skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disclaimer: I have 'chronic' dyslexia. I seriously suffered at school and dropped out of university. I'm completely in agreement with this article.

I often attribute specific 'sub-disabilities' of dyslexia to a seriously important skillset that saves my company serious amounts of money. For example, if my mind believes that 'b' and 'd' are the same thing, does that not mean I can quickly identify the common ground between two different problems? I definitely does: I'm frequently able to distill multiple problems into one single problem (which is usually cheaper and faster to solve).

I'm also the last-line-of-defense debugger (read: memory dumps) where I work, which I attribute to the ability to conceptualize a 2 MLOC architecture and mentally run use cases through it. My manager is worried about only having one person who can be relied on to solve this stuff, my answer is "hire a dyslexic."

Screw being a snowflake, I've recently come to believe that these "learning disabilities" are an evolutionary step. An anecdote I used with my one nephew (who also has a sum of "learning disabilities") is:

> Imagine one day you woke up with the superpower of flight, how would you spend the rest of your day? Probably stuck on the ceiling of your bedroom. You have a superpower, learn to use it.

People like to use dyslexia as an excuse, it's easy, it's a "disability." They don't want to learn how to control it because excuses are easy. The truth is that the rest of the human race, and specifically schools, don't know how to cope with it.

> take this with a grain of salt for now.

I'm in agreement with this too. Dyslexia is a very broad condition. Right now the science is comparing apples and oranges to pears and grapes. At least it's on the right path, though.
Yea Emily Lakdawalla has an interesting blog article on the nature of the damage to Curiosity's wheels and the implication for NASA's 2020 mission: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2014/0819063...
The OP doesn't get too many points in the Crackpot Index, and at least the site is not in all-caps.

But a very big red flag is that the cites 17-38 are a mix of preprints, arxiv's submissions and conference proceedings, where one of the authors is the site owner. The last article published in a peer review journal is from 1995. This is not usual in physics and cosmology.
10 practices to implement in your startup for stronger teams
If a law changes, predictions made prior to the change are invalidated. Any meta-laws describing how laws change would be susceptible to this as well.

I think the idea is that, were we to have the state of everything at a moment, the laws we would use to predict the state at the next moment would be embedded within the state we had captured initially and so the prediction for the next state would have to include the state-change for the laws, for which we would need meta-laws to describe that change, which themselves would need to be embedded in the initial state, ad infinitum.

I think the only interesting idea to draw from this is that if laws change over space and time, all predictions are, at best, only probabilistic if the changes are continuous over space/time.
I couldn't even try it. Waiting to check out tho
Please, read the article that's referenced on GitHub:

"He beckons me over to one of his eight computers and presses several keys, activating Blockfinder. In less than 30 seconds, the program lists all of the Internet Protocol address allocations in the world — potentially giving him access to every computer connected to the Internet. Appelbaum decides to home in on Burma, a small country with one of the world's most repressive regimes. He types in Burma's two-letter country code: "mm," for Myanmar. Blockfinder instantly starts to spit out every IP address in Burma.
Blockfinder informs Appelbaum that there are 12,284 IP addresses allocated to Burma, all of them distributed by government-run Internet-service providers. In Burma, as in many countries outside the United States, Internet access runs through the state. Appelbaum taps some keys and attempts to connect to every computer system in Burma. Only 118 of them respond. "That means almost every network in Burma is blocked from the outside world," he says. "All but 118 of them."

These 118 unfiltered computer systems could only belong to organizations and people to whom the government grants unfettered Internet access: trusted politicians, the upper echelons of state-run corporations, intelligence agencies.

"Now this," Appelbaum says, "is the good part."

He selects one of the 118 networks at random and tries to enter it. A window pops up asking for a password. Appelbaum throws back his head and screams with laughter — a gleeful, almost manic trill. The network runs on a router made by Cisco Systems and is riddled with vulnerabilities. Hacking into it will be trivial.

It's impossible to know what's on the other side of the password. The prime minister's personal e-mail account? The network server of the secret police? The military junta's central command? Whatever it is, it could soon be at Appelbaum's fingertips."
Hey there, I work at SoundCloud. One thing that might not be totally clear in our messaging about this right now is that ads will only play against tracks premier members have chosen to monetise. If you aren't monetising your tracks, your listeners won't be affected.
Agreed. Nothing about the Medium frontend (despite its prettyness) requires JS at all. I'm not sure why it wouldn't be completely compatible across the board.
Is it anything like code challenges? I might add it to this list: http://codecondo.com/coding-challenges/
Thanks for the reply. I don't know if wikipedia is the best source, but talking about health risks, it states:

> A team led by Los Alamos National Labs found that although the forces that terahertz waves exert on double-stranded DNA are tiny, in certain circumstances resonant effects can unzip the DNA strands, tearing them apart. This creates bubbles in the strands that can significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication. [1]

Unzipping DNA strands in certain circumstances sounds pretty harmful.

I understand theoretically why millimeter waves are lower risk than backscatter x-rays, but it seems to me that there still are risks. In my opinion, before sending the population through these things, we need studies of their long-term effects from real-world exposure, not just theoretical reasoning about why the rays are most likely safe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millimeter_wave_scanner#Possib...
Type-in code in magazines aren't quite dead yet.

My daughter gets a kids' magazine called Aquila, and an issue a couple of months ago it had something about the Raspberry Pi in it and had a load of Python code to type in create some slime mould patterns (https://www.aquila.co.uk/media/432350/spiralcode.html).
In fact, I'm not sure I've heard of anyone who wrote any significant amount of lisp code and came away talking about parentheses.

Whelp, now you have. Hi! :)

Although I sometimes miss the goodies homoiconicity brings, I much prefer the increased syntactic structure of other languages.
Anonymity, Privacy, and Big Data
Indeed. Whenever you break convention like underlined and colored text for links you in general need to have a good reason.
Why would anyone buy this when you can just use a Photoshop action like [1] to do the same thing?

[1] https://dribbble.com/shots/984999-Perspective-Mockup-Photosh...
It's a zombie complaint.

I feel it's actually easier with parenthesis because with always well formed lisp you get the benefit of incredible tools like paredit-mode which make it easier to type than in other languages and I say this as someone who does full time c++ with a fair bit of python, javascript and html and I only do lisp stuff as a hobby.
I can't think of any good cases for crashing a program when fork fails. If you're doing work in a pool of processes and the parent process tries to fork another process, but fails, there are many ways to handle this: wait a few seconds before trying again, wait for another process to finish, kill a few processes, etc.

If you were forking in a high-level language such as Python, failing to fork would raise an exception which would possibly crash the program if left unhandled.

C does not have exceptions so return codes are used to indicate success or failure. This is true for nearly every function, not just fork. If you're not checking for errors in a C program, it's going to break in unexpected ways, and will possibly be vulnerable to exploitation.

fork has 3 possible return values:
- 0 for the child process
- a positive number for the parent process
- a negative number if it failed.

If you look at the man page's "Return Value" section, it is extremely clear, see: http://linux.die.net/man/2/fork

"On success, the PID of the child process is returned in the parent, and 0 is returned in the child. On failure, -1 is returned in the parent, no child process is created, and errno is set appropriately."
What's happened to Webnotes?
Hi, who is using webnotes currently? I discovered their service was down since yesterday. WHY??

http://www.webnotes.net/
Branson, business leaders seek Ukraine solution
Most Christians don't claim the earth is only 6000 years old - that's only a particular brand of fundamentalist. There are plenty of religious people in science, even prominent in science - they are just mostly moderates, and learn to not publicise their religion to avoid conflict.

The thing is that while the root of Christianity and science aren't compatible, the everyday practice of Christianity has little to do with that root. It's just some initial justificiation that doesn't really touch the everyday. The congregation are generally not so interested in the philosophical underpinnings than the daily practice. Praying to a saint that can't be proven, lighting a votive candle, or dropping money in the poor box does not compete with investigating atoms.
Debit card holds both cash and virtual currencies
It seems to make sense: the interpreter already stores list structure to interpret, there's no space in RAM for a redundant second representation, and going to external storage for the text would practically force batch mode when the store is paper tape or punch cards. That's similar to 70s/80s home computers keeping BASIC code in RAM in tokenized form, except there you had to type a line over again to edit it.

(But on larger machines in the 70s I get the impression Interlisp stayed with structure-editing for its advantages, not just inertia. It was killed off by Common Lisp which owed more to the east-coast Lispers who gave us Emacs.)
I find it a pain and error prone when having to change indentation in python code. E.g. when adding an 'if' in front of a block of code. So easy to miss a line or mess up the indentation in the block itself and then you might not spot an error until run time.
Steve Yegge, famously linked the Software Engineering with political axis. Interestingly he named people "Liberal" who prefer Dynamic languages over static.

https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/KaSKeg4v...
Which ones are you running? With Ghostery alone, everything works on my end.
The App Gold Rush Is Over
Actually, greenhouses work because they let the sun in but prevent convection from cooling the heated surfaces. The stuff inside would need to get pretty hot to put out enough IR to make much of a difference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect#Real_greenho...
I feel like the arduino is irrelevent and the story has nothing to do with technology. Pretty cool how you tracked your stuff down though.
What if the universe is a black hole, with a very big (and growing?) Schwarzschild radius? That nothing can escape a black hole does not mean nothing can't exist within a black hole ...
Nope.c: Node.js for C programmers
Summary:

"It's a policy-induced disaster. ... eurocrats .... the euro is standing between them and recovery ... Europe is stuck with a fixed exchange system that doesn't let them print, spend, or devalue their way out of a crisis"

There's no source or data for any of these claims, so you can skip the article. IMHO, it's just an anti-euro rant. Why wouldn't Europe be able to print money like the USA does? Article doesn't say.
> That light speed is a constant is a premise, an assumption. It doesn't fall out of any math or other physics relationship, right?

But it does, it falls out of the geometric relationship between the three space dimensions and the time dimension. In a way, the speed of light can be thought of as the speed of time.

Think of the relationship between space and time as orthogonal, as a right angle -- which makes sense, since the time dimension is at right angles to the three space dimensions. If you move quickly through space, you can't also move quickly through time, and the relationship between your time and space velocities is just what you would expect for an orthogonal relationship:

t' = t √(1-v^2/c^2)

t = time at rest

t' = time at velocity v

c = speed of light

Einstein wrote the above in 1905, then his math teacher (Minkowski) read Einstein's paper, saw the above equation, and realized it meant time was a fourth dimension. Minkowski then famously said, "Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality."

In response, Einstein said, "Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore."

But from that point to 1915, Einstein acquired much more math knowledge and used it to write the General theory.
This is my favourite thing on the internet today.
There have been many hermits to compare him with but my favourite is Simeon Stylites who spent 47 years on a pillar.

~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simeon_Stylites
Both are by the same person, think of it as a free v1, or a paid for and feature rich v2
Technically, non-root users can use negative nice, if they are explicitly allowed to in /etc/security/limits.conf
You mean "mitigating factors"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitigating_factor

Where are you from, if I may ask? They're a very well established part of the legal system in lots of places.
My point exactly; there are no articles saying "this article will only be about men" like this one is about women. Instead, they are saying "this article will be about great games" or "shitty games" or such. That's why I perceive this article as sexist.
> this panel stays with you like a bad STD

Wait, is this an actual product or is it a satire on the sad state of our industry?
I believe this is what the kids call 'satire'
If you'd read the copy you'd realise it's designed by Blaz (from Dribbble), I'm just posting on his behalf :)

Edit: it was really just a way to start building photoshop plugins to see what the ecosystem is like, we've got 4 new plugins that are actually useful for a wife audience coming out soon.
The Biggest Lesson I Learned As an Apple Designer
It's best to separate two elements here -- the measured speed of light, and the relationship between space and time. The relationship between space and time is easily expressed in closed form:

t' = t √(1-v^2/c^2)

That's pretty clear and easy to interpret. So measurements of c may be messy and subject to controversy, but the geometry expressed in the above equation, and what it tells us about spacetime, is much more clear.
Normal users can't make a directory at the root of the filesystem by design.

To write that safely, you'd test for the result of mkdir and cd to return success before deleting.

In a shell, you'd just go

mkdir /foo -m 0700 && cd /foo && ${deleteallfiles}
Here are the slides [1] from ECOOP 2014 presenting his research. It was a really interesting talk. He also did a demo which was cool.

[1] http://ecoop14.it.uu.se/programme/ecoop_ss_tratt.pdf
This seems fair. What about on the users stream page though?

Also, what is a "premier track?"
Yes, I realize that :) It just seems like such a fad and then especially in the area of design where people tend to want to have more control over things. I'd expect the "v1" to be good enough for them to base any further tweaking on.

Oh well. I also cried "fad" when reading about Minecraft, Bitcoin, the grooming of beards, the resurgence of PHP and various other things, so what do I know?
It's somewhat of an indictment of our industry that I genuinely can't tell whether this is clever, semi-ironic marketing for a real product or flat-out satire.
This to me is a good example of why exceptions in modern languages are good way to handle errors. In this case the user has basically ignored the error return from fork() and the accidentally used it in kill.

If fork() had thrown an exception for an unexpected failure then the user could not have accidentally ignored it in the same way.

I realize that this is not appropriate for a system call but it seems like a good example of why handling errors using exceptions is helpful sometimes.
> I don't know. That address space is very much larger than all the storage every produced in human history.

Not a chance. 64 bit is ca 16 exabytes.

Currently, the shipping volume of harddrives is about 500 million units/year. If we're generous and say that their average storage size is only 100GB, despite the large number of models in the 1TB-5TB segment, then that's 50 million TB/year, or about 50 exabytes of harddrive capacity per year. In reality it's likely much higher, and rising rapidly.

Yes, the number sounds big, but so did 1TB just a few years ago. And 1GB just a few years before that. It's not that long ago we were marvelling over even being able to buy 20MB hd's for home use. The number may sound outrageous, but my experience based on actual product availability is that we should expect a factor of 1000+ rises in storage capacity per 10-15 years, and I see no evidence to justify a slowdown.

And increases in capability causes changes in how we engineer things. When petabyte sized databases becomes possible for more people at reasonable price points, you'll see a lot of people that previously "made do" with terabyte sized databases find all kinds of uses for extra analysis etc., or simply storing more intermedia stages and being more wasteful because we can.
I clicked the "Buy now" to see if this was serious. It is.
Or exceptions in many languages for error conditions that you don't want to accidentally ignore.
Designing for Brobdingnag: considerations in scaling large web systems [pdf]
It's nice to have, but I wouldn't rely on it to save me - it's no replacement for checking return codes properly.
Yes. Refraction takes place because photons are slowed down through interactions with matter. If a photon is absorbed briefly and re-emitted, this can be taken to represent a reduction in velocity, even though the photon travels at c when between atoms.

In a convex lens, photons take longer to pass through the thickest part, which creates a concave wavefront that naturally converges on a focal point:

http://arachnoid.com/example/index.html#Lens_Example

Photons don't need to have mass for this to happen, because they aren't being deflected like billiard balls, they're being slowed by their interaction with atoms.
Mike Rowe: Learning from Dirty Jobs
As a pragmatist, I take from both sides always and I think a lot of us do. To apply it to politics:

http://www.allmystery.de/i/t5be775_subgenius_big.jpg

Python with static type hinting is where I want to be.
I'm aware, but the new yorker is ostentatiously trying to be correct, and surely doesn't expect its audience to be familiar with Chinese names.
I'm not from the US so my view on taxis might be different. Typically I call a number and they have someone there in 10 minutes. It's rare to be taken advantage of because they know you can make a complaint to the taxi company they work for. As for cash I don't think anyone here minds. If you don't have cash on you the taxi driver will stop at an ATM for you.

I've used Uber once and it was great but from my experience with taxis Uber isn't offering much extra.
When visited with w3m I got spaces breaking words frequently.
Is there any justification to use complex html to control intra-word spacing for a web page?
Nice comment, but minor nit-pick:

If you hyphenate ethnic-Chinese, it looks less like a Chinese person who is also ethnic, which is how I first read your comment (which distracted me for a moment). The alternative would be to use an adverb, as in ethnically Chinese (describing 'is').
SIMIAN UI
Easter Egg Hidden in VMWare Fusion and Workstation
I program in python (and C/C++) and really dislike python's whitespace handling. I think giving semantic meaning to one of the least-standardized aspects of text (tabs/spaces) is a bad decision through and through.
Checking the Cross-Platform Framework Cocos2d-x
ICs, managers and bears Oh my
FWIW In DrRacket the key ] inserts either ], }, or ) to close whatever is open.
The biggest problem I've had with ZFS on Linux is that the arc_cache won't back off from memory quick enough. There's still an edge case in their somewhere where it hits swap and effectively locks up (its still running, just amazingly slowly). The fix is to set the arc_limit low (like 1GB) - it's not a hard limit, but it stops it eating all the RAM on my 8gb ram box.
A premier track is a track uploaded and owned by a SoundCloud member who is part of the premier program. It can be monetised (ads can play in front of it) or not. The premier tier is currently invite-only but we want to open it up to more artists as fast as we can.

If a user (currently US only) is listening to their stream and they start playing a track a premier member has decided to monetise an ad will play in front of it. There are some other factors that will influence ad frequency obviously, but that is the general behaviour.
RubiCSS Cube
It still makes me happy.
They don't. But the re-emitted photons become part of a coherent wavefront through what Richard P. Feynman called a Path Integral:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_integral_formulation

So the reason you have a coherent wavefront moving through a lens, as one example, is not because the photons are emitted in a particular direction, but at a particular time.
Dot-clipboard – Monitor your clipboard and run scripts based on its content
What's your Weissman?
Thank Kenny, we are definitely considering adding a Github auth option.
You'd like the world to be black and white, heroes and villains. It's not that simple. Sometimes there aren't any good guys.

What does it say to you that the father of the innocent victim blames the system first and the killer second?
Seriously, it doesn't matter where the hell you are on this planet, don't leave anything in your car. Not even a pen.

I had a windows smashed in a nice bit of London, and all they took was a Bic biro, £10 first aid kit, a USB cigarette lighter adapter and a USB cable!
Show HN: Drop-in sticky headers and footers for UICollectionView
This doesn't negate what I said. Preventing convection means that hot air stays inside instead of being dispersed. But hot air does emit IR radiation, and if that radiation could escape the air would get fresher.
I really hope SMC succeeds. Sage is pretty awesome and probably the closest thing we have as a free software alternative to things like Mathematica. But Sage still needs a lot of work. E.g., the packaging is simply bad. It's just one giant source tree containing almost every dependency including GCC and Python. That's just ridiculous.
One suggestion for the founders, don't start the timer until the code has loaded, and stop the timer once you submit. I lost 10-15 seconds to loading the code and then got game over because i submitted with 10 seconds left and it took longer than that to actually send.
I hope that in the next ten or twenty years it will become normal practice to include tones in Chinese names, or at least typeset the original names parenthetically beside the transliterations.