skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was thinking about a Bitcoin-based e-voting system (Specifically made for political nation-scale elections) for some time. It was a project that I'd like to get involved after I get my degree (~ Jan 2015). I believe it is the future because it can incorporate everything that an e-voting system needs (privacy, votes are re-countable, data is publicly accessible, nodes can be run from individuals to organizations to parties, etc.)

This looks not bad but what I'm failing to understand is:

* Is this an organization or a company?
* Is code open source? Where is it?
* Are they interested in 'corporate voting' schemes or in public voting schemes?

I see nothing more than a landing page which says a several things but nothing specific and NO I don't want to register first in order to know exactly what this is.
64-Bit Chrome for Windows
It's dead to me.
Parsing HTML with C++ (With extra UTF-8 woes)
Show HN: Containerize the Web – A Hacker News for Docker
See http://containerizetheweb.com/posts/mb4CRdZS5X3Qsc366 for my motivations.
The m64.pl executable seems to be a vanilla version of cpuminerd. By default it connects to http://127.0.0.1:9332 and mines using the scrypt algorithm. It could have been started with different parameters, or the port was tunneled to a pool. Would be interesting to know the ip.

off: does anyone know which font he uses in the terminal? Looks awesome.
Backstage with the Gameover Botnet Hijackers
Did you read the article? Every point you raise is addressed by it.

You: Mistakes happen because of people

Article: When a space shuttle crashes or an oil tanker leaks, our instinct is to look for a single, “root” cause. This often leads us to the operator: the person who triggered the disaster by pulling the wrong lever or entering the wrong line of code. But the operator is at the end of a long chain of decisions, some of them taken that day, some taken long in the past, all contributing to the accident; like achievements, accidents are a team effort.

> the reason pilots have less mistakes is because a computer pretty much does 99% of the work

Except in take-off and landing, which is when most accidents happen. Also, automation would not have helped at all in the United 173 situation - that was clear human error, and the reason those kinds of errors happen less are due to the accident investigation and human resource management techniques this article is talking about:

> To the great credit of the aviation industry, it became one of the most influential disasters in history. Galvanised by it and a handful of other crashes from the same era, the industry transformed its training and safety practices, instituting a set of principles and procedures known as CRM: crew resource management.
please see github.com/openspatial for SDK, code samples and an emulator for iOS/Android.
Another perspective: Perl lost because the culture of internet software development moved away from hackers who grokked humor and cleverness towards team-driven business application developers who preferred synergistic framework solutions.
First thing I looked for in Swift was support for Python's slicing syntax. It's a shame they decided against using that.
You can use a similar technique for identifying international arms dealers, sanction busters, CIA rendition flights, etc. Alex Harrowell occasionally blogs about this:

http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2011/01/09/a-quick-howto/ - aircraft investigation resources

http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/07/23/o-rly/ - Suspicious Iran-to-Syria flights

http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2009/12/23/mystery-jet-upda... - mystery 727 in a desert
On 2: Still 193 unique files in /usr/bin on my system containing the string '/usr/bin/perl'. Only 51 containing '/usr/bin/python'.
well changing the MAC can be evidence for this:

imagine you get banned from your university network for breaking the terms of use (lets say torrenting) - you change your MAC address so you can get back on the network. you know you've been banned and you've made the conscious decision to bypass the security of the network.
I think the article is a little bit harsh on Perl. Ruby (1995) and Python (1993) wouldn't probably exist without Perl (1987). Hence IMHO it's just a sort of evolution, nothing more. The other two languages learned from Perl's mistakes and were better designed.
Why Does Matter Exceed Antimatter?
Assuming you're referring to the font of the blog's text...

Firefox: Right click, inspect element, click the "fonts" tab on the right.

Chrome: Right click, inspect elmeent, look at "Computed" styles on the right, find Rendered Fonts.

Ironically, the answer is he's not using a font. It uses Times New Roman on my Chrome and DejaVu Serif on my firefox because those are my default system fonts, not because he specified them. If you look at the source of the webpage, you'll see he has zero stylesheet links, all his styles are inline in <style> blocks... So searching font in that one source page is sufficient to find he only styles code blocks, the rest is default.

If you're referring to some other font, I have no clue, sorry!
For anyone interested: The videos are open to the public at https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/.
Perl's brand is damaged. No amount of explaining fixes a broken brand.

The best that can probably be done is to create a new language which is, say, a clean subset of Perl 6 and call it something new, focusing the message on how readable and intuitive it is.
Tom Ray's electric-powered evolution machine
The NHS also runs on overworking its employees and assuming they will still be effective at the end of a 20 hour shift with no sleep. If anyone making a completely understandable mistake due to the terrible conditions they have to work in is blamed and fired for it, would that really help? I think it's understandable for people to cover their own ass if they are expected to be infallible even under poor conditions - everyone else is doing it, if you don't the only difference it makes to the NHS is that it's down one employee. This is just one way of many possible ways that what might first appear to be a single human failing is down to a larger institutional problem.
Thanks, but I was referring to the screenshot :)
That sounds like great fun, I'd be really interested in a write-up of your project if you have the time. Particularly hacking the TV dongles, and working out the interesting GPS math!
Hong Kong, Remote, Full Time

Stack: Front-end: HTML, CSS (SASS & LESS), JavaScript (BackBone.js, Angular.js & Node.js)

Resume: https://www.dropbox.com/s/0wyi7yqc2b2xeqt/CV.pdf
Contact: Can be found in my CV

I'm looking for either a startup building a product, or an already established company building a great product.
I would love to build something that users love using, something that I can improve and make better.

I'm also interested in performing A/B tests and looking at user behavior.
github.com/openspatial already documents the wire protocol, has sample code, SDKs for iOS/Android and an emulator.

We invested our time in making sure the SDK was robust and documented well for developers. We plan to add more technical documentation in the future. Stay tuned.
Isn't that a weird thing? Every recruiter post I'm seeing talks about how to write unit test, write clear comments, choose methods (functions) name with care, document your code even if it looks silly and again write tests!.

It's like what everyone wants, but then neither needs...
Not my downvote, but I suspect people don't like the slippery slope argument ("tracking is omnipresent on the web, therefore it's OK to do it in the real world as well").

Then there's "better shopping experiences" which most people's BS translators will read as "worse shopping experiences / persuading people to spend more than they intended".
> It's nice to see software engineering practices being backported to more conservative and stagnant forms of engineering. 8)

Hehe, I had to read that three times before the coin dropped :)
Perry actually won the Ignobel price for this essay: http://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2011

(you may have to scroll down a bit to see it)
Or more importantly, once in they insert a public key in there so if you naively disable password access they'll still be able to get back in. Change the password AND remove any keys in ~/.ssh. Also a debsums or rpm -qV is a good idea. A complete re-install is my preferred method though.
Treating Delhi's Birds of prey
Spoken language is just a small part of overall communication. Today Turing Test should consist of not only speaking but simulating, perhaps by a streaming video, a professor in front of a class of wild students. He should strive to capture their attention, to gain their respect and interest, to understand their inner state of mind.

Speaking is only a way of getting into the stage. Once into the highlights you must prove you are a leader or, if you decide so, that you are able to gain the attention of your audience to emphasize something important that previously was not perceived as such. That is speaking is an art, is not about explaining a plot but about creating a story.
UK's healthcare system has real serious issues, sorry but the Victorian era is over, stop underrating all the protocols, procedures and recommendations from your American and European counterparts.

And don't say it's because UK population has different needs, one example, two hospitals at London same medical specialty, they recommend different medication doses for exactly the same treatment in their protocols.

No specialty chiefs, no teams, no supervisors, only solo consultants.
One of the best pieces of advice I heard from our resident stats/machine learning researcher at Uni was this: If a paper is published which claims to show a technique for profiting on the share market, then it doesn't work. If it did, they wouldn't have published it.

Having said that, there is plenty of interesting papers in this area, and from the abstract, this paper seems to take an interesting approach too.
I agree. Smaller cars are not only more affordable (both in terms of original price and fuel efficiency) than normal-sized, let alone 'big' cars, but they're also significantly more practical in crowded conditions, with regards to manoeuvring and parking. They don't even necessarily offer less utility than larger cars; they are simply more compact. For these reasons, I think it is likely that smaller vehicles will be adapted in urban centres of developing nations in great number, and they may even gain popularity in developed nations due to their environmental and financial efficiency.

If the article in question reports anything even close to the truth, then auto-manufacturers in Japan are making a mistake: they are abandoning their practice precisely when they are really getting their chance to make significant global impact.
underlying "wars" occurring within a single species

Have you met any humans lately? We all have divergent interests, differently expressed in different aspects of our lives. The entirety of law and politics is this.
HangFire – reliable fire'n'forget, delayed and recurring tasks inside ASP.NET app
I agree, but naive new Perl users might benefit from some prominent showcasing of well-known good modules or maybe comparison charts between modules in the same functional niche... Maybe that is a subject better left to Perl bloggers rather than to the neutral CPAN, but first contact with Perl is sometimes an embarrassment of riches.

Anyway, I love the CPAN - whatever I imagine myself wanting to do, five people have done it already !
No language syntax causes me higher cognitive dissonance than perl. I just find it fugly.
I don't think your downvotes relate to criticising Apple per se; they're due to a poor argument style. I am no great fan of Apple, but hurling vague accusations and FUD, then shifting the goalposts when anyone tries to refute you, adds little to the conversation besides noise.

> I still haven't changed my mind

Well you should have. You've been thoroughly shot down. The fact you don't accept that says more about you than anyone else.
But if they asked, you could lie to them. Lots of people would. There's a total presumptive lack of trust, which is part of why the whole business is so corrosive.
Hibernate and Concurrency: The Data Knowledge Stack
I always thought a fun phone app would be a Google Sky clone for aeroplanes. i.e. instead of pointing your phone at a planet, point it at a plane and get the ADS-B details on it appear.
> Punctuation started with periods that told the speaker when to take a breath

A great book that looks at how punctuation characters date back to ancient greek writing and how it was used to show how text should be read is Shady Characters: Ampersands, Interrobangs and other Typographical Curiosities:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EAA6QHC/

Edit: You can read the first chapter in the preview with pictures of the ancient texts
Scientists: A mysterious animal ate an entire 9-foot great white shark
As nice as this may be for privacy, there is too much at stake here commercially, so this will likely be just a step in the cat and mouse game.

Face recognition comes to mind as a technology that can replace this, and perhaps as a result of the MAC scrambling we will see a bigger push for face recognition in stores.
But this shows once again the conflictual nature of Microsoft's two strategies with the Xbox One. It's like the gaming part is more of an afterthought, and what they really want is for Xbox to become everyone's streaming box - a $400 streaming box.

For now. But they also have a perfectly capable $179 streaming box that blows e.g. the Apple TV out of the water performance-wise and has a large number of popular game titles.

The XBox One is apparently popular enough to sell a couple of million devices (roughly in the same ballpark as most other streaming boxes) and packs enough punch to gently go from $400 to the 360's price point.

What I wonder about is what's in it for Microsoft. First of all, the music + movie + some apps market is much larger than the hard core gamer's market. And they make it awfully hard for people to buy into their ecosystem. A $50 streaming box would make that Windows Phone (which cannot stream to Apple TV or Chromecast) much more interesting for a lot of people than having to buy a game console for streaming.
I think it does prevent sending keyboard strokes by having two levels of sandboxing, where you can either run heavily locked down with no network, or opt in to extra permissions including networking in which case your app will be extra carefully reviewed by apple + users will get huge warnings during install.
The problem is the VISA. If you don't have extra-ordinary skills for a company to decide to get you a VISA, it's hard to get a job.

Try to spend 1 or 2 years in Europe working for a big institution and also start a submitting code to big, shinny open source projects in the area that is of your interest. Then you can build a portfolio. Also be active here, on github and on SO, will help considerably from what I've seen.
Save Our Inboxes, Adopt the Email Charter
Elon Musk Is Making The Most Difficult Bet Of His Career
As a Linux enthusiast, I cringe every time I read "year of the Linux desktop". (Bear with me, this is on-topic)

Linux is a very usable OS today. Windows, comparatively, is a much less usable OS. USB drivers that need 3 minutes to set up every time I plug my mouse in a different port. More issues with sound than there are with Pulseaudio. And, yes, this is a huge peeve of mine: Only a tiny fraction of windows software is ever ported to 64 bit. WTF?

Almost all linux software is readily available on 64 bit, as 64 bit; this includes Chrome/Chromium from the very, very early days. So now, a major web browser was released as 64 bit on Windows. Congratulations. Maybe 2014 will be the year of the Windows desktop.
The Metasploit Framework
Dc.js – Dimensional Charting JavaScript Library
> The OS takes 30 percent of the processing power with a game running? That's crazy if true. It would show how silly the whole idea of "one OS everywhere" really is. It would be much better to have a more stripped down OS that just does the basics and gets you inside a game, and then gets out of the way, instead.

Isn't that 30% made to take care of the social features, like "sharing a clip of the last frag I just achieved" in a FPS or something like that ? If you want to have these advanced features, you need a number of tasks to run in the background and I would not be surprised by the 30% CPU time.
How can I disable Secure Boot, without entering in BiOS Setup?
It's not mandatory in Europe until 2017 - for instance you won't see any FlyBE ADS-B tracking data on sites like flightradar24 because their fleet consists mostly of Embraer's and Dash 8-Q400 and very few of those aircraft have ADS-B transponders (at least at the moment).
Chromium blog (the actual source) explains why 64-bit windows version is interesting: http://blog.chromium.org/2014/06/try-out-new-64-bit-windows-...

TL;DR: This version improves on speed (processor optimizations related), security (windows features only available in 64-bit) and stability (they don't say why, could be related to windows itself).
>But industry and government officials are increasingly worried that these microvehicles have become a distraction for the nation’s automakers — still bastions of the Japanese economy — and are moving to wean drivers off them. In April the government took what its critics charged was a hard-line route. Kei drivers were hit with a triple whammy of a higher sales tax, higher gasoline tax and higher kei car tax, the last of which the government raised by 50 percent, sharply narrowing their tax difference with regular-size vehicles.

I feel like there's more going on than the article is saying. "industry and government officials are increasingly worried that these microvehicles have become a distraction for the nation’s automakers" sounds like lobbyists for full-size cars feeding politicians what to say. I don't buy that a bunch of politicians decided it was the for the greater good of the country to increase taxes on a cheap, fuel efficient vehicle.
Well OK, but if you had a conversation like that with a bot, would you be prepared to consider the bot as being conscious? Thats the deeper question that the Turing Test is really about, rather than human/not human.
IDEO Releases A New Photoshop For Interaction Design
iOS 8 Extensions: Apple’s Plan for a Powerful App Ecosystem
Any major IT consultancy company. Especially those working for the government.

But the modus operandus is standard even for small agencies.

You get to bid for a project. If your bid is anywhere near realistic, there's no way you'll ever get it, because the competition will bid way, way lower.

So you put in a bid that you know will never get the project completed and/or will reduce quality well below what will ever be acceptable. However, the contract will be full of loopholes that will allow you to get away with it. You know that once your in, and once the project is far enough along, the client will have no choice but to pay you extra to do what actually needed to be done in the first place.

No, the client is not getting screwed. Especially when it comes to governments and major corporations, everyone knows this is going to happen. It's just impossible to get the project started for anywhere near the real price tag.

But even on a smaller scale, for instance a web agency with a 20K project, if you put in an honest bid you'll either never get the job or be forced to build crap.

From web shopping carts to bridges, people don't value good engineering and planning. Or at least not until they are confronted with the results of bad engineering and planning.

So there's the original budget and there's reality, and an entire cult of rituals surrounding bridging the huge gap between the two. And it is this ritual in which people on both ends take a considerable percentage of the top, so all the decision makers are vested in keeping this ritual going despite all of the well publicized failures.

If you are a contractor and you're not getting at least 50% more out of a gig than the original contract, you're not playing the game very well.
Flightradar24, the iOS mobile app, at least, already do it.
I really love this. I made a similar thing back in 2000:

http://www.clustercompute.com/

We had landed a job to compress tens of thousands of CDs to mp3 for a dutch broadcasting corporation and doing it on a single machine would have taken years at the speed mp3 compressors were running in those days (Fraunhofer reference code).

Doing it on this stack of boards got the job done in under two months.

Nowhere near as just-because-I-can as the linked article though.
How do you abbreviate million? m? M? MM?
"The way I see software, it gets better with use. It is not self-healing, but given that somebody is fixing the bugs that are found (which is often the case), then software keeps getting better with use."

It's got to be more nuanced than that. For example, software won't benefit from bugs being fixed if the rate of churn is very high, if new features are added rapidly and the size of the state space explodes. Times like that create technical debt. Surely technical debt isn't antifragile. Since we still don't know how to avoid it, it seems a stretch to say all software is antifragile.
Former submariner here. I'm glad they included my favorite Navy definition, which I think can be important for startups, too.

"50/50/90: Used to describe the phenomenon whereby a question that statistically has a 50/50 chance of being answered correctly is actually answered incorrectly 90% of the time. Used primarily in reference to nuclear operators, who tend to over-think ("nuke") a problem."
NDC 2014, Insecure coding in C and C++ [video]
Well, CPython is embarrassingly slow.

The damaging thing is claiming things like PythonJS are implementations of Python, when they merely share syntax and some semantics. They might be fast, but that's not very relevant.

Runtimes like PyPy is where we should be looking, since they implement the full Python language and are fast.
Others would take the definitions They learned 10 or 50 years ago in their college comp-sci textbooks as the agreed upon definition, and those differ.

For example, what I learned decades ago doesn't include that 2004 paper that convincingly shows reference counting to be one end of a scale that has pure GC at the other end.

Yet, that paper made me realize that reference counting is, in some sense, garbage collection.

On the other hand, I see no big problem in having an ambiguous term. That happen all over the world, also in science. Chemists have 'alcohol' (ethanol) vs 'an alcohol' (a family of compounds that includes ethanol), mathematicians have words such as 'algebra', biologists have roses as a family of plants and as a subset thereof, etc.
> I don't buy that a bunch of politicians decided it was the for the greater good of the country to increase taxes on a cheap, fuel efficient vehicle.

You are right, politicians in Japan are mostly influenced by industry lobbies. They went to devaluated the Yen not too long ago just so that Toyota and a few other major manufacturers could sell more products overseas. And now everything is more expensive in Japan (petrol price increased so all manufacturing goods and anything that needs to be moved around has increased significantly in price).
What people say when asked is not very interesting. How people actually act matters much more. People say a whole lot of things about their own behaviour when asked that has absolutely no relation to reality.
cffi has been getting more popular lately, though, and it works on both CPython and PyPy.

Hopefully this will slowly fix itself.
Possible, but it doesn't take many people trading on a signal to wipe out any correlation that may have been there.