skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just reposting a comment that I made earlier today (re Syria, but apropos here too):

IF you have some free time, the Humanitarian Openstreetmap Team (HOT) is always looking for volunteer mappers. The current ebola outbreak is the #1 priority for HOT.

Tracing buildings, roads, and other features from aerial imagery is something that anybody can do, and it provides immediate benefit to volunteers from the World Health Organization (WHO), Doctors Without Borders (DWB/MSF), IFRC and other humanitarian organizations on the ground responding to the crisis.

To map something now: http://tasks.hotosm.org/

More on HOT: http://hot.openstreetmap.org/get-involved

"HOT benefits from contributors with a wide range of interests and experience. Almost anyone can make a tremendous contribution to our projects by contributing mapping, but we're also very pleased to hear from developers, documenters and ideas hackers that can engage with us and our work."
Dropbox Platform – New datastore features
There's got to be a lot more to this story.

Factorli sounds like a viable business, but not really something that would attract venture capital money.

What happened to the millions of dollars in tools and equipment?
Thanks! Changed from http://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=358899&ftid=289773&dwn=1.
I would guess that for (m)any breaches that have occurred so far, the owner might not have even checked for evidence nor have the thieves bragged yet. Time will tell.
I just signed up and was able to have my account validated through the chat - so far it seems pretty great!
Thanks, I did this too!
HACKathon
Comments start at 1 point.
What kind of areas are you interested/experienced in? What would you like to learn? I'm sure there are tons of gaps out there that you could help fill. Maybe the folks on irc.mozilla.org #rust might be able to give you some ideas.
This was the moment at which the Bushido Code really did the Japanese no favors. The island hopping campaign had been brutal. It did not take a great deal of imagination to make an assault on the Home Islands daunting.

Things I've read indicate that there was an actual lack of trusted comms between the Imperial staff and the U.S. I believe things were going through the Soviets. Some credit that with leaving enough gap to make any offer of surrender much slower and harder to verify. And there was allegedly a power struggle within the Imperial chain of command.
I was thinking more along the lines of the ensuing nuclear arms race, nuclear proliferation, MAD, etc. The fact that the bomb worked, and worked so well (regardless of its effect on the outcome of the war) definitely contributed to this.

Sure, if it hadn't worked, they may have tried again, and the next attempt may have led to all these things, but fact is, it DID work, and everyone in these photos contributed to it (knowingly or unknowingly).
My favorite quote:

"Snapchat? What do I know about snapchat, we didn't fund them. How about another question."
Law enforcement is far over reaching in my opinion. This data is still hackable because all data is hackable. the fact it is inconvenient is a good thing. This is like saying you should only be allowed to have car or house locks that law enforcement has keys to. They can still acquire the data but they will need to spend significant resources to do it. Invading your citizens privacy should be difficult!
They could wear suits. That might remind them they are of the people, and their first priority is to serve the people. They might also consider attending the memorial service for Mike Brown. In suits.
I'd be happy if I could just download all my comments. Right now it's restricted to the most recent 1000. I've been complaining about this to the admins for years and they keep saying they're working on it.
It was just for fun. Part of my job at the time was evaluating benchmarks, so things like the water simulation were on my mind. I don't remember if there were microwaves on each floor that I might have used instead.

I don't dog-ear book pages, if that makes you feel any better.
Memes, inside jokes and other fluff content are good for attracting new users and light entertainment. That makes sense.

What we're saying is that such low-effort content gets old. Users get bored after a while and want something thoughtful and novel. If reddit does not come up with a way to provide such content (without the constant slide toward the lowest common denominator), it may have trouble holding users.
I have no idea if its strange or not since I've never raised money, but if you were to invest in someone it would probably be quite valuable to know their work history. Given that you're part of some program and not soliciting VC's individually, I'm guessing this is one of the easiest / fastest ways to get to know you.
Thanks. I just sent in a query about that to your support email. How would you feel about someone who bought a large number of $0.99/month instances, all of which had lots of network traffic with each other and were often compute-bound? Like the things one routinely does on Amazon AWS.

(I'm exploring the possibility of a new kind of service which requires each user to have their own private cloud server, with all the cloud servers talking to each other.)
Insult unnecessary. At this point, prayer & science have similar influence over curing someone of Ebola. Contradictory to say you'll "choose science thank you" yet don't have (per hyperbolic statement) any sensible tangible preparations to meet an Ebola epidemic with.
My take is that what's happening right now is mass reconnaissance. Since the Shellshock problem will only occur on sites (or specific pages) where bash is invoked it's necessary to go round and figure out what's vulnerable.

I'd guess that blackhats and whitehats are all out building those lists of vulnerable machines. They can then go back and exploit them en masse later.
Show HN: Clock140, a clock for Twitter and time
Ha. I've love to see them backpedal on this.

'We were wrong to jump right to 10, but wanted to show how much beyond 9 we are. So instead:'

Introducing Windows 911
There is a distinction between "terminal" and "instrumental" values. If you continually ask yourself questions like "why am I doing this", you will eventually get an answer of "just because". That is your terminal value, the reason you do everything you do.

Humans have some complicated unknown set of terminal values. Everything we do, we do because we believe it will maximize our values. A value might be something like "avoid suffering", or "other people suffering is bad", etc.

In this example the AIs terminal value is "make paperclips". Everything it does, it does because it believes it will maximize this value. It would never ask itself questions like "why", because that action doesn't maximize that value.

If it has the ability to rewrite it's own code, it would rewrite it in such a way that it can't ever change it's own goals. Changing goals is counterproductive to achieving them.
Clock140 is a WiFi connected clock that displays your Twitter feed. You can customize buttons, alarms, and other services through a browser.
What companies can do quality startup intro video for a good price?
I am looking for some recommendations on consulting companies / motion designers that can do short intro video for product. Must take American Express.
Harness the Power of Your Footsteps
About 30 seconds on the homepage of Reddit will tell you exactly how its different from HN.
The Nate Silver 'disaster' at ESPN
This is a good write-up.

I still think some kind of vanilla ML would suit a lot of people very well.
I'm amazed at the how FBI and the Justice Department somehow managed to not notice that Apple was improving their security in iOS 8 until after iOS 8 was launched, despite months of public beta testing.
This is a great semi formal interview with a local infectious disease specialist I heard on montana public radio yesterday that gives a rather unique view:

http://mtpr.org/post/missoula-doctor-ebola-front-lines

As he explains, Montana has one of the few labs in the country (actually in the small town I live in) where you can work on live ebola cultures so we have medical people trained to deal with ebola etc and some also have been spending time in africa.
In addition to being a great lang, I love all the little things. Like he mentions, the doc tools and compiler are very nice.
Shared hosting providers often don't allow background tasks, so I'd guess that's where it came from.
BFL internal log, the Monarch from BFL would melt at 520GH
After 20 seconds on Google: Keefe

There are a lot of prisons out there, state, local, federal, private and public and they use a wide range of companies. However, they have little incentive to allow multiple venders at the same time so there is little real completion after the fact.
Headlines and documents from the FTC vs BFL Bitcoin mining case
Show HN: Wow Moments - Capture the best moments in YouTube Videos
As someone who chose the Lua runtime as a basis for his own toy language, these are my observations:

A. True. Paradoxically Lua's source is well-documented in places that arguably didn't need documentation in the first place, but it tends to contain no comments whatsoever in tricky places like the VM or the implementation of internal data objects.

B. Global-by-default has bugged me as well. Thankfully it's not difficult to patch it so declarations are mandatory and local though.

C. It's a matter of taste in the end. I struggled for a while on whether to convert it to 0-based indexing or not, but so far have left things as they are. Depending on your programming style, you might end up not using indexes directly all that much.

D. The distinction between having separate array and hash parts in a table kind-of works, but only if you make the conscious decision never to work with numerical indexes. Generally, I think this type of array/map hybrid is something PHP got right with their ordered hash maps, whereas Lua's way of doing things have a few gotchas.

[] For a lot of applications, having only one number type works surprisingly well. I just wish they had opted for morphing the internal number representation according to usage in the script, instead they are now doing a separate int type in Lua 5.3 which feels a little out of place for my taste.

[] I really don't think Lua needs a separate symbol type.

[] Things I didn't like include how often you have to check for certain conditions in Lua to avoid raising fatal errors. Not being able to use keywords inside the table dot notation. The idea that the self operator works on a function in the table instead of its metatable. The lacking core library, especially when it comes to table usage. The fact that a require()'d file doesn't know its own file name. No default to-string serialization on tables. The pattern that control flow statements always require code block components instead of single expressions. Goto statements.

Here's a link to my project which addresses my personal Lua pain points: http://np-lang.org/
I don't think Biosphere 2 is a great example. In Mission 1 there were huge problems regulating CO2 and O2, their pollinators died, invasive insects took over, and they had continually increasing NO2 and CH4 gases. They eventually injected O2 from outside to make up for the decreasing levels, and when a participant got sick, they smuggled supplies back on their return. It was a disaster. And they had a door they could open to walk out.

The issues with getting something like an ecosystem on Mars would be much more dramatic, esp. given that while there are some ways of getting O2 and carbon, there isn't a source of nitrogen on Mars that we know (we assume there's fixed nitrogen in minerals, though that's very hard to breathe). Any loss of significant life forms would need to be replenished from Earth. And while some life forms will probably manage in 38% gravity, there's no reason to assume many would have long term viability (especially vertebrates like humans who depend on Earth gravity to function).

Getting an ecosystem on Mars that could support humans doesn't seem like it's in the realm of possibility to me, especially when there's good reason to believe humans themselves wouldn't be able to survive for long periods there unless something managed to solve that very hard problem. You could use a centrifuge for the long trip out (and nobody could survive without that), but you can't just live in a centrifuge on Mars forever.
This seems incredibly strange. Personally, I don't see how it's going to add value to Reddit and help build the community. Mixing money into the site is going to complicate things, bring forward a lot of challenges, and it's going to be a large time sink.

I think Reddit has more important things to focus on, and I don't find this to be a good use of resources. Reddit is also slow to roll out changes, so if this has a negative impact, it'll take them a long time to pivot back on track.

Perhaps it's going to be a minor feature that the majority of users never know exists, and things will continue as they do now. If it's a major feature, I think it'll be a flop, and open up room for competition.

Edit: To expand a little more, what's the best case scenario they're hoping for here? They think the community is going to grow and more people will flock to the site because of this change? Reddit is anti-corporate, the community likes to feel small, even though it's one of the largest communities on the internet. When they associate money with the site, people will look at it as more of a business, and I think that'll drive more people away than it brings in.

Why doesn't Reddit just launch an image hosting platform? Why do they send all this traffic to imgur and gfycat, when they could roll out their own solution for the community? They can spin it off into a separate service to attract non-Redditors, and with all the incoming visitors from other sources, they can refer more people back to Reddit. To me, this seems like a no-brainer, since a large portion of their site revolves around images, and they're giving that traffic and monetization away to third parties at the moment.
https://www.google.com/search?q=railroad+diagram&ie=UTF-8&oe...
Why were there so many pitchforks?

> FTC examiner at Butterflylabs:

> During my inspection of the premises located at 10770 El Monte, I observed red foam pitchforks, with the words “BFL is late!” and “Y U NO SHIP!” imprinted on them, located at various places within the offices and work stations. There were many red foam
pitchforks being stored in Mr. Zerlan’s office at 10770 El Monte, as well as at the storage facility located at 17501 West 98th St. True and correct copies of photos and/or image stills from Mr. Lex’s video recordings demonstrating the locations of the items are
attached here as
I understand the need to fight obvious spam and shadowbanning being a good tool for that, but shadowbanning regular users that are trying to contribute actual content is very disrespectful to the users.
Emails get lost, most often in Junk Mail boxes.

When I don't hear back from someone within a reasonable time frame, I follow up with a short email asking if my previous email about this and that was received. If I do not get anything back either within a day or two, I call with exactly the same question: "I sent you an email about <subject> on <date> but have not heard back, so just want to make sure it found its way to your inbox". More often than you would think the person I called would either find my emails in their junk folder, do not find them at all, apologize for overlooking them, or apologize for not replying sooner. (And sometimes they would say they replied and I would find their replies in my junk folder.)
The number of jailbreaken device is significantly less in Hong Kong compared to that in China, percentage wise.
I didn't say hypothesis test, I said decision rule. The method I describe in the article has only two quantities "pulled out of the ass" - the threshold of caring and the prior. If you visually inspect the posterior, your are implicitly pulling out of your ass an unknown "threshold of visual similarity".

That article is weird. It uses a normal distribution as the prior for the conversion rate.

That's incorrect. From the article: "To begin we will choose a Beta distribution prior." The computational intensiveness is not caused by the choice of prior, it's caused by the need to evaluate an integral over the joint posterior.

A Dirichlet prior is also not what you'd use for more than 2 alternatives - you have two beta distributions, one representing the posterior for the control and the other for the variation. If you had a second variation, you'd have 3 beta distributions, and you'd need to evaluate a 3 dimensional integral.
May God Bless you.
What would make the best “lingua franca” programming language(s)?
30 Year Old CS Image-Recognition Problem Solved Using XKCD Solution
China's Censorship of Weibo Posts in 2014
Thanks. I'll definitely try out irc for some ideas. My general projects are small automation tasks for myself as well as small web-based apps for myself and friends. That's part of why coming up with ideas for something like rust are a little tricky.

The only promising thought I've had is maybe implementing some sort of template preprocessor that I can find a way to work into an existing rust framework.
You're looking at this from the worst possible angle.

Government operates by different rules than the rest of society. In business, if something is taking up a lot of resources, that means it's a hog and you have to figure out how to get it to stop consuming so much.

In government, using lots of resources is the hallmark of a thriving and publicly useful program. We need a hundred guys like Leopold making the FOIA people look more and more important, making the politicians that protect and support FOIA look more and more right, giving them the power to dramatically expand the bandwidth available.

The US government is not a constrained resource-poor embedded device, it's a massive datacenter where every cabinet and area and floor has to fight for its existence, and increased traffic is the goal, not the enemy.

If the program isn't used, it'll get downsized or shut down and they'll give the money to military contractors, who know exactly how the game is played.
> the [...] compiler [is] very nice.

No doubt clang has been a good influence in setting the standard for gorgeous, readable error messages with nice colored squigglies and arrows. Borrow check errors probably the hairiest you get, and you get less and less of those as you internalise the rules.
Las Vegas is not his hometown, but it is mine (and my father's, and his father moved to Boulder City at 19 to work on Boulder/Hoover Dam).

Family business growing up (started by grandfather/father above): drilling water wells. So, ya know, I've got a layman's understanding.

In the West, water rights are property rights. There are nearly 100 year old agreements on the split of water taken from the Colorado river.

Look up Arizona v. California.

In summary, as long as at least 7,500,000 acre feet of water is available from the Colorado River, California is allocated 4,400,000 acre·ft; Nevada, 300,000 acre·ft; and Arizona, the remainder. If more water is available, California is entitled to 50% of the water from the Colorado River, Arizona to 46%, and Nevada to 4%. If less water is available, the Secretary of the Interior must allocate the water according to various formulas (which were the subjects of the court cases) to ensure that each state receives a specified amount, with California receiving an absolute fixed maximum of 4,400,000 acre feet per year (547 U.S. 157).
I had no idea. Thanks for the link!
Not to mention it sort of defeats one of the main value propositions of cryptocurrencies - their decentralized nature. If reddit created such a currency you would need to trust reddit to trust its value. And if it's backed by reddit shares, then it seems like a proxy for allowing public trading of the shares of a private company. I wonder what the SEC would think of that.
Crypto Market Monitor – Easily Access Bitcoin Market Data
They don't really define what they mean by contribution. Maybe it's karma maybe it's not.

What if they mean to reward non karma based activities on the site? Moderators for instance.
Searching for ":;" in my Apache logs, I'm definitely seeing some hits -- although the majority are security organizations doing wide scans to see how many systems are vulnerable.
I wonder if this is what contributes to the large price difference - for example, a 1Gb/1core Gandi instance is about 2x the price of the corresponding Linode plan.
Rumors on the internet[1] suggest that Microsoft is moving to a more incremental update cadence, and, correspondingly, there will never be another major version release of Windows. If that's the case, I'd wager they didn't want to be stuck "a version behind" Mac OS X forever.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/windows-threshold-and-cadence-how-fast-...
The solution isn't making a more efficient competitor to Jpay. The solution is abolishing prisons. Angela Davis has written a good short book on this subject called "Are Prisons Obsolete?".
I think you mean the other way around. All the ones listed will very likely have at least some human survivors. Eventually humanity will rebuild and get back to where it was more or less.

AI is the only thing listed with the capability to literally destroy the planet. While something might still exist afterwards, it will likely be totally meaningless and worthless: http://lesswrong.com/lw/y3/value_is_fragile/
This looks well done. Well done.
-12 for being honest? Keep them coming then.
One has to admire this man's grit, discipline and inventiveness. It's inspiring in a way, and makes you want to cheer him on.

OTOH, a part of me feels this effort more resembles idealism driven by a historical scarcity event. I suspect this emotional subroutine could be fueling his mission, rather than the logical post-apocalyptic rationalization he puts forth.
What do you mean by 'vanilla ML'? I wasn't sure there were any really around... Ocaml has tons of stuff added, and SML also has lots of added extensions.
The USA spends more on health care than socialized healthcare countries do. Therefore, socialized healthcare systems have less money, and money is an important resource.
You're not hearing about anything major because those who have major exploits aren't about to tell the world. Successful intrusion here means what it usually means: RATing any devices possible; patching those devices themselves; infecting the network when possible; staying quiet and gathering. Machines that were vulnerable and later fixed now should be considered with the same weight as having been rooted. They should be fully overhauled. That means new drives, even. Of course, we all know that'll never happen. The overwhelming majority of people and companies handle data recklessly.
you might also like ocaml as a higher-level language with a lot of the same features.
Users can create their own communities called subreddits. If they do, they are the first and only moderator of that sub. A sub can be about anything, and if other users enjoy that type of content they can subscribe.

Ultimately mods can remove or approve any post they desire. Some mods are hands-off, and others curate content. It depends on their goals for the subreddit. If users are not happy with the content of the sub or the moderation style, they can subscribe to a competitor subreddit or start their own. It's very much an open system.
Introduction to Low Level Haskell Optimization
Not many BSL4 labs in the whole world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level

And only 15 in the US planned or capable of operating at that level. At least a couple will only do BSL4 work if surge capacity is needed.