skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, in practice the Bitcoin block chain is now "secured" by about four centralized mining pools which control more than half the hash rate. Those pools operate big mining centers, many of which are in China.

Bitcoin mining is now less distributed than steel manufacturing. Home mining is now insignificant.
I can't speak to BART, but in Vancouver when people ask why our trains don't run 24/7 the answer is always "because we need maintenance windows". Maybe the second transbay tube would allow them to keep one tube open while they do work on the other tube?
The main thing that helps me is being interested in the technology itself. The actual sport as it plays out is highly optimized/refined, as you say, but if you’re interested in what determines the performance envelope and how the different teams approach the problem of expanding it, then the whole thing takes on another dimension. The teams design and build their cars themselves with a huge range of available resources, so there is a nice mix of scrappy ingenuity, dogged refinement and luck on display.

This, together with the huge budgets involved at the front of the grid, also produces a sport that features celebrity engineers who command multi-million-dollar salaries and have dramatic contract disputes, etc. This may or may not appeal to you.

Crucially (for me), the teams are very secretive about what they are doing and why, so figuring out the mechanical and aerodynamic approaches that are in play, which ones are winning, which brilliant ideas are languishing on underfunded teams, etc. becomes a very interesting saga of nerdy armchair detective work. Even the parts of the cars that they can’t hide — the bodywork — are sophisticated enough aerodynamically that you can’t necessarily tell what is going on (or copy it for your car) without a relatively detailed understanding of how it works within an overall aerodynamic philosophy. There is a good and growing online community to get into with that.

Then you add the drivers; there are only a couple dozen to know about so its pretty accessible that way, and you get a sense as others here have said about who is under pressure, who has the talent but not the machinery and vice versa, and how they all interact.

Another interesting interaction is between drivers and cars, or driving styles and car characteristics — there are drivers that can uniquely exploit certain car characteristics, or cars that may be designed to suit certain drivers or styles, etc. and those will evolve as drivers move among teams and as the technical regulations change.

I realize typing this out that these things point more to enjoying the sport more than the races themselves. I am a lot less fixated on watching the races than I used to be, but there are still some great moments and I catch what I can. Today’s Russian GP was notably boring for the last couple of years, FWIW. For more instant gratification Moto GP might be a better bet, and most of the technical drama unfolds over there too. I still think F1 is pretty exciting though.
Python does the same, but it has a 1-line version of conditionals that is what the parent uses. Many Python programmers enjoy 1-liners, but I think once you start adding else statements to them they become unreadable.
The main problem with the study: it was only done in Western Europe and North America. It doesn't work when you try the idea on, say, Japan.
Cleaning up and modernizing trains would be a big one for me. I rode BART again recently for the first time in 17 years and it looked, felt and smelled exactly the same as back in 1998. It's a disgrace for an Alpha-World City.
A homeless person was driving back and forth, sleeping on the front seats. The seats and carpet were decades old.
How hard can it be to at least modernize/clean the rolling stock, if you're not willing to invest in new ones?
Bike cars with dedicated bike racks.
BART does not currently run 24/7 primarily because they have to perform maintenance on the system, some of which requires that trains are not running. This is especially the case for the Transbay Tube which requires a lot of attention.

If BART had two tubes then they could run 24/7 and still complete the required maintenance with shut down periods staggered at different times for each tube. This would allow the full system to remain running 24/7.
The problem is that we already use them and it will take generations to change, regardless of what D and Rust are trying to do.

The industry has taken the path MISRA,static analysis and formal methods. With Spark being the only exception.

JPL is only now moving away from C to C++ as shown on their Mars Rover presentation at CppCon. So it will take several years before they change again.

Even if they resolve the issues pointed out in the paper, the adoption is still questionable, given the way the certification processes work.
or... automatic authentication
From the article:

"Of the 135 Space Shuttle launches, only one (STS-51F on 7/29/85) experienced an abort-inducing failure during ascent. In the case of 51F, they safely made a lower-than-planned orbit and carried out the mission. All of the other flights cleanly avoided the dubious honor of settling the RTLS bet."

All but one. Did the writer just forget about the Challenger mission, or did that one somehow count as "cleanly avoiding" an "abort-inducing failure"?

(Someone in the comments to the article has brought this up as well.)
Rewiring your brain to become fluent in math
This is only for pointers into instruction space, not data space.

There's an argument for using a separate stack for subroutine return points. A few CPUs have been built with hardware for that. (One from the 1980s only had a 20-deep call stack, which was kind of limiting.) That achieves much of what this paper proposes.

This is a solution to one specific type of attack - overrunning the stack and overwriting a return pointer. That's a problem, but only one of many pointer-related problems. Fixing subscript-out-of-range problems more generally is much more useful.
Tangentially related, I was struck the first time I saw a compass on an airliner seat-back display... Is the plane's navigation system really interfacing with a Windows CE entertainment system? And how do you isolate it so a crashing entertainment system (we've all seen blue screens of death on the seat backs) doesn't adversely affect the flight system? I'm imagining optical isolators, or a separate compass just for the seat backs, or ... Hopefully it is isolated physically and not just by code review!

Extending this, it is easy to imagine modern military aircraft are interconnected so their radar etc interacts with others. How do you protect it?

(And is, say, 2.6% CPU a price worth paying up front to do so?)
They actually are investing in new ones.

http://www.bart.gov/about/projects/cars
(Mill team)

All exploit mitigation checks most welcome!

The Mill has a hardware managed stack and various other security-related details, many of which are good old ideas not previously making it into silicon. But defence is best in depth. More details http://millcomputing.com/topic/security/
>I'm not sure sure why there is no centralized effort to accelerate research

Your answer is right at the bottom of the science article.

"In memoriam: Tragically, five co-authors, who contributed greatly to public health and research efforts in Sierra Leone, contracted EVD and lost their battle with the disease before this manuscript could be published: Mohamed Fullah, Mbalu Fonnie, Alex Moigboi, Alice Kovoma, and S. Humarr Khan. We wish to honor their memory."
Caltrain is not "already pretty good". It has antiquated, overweight trains due to federal requirements and the fact that it shares track with freight traffic. Those trains can't accelerate properly, so those "convenient" stops in each downtown mean the trains can't run with enough frequency. There are not enough trains and too many at grade crossings, which produce severe noise pollution (due to the federal horn sounding requirements).

Caltrain is WAY overdue for upgrades. The electrification project, which will solve some but not all of these problems, is in need of a speedup. Many at grade crossings need to be replaced with bridges (and some are being replaced), but because of all the fiefdom-like towns along the way, getting anything done along the right-of-way is a nightmare.

Although there is no tractable way to merge Caltrain with BART (because of BART's own foolish planning decisions, such as a custom gauge), and you're right that there is no space for a second right-of-way, there is another neglected project that would benefit here: Dumbarton Rail (http://www.bayrailalliance.org/dumbarton_rail). At various points it was suggested that either BART or Caltrain should be extended across that bridge - either way, completing that link would add badly needed capacity in a region that has long neglected its traffic infrastructure.
I've seen plenty of people call CSIRO a troll. And it's definitely a NPE and also not a university.
Surely more controversial would be the range safety "Flight Termiantion" (i.e. self destruct) option?

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/nasa/4262479
HN trivia: you can still comment on a dead discussion if you have a window opened on it from before it was killed.
I deliberately didn’t go about omitting the number 15 or the string FizzBuzz, because that would have distracted from the key points I was making about Rust. It is not possible to make it as efficient under those constraints—you end up needing either more than one print call, or to use an owned string, where I was able to end up with a solution that didn’t require any heap memory at all.
Any chance for MIT or BSD?

We can't use GPL or LGPL at the company, everything is statically linked.
Commodore Amiga – A visual Commpendium
Orion, NASA's newest spacecraft
I'm interested - noirs53@yahoo.com
yeah. I'm being too nitpicky. I guess part of the "beauty" is that 3*5==15 but I realized that you'd need more complexity after hitting the reply button.
Millbrae, Colma, Daly City, etc. -- and their respective BART stops -- are all in San Mateo County.
Exactly. Silverlight was awesome! It's the best cross platform UI kit I've seen yet.

It's sad that the trifecta of lame known as HTML/CSS/JS won out due to the fact that it's the only cross platform kit that native mobile environments will fully support, since it's so non-threatening.
Challenger never got to RTLS, so yeah, it cleanly avoided settling the bet.
Ebola is fairly difficult to spread, it is not very contagious, no matter what you might believe based on news reports.
If you want to look at a contagious disease, look at flu. The 2009 flu pandemic lead to hospitalization of ~200,000 people in the US alone within a few weeks [1]. Talking about the flu, you can somewhat guess the number of infected people to be much much higher.
The current Ebola outbreak lead to ~8,000 infected persons since its outbreak more than half a year ago in March.
As you see, Ebola is not very contagious when compared to the flu. Yet flu pandemics are usually restricted fairly well once they take off and people are aware.

I'm constantly reading people being afraid of Ebola mutating to make people survive longer so the virus can spread better. Influenza (Flu) is very good with that, yet not even the very contagious flu was able to cause a significant thread to mankind in the recent history.

Ebola is the cause for a humanitarian crisis in West Africa and we should put all our efforts to helping the people who are affected by it, rather than worrying about ourselves for no good reason.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic
I'd really like to see Bart extend to Marin County. Like why isn't that even an option when a second transbay tube is? An extension to San Rafael, Marin City and maybe even Novato would be greatly appreciated.
All the choices offered are spend more or tax more. Haven't they been budgeting for the "$$$$$ $" in needed maintenance and repair all along? It appears that BART was never run to be sustainable but would require period bailouts to just survive. We can do better than this!
True. The argument wasn't logically sound. Although, to be clear, I was not saying that there was no possibility as you're now claiming. And I'm not sure how your statement about the Black Death supports your argument. As we all know, the Black Death passed. It continues to pop up from time to time, but that's true of almost any disease.

Perhaps a more convincing statistic would be that Ebola does not have a 100% mortality rate. This would suggest that, technically, it will pass since there will be survivors. Again, I think people are more concerned about how quickly that will happen and if/when it will resurface, which it probably will.
More parking capacity in the Bart station. A lot of people decide to drive to the city because they cannot find a parking space in some stations. It is not practical for them to walk or bike to the stations due to a variety of difficulties.

The extra parking space could be achieved either by converting the basic and space-inefficient one floor parking ramp to two floors, or building a new underground one.
The anti-growth, Agenda 21 conspiracy theorist crowd is far too large in the North Bay. Instead, this is being built to go to the Larkspur Ferry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonoma-Marin_Area_Rail_Transit
How to give feedback that inspires. Great advice from 5 experienced leaders
Note that it disabled the exploit instead of fixing it, which still is a remarkable feat. I wonder if that could be exploited e.g. by exposing an light exploit from security feature you trick the software to disable a security feature that was stopping a more dangerous exploit, a la The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds.
Lowendbox was bought by ChicagoVPS and basically exists to serve as a shill forum for their many many brands. VPSBoard.com is a neutral third party site where many low end boxers went to.
Ag is $50B of a $1.8T economy ( <3% ). CA won't miss it much.

I am suggesting we buy out ag in CA to reduce the adverse pressure on water and the environment..
Why would it be wrong? The pixels have the correct lighting (assuming the overall ambient light didn't change during the rotation), just the wrong position.
I wonder if this maneuver could be performed in that Kerbal Space Program game?
New fundamental, simple Wall Street math result (read section 3)
Gratipay: Gwern
I assume that's the point of adding bash regression tests into the mix, if the tests cover "needed functionality".
My friend Nick P. made me a wonderful orange "LISP CHINE NUAL" t-shirt -- he had to custom silk screen it to get the letters wrapped around the side properly!

I was wearing in in Dappermarkt in Amsterdam during Queen's Day (a day when everybody's supposed to wear orange), and some guy actually recognized it and came up and complemented me on it! I guessed that he must be a graduate student studying AI, and it turns out that he was, of course!

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=74206161754&set=t.50...

Here's another photo, where I'm competing with Howard Rheingold and James Burke for the Loudest Shirt on the Boat Award:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=83379246754&set=t.50...
iOS App Review – Overcast
It would require an extremely extraordinary death rate to kill all humans.

It would require that three diseases with a 90% kill rate strike in quick succession to drive humanity down to a few million survivors. Not even the current outbreak of ebola is up to that kill rate, nevermind where the other two plagues would come from.
Caja is (more?) often deployed on the client side to filter Javascript.
You have been downvoted, but you have a point. In the 1970s, you could buy both leaded and unleaded gas at service stations. New cars used unleaded gas, but old ones "required" leaded for various reasons that turned out to be mostly wrong (http://www.stevelinden.com/unleaded-gas-vs-regular-gas-in-cl...). Unleaded was required to work with the catalytic converters that were newly required in cars.

Regular leaded gas was cheaper. My neighbor had the catalytic converter in his car removed (it was illegal) so he could use the cheaper leaded gas.

So there would be an effect in which old cars imply more lead.
Hello, one of the paper authors here.

One of the jobs that our implementation has to do is close down all channels by which JavaScript could leak data: so this includes postMessage, the DOM, XHR, cookies, local storage... fortunately, these overt channels are well specified DOM APIs so from the implementor's perspective it's not too difficult to lock them all down. (And we just deny access, there's no "shadow" structure s involved.) There's nothing too fine grained going on: if you read private data, everything it isn't allowed to flow to is locked down.
Very cool list, thanks for sharing.
Range safety is a necessary evil. RTLS is doing a bootlegger turn in a very large, very fast vehicle without even a horn that can blow dixie while doing so.
I sort of touch on that in the slides. If the smart card didn't take difficulty into account, you could bypass it simply by generating a bunch of low level difficulty transactions, with minimal effort.

You would need to also model how much difficulty each proof of work should have. It's a risk, as some major bitcoin collapse could leave you effectively with no ability to decrypt your saved package. The closer you're able to accurately model how much difficulty there will be over the time period, the more secure the system will be. The more lenient, the less power an attacker would need.

Even 5% of the bitcoin block network's hashing power for the duration of the life of the secret would represent a substantial amount of computing power.
I doubt it's just me though. Our lives are driven by heuristics and one of those is: "If something deviates from the norm, it's risky." For good or bad, the norm today is GitHub.
I’m Going to Give My Startup Ideas Away
Although I love pattern matching, I find the solution with 'if' more legible and no less functional.
For reference here's some plans for the next few years of upgrades to the London Underground https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3Q0FZUKHkY
Definitely. KSP doesn't really model aerodynamics, nor re-entry heat, and has a fairly simplistic model for stresses between components.

You can almost certainly RTLS successfully in a KSP version of the shuttle because the game conveniently doesn't simulate the hard parts ;)

Now, KSP with the Deadly Reentry mod and the FAR aerodynamics mod would make the exercise much harder.
I still miss Ebert and his work.
I had the pleasure of using Knockout.js on a recent project. It's so much simpler than Angular and a real pleasure to use.

It doesn't provide a complete opinionated framework like Angular. You have to pair it with the right 3rd party components to get a full SPA kit, but I like that better. I don't always need a full SPA either.
Where does all the money go? The Bay Area, and NYC even more so, spend far more than anywhere else in the world for an equivalent level of rail service. The "Central Subway" (only 2 km of tunnel!) will cost $1.6 billion; at the end of the day, that money is going into someone's pocket. Whose? As far as I can tell, nobody in local government has the foggiest idea - the contractors all hide what they're doing under a cloak of darkness. Maybe FOIA should be extended to private contractors for contracts over a certain amount.
I wonder what construct the neurons form within the gel. Could they form a thought?
They have the correct lighting at their current position (the propeller was actually at that point in the image when the photo was taken). Which means when you transform them you'll get wrong lighting in the severely bent parts because they rotated elsewhere when the picture was taken. Light shines on it from another side and you cannot fix that just by changing the image transformation. It's not the ambient light, but the directional part.
I don't think its embarrassing. Their are often competitor products seen in their latest products advertising. For example their latest bluetooth keyboard ad is full of iPads.
Impossible to think of Apple showing Lumia phones in their ads.
> Will Rust's type checker warn you of a non-exhaustive pattern match?

It refuses to compile entirely.
So assume there are 200 board members (a stupid number) each having their pay cut by $100k (another stupid number), and each of those have 5 passes for their family members who ride BART every day of the year from one end to the other (about a $10 ride) -- thats $20.365m. Where's the rest of the money going to come from?
Ah, I misremembered, thanks!
Most type systems (including Haskell's) can be subverted. Java does catch many common errors, typically of the form "I refaxtored, now this function takes 4 args instead of 3" or "this function returns an X now".

The latter sort are, in my experience, the most common form of type error and catching g them is awesome.
Doesn't type inference stop at function boundaries, though? I'll grant you that idiomatic Haskell uses type annotations for function signatures (unlike idiomatic OCaml), but it is optional (which is convenient in a REPL).
> and we need something to improve things now

I disagree. Nothing is needed now, HTTP/1 is not broken and it works well enough.

There should be time enough to come up with a clean design. Even if it requires designing a new transport protocol.

Rolling out a new transport protocol like SCTP takes a lot less time than rolling out a new network protocol like IPv6. Transport protocols only runs on the endpoints, not on the routers in the network.

Except for firewalls and NAT'ing home routers, but if HTTP/1 over SCTP would result in a faster better browsing experience the problem would solve itself.
| Angular ... seems very complicated

Having recently picked up Angular, I can perhaps comment on this. Once you're past a few questions of where to put what, development with Angular is fairly straightforward. If you've dealt with two-way data binding before, it's even simpler.

I suspect you should be able to pick it up to a reasonable degree (one where you can decide if you'd like to stick with it) within a week or two at most, even in your spare time. In retrospect, I'm not sure I'd call it complicated any more.
YouTube's stabilisation option attempts to remove (with reasonable success, in my experience) rolling shutter wobble caused by camera movement, although I don't believe it will mitigate the effect of a moving subject.

There was a talk at last year's Google I/O with some examples:

http://youtu.be/QdXugkXBTbc?t=15m56s
JavaScript sandboxing is a sort of orthogonal concern to what Cowl is after. Cowl needs sandboxing to work (either by built-in browser support, or by Caja et al), but even with a sandbox, you still need some sort of policy for when to allow data in and out of the scripts, and that's one of the main things Cowl provides.
Yes, network protocols like IPv6 have a glacial deployment speed. Because all the network equipment have to support it.

But it isn't so for transport protocols like SCTP. Only the endpoints using it need to support it. So a transport protocol that provides a real benefit could be deployed relatively quickly.
Antarctica's ice loss changed Earth's gravity: study
> As a little experiment, I've deliberately avoided learning Rust to see if I can understand its idioms without reading any docs.

:D

If you have the time, as you do this, I'd love to hear about your experience. Email me any time.

(I maintain Rust's docs, and am also starting to write some introductory curriculum. Hearing from people like you is _invaluable_.)
Bold approach. That's really good thinking!
Not really. The controversy here is over whether or not it would work if they needed it. Range safety is something everyone agreed with the necessity of, and there wasn't a lot of concern that it wouldn't work. (It was basically a small explosive charge sitting on the SRB and a radio control - very well understood).

The RTLS abort mode, everyone agreed was necessary (in the "no other options" sense, but as the article explains, no one can be sure it would actually work.