skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's bad practice and complexifies a lot the creation of peer-to-peer infrastructures.
The DDoS-for-hire being discussed here are called booters. Access to them can be bought for a few dollars (~$10), and then one is able to log into the site and click a button to attack someone for a few minutes (the exact time depending on the booter itself and sometimes how much you pay).
This is what arrogance looks like folks.
>He then gave an example of another new artist who said he’d have to sell 1 to 1.5 million records with his current record deal to make $1 million. With Ryan’s system that artist could make $1 million with only 10,000 customers — only 1% as many customers.

I'm pretty sure that math is wrong in the article.

$1mln for 10,000 customers means $100 per customer? for an album? Who pays $100 for a small time artist's album, much less a digital download.

>Distribution isn’t hard. If you’re selling apps instead of albums, then you’ve probably already got the skills to set up your own store front.

You might have the skills to setup a store front, but chances are you wouldn't do it well, unless you've built several store fronts.
Twitter shuts down Tweetdeck after XSS flaw
ELIZA is from 1966.
I think this item means stop designing, building, and selling hardware. This article is from a time when all PCs were third party clones of IBM PC yet there was breakneck innovation happening. Apple had toyed with licensing hardware.

Regardless I think they did realize that they were competitively out of the hardware game and eventually doubled down instead of folding.
I have some sympathy for free markets, but your post just sounds trite and somewhat tone deaf. If you want to be convincing, you should respond to the actual problem - what will happen to the taxi drivers - and not just write generic terms like "booms and busts".
Posted a couple of years ago and generated some discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3628887

I felt it was relevant again due to the recent Eugene Goostman controversy.
I'm not so sure that just because you can fool me that an object is a duck, that it is a duck. At least when applied to general AI. Nor do I necessarily agree that just because I can have a conversation with an algorithm, that we should give that algorithm all the rights given to humans.

For example, if I say mean things to that algorithm, even one that can fool me into thinking it's another human for decades, is that morally wrong? Even if it's just setting some variable in memory to sad=true? If so, is it morally wrong for me to create a program consisting only of a singular red button, that when pushed, sets the sad flag?

There was another "game" created a couple years ago that featured a fictional human (a little girl, if memory serves) on life support. They programmed it so that unless somebody in the world clicked a button in their browser, the girl would die within 10 seconds and the game would basically delete itself, ending forever. (The response was so strong that people flooded the server, and I believe their hosting provider blocked access to their site, thereby killing the program untimely.) If the little girl was removed, and the goal was to just keep the program running as long as possible on life support, would that be morally wrong?

I ask these questions because I don't think a even a complex script which is doing nothing more than attempting to fool me should be considered worth assigning rights to, even if it's really good at it. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how to define consciousness in this regard, but I suspect it would require surprising its creators to the point that they cannot fathom how it behaved the way it did. Or maybe I'm confusing consciousness with free will. Either way, if the only thing separating a program that deserves human-level rights from those that don't is some combination of power (enough to scan all the valid responses and deliver the best one) and a wide array of responses linked to conversations, then I'd argue that all programs deserve the same basic human rights.
Yes, the better way is by using the fallocate program which uses the posix_fallocate syscall, which makes a new file with a given size containing whatever happened to be on disk at the time. Basically malloc for filesystems.
I use old-fashion serial cables for kernel development in 2014. It would be hard to debug without it. Sometimes you have bugs on physical systems that aren't reproducible in a VM and can only get any output via a physical serial cable.

For what it's worth, I also use serial-over-LAN to administer remote machines and virtual serial devices in VMs for security purposes.
The discussion of types here is all over the place. This is because they are handled so differently in various programming languages. Pascal included array bounds in the type annotation for arrays and subscripting was enforced (at runtime) to be withing bounds. In C (and C++) arrays are almost equivalent to pointers (the full answer is complicated see [1]) and there is a real danger of buffer overflows. Python doesn't include type annotations, but the run-time enforces strong typing, lists carry their type information and will throw an exception if subjected to a non-list operation. The type system in Haskell is perhaps the best example of a really expressive and really effective system for ensuring that the compiler can catch as many error as possible at compile time.

Haskell programmers sometimes say that if a program compiles it almost always works. This is interesting, but unfortunately, types and type annotations in use today don't fully capture the formal specification needed to guarantee program correctness.

Just writing down specification in preparation for a proof of correctness can be difficult. The specifications have to be expressed in a formal system, for example some form of mathematical logic like predicate calculus. Working with anything less than a formal specification is like trying to solve a mathematical set of equations without using math symbols. Natural language is just inadequate to the task. See [2].

Getting the specifications right isn't easy. I remember my first attempt at proving the correctness of a sorting program. I understood that I needed to insure that A[i] <= A[i+1] for all elements in the array, but I forgot that the final result had to include all and only the original elements (i.e. that it had to be a strict permutation of the input elements). I don't believe that type systems are currently useful for these kind of specifications and verifications of program correctness.

Real programs interact with the outside world (e.g. GUI's are hard to describe mathematically). Real programs often have distributed or concurrent execution for which new logics (like Temporal Logic) may have to be employed. Proving that a program will terminate or make progress or not deadlock or not livelock or will meet some real-time constraints are all exceptionally hard.

Many years ago (in the 1980's) I worked on this research area at University. I had the hope that eventually, programming would be more like an interactive exploration with a sophisticated program prover. I thought that the programmer and software-prover would work together to produce a correct program. Today, we are still programming in pretty much the same old ways as back then. The languages are much better, but it's a harder problem than I thought it was going to be.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3959705/arrays-are-pointe...
[2] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E...
I don't think anyone has a problem with offering defense services. The problem lies in that CloudFlare is helping to create the problem. It would be analogous to your bodyguard constantly hiring hitmen to make attempts at your life.
No, in London the Uber drivers are licensed. You are not allowed to run a service with unlicensed drivers.

The problem is that taxis were given a monopoly on metering by time and distance (largely, minicabs are supposed to pre quote, not sure how Uber gets around this), and a monopoly on street hailing. Smartphones make stret hailing much less advantagous.
I've had conversations with more artificially intelligent text editors in the 90's.

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-doctor.html
Absolutely! This sword cuts both ways. Our bots are stuck in Searle's Chinese room, performing silly input-output matching tricks without understanding language on a deep human level.

An intelligent bot would indeed recognize unproductive lines of inquiry and should act accordingly. It would be more realistic if a bot answered that it has gotten tired of answering stupid questions.

Yet: If the Turing Test was made to avoid discrimination based on appearance, then applying the Turing Test while starting out with a tricky biased (unfair, unnatural, unproductive) line of questioning in the hopes of tripping up the machine... this doesn't seem in the spirit of the Test. The chatbots are at least polite enough to try to answer. Who not extend them the same courtesy as you would other humans, at least till you "figure" out that it may be a bot?

Again: It doesn't say in the paper that the interrogator is to be made aware that player A is now a machine. The interrogator will continue its line of questioning trying to distinguish between male and female. This line of questioning should be far saner, and easier for bots to interpret and play along with. By starting out like Kurzweil he places the Test on the shoulders of the bot: The bot has to find out if it is talking to a sane human or someone spouting gibberish. Kurzweil becomes Eugene's Turing Test.
This book is how I picked up algorithms and data structures having never gone through a formal computer science program. Glad to see it's still being worked on.
TweetDeck Taken Down To Assess XSS Vulnerability
It seems like the hardest (or maybe just most tedious) part of this sort of thing is keeping the rules on the front-end and the rules on the back-end consistent. Obviously the back-end needs to be the canonical source of truth, but it's nicer for the user if the front-end knows the rules too so that it can do the right thing prior to a full request cycle. I'd be interested to know if you've come up with a good solution to this, because I haven't found any that are very satisfying.
You're reading a lot into a single sentence fragment, and an awful lot of these decisions are not obvious a priori. In this case, the impression I got was "separating a large monolithic app is a risky, expensive move" and that concern overrode other practical concerns.

I doubt these constraints came about as surprises once their hand was forced.
Airbum?
> Free markets are the only way to avoid catastrophic booms and busts. Protectionism leads to giant bubbles which fail all at once, as opposed to more manageable gradual change.

This isn't a mainstream economic viewpoint, and needs acres of citations.
Also - Cairo/WinFS failed because their requirements were not achievable, and there was no real market demand for them. Just like natural language input for the general market (no one outside of very specific niches actually wants to interact with a computer using voice).

What value would a "filesytem" that understands contacts add to a web-server or load balancer? All it does is couple application-specific domains and complexity into layers of the system where they don't belong.

No one is debating that it would be nice for all computers to have a unified understanding of what a document and what a contact is, but those are orthogonal requirements to what a filesystem needs to do.
they seem to be using Cloudflare now: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6sx8li6d0eioxwt/Screenshot%202014-...
But in resorting to shame as a tool of retaliation, they become the problem that they are angry about.
This is in a similar space to reactive programming, but isn't reactive at its core.
The best explanation of the monad we use developed is described in the paper here: http://community.haskell.org/~simonmar/papers/haxl-icfp14.pd...

Query sharding is at the data source layer, which Haxl doesn't delve into. It's up to each data source integration with Haxl to do the appropriate routing/etc.

Hope you find it useful!
> Though you and the article both are perpetuating the lie that hash table operations are O(1).

Hash table operations are O(1) on average, assuming a uniform hash function, and assuming that the number of buckets is kept greater than the number of elements. More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table#Performance_analysis

Computing the hash function itself is not usually factored into this analysis, probably because it's an orthogonal concern (ie. hash functions and hash table implementations can be mixed and matched), and because computing the hash function for every operation is not strictly required (the hash of the key can be cached).

But even if you are factoring in computation of the hash function, this is a strange argument:

> Hint: distributing into O(n) buckets requires looking at O(log n) bits.

Computers can look at O(log n) bits in a single operation for any "n" that can reasonably be held in memory.

For example, if your hash table has less than 4B entries, "log n" is less than 32. Any 32 bit computer can "look at" 32 bits in a single operation. So I can't see why you think that "log n" needs to be a factor in the complexity analysis.
seems to be down, does anyone have a mirror?
Isn't a completely free market likely to collapse onto one or two dominant suppliers who then prevent future competition by restrictive practices?

I'd imagine the use of time sensitive tariffs to bankrupt competitors. Sort of like Starbucks saturating a city centre district, bankrupting local independent cafes, then closing down the extra branches.
Is this about a storage breakthrough with memristors, about alternatives to Von Neumann architecture, or just an incomprehensible press release?
I like how everyone always wanted a computer-tv or tv-computer back then. It's the faster horse thing, but for computers.
No, "pure HTML5" has a specific meaning in the gamedev community - it's the combination of HTML5 elements like canvas, video and audio with JavaScript for the game logic, i.e. using the browser as a game engine (it's actually pretty cool, the APIs are very high-level and well-suited for the task) as opposed to using an actual game engine, like you normally would.
I encourage folks to watch this tech talk by HP Research Labs on the discovery of the memristor and implementation details.
It goes into the gory technical details, from the low level physics to the construction of the gates, the truth tables, and the high level computation possibilities once chips are assembled in a crossbar package.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY
Another tip, be cognizant of the difference between sustained drawing amperage, and spikes; when a server starts up, it can spike to 1.5+ amps. I've seen many circuits trip because, while the draw should have been in an acceptable range, spinning up a number of servers at the same time was too much.
Finding the Right Seeds – The Herb – Warrior's Journal
There are network effects regarding the portion of outliers that SV captures, but if we're talking about experience alone then I'm skeptical of your claims given how much of SV is driven by freshly minted CS grads.
At least I've mostly stopped using Twitter.

This is absolutely a good idea. As a gung-ho advocate for Twitter for several years, the service has become a cesspit of mud slinging, public shaming, and rapidly bringing together people for crusades rather than somewhere opinions can be discussed sensibly and processed over time (140 characters + real time == ripe for gut reactions and basal instincts, unlike blogging or video).

A 'lite' alternative I've adopted in the past week is to only read and post but to totally ignore the "Notifications" tab (so you see no @replies). That way you get the best bits but without exposure to most of the toxicity.
A little of each. The article got kind of meta at the end.

"Any delivery date has to be taken with some skepticism given that HP has been hyping the memristor technology for years and failed to meet earlier self-imposed deadlines."
KPlugs – A Kernel Space Bytecode Interpretter. Python in the Kernel
You definitely see lots of things like (string? x) even in Lisp. It shows that some types are unavoidable. (Though frequently the type information is just used as additional information.)

Typecheckers definitely do things. But are those things interesting?
Take a look at https://github.com/ayourtch/nat46 - I've coded it primarily for OpenWRT (so it requires forwarding), but the core portion is usable in userland as well - so I have this crude hack (https://github.com/ayourtch/example-nat46/) to get something-of-a-CLAT running on OS X with zero changes to the nat46-core.[ch] code - I literally sync them between the two repos periodically.
> it seems like there is a lack of strong technical leadership and a lot of big decisions are being made without thinking them through

I didn't get that impression at all. The ability to do it right (tm) the first time is quite often hindered by the need to iterate quickly and focus on growth and/or revenue. You'll eventually end up with an increasingly-more-painful monolithic core system, but that's an okay trade off if it got you to a place where your business really takes off.

At that point you have a few options. You can do a major rewrite, re-architecting everything from the ground up. Or, you can take Soundcloud's approach, and slowly migrate the old system to a more service-oriented architecture, reducing the amount of dev resources you need to throw around.

The trick is that the slow migration will be different for every business, and it depends on the needs of the platform and the way things were constructed initially. Just like you can't blame the technical leadership the trade-offs made early on, and you can't blame them for experimenting and iterating before finding solutions that worked for them. (After all, hindsight is 20/20.)
HR Antipatterns at Startups
I would recommend learning Objective-C. For your first app, you'll probably be doing a lot of Google and Stack-overflow searches and the vast majority of results and examples are in Objective-C.

I would also recommend picking up one of the Big Nerd Ranch iOS books [1] as I found them quite helpful. Good luck.

[1] http://www.bignerdranch.com/we-write/ios-programming.html
Just in case anyone is curious, this does not effect any implementation of std::sort in C++ I am aware of.

They all use introsort -- basically use quicksort until you have done some number of partitions, then switch to heapsorting the cells of the partition. This ensures fast quick-sort performance while guaranteeing O(n log n) worst case.
A little of each, but a lot of money being thrown at it, three quarters of HP research.
Docker and Logstash: Smarter Log Management For Your Containers
And they might be late again, but we'll see.
The web site runs on a small ARM board, maybe it was HNed.
I got the impression that most of the sticks and devboards are only "mostly" debugged, and seem to fail under 24/7 intensive use. As a mass production consumer product, the Samsung Chromebook has gotten a lot more debugging work.

Also those sticks are mostly intended for Android use, whereas this application uses regular Linux.
Seems like a test platform for memristor tech.
Because before Hailo (set up by a former black cab driver) was previously only for Black Cabs. It isn't bad, unless you are a black cab driver. Metering would work differently than with private hire cabs too (cheaper)
How does the cost work out vs. colo when you consider capitalization?
"Easy money" - John Connor
But seriously, loved this story, hopefuly boys got rewarded for pointing out this serious hole in the system.
Nice. I don't get why they can't just use the super key by default like everyone else, but it's not a very big problem. Is it a fuzzy search? How does it handle "term" and "temrinal"?
An accusation should not be sufficient, obviously. Why can't CloudFlare take abuse complaints, verify and take action based on that?

In fact, this is precisely what they've done in the past, though they'd only provide the host details rather than stopping service to a site. (I don't think they'll even go this far anymore, rather they'll give you the abuse email for the host and tell you to have the host contact them, which is ridiculous.) I've filed a few such complaints myself. In one instance, the booter site didn't provide any info about its services without registration, so I linked to the hackforums thread where it was being offered. CloudFlare declined this as sufficient proof. Luckily, I could register an account without payment, and that gave me the options to pay to launch attacks, so I sent the login details to CloudFlare and they accepted that.
The Slow and Glorious Death of America's Worst School System
The two biggest problems I have with HFS+ are no sparse file support and the catalog file (limits concurrency). It would be nice to have timestamps better than 1s too.
Sometimes I wonder how much better the computing would be if Lisp Machines had succeeded in the industry and UNIX never left the lab.
I could design chat bot that passes itself off as a human using speech to text.

Interrogator: "Hello, how old are you?"
Bot: "I'm 2 and a half."
I: What is your name?
B: Keegan
I: I live in the Capital of the United States.
B: Why?
I: Because there was a job open and I needed one.
B: Why?
I: Because I need money in order to live.
B: Why?
I: You know, to buy groceries and stuff.
B: Why?
I: What do you mean?
B: I like butterflies!
I: Oh, really?
B: Yeah, do you know butterflies come from cappilars?
I: Yeah, I knew that.
B: Do you like butterflies?
I: I guess so.
B: Why?
I: They look nice I guess.
B: Why?
I: I don't think you're a person, this is shit.
B: SHIT!
I: What?
B: SHIT!
I: Stop saying that.
B: SHIT SHIT SHIT hehehe!
I: Oh God damn it what did I do?
B: SHIT SHIT GOD DAMN SHIT HEHEHE!
I: I gotta go.
B: OK, bye!
B: SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!

I take issue with the example given in the article because nobody's going to reply with 2 sentences for every simple question. Likewise, it's bad with memory and reasoning. It should have had some trouble when he said he lived in the capital of the US and the capital of the country that built the great wall, but then again it was obvious that it didn't remember where he lived at all.

At least in my example a 2 year old doesn't care what you're saying. It's able to learn better than the other example, but still not a lot is expected.

I bet there's some cognitive age level that we're able to emulate well enough to pass off as human, at least in terms of verbal communication. I think it would be useful if we were better able to measure that, and raise that level slowly. Maybe we actually can impersonate a 2 year old well, then what about a 3 year old? 4 year old? Where do we get hung up?

If we can't get a 2 year old's cognitive processes down without a doubt, we should build on that first instead of trying to do something more complex without an understanding of how to make the foundations of that intelligence work.
This company raised $12.75M outside of the valley #DC #Startups
Neither the archive nor Google Cache seem to have it.
> Free markets are the only way to avoid catastrophic booms and busts.

This is an unsupported statement of deep faith. To my mind, it fails along two different axes: I don't think that free markets are the best or even only way to prevent major booms and busts; and more importantly, I don't think that free markets actually even do prevent a substantial boom-bust cycle. In particular, the early capitalist period was made up of nothing but major boom-bust cycles until the markets were regulated, and the deregulation fad that started in the 80s and continues today has certainly seemed to contribute to the fluctuations in the economy.

That's not to say that protectionism is the answer either. But the unfettered free market is the opposite of a solution to our problems.
So powerful, it even supports scripted tweets