skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who actually switched from Fastmail TO Gmail several years ago, this definitely resonates. "Fastmail" is not easily recognized by most people and becomes especially unclear if you're reciting your email address over the phone.

Fastmail doesn't even own fastmail.com! They do have many domains available [1] but none are that great.

[1] https://www.fastmail.fm/help/legal/ourdomains.html
Every eBay account in the world has been hacked
We're an Australian company. Everything else you say is accurate enough, though we actually use an Australian payment provider (https://pin.net.au/).
The only downside I've seen switching from Gmail to Fastmail is that Fastmail's spam filtering isn't as good. But I can live with it.
There are people using "generated" tests based on specs crafted by programmers. The whole thing is called "generative" testing.

The reason why this stuff works, is that there are almost always lots of bugs out there, and that RNGs aren't subject to the misconceptions programmers are subject to. It's also why fuzzing works.

I could see GAs doing very well with this.
I remember the early days of eBay when the founder said people in the world are basically trustworthy. I wonder what his opinion is now?
The problem is that this forces programmers to tightly couple interfaces and implementations.

Take for example a cache interface that wraps multiple implementations. The cache might be in-process or it might be a centralized memcached, etc. In order to support both of these, the "get" method must take a key and a callback. But the most reasonable in-process implementation actually grows the stack before calling the callback, while the other implementations reset it. If you iterate a large list of keys, you'll blow the stack with the in-process implementation.

So you end up doing things like "setImmediate()" on every get to reset the stack. The "async" library has a neat trick to detect if the callback is called without deferring to the event loop, in which case it does the deferral itself. But in general, programmers are forced to think about these kinds of problems constantly, or hit weird bugs. For example, I once had a periodic task that iterated every account in the database. It began crashing when our database client began returning larger batches, causing iteration not to defer to the event loop.
The point is that the other side of the tradeoff (of COURSE we would like things to be correct as they can be) is getting it done. I question that this is not somewhat obvious.
Google Apps no longer serves ad's in email to anyone. So their business model is not to sell ads - it's to charge for email, calendar and storage - a very similar model to FastMail. Except Gmail has perfect forward secrecy, the best security of any email provider, and great web and mobile apps.
For most people though they're only ludicrously faster than the other cars up to 35 (ok 40) or 65 (ok 80) miles per hour. Otherwise the number of cup holders is a more important spec than the handling and horsepower.

That said, I own a sports car despite being aware of this because I love driving it. It's much more enjoyable than an econobox even if that guy beats me to work owing to lane choice.
It is worth noting, however, that a region of lower vacuum energy does not actually expand at lightspeed- merely near the speed of light (and exactly how near depends on the details of the vacuum inside the bubble), due to the fact that domain walls have mass-energy. So, if it happens sufficiently far away, we could in theory actually notice it happening before it killed us, unlike a gamma-ray burst.
Do anyone know about a similar analysis of go? There are records of games dating hundreds of years too.
If I were to design such a system, booting to full functionality would require human intervention prior to launch, but would allow a reboot to a separate partition with enough functionality to fly the drone back to base. Data, as was pointed before, would be asymmetrically encrypted and would require a separate key that would never reach the drone.
Congratulations, this code failed to properly parse my CSV at least 100 times faster than OP's :)
http://lesswrong.com/lw/nf/the_parable_of_hemlock/

> The problem with syllogisms is that they're always valid. [...]

> The Bayesian definition of evidence favoring a hypothesis is evidence which we are more likely to see if the hypothesis is true than if it is false. Observing that a syllogism is logically valid can never be evidence favoring any empirical proposition, because the syllogism will be logically valid whether that proposition is true or false.

> Syllogisms are valid in all possible worlds, and therefore, observing their validity never tells us anything about which possible world we actually live in.

If a proposition is logically possible, there's a non-zero probability it's actually true. E.g. it's possible that God does not exist. It's also possible that God does exist and put dinosaur fossils in the ground to troll us. I say this without sarcasm.

Pure Logic(TM) isn't always pragmatic enough to suit our needs because it restricts its inputs and outputs to 100% certainties. In the real world, nothing is ever 100% certain. Maybe we have a lot of life experiences with gravity. Maybe we predict with seven 9's that objects will continue to fall down like they always have. But can we ever be truly-entirely-perfectly certain that tomorrow, gravity won't be around because God forgot to pay the utility bill? No, actually, we can't. We're just really confident because we've experienced evidence of gravity for our entire lives.

Likewise, you can never be truly certain that the diodes in your computer won't spontaneously reverse current. But we can still rely on diodes to work properly because we predict that such an event is super-ultra-extremely unlikely (has low probability) given the voltages humanity's electrical engineers decided to ram through our circuits.
It seems that dictators generally need to make enemies out of the world's democracies.

This is so the populations don't start to get ideas about why their junta's steal so much money and they don't have any freedom. "Democracy and freedom are just lies -- the westerners are degenerates which tolerate homosexuality, etc."

So if Iran couldn't antagonize the West for what you consider "relatively unimportant reasons" (e.g. being one of the world's worst terror supporters), they would just try harder. And still be tight with other juntas which also fear democratic influences of their slav... population.
"Indeed, one man's "objective fact" is another man's subjective opinion"

If it's objective, it's objective. It's not subjective. Objective facts can be measured with numbers in units of time, bits and money. If your objective facts don't involve numbers, then yeah they're probably actually subjective.
They have one really great domain: sent.com

I have never had a problem communicating it.
US. 4.5%, 30 years.
While Canada would certainly welcome you - I'm guessing a large segment of the demographic would get stuck at the border (criminal convictions and such).
The Military maintains MIL-STD-1472 which contains the duty cycle for flashing text. Here's an interesting (and occasionally submitted) discussion on jzw's blog: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/08/a-light-has-gone-out-on-the-...
Mandatory article (that was commented on HN a while ago): http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/45768546804/diamonds-are-b...
I don't have an ebay account but if I did I would put a credit alert on my name at the credit bureaus. Its free and does not impact you in anyway unless you are in the process of buying a car or house or some other big ticket item requiring new credit. A single request puts the alert on all the major credit bureaus.

https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html
Is Piketty All Wrong?
I'll live. :)
First of all, I'm not proselytizing. I've never once in this discussion stated, or even alluded to my political opinions, let alone tried to convince anyone else of them. I offered opinions about the politics of the editorial staff of both the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal, neither of which should be terribly controversial, and both of which are utterly orthogonal to my beliefs; and I offered an opinion about whether Piketty wrote his book in service of a pre-existing agenda, as distinct from a belief. That, too, is irrelevant to my politics.

Second, my claim of ad hominem isn't "ironic" in light of my other statements. Nowhere did I say the positions of the FT or WSJ editors were wrong; I said they were biased. One can be biased and correct, just as one can be biased and wrong.

I don't think it's much of a stretch to posit that the author of your WSJ quote meant it to convey something about how correct Piketty could possibly be, because "socialist". Note, too, that the quote doesn't say Piketty, himself, is a socialist; it just says that he keeps their company (or, more specifically, that they — but mostly, just this one, really, really icky one — keep his): guilt by association.

Contrarily, I'm not saying they're wrong because anything; I'm not saying they're wrong at all. I'm saying, "Capitalists don't like something that points out flaws in capitalism. Film at 11." Inferring anything further is projection and fabrication. Sorry, but I'm not your straw man.

Finally, if there was any downvoting, it wasn't on my part. You can't downvote direct replies.

EDIT: And I have the book already. It's in my queue. I just had to buy another bookshelf, however, so you can probably guess how deep that queue is.
I am related with FastMail (also pretty easily verifyable) - and we love how popular we are on HN. We do get kind of surprised at how often people post about loving us as well, but we're not complaining

(I'm sitting on my laptop during the break at my choir rehearsal today and reading through this thread to see if there are any questions I can answer. I'm doing this instead of going to get a coffee... which now that I think about it must mean I'm insane, because I'm going to need coffee to survive the next set of rehearsals. Madness. If anyone at Melbourne wants to come to an awesome concert next weekend, email me or something)
Repo updated, pure JS now :D.
You mean like http://www.dc.uba.ar/inv/tesis/licenciatura/2010/lerner ?
> Having patents and enforcing them does not make you a troll. It's generally understood that trolls are non-practicing entities.

Apple and Microsoft have managed to turn that line thoroughly into mud by weaponizing patent trolling as a tool to wage proxy wars.

> Unfortunately, people frequently use the word as a derogatory term for "someone who uses patents in a way I don't like" (which often really means "someone who uses patents for their intended purpose, which I don't like on principle"), making it lack any real meaning.

Patent trolling as a practice has quite clear contours: The perpetrator alleges patent infringement and demands a license fee which is less than the cost of proving non-infringement or patent invalidity in court, leaving the victim having to either pay the troll the Danegeld regardless of infringement or pay even more to their own lawyers to prove otherwise.

> That someone as litigious as Oracle was supporting this should tell you something: that this effort had little to do with "reforming patents" and more to do with "large corporations managing risk".

Your explanation is belied by the number of patent nastygrams received by startups that can hardly be described as "large corporations." That we see Oracle on the side of reform next to the likes of Red Hat and the EFF only goes to the severity of the problem.
This'll return a CSV based off of a JavaScript array of objects (or arrays). You'll have to find something else to allow the user to download a .csv, since that's out of the use-case this was designed for.
I've seen games that feature increased firing precision while crouched. The mechanic can lead to changes in pacing and ammunition spending. I personally like it. But why not just have Hold to Crouch as default? Players who set it to toggle will have forced awareness of the setting and the relevant button.
Ask HN: wireless interference company name?
There was a few great articles on HN about a company creating wireless technology that THRIVES on interference.

They are setting up test networks in NYC and on the West coast.

I can't remember their name - but I think it was based on greek or roman god?

Anyone recall?
Vanilla JS is up :)
It's now usable with both Node and AMD.
Typos should all be fixed.
I'll put up on bower and npm once I become RFC4180 compliant.

Thanks for the feedback!
FastMail's server is very standards compliant (except for some weird parts of LIST-EXTENDED that I haven't worked out how to do efficiently yet, so they're still broken in the upstream Cyrus IMAP server)

And we're really blindingly fast for a lot of stuff, particularly if you're just downloading new email. We split every mailbox in to two sets of storage - SSD for messages less than 1 week old and lower than 1Mb in size, and big slower disk for the rest. The index metadata is also on the SSDs, so most common usage patterns can be served entirely from SSD.

Those SSDs are a RAID1 pair of Intel DC3700 drives, which are enterprise drives and very fast even for SSDs. We dropped a chunk of money on moving to this setup, and it's made both IMAP and regular web usage very nice.

So basically, we're optimised for IMAP and we're optimised for speed. Every server has local storage, and the local storage is fast. It gives quite predictable performance, and very fast performance.

That's my story as both the author/maintainer of our IMAP server, and the designer of the server architecture.

That's not saying that GMail is awful, just IMAP isn't so much their focus, and they don't optimise for it.
Work on it has been done:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_poker

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/16sue5/decentralise...
I'm more disturbed that they managed to remotely "trick" a US drone into taking new orders.

Imagine if that was a Reaper.
Then why do used diamonds go for such a small fraction of the price?
Here is the best explanation I have seen of the issue: http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127...

The tl;dr is that arguments against privacy generally focus on not having anything to hide if you aren't doing anything wrong. In reality, it's a lot more complicated. Loss of privacy can cause a great deal of harm even when you haven't done anything wrong.
That sounds like over fitting. It happens with all optimization routines, is the EA somehow special in this regard?
I'd argue that's the wrong interpretation. Function-calls absolutely require pushing a stack-frame, and TCO is no exception. TCO just says "Oh hey, we're done with the current stack-frame, let's toss it out before we call the next function". That's why TCO can apply to function-calls which aren't recursive. The recursive case still follows this rule, it's just the old and new stack-frames are identical. The compiler makes another optimization of not bothering to remove the stack-frame and just reuses it for the next call (Since it's going to be the same size anyway). Even noting that, there are still some cases where this also doesn't apply, because if (in C) you use VLA's at the beginning which depend on a supplied argument, then even with TCO, you still have to remove and create a new stack-frame every call.
Well, I agree that non-professionals probably should avoid writing anything complicated, as there is a high risk that they will make bad mistakes.

However, that IMO does not mean that it's not good for essentially everyone to have at least some basic knowledge of programming and CS basics. For one, communicating your needs to a professional is also pretty costly, especially so when the task at hand also needs specialized knowledge from your own field (be it that communicating the requirements is a lot of work upfront or that the project in the first (few) round(s) doesn't end up doing what you expected it to do - not exactly unheard of in the software world), and secondly, even if the problem that you need to solve is too difficult for you to solve with your basic knowledge, that basic knowledge might still be very helpful in communicating the problem to the professional, as you might be able to see what kind of information the professional needs in order to help you. Plus, it might allow you to better select a good professional - the risk of hiring someone who isn't actually all that much of a professional is pretty real, after all, so adding to the costs of not learning and doing it yourself.
AndLinux is super cool, but not sure how this is news. New release or something?
That wealth hasn't been concentrating at the top.
... "Welp, all of existence will be totally annihilated in 2 years".

Yeah, that's not better.
Classic reply.

I wish I could be open about all these things. I really do. Unfortunately, society currently expects us to keep some information private. A lot of things, such as private-key cryptography, actually rely on this very secrecy.

Privacy sustains an intolerance that prohibits me from sharing this information publicly. This is the precise reason why I think we should get away from privacy.

There's few things I want more than being able to be 100% honest with myself and others, and never have to tell another lie, but this won't be possible as long as we value privacy so much.
Don't you have clothes that you own?
Don't you own your food before you eat it?

If I buy a computer, I own it.

Far from a 'situation that basically no-one is in' I would say.
I suppose what you meant is that basically no one really own their house. Well if it's the case, why use the word anyway?

Words have meaning. You can't just decide to apply a word to a situation where it doesn't apply and call it a day.
Did Lily Allen really make £8,000 for her christmas Ad?
Good and short intro to genetic algorithms by coding a tetris ai player http://luckytoilet.wordpress.com/2011/05/27/coding-a-tetris-...
I've read this before.

Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of things to hide. But the only reason I have to hide them is becaues society expects me to do so.

In a more transparent society, people would be much more tolerant.
Overfitting is when your model is over-fit to the data you are training on [1], but what we're talking about here is slightly different -- the EA has maximized the given objective function correctly, but it turns out that your objective function is corruptible: A high value on your simple measure doesn't match the intuition motivating it.

You had something particular in mind when you set the objective function for your biped robot to be distance travelled before it falls. Finding an exploit in the underlying physics engine that allows the biped to explode and travel quite far -- while indeed excelling at the function, is far from what you had in mind. Yet it does reveal a vulnerability in your physics engine, which while unexpected, may be valuable in its own right, as the application the post's author argues.

This isn't entirely unique to EAs -- but it seems to happen more frequently in the kinds of domains EAs are often applied to -- complex simulations where the gradient of an objective function is difficult or impossible to calculate.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting
Oh, you know what? I think I have. IIRC there was news about a cert issuing entity charging to remove insecure certs, so I removed it from my trusted list. I'm sure that's what has caused this issue for me.
When I worked at Google (2010), this was a major pain point. Your @google.com account is essentially a Google apps account and most people have a personal @gmail.com account. At the time, the best solution was to use multiple browsers or incognito mode.

The flows can definitely be improved and I'd attribute this to it being a hard implementation problem rather than a lack of awareness around what a good flow looks like. Most companies don't even try to support letting you log into multiple accounts at one time. Having multiple domains (google.com, youtube.com, Google Apps domains) makes it even more complex.
Well, I doesn't 100% sure that Sony didn't release PS4 LLVM code yet, maybe my memory is wrong?
Ask your significant other if she wants a diamond that was owned by someone else before her.

In all seriousness, do not confuse the price of a rough diamond with the price of a polished diamond at a retail store - there's likely a 100% markup. If you were to trade in used rough diamonds, you'd find the price close to freshly mined rough diamonds (though the profit margin for the cutters/polishers is tiny).
This is a good reason for all of us to keep switching away from GMail. It benefits us all via network effects.
The email upon submission is funny.
That could be an "it depends". I can believe a lot of public universities have quotas on CS undergrads (and other majors, especially ones that require labs, and until recently as these things go that was a big issue for CS), but it's the mark of a good private school that if an undergraduate wants to major in X, they'll find a way. CMU is the only exception I know to this, has a quota of about 135 CS students the last time I checked.

According to this page http://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enrollm... , as of 2011 61% of students enrolled in public colleges. That's for students at all levels, however (you can use this page to subtract those, but it's breakdown is by gender: http://www.statista.com/statistics/236654/us-post-baccalaure... ).
I am not a musician and don't know much about analog circuits but one thing I could tell is that it was a work of love. Someone has to be really passionate about the topic to write and share that. I admire that.
Loops are a much higher level construct than tail calls. It's much easier to make a mistake iterating through a list using tail calls than it is using a loop or a higher order function. (E.g. you can forget to handle the base case.)
Implicit in what you've written is the idea that humanity has reached some kind of end state in contemporary modernity. Yet given the accelerating pace of change, when the humans of 200 years from now look back on us, they'll undoubtedly see us as even more primitive and different than humans from the 1800s do to us today. Future-humans might even lament how poor and stuck we all were, perhaps in large part because so few of us could program.

Illiterate societies indeed tend to not progress, and humanity at the moment has massive problems that it shows little evidence of being able to contend with. You're completely right that existing professions, as currently practiced, benefit little from adding to them an ability to program. Yet we're seeing a massive trend away from many current professions, as currently practiced. Many jobs are getting automated out of existence[1]. The chief culprit? Software.

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21594298-effect-todays...
I worked at a hedge fund and we used this to figure out whether other funds were falsifying their returns or not. The most notable deviation was Bernie Madoff's.
Of course, but obviously having the same animals as the Europeans (with the exception of Llamas) don't count -- Europeans would have already been exposed to those diceases.
> When did it become appropriate to diss open source software without the expertise to create something better

I know cancer is bad, even though I lack the expertise to treat it. I know house fires are bad, even though I lack the expertise to put them out.

You don't need to be an expert on some piece of software to see that it's bad. You only need to be an expert if you're actually trying to implement it.