skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Speaking from personal experience, I tried to learn C first and could never understand pointers, then I studied assembly and that was a huge eye opener. I've had very good success teaching people programming starting with Assembly (well, starting with "This is a turing machine", but moving to assembly next), and it makes understanding something like C a lot simpler. The problem with C as a first language is that it's too low level to ignore details like memory management, but it's too high level to really understand how it all functions.

You could maybe do Python -> ASM -> C, but Python -> C -> ASM will probably be a waste of time because you won't actually get anything out of C until you've done ASM (and certainly not anything more than you'd have already gotten out of Python). I'm also not suggesting that he (or she) should spend months working in Assembly, but rather start with something simpler, play around with it a bit till you can do basic things like add a couple numbers and display them (things that in anything but assembly would take about 2 seconds), and get a feel for how at the most fundamental level a computer actually works. Once you understand the basics of what a computer really is, then when you move to C or Python you can actually understand what all those abstractions are doing for you. The law of leaky abstractions means sooner or later you're going to need to understand all of that anyway, and the sooner you do, the less time you waste and the firmer your understanding will be.
Shall we play a game? How about Global Thermonuclear War.
The fine state of County Durham.

As a tenant - a student tenant, no less - your rights are virtually squat.
One of the most bizarre errors I've seen undergraduates make is in induction proofs. I saw it so many times that I decided a TA must have been telling them to do this.

They would always show the base case correctly. Then they assume it's true for all positive integers up to a fixed positive integer "n." So far so good, now we need to prove it's true for "n+1." This is where weirdness happens, I have seen a hundred assignments where an equation is reduced down to "0=0" or "1=1" and they then write "Q.E.D" even though the fact that 0=0 was not under contest.
The key will be to see where the second (non-pilot) graduates go. There is room at the top for elite for-profit school. Look at http://www.avenues.org/ as a N-12 example. Does it work on a large scale? That's the tougher question.
As if they could comprehend the difference.

And anyway - quite wrongly! What if one works from home?

And whatever happened to fostering entrepreneurship, innovation and asking people to take their own lives in their hands by doing things like setting up their own company, all these things that the current UK conservative government claims to want and support?

The law around lettings in the UK is detrimental not just to those who rent in the UK but the country as a whole.
Ask HN: Why are cross-domain cookies and referrers allowed?
It seems to me that web browsers are increasingly addressing all kinds of security/privacy issues from CSS history hacks to almost anti-virus-like heuristics for XSS protection.

Maybe the most controversial example on the privacy side is the "Do Not Track" HTTP header.

What I don't understand however, and what my question is about, is why in the world do browsers first send identifying, personal information about the user('s browsing habits), without consent from the user, across sites that may not even be affiliated in any way and _then_ tell that site "please, ignore this data".

Why send it in the first place? If the browser vendors don't care about privacy, why did they implement the "Do Not Track" header? If they do, why did they implement the "Do Not Track" header?

Why are cross-domain cookies and referrers still allowed by default?
Is there any plotting library I can use with Kivy?, something of the likes of D3.js
(http://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery)
Swift is a poor choice because of it's instability (in terms of changes to syntax), and because you really need to be able to read Objective-C to work with the platform.
Something weird-looking about France and Germany there...
Sorry for my bad expression, Mix aims to solve some simple MySQL sharding problems. I should improve the document first, maybe:)
Who returns, Project Euler?

Neither the news page, nor the "about" page, nor the front page of "Project Euler" care to explain what this website is all about. Of course, I can guess that it has to do with mathematical problems of some sort.

It is sad if you have to turn to Wikipedia to find out the basic details about a website. A sentence or two of introduction would have made everything better :-)
Motorola Teases Moto 360 Launch, X And G Phones And More For Sep. 4 Event
It's a real pity though, because there is one group I never see at PyData; undergrads (and this is true for many other meetups). And that could be seen as a problem; every tech scene needs its supply of mindless idealists if it wants to produce a reliable stream of start ups.
Hm... Couldn't you just sign in by using only your email without any password or any other extra stuff? I mean, it's not like there's any sensitive information there. Could lead to some trolling, but I think trolls and Project Euler don't have much overlap. In some cases I think it's valid to ask "why security?".
It's improving at Cambridge, but slowly.
Limitlesslane: A free online password manager
Nukes are computer controlled.

Computers have mice.

Mice are used for things other than playing games.
All languages present on codeacademy are worth learning.

But: if you have something in mind you want to build, pick a language and environment that fits it. If you want to code on microcontrollers, python and ruby are not a good idea. Want to build a website? python or ruby + javascript are a great idea! Use something that people commonly use to solve such a problem.

Your first implementation will be bad in any case, regardless of language. You will laugh at it in a few years. Rebuild it after a whilse. But thats no problem: everyone of us went through this process.
There would have to be some kind of dynamic security setup so people couldn't do that. Like always-changing RSA tokens, etc.
Stopped reading at spaces instead of tabs. It may be a silly argument, but it's one that I'm willing to fight in the streets over. Bring it on.
For those not familiar, Steve Jackson Games makes RPGs and were nearly driven out of business due to a secret service raid[1] done in response to the "GURPS Cyberpunk" book (described by the secret service as "a manual for computer crime") they were working on.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sundevil
Don't encrypt all the things
Does not matter, you will pick the wrong one. Thing is you will always regret not coding in X because of feature Y, when you actually have a project. On the other hand, you will not notice all the times that features A, B and C of your language of choice are helpful. So at least subjectively, another language would have been better.

As actual advice, it depends on your goals. If you want to build websites, then you should start with Java Script and perhaps another language for the backend. If you want to understand computer systems on a fundamental level or hack the Linux kernel, then you should pick C. And if you want to see progress, pick Python. But it is not too important, since a large part of programming is language agnostic. So just pick one, and learn another when the pain becomes unbearable. ( Then return to the first one, once you realize your mistake.)
Healthcare.gov: Contract Planning and Oversight Practices Were Ineffective
Dove focuses on friendship to extend Real Beauty via greeting cards
I agree. Authors write all kinds of fiction; some of it sells better than others, then authors look at what sells. It's a market with feedback.

The interesting question is not "what should authors write?" but "why does dystopia sell so well nowadays?"

Or as Chuck Palahniuk put it: "When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?"
Uhhh? The "mouse click" was a dead give away. Also, Occam's Razor. Is this guy programming a game in his apartment or is he programming a ICBM with 0 related hardware plus probably no other corroborating evidence. No reason to act like it takes more than a couple minutes of investigation to figure this shit out.

Edit: for the guy below me, since I can't reply directly, find me a nuclear missile guidance system that is destination controlled by a freaking mouse clicking on a map in the Pentagon and I'll concede the point.
Henry I'm not sure if you are checking this thread, and I can't find a way to contact you on your site but...

I wanted to see more of your posts, so trimmed the URL down to "http://henrysmith.org/blog/" and got an error message "Included file 'navbar.html' not found in _includes directory" at the top of your page. Clicking your name in the left directs me to henrysmith.org which doesn't have this problem.
I'm going to get downvoted for this but I cannot believe what I'm reading... we're talking about a nuclear attack involving inter-continental missiles. I'm far from an expert on this subject but I'm pretty sure you cannot build one in your garage on your own. (and especially not with a simple schema on a white board).
Honestly I hope that even non-technical people know that the blast radius of a nuclear bomb is somewhere around the size of a city, not several US states. But there goes my optimism again...
In defense of opportunistic encryption
Whichever one looks interesting. Once you get one down, picking others ones up isn't as challenging. The important thing is keeping your motivation up, so pick one that excites or intrigues you if possible.
What did the court say when they applied for a possession order?
I made this all with Javascript and some of the HTML5 apis. It is a static site and everything runs client side in the browser (i.e., no server or flash components). I wasn't sure if it would be possible but it seems to work on most current, non-IE, desktop browsers.
Tinder line almost everyone replies to
Yep, you'd never find something so silly as a computer mouse in the Pentagon.
I have a feeling people who think they're using a secure cryptosystem will speak much more freely than those who don't--meaning that the net effect of convincing users to use "bad crypto" is giving the global passive adversary† more interesting morning reading.

I'd rather have that than the society where everyone silently accepts global surveillance as a norm and treats any kind of self-expression that gets you into trouble as pure stupidity on the part of the speaker (e.g. blames the victim).

What we have right now is a vicious cycle. "Normal" people have no cryptographic capabilities. So they simply adapt their beliefs and behavior to this reality. This makes them think of themselves as different from people who do have cryptographic capabilities. This means they develop "us and them" mentality and can no longer empathize with anyone seeking any level of digital privacy. This means there is no popular support for crypto. So "normal" people have no cryptographic capabilities.

I believe that "consumer cryptography", even if it's weak, would break this cycle.
> "Account recovery will no longer be possible."

A site that purports to teach is incapable of learning of how to strike a balance between securing confidential information and making it possible to recover an account. This is a solved problem. If my bank can have a password recovery system, a site about numbers can have one too.

> " With respect to this issue it is quite possible that some members will have genuinely forgotten passwords."

Who hasn't "genuinely" lost a password?
Wouldn't you get most of the benefits by just running IPsec and dropping all non-IPsec traffic? Authentication would prevent port-scanning and optionally encryption would prevent detecting services by observing the traffic.
It's the kind of thing that makes you wonder why LTE networks exist at all.

WiFi + wired broadband networks are so cheap to provision that businesses of all kinds can afford to offer them as a marketing cost. A month of WiFi costs less than one day of running postage stamp ad in a daily paper in a small market!

No wonder why Big Telecom is so resistent to wireline expansion -- why offer affordable wireline service when you could 'offer' LTE which is $10 a GB when and where it works.
The talk didn't get "banned", it was merely disavowed by the TED organization, which interprets their mandate "ideas worth spreading" as excluding blatant pseudoscience such as the idea of "morphic resonance".
I heard that a third of the graduating CompSci class applied to Entrepreneur First this year?
You are relying on the popular-press description of the algorithm to assess its sophistication. If you would like to read it, I can send you the supplementary pdf which explains the algorithm in detail.

The algorithms do look straightforward compared to machine learning approaches, but that's a good thing! I'm guessing you're a machine learning person? I believe this approach comes more from the control theory side of automation. Simple-looking algorithms that achieve complex phenomenon is interesting. The authors also provide proofs that the algorithms will, in fact, achieve the goal.

I also want to point out that they are under hardware constraints which preclude approaches which require large amounts of computation and memory. From the supplementary material:

The Kilobot robot has strict limits on its available memory: 2K RAM and 32K for program memory, which includes the code for the bootloader/wireless programming, robot move- ment, and communication libraries. The full self-assembly algorithm takes approximately 27K of program memory including 241 bytes for the shape description and scale factor. The Kilobot also has limits on message size; we optimize by combining messages from the various primitives, placing all the data in a single 7 byte message.

In general, I find it dangerous to make conclusions of the novelty of research from the popular press description of it.
That is absolutely not true. Having rented properties in the UK I know that letting agencies will treat you like shit. No matter. Contact the property ombudsman, he will sort them out:

http://www.tpos.co.uk/

Might even recommend going to court over it.
Why do I envision a sci-fi future only allowing variations on the Dummi Bears?
Repeating magic phrases doesn't accomplishes much without understanding.

If you make something really secure and then you hide it really well, that's better than just making it really secure.

Just don't replace making it really secure by hiding it, is what that phrase says.

It's like moving an sshd away from port 22; doesn't make your sshd implementation magically more secure, but it immediatly gets rid of a mass of autmated naive ssh port scans. So you need a solid implementation still, but the obscuring part certainly helps.
Knowing some landlords, the number one thing they complain about is how impossible it is to evict anyone. I really doubt you had any rights.
move left.
To be fair, your bank likely has a bit more money to throw at this problem.

I would think in this case the entire point is not so much to help them secure stuff, but an attempt to remove them as a target for hacking in the first place.
For the sake of clarity it's worth noting that in England tenant rights are quite good. For an eviction to take place it must be ordered by the courts and a landlord can only apply to the courts for possession after providing a tenant with 2 months notice. A quick eviction in England takes 3 months, an average eviction is closer to 5 and in some cases it can take much much longer. The only situation in which someone can be evicted with no notice is if they are a lodger (renting a room with a resident landlord), which wouldn't involve letting agents or inspections. The confusion over evictions in England comes from tenants not understanding their rights, a notice to quit (Section 21) is NOT an eviction.

A tenant can only be evicted for rent arrears if they have over 2 months rent due (and bringing the arrears under 2 months at any time invalidates any court action), landlords cannot evict if they have not legally protected the tenants deposit and landlords have no rights to enter a tenanted property unless it is an emergency.
The simple answer is - insurance. Let's say that you have an accident at home while doing your office work(because you stayed at home that day), and the house is on fire. Suddenly the insurance agency refuses to pay because the house was not insured for commercial purposes. Stupid, I know.
The trouble is that it encourages the kind of "critical thinking" that we often see regarding, say, GMOs and nuclear energy. To most of the population "skepticism" seems to mean "believing the loudest, scariest person in the room," not "I've got some reading to do." When people do decide to read, they use google which heavily skews its results away from the expert consensus and towards sensationalist outsiders.

We have to do a great amount of work to fix "skepticism" before encouraging it will be a universally good thing.
Working 60+/80 hours a week for a health sector company is not really a good idea. Every mistake could cost a lot (lives?)

And I think people who work that much are more likely to make mistakes.
The author calls for creators to present a new future world that is optimistic and to me, that feels a little shallow and half baked. It is certainly not subversive, it is naive.

We are out of the pure postmodern cynicism, but the rebuttal isn't a swing back to modernism as the author seems to vaguely hint at. Personally I subscribe to the idea that we have moved into a new cultural period that many call Meta-modernism. There are many other theories alongside this, Digimodernism and 'New Sincerity' being the ones I've heard the most about. Point being is that this new approach blends the cynical with the optimistic to have a more holistic view. Objectivity and subjectively co-exist.

In this frame, there has been a movement in the design world for the past ten years called Design Fiction that works in this space I think. Dunne and Raby at the RCA London pioneered it and sci-fi author Bruce Sterling is an adamant supporter. From MIT Media Lab, Design Fiction is:

"How to provoke discussion about the social, cultural, and ethical implications of new technologies through design and storytelling."

In short, it creates objects that imply worlds of the future. It is not completely dystopian, nor is it completely optimistic. Those views are left up to the viewer to decide on. I definitely feel this approach is much more valuable than the authors' knee-jerk out-of-date push to happy-up sci-fi.
Yeah, the London tech scene is big.

It's funny how meetups have taken over universities as the place to be for the best knowledge transfer.

As you say, it is way easier to host things at companies, coworking spaces, coffee shops, and pubs.

Universities are exclusive, but they lose quality by being so. They also lose the title of "the place to be" for learning. They're now in third place behind meetups and topic specific internet communities.
Common sense tells that anyone who has access to Intercontinental Missiles probably does not sketch a trajectory by hand on a whiteboard in a rental apartment. Even if there were no it-technical context, it could be a plan for a novel or a movie script. Than much even non-technical people with common sense should be able to guess.
Common sense isn't quite as "common" anymore. If you actually read those diagrams it is pretty obvious (to me) that that is a game, and not some missile design or "plan" (although who plans a state missile attack from their apartment?).
JS is a necessary evil. It's one of the worst languages in terms of design (beaten only by PHP and obscure languages no ones heard of). Learning it as your first language is going to gain you very little since almost none of that knowledge is translatable into other languages, and you're likely to have picked up a bunch of really bad habits from it. Further making matters worse is that there are tons of really really really really really bad JS code snippets floating around the internet, things that make professional programmers want to gouge their eyes out just looking at them, and for a newbie who doesn't know any better they're just as likely to assume that writing code like that is actually an acceptable thing to do.

In terms of a first language, nearly anything is going to beat JS in terms of learning useful things from it. The fact that we're stuck with JS now and you're going to need to learn it at some point doesn't mean you should expose a newbie to something like that, it will take them years to fix the damage that would do, it's like starting them at net negative in programming knowledge.
> Nukes are computer controlled.

"Guided" sure, "controlled" is a bit ambiguous. Launching them requires more than just a click.
Of course, which is why the whole thing is ridiculous - but that would be true even if the person was planning an actual nuclear attack - in a free country, the only reasonable course of action would be to "let them try" - obviously there is no chance of success.

If they actually do get anywhere, AFAIK possession of radioactive material is illegal, so that's when you could actually arrest them.
In the UK you almost certainly have an Assured Shorthold Tenancy (even if the agent says you don't). This gives you a lot of strong rights which you can use if you know how.

In practice the agent or landlord has a lot of leverage but you can often win if you use the law to your advantage. In particular there is a very specific set of steps they have to follow to evict you.
You Are Not Nearly Scared Enough about Ebola