skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Federation plugin looks interesting, but all the configuration that's necessary looks like a chore.

For one: Unlike most Unix daemons it must apparently be applied as rabbitmqctl commands after the daemon has started, which is awkward to do in a Puppet environment; as far as I can tell, you can get into situations where RabbitMQ starts in clustering mode, and there will be a race condition before you can apply the plugin config.

Secondly, the documentation is very poor. I have read everything pretty closely, but I still don't know if federation preserves the exact same behaviour, from the client's point of view, with regard to consistency, atomicity etc. What's missing is a feature matrix of how RabbitMQ behaves in the different modes.

The same thing goes for the Shovel plugin, except fortunately it allows for static config to be declared in rabbitmq.config. But again, because of the poor documentation, I still don't know how it would behave in practice.
I don't think you're right. I think digitisation is not the cause of the surveillance state, at least by default. That is, regardless of who are the prime ministers, presidents and such of the era, the surveillance state was coming.

It's not unstoppable, but I think it will need to become the no. 1 issue for a long time.
Putting aside what the law and constitution currently say, do you think mass surveillance of metadata, URL tracking and search history should be fair game?
I talk a lot of people who've had trouble with "data scientists" who are strong in statistics and know some matlab or R or something like that, but know nothing about the craftsmanship of programming.

By that I mean skills like using version control, writing software that is maintainable, working with a team that uses project management software, things like that.

A common kind of workflow is that a data scientist develops an algorithm and makes tweaks to it, and that this gets baked into a production system.

If the data scientist throws something over the wall and it takes the developers a few weeks to get it ready for real use, the "real time" productivity of the team is going to be awful. The closer we come to the data scientist checking the changes in and that's that, the more valuable the data scientist is.
Looks interesting, I'll bite. Looking forward to the beta.
It was the submitter's title, not a mod edit, if that matters. The submitter did a good job, because the rest of the title ("marks milestone in computing history") is certainly linkbait and arguably misleading. Having it there would likely have made this thread a lower-quality controversy than it currently is. HN threads are surprisingly sensitive to initial conditions.

Edit: Oh, and considering how many fluff press articles are showing up about this [1], the submitter also showed exemplary taste in source selection. Yay, stevejalim!

1. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=turing+test#!/story/sort_by_date/0...
There are two components to PyParallel: the alternate approach to async I/O afforded by Windows and IOCP, and the changes to CPython that facilitate multiple interpreter threads running simultaneously in parallel.

The latter is, at a conceptual level, not limited to Windows.

The proof-of-concept implementation that pairs the two concepts is Windows-only, at the moment, because Windows simply has better out-of-the-box scaffolding for this sort of stuff: https://speakerdeck.com/trent/parallelizing-the-python-inter...

As for non-Windows implementations, there are other operating systems out there that provide similar primitives: AIX copied the IOCP API from Windows verbatim, Solaris has event ports, and OS X got GCD.

I'd love to see the Linux kernel provide semantically equivalent primitives. You simply can't achieve the same affect without kernel-level thread dispatching support tied into the mix (https://speakerdeck.com/trent/parallelism-and-concurrency-wi...).
It's interesting how closely these things are intertwined (Twitter -> Klout -> Bing -> back to Twitter). Buying fake followers seems like a silly ego boost but apparently it does increase exposure.
But you don't get to change the voters, only the system (well ... besides re-education camps or similar I guess).

So if the specific choices of the voters are consistently against their own interests it has to be the systems fault. POSIWID [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what...
You can use Excel for more than many people think. For some great examples, and with only a single chapter at the end devoted to R, see Data Smart, by MailChimp's Chief Data Scientist:

http://www.amazon.com/Data-Smart-Science-Transform-Informati...
Walmart -> Unlocked Cell Phones -> Blu
The means of the state are not endless. States carry an obligation to make rational use of their means to macimize the benefit for their citizens. The argument is not that terrorist strikes do not deserve deterrence or punishment, it's that the war on terror is inappropriate in its scale, because the same means could have achieved much more good for the american people when put (mostly) to other uses.
Nope, or at least not directly. AT&T and Verizon (US Worst/Century never really cared about this) stopped when the Great Recession hit. Since new home construction also took a big hit, there was also less demand (although I know Century is spending non-trivial sums to wire up new residences for people attracted to North Dakota Bakken formation hydrocarbon extraction).
try:

> In this case, em dashes are doing something similar to a pair of commas (which can also denote side info but they do it more casually) and parentheses.

The commas after "pair of commas" are the parenthetical commas he is describing
>> I like my humor like I like my wine: dry and produced in a manner which oppresses many people.

Always nice to find a kindred soul. :-) But I really prefer people I don't agree with, arguing teaches me more.

>> A real business proposal is one which uses machine learning to detect it.

There was a story on HN recently about CIA (NSA? Some TLA) wanting an irony/sarcasm detector. C Stross had lots of fun with it. I guess such a detector would need a full damn General AI -- and probably not even that is enough.

Some form of accredited user accounts (HN/slashdot style) could vote for if something should be flagged. I can't see anything better, really.

Re the Russian subject, I saw these on FB some time ago:

http://www.sptimes.ru/story/38052

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/04/pro-rus...

Edit: On consideration, re a detector: This is a type of spam, the comments seem to be written and then translated. The problem is that detectors need to recognize new comments/angles at least every week, maybe more than once a day. And quite quickly it would be rewritten to fool the detectors. I don't believe in automation here, but please prove me wrong.
More likely 1E9
Your spec is over generalized into all forms of observation and comparison. The Turing test is very limited into written 1 on 1 conversation as culturally conceived by humans. There's no particular reason to assume a non-human intelligence would have a human-like culture of communication, which kind of breaks it.

Here's a fun idea for several intelligence tests we can call the VLM tests that have nothing to do with two way conversation like the Turing test.

Given "a machine intelligence" spin up a couple million of them in a "fun" simulation environment and see how much thermodynamic dis-equilibrium they generate by whatever social interaction they see fit to apply to each other. Is it as interesting (aka thermodynamic dis-equilibrium) as a GoL or a real world anthill or a Dwarf Fortress or a Google Earth? Is their simulated culture as interesting to read as HN, or as dumb as youtube comments (which used to be the gold standard of dumbness in social media)

Assuming you can crack the literary code (if any exists) another game to play is extract the meme-flow of a culture of AI vs a culture of 4chan and vote for whichever meme came from a more intelligent group. This is Turing-ish WRT human observers majority vote and such, but is completely non-interactive, merely humans, or even trained sociologists, trying to figure out given two memes which is more intelligent.

Getting out the Sherlock Holmes hat, its possible to determine if an artifact came from an intelligence without talking to the intelligence for awhile. I suspect archeologists have really fun debates on this topic. Is this a stone hammer or merely a peculiar river rock, etc.
You mean judging an idea's viability by sitting around a table and guessing? When it comes to judging ideas errors by investors and "customers" during customer validation give prudence to the fact that no one knows which idea would really take off. A computerized system would make the mistake more difficult to accept.
I like this definition of unimportant stuff, "What's "small stuff?" Roughly, work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary."

If you you have children, hopefully they will write your obituary, so putting of cleaning the house to go camping with the kids might result in a, "loving dad" on your obituary.

This is in addition to all the obvious big career stuff I thought of initially after reading that definition.
It's about a 3 way similarity between em dashes, comma pairs and parentheses.

(if they didn't share the similarity I guess 'or' would fit better)
The funny thing about this issue is that while many banks have ridiculously bad authentication systems from a network security point of view, they generally seem to suffer almost no negative consequences from it, as far as people actually getting hacked and losing money. Perhaps it's the level of secondary checks in their systems making it tough to actually monetize a hacked account without leading the law straight to your door.

Maybe there's a lesson here - a broader approach to security, like implementing checks at every level of operation to make sure nothing bad happens even if an attacker is deep into the system, is better than a singular focus on password length and other login details.
Your circle of friends (even better if they could be potential users), and a Google or Excel spreadsheet.
"You guys all try to find ways to vilify...."

I would appreciate it if you would not hijack my comment to accuse me of something I haven't done.
InfoQ did a surprisingly accurate summation, too: http://www.infoq.com/articles/PyParallel

> I believe communication from parallel threads to the main thread is done by sending serialised objects.

That's one of the open areas of exploration... how do you share things in a shared-nothing approach? This isn't as important for stateless I/O-driven applications (like an HTTP server), but it becomes very important when trying to leverage PyParallel for, well, exactly that, parallel computation.
The only way to get people to encrypt their email will be to make them want to encrypt their email enough to overcome whatever hassle it takes to do so.

Most people seem focused on making the second part of that equation (the hassle) small. Which is great. But even if you can somehow get it to 0, that may not be enough to get it over the hill.

That leaves making people want to encrypt their email. And abstract notions like the NSA aren't going to be enough. It needs to be personal and immediate. So: if you really want to encourage secure email, start intercepting clear email and responding to it. The surprise introduction of a third party in the email conversation will cause most people to realize their email is not secure (which almost everyone doesn't know) and create an impetus for action.

Now, this is a pretty nefarious scheme (grey-hat at best) and extremely dangerous due to the inevitable legal freak-out, and I'm not going to be doing it, but if I wanted to encourage the world to move to secure email, it's how I'd do it.
There is also a herd immunity as the bank is highly unlikely to post two lists on their website, one of low security users and another of high security users. So outside attackers have to break the first ring of security before knowing there exists a second ring.
it's a good point, but isn't that the point of punctuation?
Pluto may Share a Thin Cloak with Charon
This is the RED BUTTON. Fight back.

http://youtu.be/NFRSHVT5sXU/
I inadvertently ran into this article a few weeks ago and was pleasantly surprised... it's not a bad summary at all (especially considering I had no contact with Jonathan).
Microsoft and co ditched ES4.Let us be reminded that the only vendor pushing for it was Adobe.
So no it couldnt have happened with a better language,in fact it didnt,because whatever vendors say today,they dont want the web to be too powerfull.
R and matlab are better, but those tools also have issues integrating into production depending on what you are doing. It's not so much the exact tool you use, but just having a little forethought about how your creation is going to interact with a production system.

A lot of people feel programming is undervalued in academia. For instance Hadley Wickham creator of ggplot2 probably hasn't gotten the recognition he deserves. With a prevailing attitude such as that is it any wonder academic code has such a poor reputation?

Whickham notes that he thinks tides are changing. I agree that it is, as a part of the datascience phenomenon. As part of the change you are going to see a few more macbooks, some cloud servers, maybe a guy with glasses talking about version control and software design. It is not all garbage, I hope you keep an open mind.

Q:Do you feel that the academic culture has caught up with and supports
non-traditional academic contributions (e.g. R packages instead of
papers)?

A:It’s hard to tell. I think it’s getting better, but it’s still hard to
get recognition that software development is an intellectual activity
in the same way that developing a new mathematical theorem is.[1]

1. http://simplystatistics.org/2012/05/11/ha/
That's from Djigstra.

I digress. Most of the times, mimicking Nature works very well. We tend to always remember our most spectacular failure, but that's a selection bias.
Even though many AI researchers will agree that the Turing Test isn't a very good representation of "real" intelligence, this is still a huge milestone. Many, many researchers have tried and failed to pass the Turing Test.

But people will continue to dismiss the state of the art and deny that computers have "real" intelligence, the same way they did when the computer defeated Kasparov, the same way they did when we saw Googles self driving cars, the same way they did when a computer won on Jeopardy, and now with the Turing Test. Even when we have robots that look and act exactly like humans, many people will say that they are not "really" intelligent and dismiss the accomplishment. They will still be saying that when AIs twice as smart as people arrive and they have to figure out what to do with billions of what will then be, relatively speaking, mentally challenged people.
Ouch. Fairly nicely written piece about punctuation, and generally nicely formatted with justification, properly indented paragraphs, use of em dashes, and so on; and then it uses straight quotes everywhere. While I'm generally used to straight quotes everywhere on the web, the additional standard set by the rest of the typesetting and the topic meant that their omission here was that much more glaring.
I'm not sure how much work that is, but I'm guessing it's a lot for every $10,000 a month you get. I'm also guessing you can't share the same domain.
I consider my 'Sales Analyst' role an intro to data science. Essentially, we're collecting all types of data from different sources and producing reports on them.

I know ... I'd be able to land a data science job ... but just don't have anything on my resume to qualify me.

Who uses the reports you produce? What decisions do they make as a result? How often do they make these decisions? What is the impact?

If you want to build on your current role as a way to become a data scientist, in your current company or elsewhere, perhaps you can look at ways to:

- Generate recommendations based on the reports you've designed

- Automate some decisions that are being made manually now

- Figure out a way to influence additional teams who could/should use the data you're analysing

In short: figure out a way to generate additional $$$ impact, or improve/automate an existing process which requires manual effort, so that those people can focus on stuff which cannot easily be automated.
I agree. But even if we agree that the focus of our attention isn't completely rational, that's no reason to expect it to be completely divorced from reality as it is with the anti terrorism.
The whole point of terrorism is the psychological impact.

Which makes it all the more important that the state not feed into the psychological impact, no? One of the ways you keep a stiff upper lip is acknowledge that society is already accustomed to certain levels of murder and accidental death.
Strangely fascinating to watch, although I did eventually get bored before my collection completed.

I wonder what algorithm this uses. Are you assuming a totally random and even distribution of all cards? If so, I suspect this does not reflect the reality. I remember collecting these cards as a kid and you'd always end up with about ten copies of some obscure East European midfielder, while the ones you really wanted seemed as rare as rocking horse poo.

The older, more cynical me suspects companies like Panini probably use quite cunningly worked out distributions of cards for each market region, to ensure that the most wanted players in any country are the hardest to come by, thus encouraging ever more purchases.
I agree with you. I think governments have always wanted to do what the NSA is doing. They've only just now become able to do it thanks to technology enabling them. Despite not being an american i also don't think the US government is worse than others, they're only better at it right now, but as technology accelerates eventually even the smallest fringe group or island state will have weapons of mass digital surveillance.

My point is that the answer is not technological or legal in nature, it is moral. We need to convince the majority of people that digital mass surveillance is immoral, regardless of who does it or why, and the (il)legality of it will follow.

The question is though: how many people even in the technology community really object to the act of bulk spying by itself, instead of just not liking it when it's done to them?
We might even have a middle-eastern dictator creating weapons of mass destruction, even going so far as having mobile biological weapons labs. Something surely must be done before it's too late!
Should never have to give out your password over the phone, but for security questions the reason why its often alphanumeric is you will have people entering security questions like "how much did your first car cost" and they enter something in pounds sterling and pence which the Philippines call center phone script reader who deals in dollars all day isn't going to be able to interpret.

Or "what street name did you grow up on" could include some UTF-8 glyphs from Asian immigrants.
You may want to read this (long) article:

http://blog.mecheye.net/2012/06/the-linux-graphics-stack/

Not claiming I understand it all, but it's long because graphics are complicated :) I have been surprised at how device-dependent graphics software is.

I wonder if Windows or OS X has nicer graphics abstractions than Linux? i.e. that make it less of a mess?
I'd suggest to continue on to footnote 3 if you plan to use footnotes in your writing, though :)
> As we have mentioned, digital computers fall within the class of discrete-state machines. But the number of states of which such a machine is capable is usually enormously large. For instance, the number for the machine now working at Manchester is about 2 165,000, i.e., about 10 50,000. Compare this with our example of the clicking wheel described above, which had three states. It is not difficult to see why the number of states should be so immense. The computer includes a store corresponding to the paper used by a human computer. It must be possible to write into the store any one of the combinations of symbols which might have been written on the paper. For simplicity suppose that only digits from 0 to 9 are used as symbols. Variations in handwriting are ignored. Suppose the computer is allowed 100 sheets of paper each containing 50 lines each with room for 30 digits. Then the number of states is 10 100x50x30 i.e., 10 150,000 . This is about the number of states of three Manchester machines put together. The logarithm to the base two of the number of states is usually called the "storage capacity" of the machine. Thus the Manchester machine has a storage capacity of about 165,000 and the wheel machine of our example about 1.6. If two machines are put together their capacities must be added to obtain the capacity of the resultant machine. This leads to the possibility of statements such as "The Manchester machine contains 64 magnetic tracks each with a capacity of 2560, eight electronic tubes with a capacity of 1280. Miscellaneous storage amounts to about 300 making a total of 174,380."
Then just work enough to pay rent and eat. I bet you earn more than you strictly need.
Knew it before I even clicked the link. They've gone a bit downhill since their first album, but the first (on which this song appears) is a classic.
I was never taught about the Oxford Comma (I'm not a native speaker), but trained myself to use it consistently after seeing this http://jaced.com/blogpix/2013/washingtonlincolnoxford.jpg.

This has made me rethink though - he makes a great point that writing is about transferring the voices in my head into the readers', so I'll keep that in mind for any creative writing.

Heck, not just creative writing, I can think of more than one occasion where I put an Oxford Comma in a press release even though it read better to me without.

Thanks for sharing!
The point is, this will obviously get much more dangerous -- not better. We have only seen the start of this discussion.

Edit: A bit of bad humor: As an old misanthrope which had to accept that all humanity's problems seems to get solved soon (energy from solar or fusion in a few decades, electric cars, better health, etc, etc) it is good to think everything is back to normal! Jingoism from nuclear states (Russia, China and soon Iran) and an impossibility to have humane, liberal societies... "The Road", here we come! :-)
Without the commas, it sounds to me like the author is excited and animated about his topic, tumbling forward. I imagine him gesticulating wildly. I guess you were imagining more of a measured pronouncement, with paused emphasis to cause us to carefully consider each element. As he says, the punctuation imparts different styles.

I think the tumbling-forward interpretation works better with the list having four elements. They're meant to be a cumulative item, making his point as much by the number of different elements as by the meaning of each individual one. This style works better when it gives the impression of rushing.