skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Again, a great article, but I feel like some of the general thinking behind heuristics is getting lost. Heuristics can be significantly more interesting than distance between two points. This isn't a huge criticism. In this context -- pathfinding on a grid -- complicated heuristics may not be needed.

When I first read about A* a long time ago I remember, for example, reading about how static summaries of chess board positions may be useful heuristics. Developing pieces towards the center of the board is often better, for example. To me, seeing this was an "ah ha" moment for heuristics: use them if they are cheap and (sometimes) informative, relative to the search cost.
Amazon already is in publishing business: https://www.apub.com/imprints
Ask HN: What happens to real estate prices after self-driving cars?
Basically my thinking is this:

self driving cars become the norm
=> no need for personal cars
=> no need for parking lots & street parking
=> more supply of land for commercial & residential

self driving cars become the norm
=> driving is much more efficient
=> no need for large roads & highways
=> more supply of land for commercial & residential

self driving cars become the norm
=> driving is much more efficient
=> suburbs that WERE 1 hour away are now only 30 minutes away (maybe even less)
=> there are a lot more suburbs which are practical in terms of commuting (sure, I'll live 100 miles away if I can still get to the city in 45 minutes)
=> less demand for prime real estate

more supply + less demand
=> drop in real estate prices

Am I missing something?

If anyone has any thoughts, please leave them in the comments.
Other close calls prevented by a single person:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident
The story would have been a lot shorter if the author knew not to answer police questions.

"The officer then opened the backseat door where I was sitting and asked if I was paying for the ride."

Just don't answer. You don't have to. Even if you knew the law had passed in Denver, why would you answer? It cannot help you.
I agree.

Using a synchronous programming style (i.e. function returns value) whenever you are performing a synchronous operation is always going to be more clear than using an asynchronous programming style for synchronous operations (i.e. function invokes passed function with value and returns undefined). And that's why many languages have await - to help make the async code have a more synchronous(and more easily readable) programming style.
The visualizations are incredibly key to helping understand. It would have been much harder for me to understand what was going on without it.

Well done!
You should definitely be using promises. Q is a good library. Don't worry about performance, I can say with extreme confidence that promise execution speed is not your bottleneck. In that 0.01% of times where it is, use Bluebird.
This brings up an interesting point about what exactly the law is and how everyone's supposed to be aware of it.

It's 2014. Why can't officers carry a tablet that stores the entirety of the law, and show you exactly to the letter which law you're violating? Likewise, every citizen should have trivial access to the extant laws, with notes explaining them in a way that's comprehensible to anyone with a high school education.

If ignorance of the law isn't a valid excuse for breaking it, everyone should have simple access to it.
Their site hasn't gone up yet, but thanks for the comment! And yes, it is a way of pre-screening clients. And yes, I'd highly suggest doing something similar if you freelance.
Ask HN: Why don't Chromebooks provide the option to run Android?
It would cost Google nothing and make Chromebooks more attractive
"my own function quene method"

Huh?
Yeah, the fact that breaking this cryptosystem is essentially equivalent to attacking unsalted passwords means that an attacker can save a lot of work.

Also, this simplifies setting up the attack in general. For example, attacking a bunch of keys based on random data + passwords is way harder than attacking keys based on just passwords, because for the former you must also have the random data (which presumably is not posted online in massive troves).
Holy crap. I can't believe I'm siding with tobacco companies, but that's absolutely absurd. First of all, it's been pretty common knowledge that smoking tobacco is unhealthy and addictive since the 60's. No one then or now who is smoking was doing so with ignorance. Secondly, there have been far more egregious instances of wrongful death (companies who didn't tell workers about dangerous chemicals they were exposed to, releasing toxic chemicals into the environment causing birth defects, etc); awarding 26 billion dollars to someone, which would put them in the top 25 richest people in the world, for a death nearly 20 years ago... I just can't see the justification. (Meanwhile, Ethan Couch kills four people drunk driving and goes to summer camp)
Right. Piss off a cop. Brilliant! The balanced and calculated reactions of these individuals was very impressive, I only wish I had their fortitude and thoughtfulness in such situations.
They were punitive damages, not compensatory damages.
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The government can disagree with your return based on their data without auditing. A couple of years ago, the government told me they thought I'd under-reported my taxable income from a couple of years earlier (I had, because a place I'd worked had failed to give me a 1099). I wasn't required to undergo an audit; they just said they thought I owed this much money and I should either pay it or explain why I didn't actually owe it.
No it's about the accelerating evolution of technology and disruption and the social chaos it's generating. Not saying it's bad, just that this is all happening.
"If anyone saw the documents that this jury saw, I believe that person would have awarded a similar or greater verdict amount," he said.

$23.6 billion is a lot. It would take many lifetimes for him to make that much money or even just have a similar affect on the world around him as that much money, so those would have to be some pretty damning documents to award that.

Though I'd be surprised if anywhere near that amount actually gets awarded.
Its not.

A user provided volume/device should always be mounted with "nosuid,nodev" options,some people will add "noexec" into the mix but i find it not to be very useful.

Most "sane" mount front ends will also not mount any arbitrary file system on these user provided volumes/devices.They will only mount file systems they explicitly allow and file systems that are already known by the system ie file systems whose modules are already loaded.This is done to prevent misuse of mount to load kernel modules that are not already loaded.

The problem is with what options were used with mount command and TrueCrypt uses bad options.Here,TrueCrypt is used not for its encryption feature,but for its bad mount command usage.Any other tool with the same bad usage will do in carrying out the exploit.
The submitter didn't include a url. We'll add it. But this is not a good HN story: high controversy, low information.
Interesting question, great to see stuff like this here.

>suburbs that WERE 1 hour away are now only 30 minutes away..

Possibly, though that kind of a speedup sounds wildly optimistic.

I'd bet the more significant aspect of this would be the ability to get work done during the ride, which also has the same effect that you point out, increasing the radius of a viable commute.

Still, living close will be desirable. Distance ridden is sure to be part of what determines how much you pay for transportation.
This is an excellent idea. In fact, I'd love to see this expanded into a complete dataset of acquisitions with at least the following data: major subject area (e.g., email, storage, etc.), year founded, year bought, amount bought for, number of total staff after one year, revenue after one year, number of total staff at acquisition, revenue at acquisition).

This could be useful to detect broader M&A trends by subject area. (Which is one possible way to decide on a business - by likelihood of M&A exit - not necessarily a great way, but worth thinking about.)
There were only $15 million in compensatory damages. I'd say it was $23.6 million in total; i.e. it was a typo.
In fact, I would go ahead and say that a synchronous style is also better for async code. Things like generators or coroutines help a lot in terms of code clarity.
I agree that it is a bit overzealous to say that every function should return its data using callbacks, but sometimes it makes sense even for synchronous functions. By making a function which doesn't accept a callback, you are creating an API that can never be made asynchronous, which could cause you more work in the long run.

For example, consider a function with a synchronous implementation. It gets the data from a place that is quick and easy to access, so making it async is not necessary. But later on, that data gets moved to an external database. Now, in the best case, every place where that function is used must be updated to be made asynchronous. In the worst case, every caller of the function, as well as every caller of those functions, and so on, must be updated. And quite often, converting synchronous code to async is no small feat.
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Rails 0.5.0: The end of vaporware (2004)
I think he was getting at "queueing" (or just "queue"). Regardless, it's a wheel that doesn't need reinventing.
Pratt, Rolls or GE?
It also just dropped from 2nd or 3rd position to 31st, pushing it off the front page, in a matter of minutes with little or no change to the ranking of anything else.
When you get to the end of the article, the police officer is presented as being extremely creepy.

From the article:

After the officer gave the citation, he opened the back door again and offered me a “free” ride to the airport. I told him that I had learned while he was gone that the state had just enacted a law allowing Uber. In fact, I referenced that the Governor was proud of it.

I then asked point blank if what I was doing was illegal. The officer didn’t answer my question, said there was some sort of disagreement being discussed about the law and then he told me that the driver had no commercial insurance and that if he got in a wreck and I got injured that there would be no insurance.

He asked again: Do you want the “free” ride or not?
I asked him one more time if what I was doing was illegal. He said he didn’t want to debate the law.

Again, he asked: Do you want the ride or not?
I spoke with super3, the Storj founder earlier today, and he was going over how they'll go about providing Proof of Storage. I'm not qualified to explain it myself, but expect a revised whitepaper in the next couple weeks that goes over it in detail.
>All else being equal, you'd prefer an encrypted filesystem to a simulated encrypted hard disk.

I disagree for these reasons:

1. This decreases composability. With encrypted filesystems, I can't mix and match filesystems and cryptosystems to suit my needs. There is no reason they need to be convolved.

2. This increases complexity. Now, the person writing the software has to be an expert in both filesystems and cryptosystems if they want to do a good job. There is more room for error. (You might say it violates the UNIX philosophy of "do one thing and do it well".)

3. This leaks information to an attacker. They know the layout of my files even without my password. I'm more comfortable with absolutely everything looking like a giant monolithic block of random data.
It seems like as long as the complexity of the passphrase is sufficient, then a rainbow table can't be effective. For example, a 128-bit random AES key is a kind of passphrase that's generally not susceptible to a rainbow table attack (though it's very hard for humans to remember). So the problem here is, how do you force the user to make their passphrase sufficiently complex?

Passphrases also don't protect against keyloggers, which is a downside of this approach.
a supporting e.g.: housing prices drop off once you pass railway stations (and if you have different fare zones, they also drop at the boundary).

Partially offsetting efficiency is more cars = more congestion.
I found it fascinating, because it's a place I'd never go to--and because I admire those with the intestinal fortitude to visit places that could potentially land them at the bottom of a 6' hole in the ground. One of the reasons I read HN is because of the occasional morsel like this that is simultaneously unexpected and rewarding.

The other side of the coin is that it was well written and humorous, which helps, but the language itself brought to life incredible images. Writing is a skill. Good writing is an art. Both can be appreciated but one is adored. I always assumed that hacker-types generally had a wide array of eclectic tastes and interests, and I'm pretty sure some of the more famous ones would agree [1]. Besides, who doesn't like a good, lively story about a culture that's alien to the majority of us Westerners?

I'm still puzzled though. I've never understood why some people have a penchant for clicking links they know they'll hate, read them anyway, and then post their misery and suffering. It would seem less of a cognitive load to ignore the unwanted than to embrace and let it fester.

[1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/reading_habits.html
The Storj developers aren't anonymous at all...Their names and photographs are posted in their pitch deck, and they're active on reddit. The Storjcoins won't be useless either; they'll be the native cryptocurrency in their apps, and from what I understand they intend to add the ability to send data directly to an address in the future.
This is the second time I ended up on Maciej's website through a hacker news link and ended up spending far too much time happily browsing about. He's a far better writer than one would expect a "blogger" to be. Let's call him an essayist instead.

This was the essay that took me to his site the first time around:

http://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
Nice! I like this methodology.

I also wonder if all possible trigrams are equally likely.

Question: why wouldn't you just use the passphrase itself as the password? Just because some websites limit password length?
never talk to cops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc

The right way to handle a police stop (in the US): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDJrQBwJpqk
Coming soon, in 10-15 years...
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Why is this bad advice? You haven't quantified any of your points, so I'm not sure whether there's any merit to either side.
Sure; users are flagging it and we just penalized it. The story is not a good fit for HN, as anyone who has read the HN guidelines should know. It is deplorable that a police officer handled an Uber situation inappropriately, and stories with a high indignation-to-information ratio are not appropriate here.
Cool, good to know. I'd maybe put a tooltip over that link for now ("Link coming soon!" or something). I love the timeline scroll animation, by the way. Congrats on doing something really cool with scroll without completely breaking it - not enough people respect the scrollbar.
Really? Universities don't have a bulk subscription plan or something?
Well, I feel like I explained why not to use callbacks everywhere (worth restating: it leads to unnecessarily messy code). As for why writing your own shoddy implementation of the async package, do I really have to explain why reinventing the wheel is a bad idea? If I did it would border on the hypocritical.
> System RAM is not enabled yet

Is this something that happens to the children of the IBM PC or is this "feature" present in other machines?

I understand someone may want to tune memory controller parameters, but can't it initialize itself with sensible defaults?
I knew someone would say that, hah!

I am 100% for making sync functions asynchronous if it's implementation might have to be async in the future.

In fact, I have done so many times for the exact example you have mentioned.
So perhaps TrueCrypt in linux has a serious security issue should be changed to read Linux has a serious security issue

Doesn't sound particular to TrueCrypt.

I remember fielding a support call from a customer running Coherent on the Commodore Z8000 system who fabricated a floppy with pretty much the same properties--used a user-space program to create a floppy with setuid and then mounted it.

Doesn't sound like TrueCrypt's problem.
Or any battery that will last a full day on my damn iPhone.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Microsoft had the job of making sure every new proposed standard breaks Linux somehow.
For any engineer/dev eloquent communication skills don't matter that much... but for a CEO they matter quite a bit!
The SVG inside an <img> tag doesn't animate under Firefox for me.
Ironically, for all their efforts to make government decisions inclusive, they're choosing to marginalize those who don't meet their tech standards - and being kind of dickish about it. "Sorry Grandma, but you don't use a 'real' browser or a smartypants-phone so bye." "Oh hey José, they only have IE8 at the public library? Tough."
What if the Chinese property bubble goes nuclear?
Please enlighten us on how to generate rainbow tables for passphrases. Assuming they use a lower bound of 6 bits per character, a 100 bit phrase is 46 characters long.

Off the top of my head, I'd use a book of quotations, popular lines from movies, etc. And try to hit common permutations of each. So there's a bit of low hanging fruit. But that could be detected when they generate their key.

Remember, salt doesn't really prevent anyone from using "password" or the first line of Billie Jean.
You are right of course. I just did not want to give out too many details.
According to the original 2010 announcement (1), that's exactly why the phenomenon went unexploited for so long:

“Most people, when they saw this effect, would say, ‘Oh, we had silicon-oxide breakdown,’ and they throw it out,... It was just sitting there waiting to be exploited.”

It's so simple it sounds too good to be true. Two terminals (not three), dielectric in between. High voltage to write (create/destroy the conduction path), low to read (at least the way I understood it). This thing can be stacked in 3D without a problem.

(1) http://news.rice.edu/2010/09/01/nanocrystal-conductors-could...
You force the password to be sufficiently complex by doing what you said: creating it (pseudo)randomly. The aforementioned 128 bit random AES key is robust, assuming the PRNG is solid. A user-provided password utilizing the human mind as its PRNG will never come close.
"svg with css animations img tag " and the object tag ones are the only SVG-based ones that worked for me.

Still, that's awesome. Need a simple "animated gif to animated jpeg (svg)" converter tool.
The video one or the css animations one?
It's true that there were a ton of civilian planes there, but it's not necessarily true that it means the SA-11 set was continuously turned on and tracking civilian flights (as that's a great way to get a HARM missile up your ass), which means that its operators might not have known about the traffic pattern.

Furthermore, double-checking civilian traffic corridors is something you'd expect a professional military to do, but the rebels/separatists are not necessarily professional military. This is admittedly a harder sell, since the SA-11 definitely needs a trained operator and Russia's GRU is known to be leading much of the action on the rebels' side in Donetsk. But it's at least possible to train a rebel operator to do nothing else but operate an SA-11 without also training them extensively in the doctrine of when and why you'd actually use one.

This leaves the question of why they decided to turn on the SAM set at the time they did and shoot down the plane they did... but that can be explained by the rebels thinking that there would be a military resupply flight coming in over the area at a certain time, they turn on the set and "oh look at that, an airplane just where we expected it to be". This "proof" would be horrific to any professional anti-air unit, but again you can see how the theory that a bunch of barely-trained "rebels" that happened to acquire an advanced Russian SAM can't be completely disproven either.

I'm certainly no Russia apologist, and even if the "rebels legitimately screwed up and didn't mean to shoot down a civilian airliner" theory is true, that doesn't really reduce the blame for Russia. After all, if we're assuming the rebels in Donetsk are really rebels and not simply disguised Russian military or GRU units with token Ukrainian participants, then Russia providing these "rebels" a SA-11 set could only have led to something like this happening eventually, the only surprise is that it happened so quickly after Russia provided the SA-11 set.

But I find it hard to believe that even Russia would deliberately target a civilian airliner, or knowingly allow whoever these separatists are to do the same. An inadvertent shoot down of a perceived military flight seems the most likely scenario, it just doesn't turn off the blame for Russia like people might think.
This is really a brilliant idea, thanks.
H264 is problematic because folks aren't legally allowed to support it without paying a consortium. That's a pretty big stumbling block.
All I know is that if Hamas didn't fire rockets into Israel, Israel's army would never come in or bomb anything in there. In fact the IDF would protect them if they were attacked.

As for the blockade -- we need international inspectors to come in and make sure all the tunnels are closed and qassam rockets are gone. Then Egypt and israel should lft the blockade.
Why Medium is the new ‘medium’?
Considering that the tobacco industry is responsible for 5 millon of deaths every single year, probably all deserve the same punishment, if not life sentence for each of their present and past managers.

Anyway, that amount and just to one... this looked like that was just a move from one of the tobacco companies to get rid of one of their competitors.
In this case, even the most cursory attempt to explore the simple explanation would've shown it was the right one, though.
I once wrote an A* algorithm to solve a 15-puzzle (the thing with 15 sliding tiles and 1 empty space, often depicting a picture, or just the numbers).

An easy heuristic that vastly improves the search: the sum of the manhattan distances of the pieces' current locations to their final positions.

So, as you said, rather than thinking about distance only in a Euclidean space, A* heuristics are much more general -- any metric that measures "done-ness".
>It has become obvious that the PKI system is failing, and the main issue is centralization.

Actually, the problem is exactly the opposite. Any CA can sign a certificate for any domain.

What compounds the problem with the CA system is that CA trust is sticky. When a new CA gets added to trust stores, they are effectively trusted for life. That's not how trust actually works.

What we need is a system that is distributed and that allows for trust to be granted and - most importantly - revoked at will without causing collateral damage (i.e. for innocent sites that end up using a bad CA).

Moxie Marlinspike's convergence[0] was a great idea, but it's never really taken off. TACK[1], also by Marlinspike, looks like nice feature to help transition away from the CA system when we come up with something better.

[0] http://convergence.io/
[1] http://tack.io/