skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Watching rm recursively burn through your filesystem is a right of passage.

I had a genius intern. Straight out of high school, his understanding of asynchronous design put plenty of my peers to shame. Course, his unix experience, especially permissions in this case, was a bit light.

I decided to use OSX's iChat to share my screen with him. As you know, iChat used to allow full control of the local machine to the remote viewer. My bright-eyed genius intern realized this:

Oh cool! I can move your mouse!

...he says, as he starts clicking around...

Can I type?!

...and he types "rm -rf /" in my open terminal.

In panic, I smashed every key on my keyboard, fortunately scoring a CONTROL+C relatively quickly. I hoped the damage was minimal, mostly praying it did not touch my home directory. I watched as every application I tried to open failed to start...

Every application I had installed, up to somewhere near X in the alphabet, had been deleted without prejudice before I managed to kill the command. Fortunately my home directory was safe; thank you "/Users" on OSX.

My intern's response was:

That command won't do anything, I didn't sudo it!

That's the day I setup Time Machine on that system.
Marc Andreessen pioneered the web browser and contributed greatly to the very platform we're using to have this discussion. After that, he became half of the pre-eminent VC firm that funded so many later developments in web tech. That's why I assign weight to his opinions and tweet sets.

Why should I assign weight to the opinions of the author of this rambling piece?

>"Marc Andreesen tweets that tech superpowers “upgrade us as creators, builders, inventors, designers, artists: producers.” And it is certainly true that the smartphone — infinitely more accessible and far cheaper than the personal computers of yesterday — democratizes access to the information age. But what he fails to mention is that, when everyone has superpowers, that’s the same as nobody having superpowers, and the same social inequities that give some people advantages over others will reassert themselves. The advantages of class, wealth and location don’t vanish."

This is a huge logical jump. Everyone having superpowers is not the same as nobody having them. Yes there are some positional goods but there are also many, many others that aren't. Consider the typical person's existence now compared to 50 years ago when most the world lived in poverty. Or compare it to 4000 years ago when lives were shorter, more violent and offered fewer options. Simply put the difference between everyone or no one having superpowers is the difference between a life of abundance and one of scarcity.
Do you earnestly believe that 9/10 fathers don't want custody of their children?

Do you also earnestly believe that the custody process is affordable and accessible to poor and middle-class men?
cool bb
But what is its weissman score?
And a link to one of the previous threads here on HN... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972798
dude this idea is freaking genius. total no brainer
At $work, I walked an admin through changing some settings of a software I had co-developed. After we were done, we deleted some caches

cd /var/lib/$application/cache

find -type f -delete

But that application was actually load-balanced on a second machine; we didn't need to change the configuration there, but still had to delete the caches. So he ssh'd (as root) right into it, and copy&pasted the 'find -type f -delete' right away, and pressed enter while I cried NOOOOOOO. Too late he realized he didn't change the directory first.

He was about to log out, and instead ssh into the backup server to recover the lost files, but I stopped him from logging out - the previous operation had erased the .ssh/authorized_keys file from /root.

In the end, no harm was done, the backups were only 8 hours, and nobody noticed any interruption.
I suppose it's my turn to link to another effort in this area, liquid salt batteries: http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_...

They have the advantage of being much cheaper to manufacture, but I don't know how their energy density stacks up.
Nitpick: non-software can't be "open source," as the "source" refers to source code. Neither does "open source" refer to libre usage terms, as it only means the source is available, not that it's licensed favorably.
It was not just the hardware, or the software, or the culture, or the interesting problems you could solve, or the zeitgeist of that time in history, but a rich combination of all those things and more, that is so hard to capture, describe or reproduce -- or even believe, if you haven't experienced it first hand.

Those giant keyboards, with all their wide special purpose buttons topped with hieroglyphic keycap labels, in combination with the huge screen, three button mouse, and of course all the great software turning on and off the little dots on the screen that you could dive into, explore and modify at will, the printed and online documentation, the networked developer support community, all carefully designed to work together seamlessly regardless of cost, gave you the feeling of being in control of a very heavy, expensive, well built, solid, powerful, luxury automobile, with rich Corinthian leather seats, a high fidelity sound system, cruise and climate control, power steering, windows and seats, a full tank of gas and an empty ashtray, a glove compartment stuffed with AAA maps, about to embark on a long and adventurous journey exploring far away places you've never visited before.

It's hard to capture that kind of multi-sensory ergonometric computational Fahrvergnügen, just running it in an emulator on a MacBook Pro. (As luxurious and well designed as the MBP is, it can't hold a candle to a Lisp Machine.)

Sitting down in front of one of those monsters with a big mug of coffee, an interesting task to work on, a rack of my favorite music on cassette tapes, many hours of free time to hack in the privacy of an air conditioned lab in front of me, and a bean bag chair for naps when I pass out from exhaustion behind me, will always be one of my cherished memories.

Ricardo Montalban couldn't have expressed the luxurious feeling of power and control more eloquently: "I have much more in this small Chrysler than great comfort at a most pleasant price. I have great confidence, for which there can be no price. In Cordova, I have what I need."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsg97bxuJnc
When to re-factor your code
Haskell Haskell Everywhere
I see Haskell everday in the feeds. When will I see companies adopting Haskell?
Given that copyright automatically attaches in a lot of countries... then yes anonymous people retain copyright over their work.

However an anonymous person could not do anything about enforcing their copyright without losing their anonymity. You can't sue someone anonymously (you as the plaintiff), you can't DCMA anonymously, etc etc.
This is an amazingly hands-on dashboard. Together with handy tips on why and when peaks and troughs occur. For example I had no idea UK wind potential (potential) capacity was so close to nuclear.
here's how you promote it: focus on a very narrow market first because your current market is very broad and hard to attack. come up with one specific use case for this bad boy like invoices, and then narrow it even further, custom invoices for paypal, and then you have a tangible market you can start to attack, not an abstract one. my examples aren't probably the best, but you get the idea. excited for you!

the thing is to get some experience and momentum in getting a customer, which is very different than engineering code. lots of good will come out of it, and it will take you in directions you can't anticipate or imagine.
Yes, they can. Enforcing those rights is more difficult if you wish to remain anonymous, but still possible.
Seems to be down, friend.
I've ordered taxies by phone, and I've used Uber, and I can tell you that I have no doubt as to which is the future.

As for network effects, is it really that hard to see that a larger network of vehicles will have inherent advantages over a smaller network? (think about distance to the nearest available vehicle, especially as the network expands outside of dense urban areas)
How are you recommending two places to get new information if you admittedly have not come across any new information since the shutdown?

Dino's Pizzeria is my favorite place to get pizza. I have never had a pizza from Dino's Pizzeria.
So a random developer with 4 years of experience teamed up with a Drupal developer to take leadership of this project?

This is pretty sad/funny.
>A bar of chocolate has 150-250.

So does a hand grenade (around 600kJ, or 167Wh).
iPhone does some of that: resolution constant, GPU up, process shrink: battery life constant.
Lego Ideas (Kickstarter for Lego sets)
IOS 8: New Features
There are several services (free and not) whose purpose it to help you in getting initial users and feedback. For instance, betalist.com and erlibird.com. (I have no affiliation with any of those, and perhaps there are more that I simply don't know).

As for your service, it looks down to me. :(
Very interesting, but those transitions don't appear to have a realistic sense of scale... not necessarily a bad thing (and maybe I'm misjudging the speeds and distances)
In your haste, you've forgotten one of the key premises of this line of discussion.

How can someone have gotten themselves into a situation where the very mention of the word 'monad' generates feelings of frustration and simultaneously never have heard about monads?
In fairness high availability is usually measure per annum, on that metric S3 is 100% for the last 5 years.

Also a few years doesn't really imply 6 years to me.
Having tried similar things myself, while autocorrelation looks useful for repeating waveforms, real waveforms at any point usually have more in common with the preceding few samples than the same point in the previous cycle (e.g. Using LPC to predict the next sample based on the previous ones). One reason for this is the cycle length will usually not be a whole number of samples so you would have to interpolate between samples to find the same point in a previous cycle, and even then it's not an improvement over LPC.
The future without net neutrality
I wrote something similar for Clojure: https://github.com/gcv/dgraph
New Ruling Shows the NSA Can’t Legally Justify Its Phone Spying Anymore
I am arguing neither of those things.

I am also not giving "feel-good nonsense" advice, nor hand-waving. I'm suggesting avenues of research that require a level of effort commensurate with the task at hand, namely, creating a long-term stable relationship.

Statistically, relationships with the same attributes as my grandparents' relationships don't fall apart. Statistically, the most likely outcome in that case is "til death do us part". (You really should read some of JD Murray's books/papers. We can predict with a fairly high likelihood which relationships are going to lead to a split family and emotional/financial devastation for the husband, and which are not. But it takes a level of introspection and a level of honesty from friends and observers that most people don't have.)
Just as illegal as when you try it with a thermal camera?
IE Heisenbug
Perhaps the deeper threat here is the rate at which the goalpost is moving.

It's strange, this situation where in there are all these things that would be seriously problematic were they to happen, unless of course they actually happen, in which case they're not actually a problem at all.
A person who the Truecrypt Audit Project has some evidence is the actual Truecrypt developer, in an email I've seen (because I'm working with the project), more or less confirmed this story.

In particular: many people on HN seem to think that Linux Truecrypt is the most important product of the Truecrypt project, but the developers don't see it that way; they started the project for Windows, and Windows has good FDE now.
Earth may have underground 'ocean' three times that on surface
I gave the vi mode a very short try, but it doesn't seem to make as much sense in a shell. If it has you accidentally deleting things, you might want to ask how much is it really worth. In vim you can undo.
This is awesome! Nothing but videos today! :D
The goal of wearables is a focus on the self not the environment - i.e. my digital environment extends out from me, I don't configure my environment to project it onto me.

It's interesting technology, but in a totally different domain to wearables.
Scientific python lectures
Well, the backup can be encrypted. It also doesn't use "mobile data" (over wi-fi). And speed and efficiency, I never had any problem with.

Any comparable service doing it better? Because those are general concerns, nothing special about iCloud.
Here's the discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7885641

Here are other submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7887576

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7888125

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7888473

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7891348
The best of all the conspiracy theories was http://pastebin.com/9catw4X7.
Also, a redditor told me about slmenu (dmenu parody for shell)

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/283ziw/tmenu_dmenu_fo...
There is this person claiming "I can confirm presence of TrueCrypt duress canary as per 2004 conversation."

There were a bunch of other tweets with further details, but those seem to have been deleted.

https://twitter.com/AlyssaRowan/status/472303977997279232

Note: I am not claiming this is necessarily true.
Good to see there are other solutions out there for nice PDF generation. I open-sourced my code for generating LaTeX (and compile it to pdf's) using Python. This seems like a good solution for the less tech savy people.
How do you promote stuff without already established social media status while not behaving or feeling like a spammer?

Find people who would have a self interest in promoting your stuff. You might have to tailor your story, but I mean things like sites that link to cool new stuff, the press, newsletters, etc. Anyone whose job it is to link to stuff like yours, that's who you want to know. Unfortunately your site isn't loading for me at the moment so I don't have any ideas, but just from the sound of it, Lifehacker might be one such place or even ProductHunt.
Hopefully the fuel cells won't run on chocolate bars, I prefer to use them as my own fuel :)
A game created by a small Palestinian startup, what do you think?
I don't give feedback of this sort too often, so this might not necessarily be useful. Now, for the actual feedback.

This is a very useful product to have for the intended target audience.

From looking at the landing page, your target audience is developers who need to generate PDFs directly from a template.

This is only useful if they need PDFs in bulk, if not they can export to PDF.

While developers are a good target market, there is also the market of all people who need to generate PDF reports in bulk.

You could add a simple frontend allowing anyone to upload a template, with a spreadsheet containing the values to substitute. Think of the spreadsheet as the API parameters.
Non-developers can easily use this interface and are very likely to find this service very useful. In addition, you can charge more since the interface will not require any dev skills to use.

The catch with this approach though, is that it might be harder to scale. When targeting enterprises a single sale gives you more revenue.

All the best!
Limitless fusion power may be only a year away
Show HN: Product Hunt API (Unofficial)
Balmer thought that the iPhone was laughable... demonstrably laughable.
Hackathon in the Philippines
Exactly this

Maybe autocorrelation is not very explored in conventional codecs (FLAC/MP3 because it has a too small gain to be justifiable - in a general purpose situation)

In real life situations the autocorrelation is much smaller, even a constant note will have a small variation in time
Precisely! When Lisp Machine programmer look at a screen dump, they see a lot more going on behind the scenes than meets the eye.

I'll attempt to explain the deep implications of what the article said about "Everything on the screen is an object, mouse-sensitive and reusable":

There's a legendary story about Gyro hacking away on a Lisp Machine, when he accidentally trashed the function cell of an important primitive like AREF (or something like that -- I can't remember the details -- do you, Scott? Or does Devon just make this stuff up? ;), and that totally crashed the operating system.

It dumped him into a "cold load stream" where he could poke around at the memory image, so he clamored around the display list, a graph of live objects (currently in suspended animation) behind the windows on the screen, and found an instance where the original value of the function pointer had been printed out in hex (which of course was a numeric object that let you click up a menu to change its presentation, etc).

He grabbed the value of the function pointer out of that numeric object, poked it back into the function cell where it belonged, pressed the "Please proceed, Governor" button, and was immediately back up and running where he left off before the crash, like nothing had ever happened!

Here's another example of someone pulling themselves back up by their bootstraps without actually cold rebooting, thanks to the real time help of the networked Lisp Machine user community:

ftp://ftp.ai.sri.com/pub/mailing-lists/slug/900531/msg00339.html
Yes indeed. In fact one of the key reasons music appeals to the mind is that it's just entropic enough to supply the brain with continuous new artifacts to challenge its compression/organization scheme.

Btw, I like your handle. What kinds of things have worked on? You should post some links in your profile!
I think you are right about separating the ObjC. C++ and ObjC don't play so well together, either, so if your primary language was C++, I think you'd need a plan around how to deal with ObjC.
> Windows has good FDE now.

Only for those running Ultimate or Enterprise edition. What's everyone else supposed to use?
Because no thermodynamic cycle is 100% efficient.
>Apple on the other hand... well, they created iTunes... but that's really the only "cloud" technology that they have besides the actual iCloud (hosted on AWS, possibly?). Apple has shown that they struggle when creating web experiences for customer. Remember ping.fm?

Yes, what about it? I also remember 20+ music stores that were created, touted to high heavens, gone nowhere and stopped existing (from Napster to Rhapsody etc), whereas iTMS succeeded widly.

It's not like Google for example doesn't have its share of Cloud failures. Google Wave anyone? Google+ that everybody seems to hate except some a-list tech writers, and which hardly made a dent against FB usage? Google Video? And tons of other folded attempts.

And it's not just iTunes.

It's also the App Store (which is a different beast to the music store). The Movies. iCloud for sync and backup and image sharing etc.

I agree that their web (in-browser) offerings (like iCloud office apps) are not very enticing.

But Apple's really not into using the Cloud for in-browser web apps -- they use it for enabling native apps to communicate and share data, and at massive scale at that.
Lie Like A Lady: The Profoundly Weird, Gender-Specific Roots Of The Turing Test
Kingston and PNY using cheaper components after good reviews
Are there any lossless compression algorithms that use autocorrelation to reduce the bit depth on repeated cycles? For example a human voice sustaining a note may have similar cycles, but with enough low-level noise-like variations that traditional deflate-type compression does not help much. However if an algorithm could spot that the second cycle only has small differences to the first cycle, perhaps it could encode the second cycle as a diff to the first cycle. Since the second cycle differences are likely to be small, the bit depth could be reduced (e.g. to 2-3 bits). Then the third cycle could also be encoded as a diff of the second, so even a gradually changing volume can be encoded with a very low bit rate throughout while ending up significantly different from the first cycle.

Has that been tried before? Would be willing to spend a few evenings hacking on this myself.
GOCE Geoid, Earth's gravity revealed in unprecedented detail
Thanks for the nice description!

For my small Linux emulator I put the link in the Wiki after "Destroy the system" :)

https://github.com/s-macke/jor1k/wiki/Explore-the-emulator#r...

The system runs already on Busybox, so the whole binary is in RAM. Is there a way to restore the binary from /proc ?
Or to restore the symlinks and maybe link them to /proc/self/exe or so?
This Entrepreneur Built A Wearable Device To Save Lives–Just Not His Own
well, the pessimistic view, as also expressed by michel houllebecq in his books:

ugly, weird, fat (and come on, look at our industry) people tend to stick to their partners because they know that the alternative is not another partner - but being alone.

truly attractive (varies by gender, between pure aestethics and power, wealth) humans tend to have more relationships - because of pure availability. it is one thing to stay loyal if there is no one actively going after you, but a whole other ballgame once you have suitors.

"is there someone better out there for me?" is the key question that defines longevity of marriage. and fear of being forever alone is a strong bond.

think about it the next time you see a morbidly obese couple living "happily" together.
Tried it just now and I see non-ascii characters messed up, while curl shows that page fine. Probably there's some case-specific reason for that, but still…
Good advice. Reminds me of this PG essay: http://paulgraham.com/identity.html
I don't know much about this site, but I can't say that quotes like this one really inspire confidence:

> Our mattress reviews and ratings are based on 18,400+ consumer experiences collected from hundreds of online message / discussion boards and other credible sources.
Fees cost almost nothing to hostile miners. With a 20% fee, they get 100% of their hashrate through the theft, and 80% from the pool. So long as you pay anything at all to new miners doing this attack is beneficial.
Duck duck go in Safari is great news. I've shifted my desktop searching already.

How stable is the beta? I'm a developer but I test mostly on my prime devices. I was planning to wait for beta 4 or so but I wondered how it was going.
Why We Miss Creative Ideas That Are Right Under Our Noses
There is no need to have debate - the current internet infrastructure does not allow privacy. Even Tor and over tools don't let you to stay under the radar. And it is not really clear if there are any better ways. At least I haven't seen any research or proposals that would provide users with better privacy online.
>Everything we do in life is to feel a certain way.

I've heard that hypothesised, mostly in Tony Robbins style self help books, but have come to the conclusion that it's an oversimplification of the human condition. I mean if you were building a Mk2 human from scratch you might build it that way be we did not arise that way - we evolved from reptile like creatures which had extra stuff bolted on when they evolved to monkey like, chimp like and finally human like beings. As a result much of what we do is as a result of ancient mechanisms resulting in actions that do not always make us feel good. For example you might lose you temper and hit or shout at someone in ways you feel bad about almost straight away but it was not done to feel good, it was done because some ancient aggression instinct got triggered.

This stuff I think complicates the whole business of dealing with depression which like aggression often comes from the more primitive parts of the brain. I'm not sure what the answer is. Trial and error to some extent. Also it can be interesting to look at what makes cat, dogs and the like happy or sad as we are probably subject to the same mechanisms.