skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would it be possible to read a value from the array and do something with it (e.g. send it to /dev/null)? Even a JIT shouldn't be able to optimize the value out if you're actually using the value, and as long as you're not zeroing secure memory all the time, the performance hit shouldn't be that large.

This might cause side effects if /dev/null does not exist or is not the null device.
I would like to object to the following statement from the article:

> While lifeguards are taught all the possible signs of a person who is drowning, pilots don’t receive elaborate training on all the things that can go wrong, precisely because the many things that can go wrong so rarely do.

In fact, pilots are given extensive training in the failure modes of their airplanes. When Casner got his private pilot license, he should have been told to memorize the emergency procedures for his airplane. De novo private pilots are not given the same level of training as airplane pilots, but failure modes and "interesting-looking instrument panels" are crucial components of instrument training.

More generally, I don't disagree with his conclusions regarding the problems with cockpit automation, but they are hardly novel - the industry has been aware of this for years. However, the service life of an airliner is measured in decades, and the regulatory environment, for excellent reasons, doesn't allow us to change the avionics on existing airliners without re-certifying the new systems and re-training all the pilots.

Last but not least, I'd like to point out that even if the airplane is on autopilot, there is still plenty for the pilots to do. For example, they are supposed to brief the instrument approach procedure and the missed approach procedure every single time they fly it. A lot of pilots relax this discipline (if you've flown into the same airport hundreds of times, it's hard to argue that re-reading the procedure yet again has much value). But relaxing it to the point of just idly chatting all the way down the glideslope? That's not a problem with the cockpit systems, and it's hard to see how better human factors would have magically turned these incredibly irresponsible people into good pilots.
Taxi companies also would need to work on their quality issues. I've had too many taxis in SF and suburban Portland that were filthy and run down and had incompetent drivers. Never happened with Uber.

EDIT: I think that there just is almost no incentive for taxi companies to improve on anything because they have had a quasi monopoly in a market that is completely underserved. When you needed a cap pre-Uber in SF, you were happy to get any cap at all. That all comes down to taxi medallions.
Twitpic shutting down over Twitter trademark dispute
A couple other naming ideas:

Consider using Star or Celebrity instead and Duds or Getups.

If I were doing this site I'd probably call it "Stylebiter" it's Catchy and could apply to more than just celebrities.

Doh. it's taken: http://stylebiter.com/
"github flavored markdown" sounds like a fork.
"standard markdown" sounds like ownership. Not
my project but shitty

"standard justin" on Twitter [1]

That. Exactly that.

John Gruber in response to the above tweet [2]

[1] https://twitter.com/justin/status/507304506007515136

[2] https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507305771265454080
I don't really understand this approach. I don't think that even in my earliest days programming Java using object-oriented principles that I would have added "search" to a Product class. After all, search is not a behavior that products perform, rather it is a property of theirs... i.e. "I am searchable". I would have most likely make some kind of ProductIndex which consisted of a hashmap or something, mapping hashes of product strings to a list of their properties for easy lookup or something... This is one thing that immediately stands out to me.

Lo and behold, you created a ProductSearcher class. It seems to me that the initial approach stems not from the view that "objects are things" but rather the notion that any related property of an object should be included in the class definition of the object, which can be summed up as a misunderstanding of object-oriented programming more so than anything else, but maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way.

Interesting article, thanks for sharing.
Yao Ming aims to save Africa's elephants by persuading China to give up ivory
To be fair, the compiler is more than a bit more primitive. Clozure doesn't come close to SBCL where numeric code is concerned. But the garbage collector really is much better, especially under heavy concurrency.
Very possible with Flash, Java, etc. in the past.

In JavaScript, in particular if you're not using Chrome? Apparently just about impossible (I haven't seen reliable timing yet).

There are a lot of downsides to embedded Flash, applets, etc., but it's going to be a long time until the things that were possible with plugins a decade ago (including decent timing, and even plugging your MIDI keyboard in as an input for a application like this) are possible without plugins.

I have some faith we'll get there eventually; but it's a frustrating time during the gap.
This may get downvoted, but I hope not, as it's a genuine question:

Why not just use AngelList? They do a lot of curation, you can have custom groups (I'm sure Naval would set it up), and there are already reviews and qualification of investors, big and small. Rather than having a totally separate list, why not leverage AngelList's network and also benefit from the increased awareness/signaling of being able to state someone is invested and share among their network?
great site. neat concept.

i'm so out of style, but I can take away one thing from that first page : crotch depth in men's pants is too low now. I know fashion is cyclical, but it feels like we're about to witness the re-emergence of 80's style high-waist jeans.

god those were uncomfortable.
While you're at it, please add a spaced repetition learning feature à la Anki. Our brains are the best PKB, we just need the right tools to efficiently upload data to it (anki)
The blog of James Altucher was featured several times on the HN feed and users seemed to enjoy it. He was an entreprenour and offers unconventional insights, some of them more obvious than others. I agree that the titles are very catchy, and I find its writing style persuasive – something I need to learn from.

Anyway, there was no need to flag it – I usually delete submissions that people find uninteresting.
Doesn't work for confidential data.
Laws against murder and rape are security theatre. If you are approached by a murderer or rapist with serious malicious intent, you're in trouble, full stop.

This kind of argument is silly, that the mere simple existence of criminality is more important than the frequency of it.
The lookbook collages look and function really nicely. Are you generating them from within wordpress? Plugin?
> Because Standard Markdown implies something that MultiMarkdown and Github Flavored Markdown don't: That it is the One True Markdown.

In computing,"Standard X" almost never means "The One True X", it generally means "the variant of X that implementations claiming to support Standard X are at least making some gestures in the direction of supporting, but which many of them still won't completely and which, for many practical uses, you'll need to go beyond anyway in manners specific to your application and the particular implementation you are using."
How about compilers having a way for us to tell it that a particular function must not be removed? It seems silly that we have to come up with hacks to work around the compiler.
I use vimwiki for some lightweight knowledge.
There's more to this story... If I had to guess I would say that it's no longer profitable (or at least, very profitable as it once was) and it's not fun to run an image host (imagine all the trouble that comes with just copyright issues, let alone criminal matters). The founder also has a new startup called Pingly which I'm sure is more rewarding to be working on.

On its face Twitpic is shutting down because they won't get their trademark, but they've never had their trademark and have had no problems operating. Twitter isn't suing them, they're just saying they are against the trademark application. They don't need the trademark and it's bizarre to shut your company down for the possibility of being forced to change your name in the future.

If Twitpic wanted to continue running they could without any changes or extra work. It's a dead end though, Twitter has its own image service and there is little reason besides legacy to use Twitpic. Here's their traffic situation which should pretty well mirror revenue as it's web based advertising paying the bills:

https://www.quantcast.com/twitpic.com

They're hemorrhaging traffic. Globally there were 85,043,992 visits in the month period a year ago compared to 13,315,016 in the most recent month. That's also just the past year, Twitpic has been on the decline for years and peaked in July 2011 with a cool 280,021,248 visits.

Expenses are likely not down nearly the same amount as they have to store more and more images every month (with less traffic there is less bandwidth, but this doesn't count images not loaded on their website).

Just in the last month they lost 46% compared to the previous period. It's falling off a cliff. This seems like a good way to get some sympathy on the way out. A rude move to their users though. Maybe Twitter can step in and offer a bottom dollar buyout so that the links don't break.
engadget is not a credible source for any news...
Sure, but programs can crash (or you can attempt to make them crash) and then your keys are sitting there unprotected in a coredump. Anyway, I'm curious if that's the situation Colin was thinking about or not. That would seem to be quite hard to protect against. The example Colin gave was one that is definitely not at the OS / Library level. Though maybe you're right and that's where the solution to all this lies.
NFL Packers vs. Seahawks. Don't be these girls
One wonders...what makes a "high-quality" deal?

I suspect the problem is more that VCs are neglecting the first half of their job description.
In the past, when mentoring developers that tend towards god-objectery, they tended to avoid creating service objects because their mental map of the problem had a one-to-one correlation between "objects" and "the physical problem domain" (e.g., Users, Accounts, etc.)

Given how much I've seen this sort of stuff in the wild, I felt it would be a useful article to hand off to new-ish developers (I'm the author).

It sounds like you're well beyond that, though, but thanks for reading nonetheless!
How I Hacked My Own iCloud Account, for Just $200
* We didn't get a response so we assume its OK

Seems like a pretty big assumption to me. Good change though
You can't copyright a name, which seems to be his main point of contention judging by the public responses he has offered.

This has nothing to do with my view point, it's simply a fact of law: you can't copyright a name. No matter what text you put somewhere says, it doesn't magically apply.
Obligatory: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth
The Russian situation is recent, due to the Ukranian conflict. The more general observation that there are different preferences in poultry consumption globally, resulting in, literally, one bird being split and sent to opposite ends of the Earth, is what I was emphasizing.

Not knocking you in any way here, just adding my own two bits. Appreciate your insider's view, really.
> whereas most of the data they grab ends up on the Internet Archive who really could use the money.

Completely agreed. The IA is a treasure, an underfunded one at that.
> Also, if the problem with "Standard Markdown" is the use of the term "Markdown", then the license is relevant. But that means that everyone else (Multi-markdown, Markdown Extra, Github-flavored Markdown, Python-flavored Markdown, Markdown Python, Markdown PHP, etc. are all equally guilty of a "dick move".

Gruber is OK with "Github flavored Markdown" because the name makes it sound like a fork. "Standard Markdown" does not sound like a fork. See my earlier comment in this thread for a cite to Gruber verifying that this is his problem with the name.
The Future of TLS
http://fairmark.com/execcomp/grants.htm
Agree on the brains comment for lowest latency cache, http://artofmemory.com/ - are you using Anki for language learning? Desktop or mobile? Does each user create their own cards or are these available as pre-existing content (free or paid)?
Cool presentation, but I have a question: go to slide #1, mouse over the top row, move your mouse along the element to the bottom row. There is noticeable lag in Chrome 37 as the page tries to re-draw the rows highlighted.

Other slides seem to have reasonable performance; is there something in ClojureScript that we should avoid here?
Then we should all wear body camera.
But higher LEO orbits are pretty stable from what I understand. I'd have to look up data, but we're talking centuries to thousands of years for decay, no?

Geosyncronous is a whole 'nother matter, and yes, anything placed there will probably still be orbiting when the Sun goes supergiant. Ponder that.
You're right, and it's relevant to the narrative. Thiel jumped into finance from a legal career, which can be difficult to do unless you capitalize on a market shift (e.g. bankruptcy lawyers jumping to distressed asset funds in the most recent recession). Derivatives was a growing area in the early 1990's, which presumably made it easier for him. Which was fortuitous, because since he didn't come from money, he might not have been in a position to start his first fund without his Wall Street connections.

This aspect of finance, the difficulty of getting into the field later on in one's career, is a major reason why so many Ivy-leaugers pursue it right out of school.
A compiler could just forward the zero from the memset directly to your write syscall and delete the memset (and I would certainly implement this optimization in a compiler if I found it helped real code).
GPS coordinates work regardless if there is an image on the Google map... a coordinate is a coordinate (which is why the military, aviation industry, maritime industry, agricultural industry, etc... all use coordinates instead of some silly system like this phonetical one.)
Samantha Austin
As a white male, I disagree with your belief that race has little to do with police interactions.

http://www.nyclu.org/content/stop-and-frisk-data

There is much, much more data as well. It's rather frightening that it has taken this long for us to do anything about it.
Pressure Washer Marietta
Avant-garde and modernist magazines from 20th century
> Clozure doesn't come close to SBCL where numeric code is concerned.

Well, you have to declare everything then you get similar performance.
Sometimes the need to be asserted on the street in order for them to be violated and hold up in court.
you have sample level control- why impossible?

i've implemented naive quantization and MIDI control in my own web apps, without plugins...
To clarify: the strategy in the post doesn't actually work (or at least, is not guaranteed to work in every conforming implementation): the "volatile" only applies to the read of the function pointer, not to the execution of the function in question.

You don't even need to assume some sort of crazy evil compiler to have to worry about this - speculative inlining of function pointers guarded by a safety check is something that FDO builds will actually do.
Silicon Valley builds up in Microsoft's backyard
Well, that just takes the wind out of our hate-sails. That's the charitable (and probably objective) interpretation. I guess people are taking issue with "hand-coded", which is an odd term that may imply things that aren't really true. It's possible it did indeed mean "customized" though.
Based on the history of communication with Gruber, they should probably assume no reply means it's NOT okay... but then no progress would be made, ever.
Probably mistaken assumption given Gruber's "new syntax, new name" request: https://twitter.com/gruber/status/507651498692849665

Personally I think it is a fair compromise.
I wonder when that was posted. Linux networking has improved massively since the 2.6 days, and continues to get better.

It's still not FreeBSD, but the difference is pretty small these days.
It will certainly take more than cameras, but the cameras should at least help. There will also have to be actual accountability, as in, police officers will have to get into legal trouble for things they do on camera.
> * We didn't get a response so we assume its OK

No such assumption is stated. They decided to honor Gruber's specific requests (stop using the Standard Markup name, kill the domain and don't redirect it, and apology) and, as a courtesy offered him the opportunity to provide feedback on a list of alternative names to use instead of the Standard Markup name.

They never suggested that they took Gruber's silence as equivalent to consent, more that the silence (combined with the general shape of the names he had indicated would probably be acceptable) -- given that they aren't going to cancel the project, and they are going to immediately honor his request to stop using the old name -- leaves them no choice but to choose the new name without further input from Gruber.
I think if stack overflow supports that part then it becomes the de facto standard and if they don't then it wont. So kind of a chicken and egg thing.
What if one made some trivial use of the block of memory after having performed the memset, say something like this:

void
dosomethingsensitive(void)
{
uint8_t key[32];
...
/* Zero sensitive information. */
memset((volatile void *)key, 0, sizeof(key));
key[0] = key[1] + 1;
}

Would that thwart the optimizer, or would it also see through that usage and eliminate it as well?
very cool, love the idea. I spoke about this idea in the past and if someone could execute it properly it could go somewhere. Any plans to monetize?
In recent years when there was some kind of alleged police misconduct, the police would invariably deny, deny, deny. What the citizens were complaining about never happened.

And then a video footage would surface that proves police misconduct.

Of course there are liars that try to get police into trouble or just hate them.

Hopefully this body camera idea will be a good thing.
Without getting a response, it still is in violation of the license, correct?
http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/license

I bet Gruber still won't be happy, but I consider this issue squashed.
What I would like is an open source browser that autorecords all my non incognito browsing history, including videos, etc within a transparent database / file format.

Even with Google, I often have problems finding interesting things that I've read in the past.

How it would work: For each page, any time the DOM changes, that is saved as a revision of the document. This way, I can get back to any state of a website without javascript complexity by browsing the revision list.

Bookmarks / Favorites would still be useful for saving notable stuff, and ideally there would be a powerful data management facilities for search (eg. Solr), deletion and merging datasets. A future project, perhaps...
Everyone, please listen to this This American Life segment, the best public radio segment I have ever heard. Now imagine if he did not have a tape recording. He might still be in the mental hospital the police committed him to. That's the possibility for everyone pulled over today by police without body cameras.
This isn't a very useful proposal, unless there's also a proposal to somehow separate the incentives of the police from the incentives of the party responsible for the recordings.
'Telepathy' experiment sends 1st mental message
<img src="about:logo" onload="alert('Browser is Firefox!')" />

Maybe this too?

<img src="about:logo" onerror="alert('Browser is NOT Firefox!')" />
I think you're reading into it. I read the comments as "straighten this out early so you're not sued later."

edit: and the replies to "I'm tired after work" seem to be "do your own stuff first and be tired at work!"
Seems reasonable actually, based on his implicit approval of all the other Markdown project names.
This is a fair point, and what I meant was something more along the lines of "It's certainly true that my school did not emphasize résumé-padding or even resume building".

No one at my school ever discussed career development, and it was a fundamental disservice to the students. The assumption on the part of the faculty was that students would go to 1 of 3 mediocre grad programs or low tier medical programs that our students were regularly admitted to, and that furthering students' development outside of undergrad was not their concern. The only reason I ended up in a better place was because of fantastic mentoring outside of school.

To put this into context, I majored in biochemistry in undergrad, and was the only person in my department (or out of anyone else that I knew in STEM) to do summer research internships at other universities (we didn't have such a thing) / in industry while I was there. I was also the only person to push for a more independent senior research thesis rather than a cookie cutter project which was handed to me.

The university I performed research at for two summers had large, well organized career counseling and job placement efforts, including multiple large scale career fairs each year. When I returned to my school and suggested that we organize a trip to a large university career fair nearby, I was met with blank stares by the faculty and the students. When I asked people what their career plans were soon after the start of senior year, no one even had a general sense of what they wanted to do or what opportunities were out there...
If Jobs wasn't there you never would have ever heard of Apple. Keep that in mind
Sounds like a neat project. I started putting something like that together but it was more text focused. I like the idea of automatically gathering data from other sources.

On a side note, I use mizuno for a project[1] and I've never had any problems with it. Thanks!

[1]: https://github.com/docverter/docverter
I may be mistaken, but isn't the problem with the title containing the word "Markdown" and therefore implying "Better Markdown"? And not with the specific adjective before Markdown?
Yes, it is a decent read. But it's a self-insertion Mary Sue fic. The author is very keen on telling you how smart he is. Very.

I do like his choice not to give the idiot ball to anyone.

(Please look up the technical terms on tvtropes. But only, if you have an afternoon to burn.)
The first comment there (by Anonymous) claims that the final technique can also be optimized:

(memset_ptr)(p, 0, len);

> can be replaced by:

if (memset_ptr == memset) {
memset(p, 0, len);
} else {
memset_ptr(p, 0, len);
}

> Which in turn can be optimized using the other tricks noticed above into:

if (memset_ptr != memset) {
memset_ptr(p, 0, len);
}

I'm no expert, but this seems like a believable defeat of the technique in the post.
So is any fork of markdown that uses the word markdown count as a violation of the BSD license until you get written permission from gruber himself?
Great-looking site, but did you license the images used? Celebrity photogs won't take kindly to usage without permission. I've even heard of blogs being sued for similar.