridge University Computer Science student here.

Not all of the research that has been done has been published, I've seen some very impressive demos!

In any case the published research absolutely does give you practical attacks e.g. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/banking/nopin/

or http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/banking/intercepto...
Great story. I was born (in Brazil) in 1979 and Malba Tahan was very popular among the kids who liked math and/or puzzles. It is one of these books that leave a mark on you. I still have fond memories of reading it and trying to solve the puzzles.

It is not clear in the OP, but the math in the book is usually presented in the form of puzzles that different characters present to the protagonist. So the reader has time to understand the puzzle and try to solve it before the protagonist begins to explain the solution.

I was immensily proud of a particular puzzle I solved before reading the solution. It was fun, engaging and educational in very deep and lasting ways. The deep respect and consideration for a culture so diverse from ours was a huge bonus that just now I begin to understand. Sure, using the arabic world was pure marketing and sure, he paints a world of fantasy, not a historically accurate one, but he could have used it with disrepect and misinformation, but you can tell he cared about the culture.

Great book, too sad it doesn't help brazilian math education a bit, as we are one of the worst in the world at it (for decades). He could have being our revolution hero in the field, but sadly he is just an oasis. A very isolated one.
Noted. Sorry for removing this, I indeed said that, but I thought it's redundant so I removed it.
I believe this is to allow alternate inputs of data, like "fill in the 2nd, 5th and 6th character" or special keyboards in ATMs, like "Press the arrow that contains the 1st letter of your password"

But yeah, it's stupid
Understanding Understudy · The Main Thread
Just that one. The "class" that the method is attached to here is the metaclass of `@user`.

That class is below `User` in the hierarchy:

class User; def foo; "foo"; end; end
# => :foo
module M; def bar; "bar"; end; end
# => :bar

u = User.new
# => #<User:0x007f2e1abc9e00>
u.extend M
# => #<User:0x007f2e1abc9e00>

u.singleton_class.ancestors
# => [#<Class:#<User:0x007f2e1abc9e00>>,
M,
User,
Object,
PP::ObjectMixin,
Kernel,
BasicObject]
Fair enough, but there are plenty of people that don't know.
So wading in to someone else's construction and destroying it counts as "fun"? Kicking over someone else's sandcastle counts as "fun"? Kicking someone else's car to put a dent in the door is "fun"? Torching someone's house is "fun"?

Slippery slope, drawing the line, yadda yadda yadda, I'm interested to see what people think is "fun" and where they would draw the line. Given that it had no protection, how does destroying it gain or prove anything?

Finding weaknesses in a system that's intended to be secure is different, destroying something simply because you can is something I genuinely don't understand. No challenge, no victory, no benefit. I someone can help me understand the mindset of the griefers I'd be grateful.
WordPress Meta Box the OOP Way
Given that someone uses fat JSON, it seems plausible that you'll have to face those sorts of problems (either simple selectors with logic for potentially dealing with multiple responses, or complex selectors into the tree). What you're really saying in JSON-land is something like, "this whole object should be destructured; I just want a flat object with short keys."

That's the right design approach for the "structs" of JSON; it's wrong unilaterally (JSON also has "hashes" with the same syntax, and they should be separated from that context. Similarly you don't want to destructure an array from {data: [1, 2, 3]} into {data_0: 1, data_1: 2, data_2: 3} unless you absolutely have to.)

Once you flatten it, then partial responses for things which return a struct do exactly what you want; you say e.g.:

["myQuery", {on: "stuff", _fields: ["a", "b", "c"]}]

and you just get {"a":1,"b":2,"c":3} as your JSON response.

So what I'm saying in summary is that if you write your own APIs you can get this sort of functionality without building a magic tool; the reason that the magic tool is not mainstream is because it's only right for dealing with structs and not hashes (because if there's a hash elsewhere in the object a user might register their own key in the hash called "ctime"); and given that some API gives you a complex structure, flattening it the way you're doing is potentially a little risky because later updates might say that there's another ctime to some other part of the Users object.
I suggest actually _reading_ the post. It notes the tradeoff. It also notes we offer near infinite support for people asking politely and making their problems known. We also note that it isn't just a matter of scale.
The estabilished terminology is "architecture" for instruction set architecture and "microarchitecture" for the user-invisible implementation details. So, microarchitecture means for example AMD K7 vs Intel P6.

So the quote is saying that ARM vs x86 doesn't matter,
but eg Cortex-A8 vs Cortex-A10 does.
How to implement TwitterStream in RoR?
How can I implement twitterstream in ruby on rails app. I need to authenticate user, make a stream of it and deliver tweet to user. Going crazy as I can't seem to find a way through it.
To mod: please do not remove the "pipebackend" from the title since it is the reason I'm sharing this... Perhaps I should have written it as [PipeBackend].
Antivirus pioneer Symantec declares AV “dead” and “doomed to failure”
My security senses are tingling. A server evaluating potentially hostile client provided expressions? Proceed with extreme caution.
Putin Passes Law Requiring $3.8B Security Payments From Visa, MasterCard