skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, they were boasting about it just this summer

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/hp-lab...
Students have always been stupid. The only thing that changes is the reason. It used to be newspapers. Then comic books. Now Google.

The hand-wringing and moral panic are always talked up by innumerates who have neither measured the purported decline in student capabilities nor adduced any reason as to why the technology in question creates the purported affect--at least, they never give any reasons that go beyond pandering to the prejudices of their own generation.

Generally, technology improves intellectual capabilities. Newspapers informed. Comic books introduce young people to stories they might not have encountered otherwise. Texting improves literacy (what else would you expect from a technology that allows young people to carry on complex social lives entirely via the written word?) and the kind of transparent access to a diversity of information sources that Google provides increases a wide range of intellectual capabilities by giving students access to actual facts to think about, rather than the completely useless contents of their imagination.

It is true, as the article says, that certain formerly-important skills will be lost, and the type of mistake we used to make will be replaced by a new type of mistake. But are the new types of mistake more frequent (unlikely, and not mentioned) or more severe (also unlikely, also not mentioned) than the old types of mistake? Strangely, anti-Bayesian articles like this one never even try to do a proper accounting of the number of old-type mistakes avoided by the technology, focusing entirely--and misleadingly--on the types of mistake enabled by the new technology. This is lazy, dishonest and misleading.

To put it another way, work-processing has had a terrible effect on typing accuracy, but who cares?
It's been an incredible journey
Has anyone tried "praxis"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rB39AXPmQQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VRtRazMYSA
Fascinating that they removed the agp driver.
What makes you think we won't just have meticulously recreated works of art, or newly conceived works of art, conceived by machines?
4 hours ~= 124.75 cents/hr

7 days ~= 4.16 cents/hr

30 days ~= 2.08 cents/hr

90 days ~= 1.38 cents/hr

This is based on the full 24 hours per day. If you do it based on "usable" time, which I've defined as 8 hours a day, it looks like this:

4 hours ~= 124.75 cents/hr

7 days ~= 12.48 cents/hr

30 days ~= 6.25 cents/hr

90 days ~= 4.17 cents/hr
Good points. What do you think about a 2FA-type of setup where if someone tries this then it sends a message to the device that asks if you are trying to access something through a webapp and if you say no then it blocks access until the correct password is entered or until it is accessed from the same device that previously successfully accessed it on a consistent basis (say 5 times within the past week or month).

Could IP-blocking be implemented or a double timer where if someone tries to DoS the account by entering too many passwords too quickly then that is also limited such as trying to submit too many comments to HN too quickly?
As a true nerd, the way I want the future to be would like in star trek; take a person like Picard in the 24th century, with their all-knowing computer a voice command and their replicators and their ease of transport via the transporter, but strand him on a desert planet, he's able to figure shit out, improvise, and survive.

Technology is just an augment to the good life and an augment for good people. Lazy people being lazy with technology or otherwise have existed in the past as they do today, I haven't seen _convincing_ evidence that modern tech increases the numbers of lazy,incompetent people.
Self awareness. At first, you just sit and let thoughts go through your mind, acknowledging each one. "I am breathing. I feel a little more tired than usual today. My dog is barking again." You just acknowledge and move on. Let your thoughts come and leave. Most of the time you don't have a big revelation, it's just kind of relaxing. You learn to be more balanced, less dramatic in how you react to things. But sometimes you do make an important observation. You think of a coworker, and you feel anxiety, and because you have developed your self awareness, you recognize that this coworker causes you anxiety, and now you can address that issue and improve your life. Most people go through life unaware, and do not address a lot of issues that happen to them everyday. But those stresses in life that go unaddressed have a consequence. People go home and argue with their spouse, unaware that they are actually stressed from work, and end with a major life disaster like divorce or health problems or worse. Sometimes all of that could have been avoided if they had spent 10 minutes a day reflecting on what their mind and body was experiencing.
Rickshaw works quite nicely (you have to the plumbing to render the graphs)
This is one of those books that does that, it introduces a basic adding machine and expands upon it:
http://www.charlespetzold.com/code/
Keep Slogging – Then Slog More
Not really- I believe the phone home feature requires a signed key. Its not just listening for a "destruct" but also a time-based, signed "nothing to report sir, continue"
The “Touristification” of Education
Sector Financiero:debe transformar su modelo de seguridad y análisis
Cutest prayer by 3 yr old
PHENOMENAL Middle School Student Government Speech
The Google app on the iPhone has the option of storing and reporting location history. You can enable it by Google App -> Settings (Gear icon on the top left) -> Privacy -> Location -> Location Reporting.

They claim to have optimized the app not to drain the battery life. I have been using it for over an year and I don't see an issue with my battery life.
The author is well aware of the tradition of hand-wringing he is joining; He makes reference to Plato’s Phaedrus! But he doesn't actually make an argument for why it actually matters that students don't learn to spell English's arbitrary orthography. His introductory example of GPS and wilderness survival is the only compelling case.
Dating the sheepskin vellum to the sixteenth century just means that the vellum is from that time. It doesn't mean the ink is from the same era.

The text that was on the vellum might have been scrapped off, perhaps simply to reuse the vellum (making it a palimpsest), or as a deliberately forgery on older material.
I agree: plenty of experts have done just that, and I would further posit that keeping that beginner's mind is one reason why they're so good. It distinguishes them from the majority who go the easier, more natural route of letting their minds forget.

Ideally, intellectual appreciation would be enough. We're very complicated creatures, though, and the thing we called "empathy" is a complicated, multifaceted phenomenon.
Polo describes (without claiming to have been there himself) a "Land of Darkness", rich in furs, which borders on "Great Rosia", the people of "Rosia" being Christians of the Greek (i.e., Orthodox) form.

That sure seems to fit Siberia/Alaska.
You are correct. Thank you. :)
A child who knows his toys well might find it tough to ignore liberties taken in discussing them.

As someone interested in mindfulness for its own pursuits, I want to learn what's in my teacher's head, rather than listen to them try unsuccessfully to tie that to what's firmly in mine. I'm sorry to say it's distracting :)
fscanf has to parse and execute the format string. It might be interesting to compare your custom ascii-to-float converter to one which calls strtof in a loop.
I dig the sort of shirts, just like those at http://shop.theunrefinery.com/

Nice work!
Another possibility is of a modern forger using old parchment, in this case perhaps not contemporaneous with Marco Polo, but still hundreds of years old. This is a known technique of some forgers.
Startups Spend with Abandon, Flush with Capital
It's merely an explanation, not an excuse.
to get through the paywall https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...
Searching for information online isn't making anyone stupid, because people do in fact retain what they discover. Because it is so accessible, some people do it all the time. By contrast, in the past, people didn't have time to go a library frequently. The world wide web is making people better informed, including people from walks of life that are not traditionally associated with being informed. At least broadly if not deeply, but perhaps deeply, too, in areas that catch their interest.

Today you're stupid if you don't make effective use of all this. We cringe when someone asks a question online that could have been googled in three seconds.
If "not as fast as C" is not fast enough, then virtually every language is not just bad, but much worse than haskell.

I agree. The only languages I've used that are remotely competitive for my purposes are static JVM languages (Java and Scala), Ocaml, and Julia for array ops. Haskell comes closer than many others, but just isn't there yet.

The docs you linked to are a 3'rd party package marked "experimental". I'll also suggest that you are glossing over most of the difficulties in using them. It's trivially easy to call `unsafeRead`. It's not so easy to wrap your operations in the appropriate monad, apply all the necessary strictness annotations to avoid thunks, and properly weave this monad with all the others you've got floating around.

(That last bit is fairly important if you plan to write methods like `objectiveGradient dataPoint workArray`.)
> There are a number of articles about writing your own probability monad in Haskell. It's not hard.

Could you provide some links? In a quick search I can only find one article, and that's just about using that package, writing one.
Thanks for that. With the vulnerability of R&D, I'd feared the group may have been sidelined. I noticed they're claiming to be preparing to ship memristor DIMMs in 2016 - hopefully that's a genuinely commercial roadmap, rather than RSN.
Does anyone have any insights on how the actual physical destruction takes place? I would assume it is a chemical triggered by a shorted fuse?

A quick glance at the laws in California make it a felony to simply have in your possession "any sealed device containing dry ice or other chemically reactive material that is assembled for the purpose of causing an explosion." The definitions for other types of destructive devices are specific to scale, but this part is not.
You can decline / reject / whatever they call it in stash and it won't be merged...
185MB. It's processing, but I fear I'll be here all night..
Same here, plus github enterprise at work and a private install of stash for a different project at work.
I'll point out that much of the reason for most traffic on the Internet being client-server is that most users are behind home routers which make P2P traffic difficult or impossible, slowing innovation dramatically. IPv6 could solve this by giving every computer their own IP address on the actual Internet. Sticking with IPv4 continues to slow innovation.
You can't straight away, but you can after a certain time threshold has passed. At least, that's how it works on my account!
http://cpuarch.quora.com/Transistors-The-foot-soldiers-of-a-...:

> I had this idea after writing this answer: Subhasis Das' answer to Computer Science: How does a computer chip work? which gained quite a few upvotes. I realized a single answer was far too little to talk about all the ultra awesome machineries that are hidden inside a processor.

I think answering the Quora question was what inspired him to start his own blog, which means he didn't really have a blogpost to reference when he answered the Quora question.
Does anyone know off the top of their head how OpenBSD performs on a Samsung 900X?
Energy cost is regressive. In theory, that can be fixed by allocating each household a budget of X units worth of energy at a low or no cost (or an equivalent in cash), and charging much more for excessive use by those who consume more
You can impersonate other users.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=humans+need+not+apply#!/story/fore...
A more powerful message would be "Stop the Abbott" campaign.
Great find. Speaking from my own experience as a 5th year undergrad student set to graduate in May 2015...when I am in class I am eagerly watching the clock waiting to be dismissed so I can return to the web to learn something new. Whether it be a new Photoshop technique or learning simply through hacking something together out of thin air. School has lost its taste to me and many others around me...why is this? Why is creativity and expression not encouraged in the classroom? Graduation has now become a roadblock to my imagination and passion for entrepreneurial ventures rather than a goal and token of achievement. But we press on!!
Boolean logic for programmers
They do. You can get around this with a little trickery, since they just scan for calls to specific method signatures.
Square Raises $150M at a $6B Valuation
I have been mowing lawns and popping nootropics from Brin, not smart yet. waiting. mowing.
Agreed regarding the graphing RPL models, but the scientific RPN calculators are pretty solid. The 12C financial calculator is more like those. The scientific equivalent, the 15C, is no longer in production, but the current 35S isn't bad for cranking out calculations. The tactile feedback sure beats hitting a touch screen phone.
Don't sell yourself short. I also am a college dropout with no formal Computer Science education and had limited professional developer experience and I worked at Google for 7 years.

Google's whole business is built around hacking data and statistics. You may very well be exactly what they are looking for.
> If every HTTP/2 server is also an HTTP/1.1 server offering the same content then there is no practical need to distinguish the protocols.

But not ever HTTP/1.1 server will be an HTTP/2 server; that's my point.

> As to URL-hiding, you know that's controversial, and for good reason.

I know; I hat it. I brought it up because obviously most people don't seem to care enough about it that we should overload a schema specifier for the sake of aestetics that don't matter.

> More importantly, that's not the only place that people use links. Every time they share one via email, for example. Every time they type one in from a magazine or the side of a bus or a flyer. Every time they cite one in a paper.

OK? some people cite ftp links. I'm not seeing your point.

> Forcing those people suddenly include a protocol distinction that is meaningless to them and unimportant to the server involved would be a pointless waste.

So we shouldn't use ftp:// or smb:// anymore? I don't get your point, because people are already used to non-http schemas.

> HTTP/2 is purely an under-the-hood improvement.

I mean you could say the same thing if all your assets were served over ftp and the browser rendered them as it does http. HTTP/2 is _fundamentally_ different than HTTP/1.1.
I prefer my HP41 to anything they've made recently. The buttons are too hard to press on the new ones.
I wondered why there'd be any hate for my comment even as it's destined to fall into obscurity. Quite alright! :) I appreciate your follow-up. Just a few basic features like that added to HN would make a huge difference.
Order a CD rom? Talk about out of touch, ouch.
Long abandoned, and already spun off (Agilent).
For me at least, it's also about being in touch the true underlying reasons I exhibit certain behaviors. The easiest examples is in conversation. Much of social relations is about signaling, not to mention playing games.

A few years ago I started to notice the underlying emotions when I said something that was designed to either a) impress or b) hurt the other person. Neither case felt pleasant. In the latter case self-righteousness can have a drug-like high, but there is often a hangover too (regret, guilt, shame etc).

So I started becoming more mindful of what I say. I strive only to say things that I believe at my core.

Occasionally I still catch myself saying or doing something that's about trying to impress or hurt the other person, but it's much less common now, and I feel like I move through my day lightly even under significant work stress.

Humor is a special case. I can "lie" by saying something absurd or snarky, but the underlying feeling is one of laughter. However, I try to avoid snide putdowns or Gawker-style schadenfreude. Most people, even those at "the top" (however defined) are struggling with something. Consider for example Elon Musk's apparent difficulty with relationships. I feel for the guy and don't see much humor in pouring salt in the wounds.
Handpose: Fully Articulated Hand Tracking by Microsoft Research
Somewhere in the Philippines, there are roads named after countries
The Immaturity and Arrogance of Uber
Keep in mind this ridiculous legislation has bipartisan support, both major parties are to blame.
> ... I don't see the revolution here yet.

I agree with your overall sentiment, but I also have an observation: I have the DK2 -- and while I haven't had a chance to play with this yet, I have been playing a little bit of the Elite: Dangerous beta.

The revelation there, is that working headtracking makes working with a huge "display" feel very natural. You can only look at one (or a few) things at once anyway -- but with head-tracking you don't have to worry about lining up five 30" screens in order to keep track of everything -- having it all (sanely) mapped out in 3d actually works just as mundanely and boring and well as you'd expect.

And that in itself is kind of a revelation. Suddenly you have almost unlimited screen real estate, that is even more naturally and intuitively accessible than multiple desktops (and I'm generally a great fan of xmonad-style tiling, no-full window managers with easily accessible multiple workspaces).

Another "wow" factor for Elite was the fact that what seems like a kind of silly gimmick on a single screen -- that "holograms" pop up with info when you look at them -- actually works in VR.

The one thing they did botch in Elite in the previous beta, was font-size -- the DK2 leaves "half-hd" per eye -- and that's not really enough to read "fine print". They sort-of fixed it in the new Beta just out -- but now the UI for space docks is "too wide" -- the text is more readable, but the "holo" should've been placed "further away" from you, so you don't have to move your head from side to side to read a line of text. I've yet to try it plain 2d -- I suspect it works fine on a regular screen.

Anyway, the point is that even a completely boring an unimaginative use of VR for programming can actually be a minor revolution. Fully working gloves/hand tracking would be better -- maybe with just a "dummy" keyboard for touch input (I'm not convinced "drum on a tabletop, visual-tracking keyboard" is actually that usable for touch-typing -- at least not when your back-tick is at shift-two-places-right-of-zero and opening-curly-brace is at meta-7 etc -- as it is on a Norwegian layout).

Finally -- immediate feedback certainly is nice -- and this is where the "big screen" effect of VR can really help. You can be effortlessly aware of both your evolving 3d model, and the text-representation of your code -- without having to have two screens, or switch between virtual workspaces.
SVG magazine is back October 2014 – Front Page
Metaverse
Just be glad nobody mentioned long horses. Yet.
> I can understand not supporting tape installation (although aren't tapes still used in large, serious, high-power businesses as backup media?)

How does removing tape installation as a feature affect businesses who use tape as a backup method?
Just as a thought experiment: if you could take a pill that did all this for you, would you still do the practice?
Of course, if the drive uses internal full disk encryption, all you have to do to fully destroy the data (or at least make it inaccessible for a long, long time) is get rid of 16 bytes of AES key. I doubt there is no way to securely implement this without dramatic explosions...
The Australian government is currently very busy orchestrating a national fear campaign to make its citizens believe that laws like the Data Retention law are required.

However, the Australian government wanted this law for a long time now and the whole IS/terrorist situation seems to be a great vehicle for the Australian government to bring fear into it's citizens so they'd approve of it.

Don't be fooled my fellow hackers! They don't have your best interest at heart, only their own.
Perhaps not an explosion within the meaning of applicable California statutes.

Looking at the pix that show chip fragmentation, I don't see evidence of reactive chemistry. No melted edges, no deposition of combustion products, no missing material that would suggest propulsive transport incident to a micro explosion caused by detonation of a tiny blob of, for example, lead styphnate or some other primer-like compound.

Exploding wires are an old technology, and don't involve "...chemically reactive material...". Think old-fashioned fuses, but with faster dynamics.

Maybe they have an on-board supercap that they dump into a buried trace, producing a brief high temperature copper plasma and a shock wave that breaks the chip?

Interesting technology, would like to know how they do the physical destruction.
Apple Expected to Consume 25% of All DRAM in 2015
For a year or so I worked as a contract programmer on the inworld content team for Second Life. I didn't have VR, and the language I programmed in (LSL) was even worse than Javascript, but it was still incredibly fun to use code to shape the world around me. It's even more fun when you can do that in a shared space and see others interacting with your creations.

Someday there will be something like Second Life with Oculus support and a decent programming environment, and that will be awesome.
I kind of would expect them to acquire Venmo before trying to build this. Venmo already has a lot of traction in this area.
"I can't think of any reason why...":
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-story-of-joseph-nacchio-a...
Agreed. This reads like the book jacket. A short advert for another Atlantic author's most recent book.
I wouldn't lump all non-religious moral philosophies into the same group like that.

There are plenty that do not optimize for reducing harm or promoting helpfulness. Many seek to ensure fairness or equality. Others legitimize strength. Most of the ones I'm aware of set humans as preeiminent to the moral construct and seek to find ways to maximize the human condition.

FYI, Nietzsche was the king of non-religious philosophers in the early 20th century and was interested in neither of those things.

Rand's Objectivism is probably the second best known and it too has no interest in either of those things.
> I was not allowed to say "I work for Google"

Seriously? That's frankly ridiculous. Performing tasks for someone in exchange for payment seems to me like a reasonable use case for the verb "work", no matter whether your status is employee, contractor, moonlighter, intern, teenager looking for pocket money, etc. It seems impressive to me that they would feel entitled to forbid you from saying so.
I wonder how this kind of money raising impact employees? (compared to going IPO)
I cannot believe I have never heard this quote before. I literally LOLed.
The article says "more than 200 security guards". Any clue about how this compare to the number of security guards working as contractors for Google? I'm curious about whether "Security Guards" in the title means "all security guards", or "a small proportion of security guards, as an experiment".