skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This sounds nice but is illogical. Actually creating alternative competitor networks are insanely prohibitively expensive, and will likely back up against a backbone served by one of the few capable ISPs anyway.

Besides that, competition is artificially stifled by government sponsored monopolies - but competing ISPs like it that way. It makes new markets difficult but on the up side, makes price collusion easy (and the threat of competition non-existent).

Like it or not, the fight is on the beaches of the FCC, and we don't get to move the front lines willy-nilly in this fight.
Yes. The argument is that the E-Government Act of 2002 makes the judiciary's policies regarding PACER illegal.

See:

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/essay.html?id=84

http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/29himg3wm/california-northe...
Murder is insignificant in the prison reform discussion. As pointed above, it's a tiny percentage of all crime. Unless you want to suggest releasing murders (as another article on here did, though I disagree), there is nothing that can be done there. What can be done is to focus on the people that shouldn't be in jail. Change laws that criminalize victimless offenses. Release current prisoners. Those are real action items, and even if it is only a quarter million, that is still about an eight of the total prison population. End parole / probation for such offenses as that is likely to lead to people going back to jail. This is not an insignificant number. Releasing these people will make a difference, more than anything else I've seen suggested.
The information density (text/meaningful graphics per square inch) is very low - most of the space is unused, the text is large etc. I assumed that, on smaller screens, the page would be laid out so that there's less wasted space...
Needless killing and destruction doesn't correlate with intelligence. I don't think AI will wipe us out. There might be some struggle if we position ourselves as a threat or competition.
true. But it is going to be too late by then.
> what if he was downloading credit cards instead? Or some sort of corporate secrets?

What if he was raping women? Or committing genocide?

> But the act here is the crime, not what he gains from it

Downloading scientific journals is not the same "act" as committing credit card fraud. It is an outrageous defect in the law that it doesn't adequately distinguish them.
Companies will gradually start selling services piecemeal at what will be promoted as a "discount", where you buy a tiered package of sites. "Obviously, you only need Facebook, Google, and Buzzfeed. Why are you paying for that shitty internet you don't need?"

Public praises the lower bills, talk shows argue incessantly, and nobody grasps either the tech or the economics: the price of the discount is that large tech/infra companies no longer have to worry about competition, and can levy arbitrary entry fees.

Gradually the big companies open up walled app stores that let you run your internet applications within their parameters, rules, and fees. Since this is the only way to reach anyone, smaller upstarts/devlopers grudgingly accept the new way of things, until the whole shenanigan is disrupted by a little guy meeting an unmet, undervalued need out of left field.

And the cycle repeats.
Have you considered using physiological tracking to cut through the problem entirely? Either galvanic skin response or heart rate+heart rate variability would probably reveal the truth, and they're pretty cheap (I bought a heart-rate monitoring strap on Amazon the other day for $50, which is a drop in the bucket compared to the value of getting reliable usability results or even the cost of the VR hardware itself).
> Hashes are universal and unambiguous. There should be a way to retrieve a file given its hash.

I'm not sure you've thought through the complexity of what you're asking for.

Hashes require (a) a hash function everyone agrees to, (b) a way to resolve them to an IP address.

Unless you synchronized all global hashes across the Internet on everyone's computer (the git hashed project model -- which we know doesn't scale beyond a certain point unless you bucket things into independent hashes you care about), you'd basically have to do something like
Hash://ip_address/bucket/hash or hash://bucket/hash if you want to give a monopoly to one IP address that manages giant hash in the sky

Which is back to URLs and HTTP, and no different from say Amazon S3
If by "in on it too," you mean have an interest in keeping the current prison status quo, then yes, absolutely. The rest of your rant is irrelevant.
The referenced article was discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6916557.
Thanks for sharing this. It's really interesting to see exactly how each browser handles both standard and EV certificates.
get this
http://puu.sh/bGSOF/3809882b0c.png
What would the response be? The petition says to remove Ortiz. Not investigate. Not chastise. Not start hearings.

That's a pretty binary decision. A website survey, that could easily be gamed, that has fewer signatures than the population of a random small city, is supposed to result in completely bypassing the USC?

Most would agree with the sentiment, but the petition was failed from the moment the creator hit Submit.
Bitcoin Mining Explained Like You’re Five
Heads up: Windows XP != Windows XP Embedded. Extended support for XPE has not ended yet.

http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/search/default.aspx?a...
Full-Spectrum Testing with AngularJS and Karma
So the man who decided that DRM in HTML5 was a good thing has an opinion on the well-being of the world wide web, eh?

Sorry if this sounds bitter. I'm just posting from a browser unable to access HTML5 content at a regular interval. It's an open source browser, and the suggested "fix" is always using a closed-source browser, OS or both.

I thought this web-thing was supposed to be open and cross platform?
If you had invested just after Jobs unveiled the iMac and the first iPod, you would have done quite well.
This is why I think Detroit is in a better position than most people think. Just give the city back to nature and it will flourish again.
> [HAL] had been driven insane by conflicting goals imposed by human authorities who should have known better, but didn't.

This is a critical point. The danger posed by AI is not that it will actively take over, but that we will put the machines in charge ourselves. The fact that HAL was running the ship in 2001 was a decision made by humans. HAL would not have murdered Frank and locked Dave out of the pod bay, I would argue, if it had not been programmed, at some level of abstraction, to consider itself responsible for the mission. But HAL was a machine, and not capable of taking such responsibility.
12 days late but still:

I just realized "Correlation does imply casuation a lot of the times" is a completely meaningless statement that I made (if correlation is not because of causation even some of the times then that's simply 'correlation doesn't imply causation').

What I really had in mind (which I think is correct) is that 'correlation ends up being due to causation a lot of the times'.
G+ did bring some unique things to the field, like Circles, but Facebook copied the functionality within a couple of weeks, before anyone really had a chance to leave in significant numbers because of it.
It's a fairly clever idea, it combines "Google Goggles" instant OCR with instant text-to-speech, to make the phone read out what the camera is seeing.

The one worry i have is that, since modern phones have no tactile input (nevermind feedback), it means a blind person will have a cellphone for the single purpose of being a mobile OCR-reader. Can people with actual experience maybe weigh in on this?

Also, holy damn, i wish it were illegal for journalists to lie in their titles.
Danny Welbeck GOAL and SKILL – Aston Villa vs. Arsenal 0 3 Premier League 2014
Actually, many people have been waiting long for such a language to come out, and are very excited about Rust for good reasons.

Managed languages solve a large set of problems, but introduce two big problems as I see it:

- Cause nondeterministic overhead which is particularly problematic for kernels, games, and software with heaps over, say, 10 gigabytes.

- Limit ability to safely pass objects outside their ecosystem. How many libraries written in managed code are worth using outside of the language they are written in?
One of the problems with writing about super intelligence is that none of us are smart enough to do it. Writing already makes us wittier than speaking, giving us a chance to edit our words and show our thoughts in the very best light we can. So in a way, we're already accustomed to reading at a slightly brighter level than we live every day. How could we stretch this even further to create dialog for superintelligent people and machines?

These aren't my own thoughts -- they've come up in a discussion of _Flowers for Algernon_ which I read somewhere and don't seem to be able to cite now. In _Flowers_, the author gives momentum to his eventually super-intelligent protagonist by starting off with severe mental handicapping, then spending a majority of the story at normal intelligence before allowing us to imagine his next state. It is a great writing technique, giving direction and then leaving things to the imagination. Imagination is like a variable that scales the amazingness to fit each reader. I think movies often fail to leave enough space for imagination -- when they're left spelling everything out to the least imaginative member of the audience they leave everyone feeling limited and dissatisfied, glum.

If you want upbeat AI Sci Fi, read a book. Read Banks's _Culture_ series, James P. Hogan's _Two Faces of Tomorrow_, or in a gentler vein, Bradbury's _I Sing the Body Electric_.
Simply use DRM. Some media can be marked as "slow download" and the web browser has to respect this.

Write it into the HTML spec et voila! One happy Tim Berners-Lee.
Andrew Ng predicts half of web searches will soon be speech and images
SSL: Browser Icons and Design Comparison
>>> What if case information was updated as per part of the legal process, aka person X is now innocent.

You seem to be confusing two questions here: access to data and reliability of data. Let's take the example of opens source software, specifically linux kernel you mentioned. Anybody can create a mirror of linux kernel sources. Would that mirror be up-to-date? Who knows. How we solve this problem? We have a network of authoritative mirrors, we have signatures, we have places where new persons can discover which mirrors are recommended to be used. Does this mean if you want to open a new mirror you'd be banned from doing so until you prove you're worthy? No. But in order for your mirror to be useful by more than yourself, you'd have to convince others you are.

Same can work with legal and scientific information. Let's even say federal government, with all its trillions of dollars, can not afford hosting a free information site. Removing merely legal hurdles, while keeping paid access, would allow volunteers with cooperation of trustworthy organizations - like universities, major NGOs, etc. - to raise private funds to keep free mirrors alive and up-to-date.

This is a solved problem, the only thing preventing its deployment is the legal prohibition. Quality is not a problem, we know how to solve quality issue. Swartz tried to use technology to go around legal hurdles - unfortunately, in current environment this no longer works, law has caught with technology enough to resist attempts to work around it with technology. Now one can only hope it would soon advance enough to actually enable technology to help, not only disable it.
Can you at least create a "Coming soon" page with a signup form?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming

Seriously. Defending cyber infrastructure is hard. Incredibly hard. If you only play defense you lose. Always. 100% of the time. Nuclear facilities and critical infrastructure get hacked when they aren't even connected to the broader internet. Our software stacks are built insecure from the ground up.

And what's the threat model you want to Home Depot to protect you against? Hackers coming in directly from the internet? Hackers coming in from a contractor (like Target)? Hackers breaching their corporate datacenters? Attackers that gain access to the production line? Attackers that return goods after they've been infected? Attackers that phish for access to employees or with PDF malware as job applications? Leaving infected CDs, harddrives, and USB sticks near the company HQ of the business they buy their point of sales device from? Creating rouge access points or using femto cells to gain access to company devices? Hacking into home devices of employees? Attackers planting backdoors into the hardware at the manufacturing level? Attackers guessing weak passwords that employees configured? From these attacks applied to vendors and partners? From attackers that compromise tools used by employees hosted on C|NET and others (like sysinternals)? There's a million ways in. Point of sales devices are just one way adversaries could collect this data.

Security researchers have been crying that the internet has no clothes for decades. The internet is a wild west without vigilantes. It's been designed weak from the start. Adversarial-tolerant design costs far, far more than fault-tolerant design does.

Wall Street was hacked. The Department of Defense is routinely hacked. The _NSA_ has been hacked.

This isn't Home Depot's fault. Everyone gets hacked. Everyone.
> Since this is the only way to reach anyone, smaller upstarts/devlopers grudgingly accept the new way of things, until the whole shenanigan is disrupted by alittle guy meeting an unmet, undervalued need.

If, as a startup, I can't reach any customers anymore, why even take that risk and start a company? Why, as a VC / angel, would I want to invest in companies that are more or less destined to lose out (Internet based businesses). I think it'll have a huge negative impact on businesses, especially new Internet based businesses and this will lead to less innovation and less startups. It all depends how severe things get, but since there's really nothing to stop ISPs from charging businesses and customers whatever they want, I wouldn't be surprised if the current tech/Internet boom slowly fades away as company after company finds that it's just not worth trying to compete.
Known as the Great Oxygenation Event, the effects were actually quite dramatic including killing most life on earth and triggering a 300 million year ice age as well as creating most of the world's iron deposits.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event
I feel bad for the folks who still haven't gotten their DK2...
Js13kGames 2014 winners announced
Aaron's attorney at the time of his suicide wrote a summary of the case shortly after Aaron died. His attorney believed that given the nature of the crime (particularly: nonremunerative) and Aaron's first-time offender status, he was unlikely to serve a custodial sentence even if he was convicted. You can reach a similar conclusion by looking at the federal sentencing guidelines and seeing where the probation cutoff is.

This isn't bickering; the C.W. about Swartz is indeed that he was facing decades in prison. He was not.

I agree with the overwhelming majority of everyone that a custodial sentence for Swartz' actions would have been a miscarriage of justice. But the distinctions being made in this thread are not minor ones.
> Bluetooth was enabled automatically after upgrading iOS. This was addressed by only turning on Bluetooth for major or minor version updates.

What?
Perhaps it would be helpful to explain the standard we apply. The comment was aggressive ("actually know anything", "out of your ass") and personal ("you", as opposed to "this" or "it"). That combination is particularly to be avoided.
I fond appeals to authority OK, given that if 50% of market share wouldn't be on board, nobody would consider adopting it.
True. Facebook has also been doubling down on C++ development it seems.
I wonder why bugging someone with a big modal has gotten so popular, I still think doing that leads to less engagement.
http://livestreamwatch.skyrock.com/3232051789-Philadelphia-E...
> Needless killing and destruction doesn't correlate with intelligence.

Tell that to the Native Americans after the arrival of Columbus. Or to the North American megafauna after the arrival of humans. Or to the millions of species driven extinct in the Anthropocene.

There's hardly anything more correlated than less-advanced species getting wiped out by a more-advanced newcomer.
New York Times Resume
This isn't so bad if it's embedded in a sentence explaining where "here" is. It can help in paragraphs where redundant information just clutters things up.
Jupiter’s Moon Europa Can Count Another Similarity with Earth
Since you can't prove a negative; Any proof that Home Depot benefited from this?
Yeah, I'm redoing the homepage now but CloudFront takes a while to clear the cache.
Please don't bring social justice theory into a factual discussion of a company's missteps and negligence that resulted in a serious breach of its systems.
Yeah, I clicked on the link thinking, "Wait - actually SEE? How could that possibly work with just an app?"
Caffeine in tea is very different than coffee because tea has an extra substance that helps balance the negative effects of pure caffeine. This article explains it much better than me :) Personally, I've been doing Yerba Mate (the traditional way from a ghord) which has been a great substitute. I still get a good boost feeling but not the crash or jitters.
Forgot article link! http://verdanttea.com/whats-the-real-deal-with-caffeine-in-t...
>So all in all colour me puzzled over why technological pessimism is on the rise.

Because SF is always about the present, and most of the population has precious little optimism at the moment.

The interesting thing for me about 50s and 60s SF was how much of it was about humans developing psychic and intellectual superpowers. Through 2001, Dune, and hundreds of short stories you had writers redefining what human minds were capable of.

That changed in the 80s, with smart transcendent machines taking the place of smart transcendent humans.

There were a few evil overlord AIs, but a lot of SF AI went in a transcendent direction, while SF humans were evicted into a universe of parasitic aliens and noir dystopias filled with comic book ultra-violence.

As tech gets closer to real AI it has become more obvious that there's a huge difference between Artificial Intelligence in the traditional comp sci sense, and Artificial Personality, which is something else entirely.

The idea seems to have been that if you get one you'll get the other for free. I think it's becoming clear now that practical AI won't work like that.
The new FTC rule the article links may be of interest to others in the e-commerce space, especially those with drop-shipping or custom-made products:

http://www.business.ftc.gov/documents/bus02-business-guide-m...

> The Rule requires that when you advertise merchandise, you must have a reasonable basis for stating or implying that you can ship within a certain time. If you make no shipment statement, you must have a reasonable basis for believing that you can ship within 30 days. That is why direct marketers sometimes call this the "30-day Rule."

> If, after taking the customer’s order, you learn that you cannot ship within the time you stated or within 30 days, you must seek the customer’s consent to the delayed shipment. If you cannot obtain the customer’s consent to the delay -- either because it is not a situation in which you are permitted to treat the customer’s silence as consent and the customer has not expressly consented to the delay, or because the customer has expressly refused to consent -- you must, without being asked, promptly refund all the money the customer paid you for the unshipped merchandise.

It's worth reading over the document in its entirety - lots of interesting points and details.
Plea bargaining exists in Germany as well (under the rubric of "confession agreements").

I think plea bargaining is a red herring. Plea bargains are a necessity: jarring as it is for us to consider this, most felony† defendants are in fact guilty, as a simple consequence of how policing works. It doesn't appear that way to us intuitively, because we only hear about the interesting cases.

That's not a defense of US criminal procedure! We have a terrible, back-breaking policy flaw: sentences are much too onerous, as a result of several decades of "war on crime" legislation from the 70's, 80's, and 90's.

† The word "felony" there is important.
I have no clue why physical sliding keyboards basically disappeared from "smart phones"... they are not only good for the blinds (I guess they probably make pretty much the same amount of money whether they include it or not)
DigiCert
The English idiom is "Thank heavens."

-- http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/thank+heavens
The choice between "100% OK" and 30 years in jail is a false dichotomy. Nobody says Aaron Swartz was a saint without any flaw, and one can easily find many ways in which in hindsight one could suggest better action, especially if one doesn't actually have to act on their own advice. But that he was a fallible human being is not the same as accepting the treatment he's got from the US government. He was trying to fix an injustice and he was not harming anyone. Prosecutors have enough power and discretion to accommodate that if they wanted. They didn't want.
Felony conviction is hardly an amazing deal, with all that it implies in the American system.
... why? Why do I care if I have a G+ account? That's the mistake.

Give everybody a free G+ and then never ever bother anybody about it if they don't use it. The mistake was making G+ obtrusive.

Well, and conflating the concept of "comment" and "share" in Gootube.

And making the "real names only" thing universal instead of a rule that users can enforce on people they interact with ("I don't want pseudonymous commenters").

And forcing me to pick a profile every time I go to YouTube (leave that until I start commenting/posting stuff, thanks).
If you know what monads are then you may know of

join :: Monad m => m (m a) -> m a

Since list is a monad then we know that join can be specialized to

join :: [[a]] -> [a]

which is just `concat` then. Now Transducers are a bit of an elaboration over functions like

Transducer in out === in -> [out]

and so we might compose them a little like

comp t1 t2 in = concat (map t2 (t1 in))

which if you follow in types ends up working out. Finally, that concat/map business is just monadic bind in the list monad. We could also write

comp t1 t2 in = t1 in >>= t2
= (concatMap t1 t2)
= bind t2 (t1 in)

depending on what syntax is most familiar. That's why they're (an elaboration of) "monad composition", i.e. a Kleisli category.

The only thing left is just that Hickey did a transformation called "Church Encoding" or "Continuation Passing Style" to the regular list functions. This eliminates the need to generate concrete lists and turns this fancy composition into reverse normal function composition. It's a clever trick.