skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think they are implying causation, just a signal correlating with imminent military activity. If a signal like this started being useful however, it might lead to an unfortunate strategy of constantly hacking all the things, just to try and avoid giving too much warning by keeping things noisy. Some might say this has already occurred.
No. He's worth only a little bit more than how ever much it costs to hire the 2nd best guy.
Ask HN: Where can one learn about how computers work?
A friend of mine wants to understand how computers work. I began explaining how binary works and a (very) basic introduction to how the processor, RAM, and graphics card work, but I am looking for a book or other (online?) resource that I can recommend to him (and possibly even read/watch myself) to get a more thorough understanding.

I would appreciate any references, including but not limited to: logic gates, RAM, units of measurement (MHz, MB, etc.), and input/output.

Thank you in advance.
KDE's default browser Konqueror seeks a maintainer
Have you ever tasted natural milk? Non pasteurized? I mean either completely raw or just boiled once straight after it's been collected? I have. The taste of European milk is similar. That of American milk is almost nothing like real cow milk.
How does the cost of this compare to elevated rail? Here in Miami we have a very very limited 2 line elevated rail [0] that the estimates to expand it run in the tens of billions of $. The idea of building retail into the parking garage structure/stations is intriguing as it could get private developers to underwrite the costs.

My other question would be (since I'm thinking Miami here), how would these cable systems fare against hurricanes? I assume the cars would just be docked in a safe building (parking garage structure).

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrorail_(Miami)
AutoDesk not AutoCAD! gah. I think you're right.

There was a collection of DRM stories i read a few years ago. People (businesses, architects, professionals that should know better) calling for tech support over corrupted files was memorable (but apparently not memorable enough). I imagine there was some grim joy in informing people they were not using a legitimate copy, and thus their program was failing.
From a Python beginner to Django Developer in Just 6 months
Technophiles have a tendency to fall in love with ideas that no one else cares about and assert that people that dont see what they see are fools. But capitalism enforces a degree of honesty. If you can put a cash value on the productivity gain some idea will provide, and it's a significant sum, then it's not much of a stretch to predict that it will prevail eventually. If the idea has no significant cash value, then it's only a mediocre idea. Sometimes we tech people have to be humble and accept that something we love is mediocre (especially when we try to start a company based on the idea and no one buys it).
While this is something that may be possible for you, I think what the parent is saying is that most people lack not only the desire and willingness to do their own research, but also the general knowledge of the topics to fully comprehend what it is they're reading.

While doctors do typically go to school for a more 'general' understanding of any given disease, they still have a great more background on the subject than the average person, which probably helps them differentiate (to an extent) between the signal and noise of any given research paper that someone researching may come across.

The same could very much be said about software. To a non-technical person, searching about 'why you should use Windows vs Mac' could be pretty fruitless. Sure, there's plenty of information available, and numbers can easily support one or the other, but do you actually know what those numbers represent?

Now, I'm not saying that patients shouldn't be able to see their records, nor that they shouldn't spend the time learning about any conditions they may have (though I won't claim that I have), but I don't think we should discredit the knowledge that your average doctor has about your health.

Distrust of your healthcare provider isn't exactly healthy either. And again, as to your last point, can you elaborate? I'm assuming your referencing something to do with depression and obesity, as you mentioned in your original comment, but you haven't really mentioned what it is they're failing at.
From what I understand the author(s) explicitly do not want this forked. The license has not been changed, and whatever fork this is will be from an older Linux repo.
Data cleaning/munging is a surprisingly pervasive problem in my field ('big data' cancer research). I spend a good fraction of my time hunting down bugs caused by dirty sources upstream of my scripts. One way to fix this is to become more rigorous about using tools and libraries that check and enforce data correctness and consistency... but it's hard to do this on an individual level. Even if I'm careful about ensuring the correctness of my data, other researchers who send me data may not be as scrupulous. As with any challenge that requires teamwork and constant vigilance (e.g. unit testing), perhaps the data science community needs to invest in tools and computational frameworks that constantly monitor data for correctness and consistency using DDLs and the like.
IBM chip has 4,096 processor cores and functions like the brain
I also shudder at the thought of Bitlocker being the de facto standard for the average American's crypto needs. Microsoft is consistently the first to kneel before any and every demand of the NSA at the behest of their board members. Skype is a prime example. They were willfully deceptive about their ability to collect and record calls and metadata on the Skype network. Microsoft started working on integrating the NSA's PRISM into skype 8 months before they even purchased it. Well, that or they bought it with full knowledge of the PRISM integration and active deception and never planned to mention it to the public until the Snowden leaks forced their hand. Of course they say they only ever took action in accordance with their legal obligations and only after careful review, but their actions would appear to speak for themselves IMO. Bitlocker is no different from Skype. It's probably fine if you're trying to protect yourself from the prying eyes of an average citizen but it is also probably entirely useless against someone with enough influence and/or connection to the government's secret ops.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-c...
Reminds me of this classic article on a business strategy of opening a coffee shop across the road from a Starbucks - http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/hey_wait_a_m...
It's just as possible for a closed-source product to be written by hobbyists of the field. You're placing your trust in Microsoft employees requiring proper credentials from the engineers, and not just taking the guy who was free and involved in the Word 2007 document encryption
On the one hand I agree with the "It doesn't matter here" crowd, but on the other hand, Python (only language mentioned in the article) has a json library in the stdlib, and it's certainly easier than doing it with regexes.

So, it doesn't matter much, but it was an odd choice.
I always recommend Code by Microsoft Press--good introduction to the fundamentals of computer engineering.
Low-Salt Diets May Pose Health Risks, Study Finds
You didn't say, would that be the USA or Chicago?

edit - from an outsiders perspective, I thought somewhere like Washington or Vegas would be considered more way more corrupt than Chicago. I guess it is different types of corrupt, as Chicago managed the version where everybody left and they ran out of money. Perhaps the problem is they weren't corrupt enough.
Those were actually sold commercially, too - as the "Covox Speech Thing". This meant that home-made parallel port resistor ladder DAC was supported in many games.
I was wondering what that meant.
This is fixed on the dev branch we are pushing and rebuilding.
Diet is the underlying cause of (or major contributor to)[0] the vast majority of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, many kinds of cancers, kidney and liver disease, auto-immune diseases, and probably Alzheimer's and other neurological conditions. There is research backing up diet-based interventions that positively impacts or cures all of these, but instead, patients are given pills that are barely palliative.

That diet plays this role is not, of course, a surprise to anybody. The failing that I see is that every medical body has chosen to follow the "everything in moderation" line[1] instead of addressing the health needs of millions of people. The diet being promoted by these organizations is causing these problems.

Imagine a world where the AHA, the ADA, the AND, the AMA, the IoM, and every other health organization came out strongly in favor of a science-based diet[2]. When you went to your family practice physician, your endocrinologist, your dietitian, or whomever, you would hear that diet is the very best treatment, and you would hear specifics on what foods you should avoid, what you can safely partake in, and what might or might not work for you, depending on you[3].

I'm not naive enough to think this would solve all of our problems, but the amount of crap food being eaten under the guise of "everything is OK in moderation" is, literally, killing people. You go into a dietitian's office, and they are advertising sugar-filled crap whose only nutritional benefit has been added during the processing. You go into a doctor's office and food is never mentioned, but you see 85 advertisements for the various drugs that will "manage your condition". That is fundamentally the wrong approach to these problems.

I think we had so much success with treating infectious diseases in the 20th century, that we believe anything can be cured with a pill or a needle prick. Unfortunately, a lifetime of bad inputs cannot be fixed that way.

0. Unfortunately, truly proving causation is very difficult here, and it is possible that there may be other causes but the lack of proper nourishment is preventing the body from healing the damage caused elsewhere. But if a diet can prevent and/or heal them, that is good enough for me right now.

1. It's hard to believe that it's not because of the millions of dollars in contributions given by companies whose food is making people sick or by the companies who provide drugs that provide said barely palliative care. Government policy also plays an important role here, and that policy is heavily shaped by lobbying.

2. Believe it or not, there are a lot of good studies that aren't epidemiological that provide pretty clear insight into what the foundation of a good diet is. This would likely have to be customized for individuals and circumstances, but that doesn't happen.

3. I'm not going to list these here because it will derail the conversation. PM me if you are interested in hearing them.
tl;dr:

The crypto component of Windows was discovered to have a 1024-bit public key embedded within it whose symbol name is _NSAKEY. The "obvious" assumption was that this permits the NSA to read, sign, or authenticate anything for Windows. Microsoft denies this and says that "we have not shared this key with the NSA or any other party".

I remember when this story first broke. I thought it would lead to major embarrassment and repercussions for Microsoft. Boy was I wrong. There was no news coverage; other than a small subset of techies, nobody was concerned; and as far as I know, Microsoft never gave a technical explanation of how it was intended to be used.
Good Old Neon by David Foster Wallace [pdf]
The excellent Shellcheck static analysis tool will save you from many of these potential pitfalls:

^-- SC2035: Use ./* so names with dashes won't become options.

http://www.shellcheck.net/about.html
My team at Airbnb is working on a tool called "Salus" - named after the Roman goddess of hygiene - that allows you to check the correctness of your data in a number of common, extensible ways. Perhaps this is something that the open-source community at large might be interested in?
Interesting. I'd love to hear the details.
> "if there are no examples of the principle"

it's a big stretch from "I didn't happen to describe any perfectly" to "there aren't any".

> "an offense can be composed solely of actions which are all individually OK"

An offense can be composed of actions which all sound like they're OK when described without the context of the other actions. (See, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6235034 -- changing IPs is OK and accessing a website is OK, but when you've received a C&D letter and you circumvent an IP ban, that's lawsuit-worthy.)

Going back to the Monsanto case, it sounds like it's OK to grow the seeds you happen to have, and it sounds like it's OK to spray your crops with roundup, and it sounds like it's OK to replant seeds that survive. But the combination, clearly intended to acquire a RR crop (and use roundup on it) without paying the appropriate fee, is illegal.
Rivers don't change courses that often, except perhaps in a delta area.
An introduction to ANSI escape codes
Awesome. Isometric art is so simple yet so neat. These days, I use my tool Isomer (http://jdan.github.io/isomer/) to draw, but I'll be giving this a shot for sure!
Hey guys, one of the developers here. We've heard many people talking about the differences in speed. Previously we had based speed on the framerate driven by request animframe. We realised this was a mistake so we've switched to time based now. It just got merged and should be updated in the apps pretty soon.
> The USA also has a storied history and marked reputation among nations for its political corruption

Not so far as I can see. Political corruption is the norm in most of the world; the U.S. is perhaps not the best, but it's far, far, from the worse, even amongst roughly equivalent first-world nations. Historically I'd say the U.S. even seems to be rather well-thought of.

You could certainly trot out a list of countries many people around the world would probably consider "better" than the U.S. in terms of political corruption, but the U.S. is nowhere near the bottom of the heap.

Many people dislike the U.S., consider them a bully, etc, especially since Iraq, but "dislike" is very distinct from "consider corrupt."
I would hope no doctor would prescribe anything without agreeing to the medical benefit of said treatment (I've asked for an off-label prescription before and my doctor pushed back until he understood and agreed it was worthwhile).

A patient can't just start taking an antibiotic; the doctor has been given that gatekeeping role, and that is as it should be. Just because patients are involved doesn't mean doctors abdicate their responsibilities as well.

(Off-shore pharmacies add a whole new twist to this, and I'm not sure how you address that. I wonder, though, if antibiotic usage in industrial animal husbandry is not a bigger problem than somebody's hypochondriac relative.)
The article doesn't give a definition, but I assume it is referring to people who work with data at a small scale, i.e. something that couldn't be called "big" data. Totally arbitrary, but it's nice to have a term which is somewhat the opposite of "big data scientist."
Don't let the internet fool you. There is no one that's going to help you. Unless you already know how to get help (for example: you have friends in high places) just throw that idea out entirely. YC accepts only 3% of applicants, somewhat arbitrarily. Don't bank on that.

The good new is you don't need help. You're a programmer. So start by creating something that people find valuable. Even a few people, as long as they really love it. There's no excuse for not being able to do this. You could do it in 10 hours a week. If you don't know how to do this then you have to learn by trying. Money hurts as much as helps here. You really need to be able to make things without outside help.
Not only that, but there is no attempt made to gather metrics based on similar configurations / feature sets. The author specifically mentions that the AMQP systems persist their messages to disk by default, and this was the configuration used for the testing. How, then, are the "benchmarks" even comparable to the ephemeral message queues that don't provide any sort of persistence? Why wasn't persistence turned off to provide more comparable tests?

And why were nanomgs / 0mq even included?

I despise articles like this. They only serve to clutter up useful communication on such technologies.
Heh. Seriously though, it does feel like I have anti-ASMR. I swear, every single thing that is supposedly happy-making for ASMR folks is "please pull my teeth out with pliers" level bad to me. It's like the same neurological response, only wired to my revulsion center. Perversely though, I kind of enjoy the sensation of scratching a chalkboard with my fingernails.
And of course, once your data is clean, if you actually want to be able to predict anything you get to spend the time tinkering with model structure, feature extraction techniques, hyperparameter tuning, data size / model size tradeoffs, and a whole bunch more yeoman's work. Depending on your temperament you might find this boring as sin.
Author/maintainer here - Thanks for the kind words! Lua's nature is definitely a bit prohibitive to a tight community, so part of my intention with this list is to provide an overview of what's out there.

As far as penlight goes - feel free to open an issue or PR to discuss any inclusions/exclusions. I haven't actually used it myself, but as a fan of microlight I decided to include the big brother. Everything can be reconsidered.
Wow. I'm sorry, that's really awful.
Well, it is for good reason that multi-user operating systems don't permit arbitrary processes to do port IO. That said, if all you want to do is poke the LEDs on an arm board, dd to /dev/mem as root will probably do the trick.
A Way to Organize POROs in Rails
ouija web?
I'm not suggesting anybody to distrust their medical provider, and I disagree that it is anything like software. This is your body. It is your life. It is your health. Nobody cares as much about you as you do.

If you distrust your healthcare provider, find a new one. But if your healthcare provider does respect you and your needs, isn't willing to answer your questions, then I also think you should find a new one.

And, as I've said elsewhere, I am not discrediting their knowledge. I'm recognizing that their knowledge, like any person's, is bounded. They have to care about hundreds of patients with hundreds of conditions. You have the opportunity to care about yourself. Take it.
No, it doesn't. That's been proven wrong by the entire developed world.
> If this issue of solving data cleaning at scale was easy, I feel that someone would have come up with a very effective answer by now (and as an industry inside, I should have heard about it).

Agreed. Even though all these companies in the 'big data' space claim they do everything under the sun because they run on hadoop or spark, data cleansing is still an area people are hesitant to dive into. Rightly so. What surprises me more is that ETL is also widely over-marketed by a lot of new big data companies. I don't think people have paid enough respect to how subtle the 'transform' stage can really be.
I noticed the same thing with Noah's Bagels and Jamba Juice. Apparently there is also a connection between the two: http://breakfastatepiphany.blogspot.com/2012/06/noahs-new-yo...
Your making the point that because they weren't outright communist, they must have been right-wing. I agree that they weren't communists, I disagree with the conclusion you draw from that.

Most trusts were nationalized, just nazi style : their management was replaced or forced to obey party rule, mostly by threats. Yes that doesn't technically qualify as nationalization, but for all practical intents it boils down to the same thing. It is most definitely not a laissez-faire policy.

> Most of the "left wing" economic policies that were enacted were emulated using good old standard "right wing" methods

We're talking about the introduction of pensions, scholarships, unemployments payment increases, job guarantees, ...

> Chemical plants that were absolutely essential for the Reich's strategic needs were contracted to companies like IG Farben with profit guarantees and profit sharing agreements, methods that would be perfectly accept to almost any right-wing economist.

You left out the part where the party threatened to imprison (or worse) management if they did any orders that weren't for the government. Frankly, if a party with a thorough reputation for excessive use of violence that is in control of the government threatens prison if you don't sign a contract ... would you consider that free enterprise or laissez-faire ?

I agree that the methods used were not full-blown communist. The state was in absolute control, that was the goal, the means and what happened on the ground. Calling this right-wing policy is lunacy.

The way I see left, right, far left, and far right is this :

left: communist-lite policies. Try to achieve the same aims as communists, trying to avoid the worst inefficiencies of that by having market-based policies, with judicious application of direct government intervention and regulation. Example: Obamacare.

right: laissez-faire policies. Try to achieve (mostly) the same aims as communists, doing as little as possible to achieve those aims. If something needs to be done at all, don't let the government do it itself.

far left: outright communist policy. Put the government in direct control of everything, and have a direct reporting chain into the government for everything that happens. Government intervention is the only thing allowed to exist.

far right: don't try to achieve anything at all using the state. Anarchism.

On this scale, Nazis fall under "far left". They never had the time to really get to full-blown communism but they made great progress in that direction.
I cannot recall the details, but the two were not in close proximity—the exec() was in a different module which was being called from another location with a regular expression from a third location. The /g had never been necessary, as the expression was ^$-bounded; I presume that the person who originally wrote it didn’t know what /g was but had seen it on some other regular expressions about the place (occasionally, just occasionally, reasonably).
Doesn't everybody? http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=995856
I completely agree with you. I'm pretty picky about what tests I'll take for exactly that reason: stress is dangerous to one's health and many tests have abysmal false-positive rates.

My hypothesis is that people, on balance, would be healthier if they took a more active role in their healthcare. I've seen it in a lot of people's lives, but there is a strong confirmation bias there. You don't see the people that tried and wound up worse off.

Fortunately, this is easy to study. We could find an answer to whether people are better off, and, more importantly, how to ensure they are better off.
Cheap and compact medical testing
E hose review
That incident was quickly referenced in the article.

“One would have to be brain-dead not to notice that the avalanche [in sales] had begun in the days leading up to the August 16th draw,’’ said Mohan Srivastava, a Canadian statistician who gained fame in gambling circles when he found a flaw in a Canadian instant game, allowing him to accurately pick winning tickets 90 percent of the time.
Violets – Belbel (Official Music Video)
Is the U.S. stock market rigged?
How high frequency traders use advantages of networks that are milliseconds faster to make millions and the solution was to slow down everyone!
Here's a talk by Richard Feynman where he explains how computers work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA