skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That sounds a lot less plausible than that they captured it over their own territory.

You're essentially implying the Iranians can jam local GPS, then capture US drones at will and pilot them to their own territory during the first attempt without the US being able to do much about it.

That's not a realistic picture.

Much more likely that they set up a bunch of jammers/transmitters over their own territory and waited for a drone to get within the trap, then to bring it down while jamming the US control signals and GPS at the same time.

After all, if they could control them that well then the best use they would have of this tech would be to embarrass the United States by sending US drones into high value targets abroad. That would do a lot more damage.

If there are no good reasons to send drones into Iranian airspace because of Keyholes and so on then those reasons apply just as strongly to Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf. Clearly there are reasons to deploy drones and some of those reasons might apply to Iran.
Password generator in your terminal [BASH]
Speed Up Your Site with Delayed Content
When I see "programming is easy" I think "dirty, filthy lies!" When people say everyone should know how to program I think "why?" There's some weird nerd myopia going on with the programming literacy movement.

Programming takes an odd kind of thinking and is about as easy as anything else that takes a large amount of time and effort (read not easy).
...."lots of money" varies from community to community.
I understand that other being hard to scale in a machine efficiency sense, the old techniques were also rather limited in applicable domain. They were often based on unjustified models of whatever the author decided was a good model of thought/reasoning, whether "frames", predicate calculus, constraint propagation or whatever. It seems to me that although you say statistical methods have little motivation, the motivation of the alternative - heuristics - is very questionable. Can anyone correct me on this?
What makes you think that Google sells any information about you to third parties?
Thanks for responding with a specific $ amount. I do indeed appreciate it.
FastMail also claims PFS support

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/08/09/fastmail-uses-perfect-for...
Agreed, but I think reasonable people can filter out the pointless childish noise, and find the useful information and opinions.

Me, I'm trying to break into 3D design in my "spare time" and I need either a Wacom Cintiq or one of these Surface Pros for painting on 3d textures in applications such as Substance Painter. I am undecided. The Cintiq looks really nice as a permanent workstation tool, but relies on a computer to run the application. Perhaps I need to accept that what I am wishing for is merely an input device for my main computer, rather than a completely separate computer.
In Gmail, clicking the "Why the ad?" link pops up this message:

"This ad is based on emails from your mailbox and information from your Google account. Ads Settings puts you in control of the ads you see."

So clearly they are using your Gmail information for marketing purposes. Are they selling it directly? No. But it seems dishonest to me to claim that they aren't selling it just because there is a middleman (Google) between the marketer and Gmail user.
It mentions the Jewish lobby and how congress is eager to receive their funds in two places, but I find it hard to equate that with 'anti-semitic nutjob'.

The Jewish lobby is real enough that they warrant their own wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_lobby_in_the_United_Stat...
Then you have to assume that god fudges with the physics so you can catch him at it. Which means that all faiths on the world must assume a god would interfere in a situation that you utterly and completely observed and understood. Because otherwise there might be a true god from some religion who just doesn't care about you.
NASA doesn't do manned launches at the moment. There are several other providers for unmanned launches (including for Mars payloads). SpaceX has never done anything beyond Earth orbit, so they'd be an unlikely choice for this.
that doesn't mean we should not try anything.
Borscht maybe, bratwurst very unlikely.
> If we are talking about recorded data, ... You could encrypt the data with a public key and store it so that the drone itself can't read it. About the only reason to do this would be to ensure if it was captured, the target wouldn't see what was on it.

In fact, there's a commercial (non-military) video recorder that does exactly that:

https://deniablevideo.com/

It's basically on-the-fly encryption of continuous digital video (and, in this case, audio as well).

It would work something like the following: A new random symmetric key would be generated every X minutes, and a snippet of incoming video would be encrypted with that key. Each of those random symmetric keys would be encrypted with public key encryption and saved so that the video can be recovered later by someone who has the private key.

Given that a commercial product exists to do this, you would think that a military drone must obviously be doing it as well, right?

Well, I'm not so sure since we learned that drones were not even encrypting the live video feed back to ground controllers as recently as 2009:

"Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations."

Full article is here: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB126102247889095011
Blog Series: Spring Boot in Action
Man... can I ask what led a company into the situation where they need to fix software without source code access? Did they rely on a vendor that went out of business? I imagine it is ancient software from the 80's or 90's?
Stanford researchers to open-source model they say has nailed sentiment analysis
IMO, as it often turns out to be, whether or not the code is copied and pasted doesn't matter by itself.

A competent programmer borrowing code would likely factor it in in a way that won't present maintenance burden later on, and first of all would know when borrowing is appropriate. An incompetent programmer may produce problematic code even regardless of whether it's borrowed or original.

(Though I'd agree that incompetent programmer borrowing chunks of code from different sources without thinking is ‘worse’ than same programmer just writing bad code by himself—more predictability in the latter case.)

In my case, I regularly see borrowed code in projects that I maintain. As long as it's contained in an isolated module, documented (unless it's short and obvious) and used appropriately, I don't see a problem.

Interestingly, front-end code I work on seems to suffer from much worse-quality borrowing—it's like Python people lose all their discipline once they turn to JavaScript.
So it's completely legal for us to play bitcoin poker?
It's dead simple to tell apart a tail call. Does it look like

return call(a, r, g, s)

It is also very simple to test if the compiler does TCO. Just write

def f(a):
return f(a + 1)

f(0)

and wait for a stack overflow.
It is not just 'expensive', it is in-feasible.

Not that that will stop the US from trying if they ever feel like it. Look at the mess in Iraq, then multiply by 5 or so (Iran + a new civil war in Iraq). You could very well end up with a much worse situation than there is today, loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and a very large chunk of the world with a strong motivation to hate everything and anything the West stands for.

Very Bad Idea.
> You really are pushing your own version of events there aren't you?

You mean, unlike you? Ye gods. He was not offered a lawyer by any traditional meaning of the phrase. He was offered a stooge selected by the very same people interrogating him and implying he might be a terrorist. When he asked for his own lawyer, that's when he was refused, rather shooting a hole in the idea that he would have been given good representation if he'd gone with the so generous British offer.

> We are so illiberal we voluntarily reduce our legislative powers.

These powers were reduced because of the overwhelming evidence that they were being abused: like by detaining people involved in journalism using powers intended for terrorism. Don't try and spin this as the UK being so awesome and democratic. We passed a stupid law that was repeatedly abused by people living in some kind of reality distortion field, and that's why the powers had to be reduced - despite the natural inclinations of many Tories.

> Are you seriously suggesting that the United Kingdom should not stop and detain foreign nationals who are carrying our Top Secret data and then relieve them of that data?

Whaa? Yes, of course he's seriously suggesting that. Your post speaks volumes about how disconnected you seem to have become from basic common sense. Miranda was working on data that had already been leaked to multiple journalists around the world and was going to go public no matter what. This fact was already public at the time. You can't "take back" information that was deliberately leaked to multiple journalists - at that point under any sensible set of rules the information would cease to be classified, because you can't classify something that's public knowledge.

I'm blown away that you find the British government's oafish response a "masterpiece". Let's see what it achieved, shall we?

* Nothing of value was obtained from Miranda.

* It triggered international outcry from journalists around the globe, making Britain look stupid and illiberal on the world stage.

* It pissed off Miranda's partner who then prioritised GCHQ related information for release.

* It confirmed what most people already suspected or knew: that the British intelligence apparatus will happily classify anyone as a terrorist if it suits them, regardless of how dangerous they actually are (in this case: not at all).

* It means in future journalists working on stories that might embarrass the British government will simply avoid British airports, resulting in the same media coverage with the added bonus that it looks like the UK doesn't care about freedom of the press.

Positive outcomes? None as far as I can tell.

Some masterpiece!
Magnificent book, but why now?
You are being offensive here - going all as hominem rather than actually demonstrating any reason parent comment is wrong.
That's a very informative post, thanks!

I guess this means dlink has even bigger issues with QA than I first thought ;)
I don't know the whole story, but seeming as this was banking software I wouldn't be surprised if it was indeed written some time in the 80's or 90's and the original developers were nowhere to be found.
Data Point: Yes, Email Still Eats Up a Good Chunk of Your Day
Agreed. I do actually copypaste code in some very specific scenarios. For instance, writing a string capitalization function for Javascript and not needing a whole string processing library.

Sure, you copy paste a line of code after inspecting it, and save yourself some half hour of time on a piece of code that is not core to the problem you're solving.

But I have never seen a programmer who says "I am in the business of getting shit done, so I copy paste code" to produce good code. Anecdotal evidence and whatnot, and my argument could be a bit of a strawman, but this is the sort of canary in a gold mine that I've found.

When a developer on my team says "I just want to get shit done", is when I start preparing for a lot of internal screaming down the line. Happens every single time. Every. Single. Time.

So no, while copy-pasting on its own is not the problem, it is a good symptom to look for.
Google's been an advertising company since the day they realized they could make money off of search.
1. I try to find out something that the person already understands, so I can frame my metaphors around that.

2. Maybe I'm projecting, but I was tinkering with computers for a long time before I started learning to program. To that end, there's a lot of just intuitive understanding of software that you absorb, basic relationships like configuration files, rebooting, memory, what a browser does, what a URL variable is etc etc.

There's a lot to be said for helping a person round out this knowledge, before you start teaching them how to program.

I don't know that a person needs to know a lot about America before learning American English, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that it helps. "You see, they're kind of a casual low key people, so their language has a lot of slang and elisions..."
You missed this part of the post then:

> whole teams grind to a halt productivity-wise because the codebase is so bad
Aside: ARMv8 has made the messy ARM terminology even worse! Quick summary:

ARMv8 (version 8 of the ARM architecture) has two execution states. AARCH64 is the 64-bit mode and AARCH32 is the 32-bit mode. These two modes use two different instruction sets, A64 and A32 respectively (and T32 which is Thumb). A32 is (sort of) compatible with ARMv7 (which is the archiecture version introduced with the Cortex cores).

You will see A64 erroneously used to refer to AARCH64 and ARMv8. You will see AARCH32 erroneously used to refer to ARMv7. You will probably find errors in this post. ARM64 (which is what Linux calls it) seems to just mean "that whole 64 bit malarkey".

And finally, the ARMv8 cores are the Cortex-A53 and -A57 (all the ARMv7 cores are Cortex-An where n is a single digit).

GOT IT?
Fair enough, that is indeed a – possibly major – difference, although Google department A sharing data with department B, which gives stuff to department C could be argued to be similar, as the size of these departments easily match those of other companies.
The legal equivalent is a redline (or blackline).
How I switched from PHP to Ruby on Rails (And why?)
I guess it depends. A freelancer hired through oDesk by default has a clearly defined job and zero incentive to care about ‘nice and clean’.

Sometimes I just can't help thinking that the code I maintain has been optimized, foremost, for someone's job security—even when I know that the author is actually just of ‘get-shit-done’ type, and has been paid hourly.
Yes. I do this from time to time. Recent example, wasn't sure what the event was called in JavaScript when the window changed. Couldn't remember if it was resize or windowResize or whatever.

SE had a sample dummy event listener add function, complete with // do stuff here. I cut and paste the whole thing and added what I needed.

I suppose I could've retyped the addEventListener function from scratch but...I dunno, that seemed inefficient. I just needed the name.
Machine Learning is more of an engineering discipline than a philosophical one. The aim (mostly, with exceptions) is to make machines that learn, not to research the nature of "understanding" or "concepts".

There are people who are looking at broader ideas of "what is intelligence", sometimes even the same people doing the more statistical research, but it's an open ended problem.

The main reason science/math/statistics doesn't spend time worrying about philosophy is because you can't really specify the problem cleanly - and having a clear idea of the problem is 90% of the way to finding the solution.

[edit]: If you want brain-inspired ML stuff, it's worth looking at what neuroscientists and cognitive scientists are doing. From what I've seen of some of their work they're developing ML algos as minimal tests for understanding how parts of the brain or consciousness works.
Empires come and go.

The US empire, like any other empire before them will be replaced by something else.

Of course you are American, by the mere fact of being born there your have privileges over people born in the rest of the world.

For example, any time you have problems you print money,money that thanks to petrodollars and US military the rest of the world have to buy by force. You export inflation to the rest of the world.

So instead of you suffering for your own abuses, you make suffer the rest of the world. Every new QE(Quantitative Easing) makes people from Egypt go from 30% of the population not being able to buy the basics to 70% and so on.

The rest of the world is not happy, and of course they plan to replace the petrodollar as soon as they can, to replace the "Exorbitant Privilege".

Of course as an American you believe this is fantastic, but put yourself into someone else in the world skin just for 5 minutes or so. People that work much harder than Americans but live way worse, people that speak at least two languages(most Americans barely speak one), engineers, physics PhDs, whatever, and you will start seeing another picture.
> These can be made on demand

Yes and no. Also the ability to make diamond is pretty recent with a lot of the fundamental research having been funded by De Beers.
Window Switch
Well, I'm still annoyed at Peugeot for not having produced the Moovie :)
White Guy Selling Kool Aid In The Hood
>I do reminisce about the pre-Internet days, when all I needed was my brain and a simple reference book!

Once upon a time, I had a bookcase full of three-ring binders containing plural "reference books", updated frequently via snap-open, pop-out, slide in latest version.

These days, I find Chrome's location bar far faster and more convenient than that bookcase!

She is absolutely correct about the importance of "developing a knack for asking the right questions on Google".

And as for copy-paste, when and to what extent to do that is another knack, one which will likely accompany the acquisition of the first knack.
Anyone has other good crypto handbooks? I would be interested.
I completely agree with you and frankly I'm shocked to see most of the responses here purporting copy-pasting someone else's code to be a legitimate practice. I also imagine that most if not all of these people are into web developed where there's a long history of copy-pasting snippets of code and no one knows what he's really doing. I've seen many people write a jQuery script for their website and calling themselves developers. You're not a developer, you're mashing together tools you don't really know how to use in the hope that everything works out. On the browser you're working with a single thread, in the real world you're always dealing with multi-process/multi-thread programs that inevitably lead to race conditions and deadlock. I doubt anyone involved in systems programming thinks is normal to copy and paste code to "get things done", it's just not gonna work.
Shannon, Beethoven, and the Compact Disc (IEEE) [pdf]
This reminds me of one of my favorite Dijkstra quotes. "The question of whether machines can think... is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim"
> If nothing is known about the objective function

What that "nothing is known" means, in the context of NFL theorems, is that values at each point are random, and independent of values at other points.

For example, if our domain is a 100-by-100 grid, and we fill the grid with random numbers, now we have such a function. And indeed, no optimization function is of any help in trying to find the largest of the 10 000 random numbers.

But this kind of totally random functions pretty much do not exist in the real world. So if out objective function came from the real application (and not from a random number generator), we already know enough about it that we can say that the NFL theorems don't apply to it.
CEC Network Hacked Through Zeroday Vulnerability in Cisco ASA
I don't know why you were downvoted. Version control would be hugely useful for all lawmakers -- those in parliament/senates too.

The UK Parliament actually has a slightly crazy system of using different coloured marker pens to indicate different revisions at different stages (1st reading, 2nd reading, Commons, Lords etc.). They need version control.
The article does not imho agree with the title. By it's own admittance, the "final word" is indeed final:

> There are two exceptions to the general practice of quietly slipping changes into opinions. One happens only after the decisions are published in final form

Maybe the bigger problem is that people are relying "prerelase" documents to be authoritative, when they actually aren't.
Show HN: Speed up your Website's DNS lookups
You may be familiar with Daniel Bernstein's advice at http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/notes.html to let all nameservers be in-bailiwick with glue.

Sites that have their nameservers on the same host as their websites can take it to the next level:
Use the same hostname for both!
That way, you save a DNS lookup to your nameserver and enjoy the extra reliability of a large TLD nameserver infrastructure.
Google, Facebook, Amazon reveal downside of monopolies and black-box algorithms
wow... You must be from the school of re-inventing the wheel... most things that need to be coded have been done before by someone else and quite well... No one chops down their own tress when they want to build a deck. They take lumber that someone else preformed and make it fit their project. If you are writing all your own code every time on every project... You must get nothing done...
>Take cleaning toilets, for example. If no one wants to do it then it will become more expensive to find people to do it.

IMO Here is the problem with what you are saying. Who actually cleans toilets today? Immigrants (largely illegal ones). This is just like the goods we import from China. There is a slave class of people who clean toilets and work in Chinese factories. I agree with the economic principles where innovation will drive improvement, but illegal immigration and free trade interfere with this.

I hope that basic income passes in Norway. It would be quite interesting to see what happens.
That's the standard narrative and parroting it over and over again doesn't really make it true. Arguments over correctness almost always devolve into a shouting match because no one ever defines what they mean by it. For your standard consumer application a notion of correctness doesn't even exist so the argument is moot there. You have to narrow your domain a little bit to actually start talking about it. You have to get down to the level of protocols and interfaces and other mathematical beasts where correctness actually means something.

The standard example of correct software and in fact where most work on formal correctness tends to happen is in compiler design and distributed systems. So when you say that there is a tradeoff between speed and correctness that is simply not true. All those compilers you use are correct, for a very precise definition of correct, and fast and constantly improving.
I think you'll find, that although the US did have an influence in the later days of WW2 in Europe, most of the really bad stuff was over by the time they came in.

Not to say that that they didn't assist immensely, but the victory over Hitler wasn't decided by US troops.

The war in the Pacific was a completely different (and somewhat sad) story.