skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think we just witnessed the first corporate pseudo-cool advertisement from Google. You know, when BigCorp tries to cater to the young and hip, thats the kind of video they produce. Crank it up a notch, and you're in the uncanny Samsung Valley.

I, for one, am looking forward to the Poochie rap!
This sounds interesting - I've been waiting for a while for Google to use more ML on the client side in g-mail.

I would really appreciate an invite at inglor at gmail dot com?
The Writer Automaton, Switzerland [video]
You can solve the "90%" problem statically. My Ruby-compiler-in-progress warns of methods that have not been seen, and I may eventually add some (entirely optional) pragma to allow hinting to reduce false positives (though getting that non-intrusive will be a fun challenge).

But you are right, the general case does require a solution to the halting problem, something which is trivial to demonstrate very explicitly:

eval(STDIN.gets)
42.will_i_halt?

Put that in a file, and run it. Press enter, and it halts. Or cut and paste something like this, and it doesn't:

class Fixnum; def will_i_halt?; loop {}; end; end

And consider that even "require" is a practical equivalent to "eval", so trying to look for eval() calls and similar constructs and think you're safe doesn't work, unless you have a guarantee that the interpreter load paths will be the same when the code is run as what you think it'll be.

But in more pragmatic terms, this is a real issue because many Ruby ORMs for example will add methods that depends on the current state of the databases they connect to, so many typical Ruby applications will actually validly use method names that are not explicitly defined anywhere.
A bad choice for what? Your fingerprint can only be used to access a particular device in the case of Touch ID. It is worthless if you don't also have physical access to the device. And it's a lot easier to tell if your device has been compromised because it means that you no longer possess it, in which case you can simply remote wipe it. To reiterate: Possession of your fingerprint alone does not allow someone to access your bank account or log into your webmail.
I am rather shocked that people are paying for it to come back.

I mean, the original was done as a side-project by the owner who did not have the money that, I assume, said post-acquisition owner now has.
China deploys troops and fighter jets in response to unauthorised flight
How the Patek Phillipe Grandmaster Chime Is Made
Of the points you make, I think point 1 is very interesting but I am not sure about it. I mean, they attempted with Google TV and it never took off.
They've had Google Play Movies for a while but do you see any good films on there?

Regarding point 2, the data they have is valuable but do people like being advertised to?

Product placement in films is pretty nastily received though. Look at Iron Man 2 and the appearances of Oracle and Larry Ellison everywhere; it was not enjoyable. It didn't make me want to switch database providers.
(I didn't notice that Elon Musk is in it too)
25 Best JQuery Grid Plugins for Developers
Why not both?

First, a fingerprint is unique, also serves as _identification_.

Secondly, a fingerprint is secure to a very high degree - cannot be easily stolen and duplicated, always is with you and so on. Thus, it serves as _authentication_ too.

EDIT: to the downvoters and critics: what you describe is using an _excess_ of effort to get my fingerprint ( technically, using force, etc ) . If I see a password, I can use it immediatelly, if you see my finger, there is a long way ( in terms of steps) until you can use the fingerprint attached to it. And btw, I am not defending Apple here.
Er, you mean to say "compiles to machine code." There is no such thing as concurrent machine code... Now the Go language has some fantastic data structures baked-into the syntax that provide a language with which to construct concurrent programs.
I turned off Spotlight web searches under Yosemite precisely because the search results were returned by Bing - they weren't any good!
The person taking over your projects when you move on would put a bounty on your head if you were to do that.
Good post, this is so true. Fingerprints should only be used as id, if at all. Like 'icebraining' said: Passwords can be compromised and must be changeable.
How I Built a Beautiful iOS Game with No Design Skills
Wow that's weird, if I heard "juice cocktail" I'd think Mango and Orange or something. "Juice drink" is plain misleading.
It's true that people quickly mentally block out adverts. Even on YouTube, I ignore the advert and anxiously wait for the "skip ad" button to appear. Doesn't everyone?
Your fingerprint can only be used to access a particular device in the case of Touch ID. It is worthless if you don't also have physical access to the device.

Or any previous device you might have had with Touch ID. Unless you change your fingerprints when you get a new phone.

And it's a lot easier to tell if your device has been compromised because it means that you no longer possess it, in which case you can simply remote wipe it.

Which can easily be subverted by simply disallowing the phone from connecting to the Internet. A "faraday bag" costs a few bucks. Assuming TouchID doesn't prevent you from logging in without Internet access, of course.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/introducing-...
Great question, and it's a tough one to answer.

First, this is not an issue that's purely "American vs non-American". It's a US compared to Chinese. As a contrast, Russians tend to be very direct even though they are very much non-American.

In this specific case, it has to do with his speech acts and his audience. This is a _huge_ topic, so I will only scratch the surface.

A simple and clear example would be how he answered the "Why are you studying Chinese?" question.

Mark answers with a touching story about his wife and his wife's grandmother. To an American audience, this is very personable, and it is very plausible.

My brief take on a "Chinese-style CEO" answer would be something like this: "Well, Chinese is important for everyone to know. It has a long and storied history, and it is undoubtedly the most important language for people to know today and moving ahead into the future. As the CEO of a large American company, I think that it is only prudent that I learn the language of one of our most important audiences." I don't think a Chinese-style answer would even bring Priscilla's heritage into the response for a number of reasons (e.g., they already know, it's personal not business, etc.).

For reference, my hypothetical response is a kind of DST (search for "DST LOL") that is common in some cultures, even if it is blatant DST.

Note that speech acts are important in all cultures, and that my Chinese example could easily be used in an American context. The important thing to ask is "What am I trying to say in the big picture?". Engineers tend to go for the direct answer, but it's not always the most appealing for a given context.
I was an Ubuntu user for a few years. I remember when they'd ship the CD's out for free. One of those things that made Ubuntu great. It was also really good at presenting a very usable Gnome 2.x desktop that was ready to use from the first boot, and I was a very happy user for a while, until they started shipping software a little bit too soon (PulseAudio for example; suddenly Ubuntu didn't have sound out-of-the-box anymore on my machine) and I've once been bitten in the behind by an update that made my video card unsupported all of a sudden, so that prevented X from starting... and then they replaced Gnome with Unity and I kind of stopped caring around that time so I went back to my previous distro. Hopefully for good. :)

Congratulations to Mark for starting this otherwise great project! May it have many years ahead of it!
It is well known that stress can alter hormone levels as well as many other negative physiological effects. That seems like the mind controlling the body. Every movement you make is the mind altering the body via the nervous system if you want to be pedantic about it.
The trick is to actually use it. If you auto complete then your coding should be typing 2-3 characters, hit enter, 2-3 characters, enter and so on. It should feel like you're entering hotkeys not typing.

Only real typing should be defining variables and methods.

Your coding speed can go way up depending on how good the autocomplete is.
I would agree. Web use and mobile don't look particularly "dorky" but AR/VR does, which is a barrier to adoption.

Also, PCs had a definite use-case but I don't see AR/VR as having one, particularly as audio/video conferencing already fills a hole.

I mean, VR helmets have been around for decades? But you don't see people rushing to get them, other than a small gaming minority?
you might want to review some of the literature around bypassing fingerprint readers before making that kind of statement... A large number of readers are easily fooled by copied prints. Also there's the False acceptance/false rejection rate tradeoff to consider.

Once of the major issues with biometrics is revocation. If compromised it can be difficult to change!
A fingerprint is trivially stolen and duplicated, and once they have physical access to you it's trivial to coerce you to use it too.
How to get feedback?
I posted for the first time here a few days ago hoping for feedback and suggestions about getsnapp.com from the community but received none. Can you please help me understand why? Thank you.
Enforce Consistent Compiler and Code Formatter Settings with Eclipse
http://www.eevblog.com/forum/reviews/ftdi-driver-kills-fake-...

marcan:
"In case anyone was still wondering if this is intentional and malicious...
Straight out of their driver. Function/variable naming and comments mine.

https://marcan.st/transf/ftdi_evil.png

I figured out what's going on with the real chips: turns out their EEPROM is written in 32bit units. Writing to even addresses is ignored; the value is buffered and the address discarded. Writing to odd addresses writes the entire 32bits, using whatever value was last buffered for the other half. So both the PID write and the checksum write are ignored on real FTDI chips, as they are both written to even addresses. I still don't know why it works on clone chips though, since the checksum is written to the wrong place (it should normally be on an odd address); presumably they don't check it."

Basically driver is fuzzing 'chips claiming to be FTDI' with illegal instructions. Want to play clone games? better emulate me completely, otherwise tough titties. I like it. Might not work to well for FTDI in the end due to PR nightmare, but from engineering standpoint its quite brilliant.
There's also the glossy fingerprint attracting screen of the iphone. Creating an artificial fingerprint from what you've left on the screen would be non trivial but far from impossible.
The Definite Optimism of Peter Thiel [video]
Humans just can't get along. There are wars and conflicts all the time. Racial hatred, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, wars, misandry, misogyny, economic inequality, religious fundamentalism, ideological fundamentalism, nationalism, political fanaticism, etc... (Writing this list makes me very depressed.) All of those can be explained by the selfish gene theory. Hate and greed are in our DNA. People do share everything, but there are crackers who disclose private information, people who disseminate revenge porn, fat-shamers, "slut"-shamers, online bullies, critics and cynics. That is the world we have today.

Sure, we have recently developed ways to transfer thoughts brain-to-brain, but the issues that may arise in the short term if we were to link separate consciences directly are more likely to be classified under the "disorder" category than under the "superpower" category. What if you woke up and had thoughts that weren't yours but from the other person you linked to. Imagine having memories of their past trauma, their first kiss, memories from the pain from the people they lost, memories from the abuses they suffered, the names they were called, the shame they felt. Will you be mentally strong enough to be able to compartmentalize those foreign memories as actually being not part of your lifetime?

Try this: try to remember the last time you checked out a place on Google street view. Have you ever tried clicking along a road so that you could get to see what was in the surrounding area?

Now as you are remembering this, do you remember only the scenery or can you also remember actually looking at a monitor and using your pointing device and keyboard? I'm willing to bet that you only remember the scenery and that those memories you have of those street views could be very similar to memories of places you actually visited, minus the sounds and smells, but you do have to make a conscious effort to differentiate between virtual memories of a scenery and memories of the places that you last visited.

Just visit a few foreign cities (Taipei, Seoul, Akihabara, Lima in Peru ) on Google Street view to try it out and think about what I wrote in a few days, you'll see what I mean.
Except for in for loops semicolons don't really do anything though. The job of the semicolon could easily be replaced by just a white space character.
Fingerprints can easily be acquired, if that weren't the case they wouldn't be extensively used in crime scene investigation. When fingerprints were supposed to be used as authentication, together with an ID card, in Germany, the German Chaos Computer Club acquired the fingerprint of the minister of the interior from a used glass and spoofed a reader with it by transfering the print to some adhesive tape.
Is Facebook still such a big thing to people? There was a time when everyone and their dog were asking "are you on Facebook?" with eagerness and then looking at your as if you had publicly fluctuated when you said "no".
With over 271 million domains on the Internet, it seemed odd that people were going crazy over one or two (Facebook and Twitter).

But now people just accept that you don't have an account and are happy with emails or face to face communication, whether that be in person or via conferencing of some form.

If social networks were relevant to everyone, then I could understand you saying that Google was in decline. However, they're not important to everyone - they might be in your circle though. Finding things on the Internet is still pretty big though, as is email.
Kippo Honeypot Video Gallery
Actor Model of Computation: Scalable Robust Information Systems [pdf]
I'll note that Gemstone IV (same game world, same general idea) still exists, and is one of only a handful of subscription MUDs that still exists. An account is $15 a month.
He may have made a deal.
For guitars they are nothing but niche. In fact they are probably more guitar tube amps produced today than they were 20 years ago.
Yesterday's Drugs Are Tomorrow's Medicines
It's a hard problem to solve. In general inferring which methods are valid on any given variable or expression is undecidable. So you have to make an approximation, which is hard and the end results usually still disappointing. Here's a little test case:

def foo(x): return x

a = foo("hello")
b = foo(34)

To infer the methods that you can call on `a` and `b` you have to trace through the `foo` function. You can't just run `foo` because what if the input is unknown or what if `foo` contains a loop or is recursive?

def foo(x, i):
if i == 0: return x
else: return foo(x, i-1)

i = int(read_input())
a = foo("hello",i)
b = foo(34,i)

It gets even worse when you have a huge codebase, monkey patching, eval, and other features like that (which Rails uses in copious amounts).
This is really smart, really the sort of thing you wonder why no one thought of it before.
"Select all last-year mail, archive. Done."

:)
It's mostly that it looks very bad in dark mode.
Google DeepMind acquires two Oxford AI startups
They're not in the OPL, but Microchip makes several chips that support full-speed USB, and they provide a CDC driver, too. I prefer them to using an Arduino because almost all of them are available in a DIP form factor, making them great for prototyping projects; available with different number of pins and features (10 vs 12-bit ADC, etc); and cost less than an ATMEGA328 +FTDI. Some of the chips are fully USB compliant without a crystal.

I've never used it, but Microchip's IDE for their C compiler and debugger is cross-platform and will work on Linux/Mac/Windows. I prefer to program them in JAL, a Pascal-like language that is easy to learn that has a large library of functions available. There's syntax highlighting available for it in Vim :-) .

If you're committed to Arduino, there's an open-source project (http:www.pinguino.cc) that has its own Python-based IDE that will take Arduino code, convert it to SDCC C code, compile it to assembly, then flash a Microchip chip.
Any Ebola Czar Could Learn a Lot from Intel About Preventing Contamination
That actually IS impressive, Mandarin is very hard to learn and he should have credit for it.

Though I'm sure he had a really good teacher.
Is it possible that when you try and recreate your image from scratch, the code you have pasted into your editor is not sufficient to recreate the image?

Maybe you pasted some things in the wrong order, or maybe you redefined a function, but some data that was created using the old version of the function is still in the image.

If this is possible in your programming environment, then maybe the dead code is not worth keeping around, and we should only retain the live image.

In which case we need tools to version and diff and branch a live image.

Does a programming environment like that exist I wonder? Or do image based environments like Smalltalk let you export an image as text, like a DB can dump all the SQL required to recreate it?
People should be complaining to microsoft to get these malicious drivers blocked and older non-malicious ones reinstated.
Ah, the mentality of the web: "I don't have time to get it right, just keep spewing code!"
pythran: python to c++ converter
I've been playing around with this in recent months and while it does work, it's a pretty deep language with lots of quirks (kind of like English, actually...)

I recommend anyone who is interested in language design having a look at it, as it is a unique and interesting variation on domain-specific languages that sacrifices scalability and performance in favour of a certain kind of accessibility and power.

I've been using Aaron Reed's "Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform7" as a guide, which is as much about the nature of IF storytelling as the language (which is well-documented in the standard IDE): http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Interactive-Fiction-Inform-7/...
Bitcoin over Tor isn't a good idea
Its not hard to detect. Its just hard to reconcile. Hulu can block service since they already have your 10 dollars. And you're unlikely to go elsewhere. there's not many other services streaming new episodes of your favorite sitcom.

But free services and websites ( you know the stuff that's supposed to be ad supported) typically value user traffic over ad revenue. Especially if they're still in the growing phase, or if there's lots of easy alternatives to your service (the case of YouTube). They wouldn't want to risk you hopping over to another service.
His argument proves too much. If he thinks fingerprints are too insecure to be allowed, then he must think the same of low-entropy passwords. Yet I don't see him advocating that Ubuntu force users to choose high-entropy passwords and rotate them regularly. If he's fine letting users choose a low level of security by picking simple passwords, why not also let them choose to auth with fingerprints?

Also, I think he misconstrues the purpose of Touch ID. It's not meant to completely replace passwords.

There are three categories of authentication methods:

1. Something you know (password, combination, challenge responses).

2. Something you have (crypto token, phone, key).

3. Something you are (fingerprint, face, DNA, etc).

Methods can be combined for added security. All three have advantages and disadvantages. Passwords are typically chosen by users, making them weak. Good crypto tokens are hard to copy, but loss or theft can mean getting locked-out. Biometrics are convenient, but can't be revoked. Also, some activities can make them hard to read.[1]

Apple uses all three authentication methods in the iPhone. Touch ID is for basic access. The passcode is for admin-level functionality like erasing or restoring the device. Lastly, physical access to the phone is required to decrypt important data such as Apple Pay's Device Access Numbers. This gives typical, non-technical users a sane combination of security and convenience. If thieves and scammers start copying fingerprints, Apple will change their auth mechanisms.

1. I love Touch ID, but it takes a while to work again after I rock climb or lift weights.
So, definitely intentional then. They went to quite some effort to fix up the checksum by calculating and writing a suitable value to the address before the checksum location (updating the checksum would cause a write on genuine FTDI chips because it's an odd address). If they'd just written the VID as zero, presumably the checksum would fail and the device would revert to a default, non-bricked configuration.
"But the panic turned out to be overblown"

No it wasn't. The panic caused changes that fixed the problem.

A self fulfilling prophecy in reverse if you will. Y2K was the same way - because of the panic people fixed things and there was no problem.
[PATCH] usb: serial: Perform verification for FTDI FT232R devices
To anyone having doubts, this is humor:
https://plus.google.com/107046448275336404830/posts/LCqHmAmb...

And context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8497179
> Imagine having memories of their past trauma, their first kiss, memories from the pain.

By that logic you would have predicted that the internet will not happen because "who wants to read all that shit".
The Ultimate Collection of UX Design Related Articles
I was going to vote this comment down, but stopped myself and reconsidered. The thing is, it's actually true and is important context.

Sentiment is all well and good, but wars are started by people making a choice. They aren't natural disasters we have no control over or responsibility for.
Finally ! Someone made a proper Linux to guarantee genuine FTDI products:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/10/23/129
> Also, it's very much likely that this is a deliberate distraction from the political conflict between the USA and Hungary that has emerged last week.

Strange theory. Have you considered they just need the extra money? Also, it wouldn't be a huge distraction anyway (from whatever) - I'm pretty sure they could invent more revolting taxes if they wanted to.