skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's things like the square brackets and triangular brackets, e.g.
def naive_convolve(np.ndarray[DTYPE_t, ndim=2] f, np.ndarray[DTYPE_t, ndim=2] g)

I know what this is for, but I have no idea how this is implemented - is it some sort of library, some sort of macro, something inside the compiler, or what? It feels very opaque. I don't understand the lifetime of these objects or what could go wrong.

Even with C++ templates, I can usually work out how something is happening, but not here without research. The Cython-specific syntax also feels pretty unpythonic. The feeling I get from using it is that it's an ugly Python/C/C++ mutant with a load of hidden rules.

What I really would like is a set of templates or even macros for C++ which would allow easy wrappers to be written for different Python implementations, handling the reference counting, etc. Does such a thing exist?
Unencrypted channels can be spied on to see which pages you're looking at, or hijacked to serve malware. Note that even with HTTPS, a passive sniffer can tell which domains you're visiting.
Thank you for saying that! Its so often repeated that our DNA contains the entire program for a human being. That's patently false. The cellular machinery provides almost all of the OS; DNA is just a script.

I liken DNA to a paper tape containing one of two punches: MAN or MOUSE. Feed it into a bio-replicator and get a man or a mouse. Does the paper tape define the man? Of course not.
Is the motivation for commit-on-write to get a kind of persistent history for undo/redo? That is an interesting idea.
I totally agree with you there. This model merely scratches the surface, and yet, I'm glad the author is attempting to explore it.
We're forgetting that the DJI itself has had some turbulence, too. IBM is not particularly out of step with the market itself... until just recently, which I believe lends some measure of credibility to the original headline because if you view stock behavior as something to be benchmarked with the greater market, it did certainly plunge beyond what most other stocks would have. See: http://goo.gl/fJkfpA
Two thoughts on that:

1) You are using it in a way that I'm not able to. For you it is a tool that leverages pre-existing relationships, which I'm sure is great. I know about four people that use Goodreads, and their tastes just don't align to me. And unfortunately for me, the stand-alone recommendation service Goodreads offers that people like me try to rely on is just terrible.

2) Even if I had a critical mass of friends making recommendations, they themselves identified the books they should read somewhere. Yes, we can all socially recommend books we like for awhile, but eventually someone has to start separating the wheat from the chaff to start making those recommendations. Books are not movies or songs, and it's much more time-consuming to do this en masse. I don't trust Goodreads to facilitate upstream discovery (that can leveraged downstream via social recommendations) in a publisher-less world primarily populated by self-published books.
the redirect happens _after_ the certificate warning. to get to the redirect, you have to accept the self signed certificate first.

so it might still scare people away, and rightfully so: normal folks cannot distinguish a self signed certificate from a malicious used one f.e. used in phishing attempts.
Abusing « dialog » for fun and profit
Slightly off-topic, but is there still much NNTP use out there other than piracy related? I was a heavy NNTP user once upon a time, but all the public groups I once used seem to be overrun by spam and private ones seem to have gone in favor of email. I would expect there's a quite a few private servers out there to warrant continual updating in a program like emacs.
> at some point, government analysts will construct a platform that gets lots of data (including both public and private data) shoveled in and produces actionable insights.

There are already quite a few platforms for doing this. Constructing and running many of them is the job of the MITRE Corporation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitre_Corporation

A friend of mine works there, constructing quite complex computer models to estimate the impact of (sometimes very small) changes in government policy or services.
> SSL makes man-in-the-middle attacks all too easy. Every owner of root certificates that is certificate authorities, secret services and big Internet providers can intervene between user and server to intercept confidential information or even manipulate it.

This problem doesn't go away with DNS (in fact without DNS-Sec it's as good as a self-signed cert) and with DNSSec, state actors/root delegates can still act maliciously.

Granted, I still think it's a better option than the current CA system, it just doesn't magically make certain kind of attacks go away.
The moment we are having with manufacturing
Couple old, enjoyable blog posts from Bunnie Huang on viral genomes from CS standpoint:
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=353
http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=1676
If they only have a gig of RAM, why does iOS bother with 64-bit support at all? Doesn't that increase memory pressure due to all the pointers being twice as big?
Killer is dead
Besides emacs 24.4 being an awesome release by itself, it also means esr can finally transition the development to git.

That will render the project a lot more accessible for new developers and ad-hoc bugfixing.
In theory this is easy and good, in practice it's not.

http://docs.cython.org/src/userguide/parallelism.html

The problem is that it's really nasty to declare all your functions nogil, because that means you don't get exception handling. There may be a trick to this that I've missed --- I find the GIL handling stuff in Cython sort of confusing.

I think my applications are genuinely hard to multi-thread, so maybe it's usually easier than I've found it. It doesn't help that I use a Macbook Air, and OpenMP isn't available for CLang. Developing on OSX sucks sometimes.
You're better off picking up a meditative practice with just enough "seed" and go from there. It's a kind of empiricism where you observe your experience, and in which insights naturally emerge from being aware of your experiencing. In a practice like that, eventually to get to the deeper stuff, you drop your attachment to models and explanations.
hey, author here. i didn't realize this was on hacker news :)

a thought occured to me yesterday - perhaps my use of this internal model isn't "for everyone", but it "works for me" because of some kind of placebo effect. every time i have emotional reactions, i'm able to look at them through this lens and act in a way that typically involves modifying an errant belief.
Hacker News is #10 referrer to amazon.com
Interesting - could you please provide some examples of how are you using rectangular mark mode? I have never used it before, so I'm clearly missing something cool here...
Nice! I've got a similar project currently in the pipes.
I've noticed that the playlist can get pretty out of sync when one of the clients disconnects and reconnects, sometimes by a few minutes. But otherwise really well done.
This is the best discussion of the different versions of emacs available for MacOS I've seen (including emacsformacos):

http://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/271/what-is-the-dif...

Short version: Lunaryorn: "I used to get them from Emacs for Mac OS X, but now I use Homebrew, because it supports more libraries, notably GNU TLS for encrypted network connections.

All in all: Use brew install emacs --HEAD --use-git-head --cocoa --with-gnutls --with-rsvg --with-imagemagick :)"
Absolutely, but that's true of most information as well. For example, the information in the article is relative to the context of understanding our language and the body of assumed knowledge and references of a reader of the New Yorker.

My understanding of biology is very limited. I've heard how physically small microbes are in every article out there. But never how information-small they are. Fascinating from a software developer's perspective.

I wonder what code golf for a virus would look like.
10 Books Every Programmer Should Read
Don't guess at how long it takes to complete work. Plan what you think you need, and then do a week of stories. Based on your velocity, make a confidence interval of dates. Next week, do the same thing.

If they want a fixed date, take 60% of your velocity and you'll be pretty sure your math will work out to give you the project on time.

Anything not based on data is pulling numbers out of your ass, and it's hilariously disastrous every time.
Killer is dead video
Is there a screenshot somewhere?
Thanks for pointing this out. In the "debian:wheezy" docker image, "apt-get clean" didn't seem to have an effect. I dug around a bit and found that, in this image, aptitude is configured to not cache the downloaded packages (via /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/docker-clean).

On one hand, I consider this a good default behavior for building docker containers, so I'm glad it's there. On the other hand, I didn't know about it until I investigated. It's strong evidence for the great point @amouat made regarding base images being blackboxes in most (all?) cases.
Interactive NYC taxi heatmap
> normal folks cannot distinguish a self signed certificate from a malicious used one

What do you mean with "normal folks"? Nobody can possibly distinguish this, since an attacker would also just use a self-signed certificate.
Performance Testing in Xcode 6
Volvo Bets Its Future on Small, Turbocharged Engines
Okay for technical docs, an occasional Wikipedia article, etc. It's not a replacement for Firefox or Chrome.
OT: What happened to Guileemacs?
Depends on which Debian I believe, but Ubuntu doesn't update their package versions beyond security fixes within a single distro version.

So you'll generally want those fixes, unless they really broke something, which I'd guess would be somewhat rare.
The Truth Behind Hiring Decisions
Congrats to everyone involved! It showcased via HN a little over 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510656
Half of the government sites in Spain also use self-signed, including payment sites.
Few posts above, I write "read carefully what Linus actually wrote." This time I can only say, "read what I actually wrote" don't take a few words from the sentence. My assumption in this discussion was that others know from other sources more about the subject. I have the impression that that background is missing in your reply. Still, even if we remain by what I've written:

In my older post I claim that I've read the random.c source cca 1-2 years ago. Note: the source, the C code, not the comments. My older sentence was: "Here he suggests an even better implementation than the one actually implemented afterwards: feeding hwrng to the pool just like the all other sources. The last time I've checked (a year or a two ago) the hwrng was there but had the special treatment, not passing the same path as the other sources."

I think it's clear: "The last time I've checked (a year or a two ago) the hwrng (..) had the special treatment, not passing the same path as the other sources."

Then in the later post my words are: "they still don't mix hwrng directly to the pool." I wrote it as I've actually checked the current git master of the random.c.

I don't see anything contradictory.

I also have more understanding for the idea behind the current implementation. Now it looks to me like they try to handle the hwrng as something that can be actively malicious, not just having a known seed (while just having the known seed, to my understanding, shouldn't be a problem to mix together with with other inputs). I personally think that the assumption of active maliciousness is to much, because the same company produces the whole CPU, and if you assume that, then you shouldn't use the CPU at all: they can be actively malicious all the time, not just with one instruction.

And, by the way, mixing through the same path but without increasing the "entropy counter" were maybe possible, but maybe it was cleaner this way.
Thanks for that! I went through this on my own quite some time ago and came to my own conclusion that GNU emacs is the one for me, especially since I do program on mac os x, Linux and Windows.

EDIT: Well, now that I've read that in full, I'm thinking of giving the author's conclusion a try:

> All in all: Use brew install emacs --HEAD --use-git-head --cocoa --with-gnutls --with-rsvg --with-imagemagick :)
It's a bit more complicated than that. There's a really good discussion here:

http://www.sealiesoftware.com/blog/archive/2013/09/24/objc_e...

and here:

https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2013-09-27-arm64-an...

Basically, as I understand it, 64-bit pointers on iOS can actually act to decrease memory pressure because the extra bits can be used to store object class information that would otherwise have to be stored separately.
Block Google and Facebook to Improve Firefox Privacy
Hmm, needs additional semi-colons.
An older link, but:
http://emacsredux.com/blog/2014/01/01/a-peek-at-emacs-24-dot...
Here's a video showing the system described in the paper playing various Atari games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfGD2qveGdQ
Congrats on your launch!

I'll offer some questions I'd be asking if I were on your board of directors. I hope they are helpful as you grow.

- It looks like your model assumes a base 50% materials cost. (I'm assuming you're storing WALs in customer's S3 accounts, not yours.) After adding staff and other costs, how likely is this to reach break-even?

- And at what scale?

- How do you differentiate if/when Digital Ocean starts moving up the stack (assuming they will eventually want to move into higher-margin products a la AWS)?
That's pretty neat. How fast is it when a big file is open?
Jazz is an abysmal product compared to JIRA.
> During the industrial revolution, the goal of progress in technology (and machines to be more specific) was always to, one day, have no humans working to survive, but living lives and do whatever they want.

No, that's actually propaganda.

The goal was always to show those pesky, skillful, artisans their true place in society. The means was to embed as much as possible of their tacit knowledge either in machines or in soft, human, procedures/standards/rules/policies. Then, the owner class would go back to control all the means of production and have the destinies of their faithful serfs on their hands.

The fact that this process brought unprecedented prosperity was a happy side effect that nobody gave much thought at the time. Then the whole process was rationalized on those bases when the social sensitivities of the serfs became too self conscious.
> Reversibility is all about trusting a third party with your wealth, which has obvious downsides.

If you do not have reversibility, you are trusting every automated intermediary, their security practices, reliability of software, hardware, etc. You have completely subjected yourself to human and computer error, and hacks. This is completely untenable.

The nature of the legal system keeps the ultimate decisions in human hands, which is a good thing. I'm not saying humans should arbitrarily be able to interfere with arbitrary transactions, but you must have the ability for a human to reverse errant transactions some way or other.

Imagine the headline, "Fedcoin bug results in $1 trillion dollar loss to hackers." Whoops.
You're right that a published Dockerfile isn't enough to really know what went into the image, but I think it's the closest thing we have at the moment. I would love to see some tools for building truly minimal docker images from scratch.
As others have mentioned, first-past-the-post makes third party voting counter-productive (although it's a better protest vote than not voting at all). I look forward to the day when individual states enact ranked/approval voting by popular referendum, so that third parties have a shot at viability.

That said: the current Libertarian Party has a lot of baggage regarding the religion of markets. While I think the market is a powerful and worthwhile engine of growth, I don't believe it is the only valid or effectual form of social contract. (I've come to adopt the term "Chomsky Libertarian". [1])

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxPUvQZ3rcQ
I was disappointed that it wasn't brewing coffee!
Cheap African solar energy could power UK homes in 2018
Three Reasons a Data Engineer Should Learn Scala
Everybody should prefer cffi over the CPython API unless you are working some very specific corner cases or need deep integration with the Python object system. If nothing else the fact that you can write your C code without having to care about Python is a huge win. This was you can use the same C code in other projects or keep it around if you ever end up moving from python to some other language.
I Fucked Up My Beta, Here's What I Learned
Don't forget that SSL/TLS normally resists downgrade attacks -- but browsers use insecure fallback due to servers that don't properly handle the SSL handshake.
The whole purpose of TLS_FALLBACK_SCSV is just to re-enable the TLS downgrade resistence while retaining compatibility to those broken servers.

I wonder what would effect more users - disabling SSLv3, or disabling insecure fallback?
Which is kind of a pointless comment to make, isn't it.
And I'm asking you an honest question: if a prospect walks in your door, do you either (1) sell them, or (2) demand they prove they are in the market and aren't wasting your time. Maybe that person has a 5% chance of closing, or maybe they have a 90% chance. Nonetheless, when you go with the "prove you aren't wasting my time" plan, the probabilities plummet.
I use NNTP to follow a handful of development mailing lists via gmane.org.
+1 I only get it without the www; chrome doesn't let me redirect away either
Any time you're working with tabular data, or data that is aligned horizontally, it's helpful. For example, I might need to delete a prefix from a list of declarations. I often use macros for the same kinds of tasks, with each macro editing a line and putting the cursor on the next line afterwards.
No, nobody trusts this certificate - it I'd identical to the one you generate yourself with OpenSSL. Certificate pinning would be nice but its simply not the issue or fix at hand here...

If China were to misuse the root I believe their academics dept has, it would be instantly banned. There was a bugzilla bug about removing it @ Mozilla and a LOT of people supported it, but it won't be removed unless there is abuse.
Why I'm betting on JavaScript
A Complete CronJob Tutorial
OK, that sounds fair enough. Just interested in whether you'll be running a patched Postgres to be honest :-).

There is of course set_config in 9.4 - superusers can then edit the config file through that (a superuser can overwrite any file the user running the server can write to anyway, but through more convoluted means).
They don't. And shouldn't be,
What justizin said. Also, let's say that I am able to MitM your connection to apple.com. You are a brand new customer, credit card in hand, ready to buy yourself a brand new $5,000 Mac Pro, and a couple of Cinema displays. You open up Chrome, go to apple.com, but instead of getting the real deal, you get my slightly modified version. The change? I run a regex on all the HTML served (that's right, I'm a real h@x0r, and regex my HTML like a boss) that does s/store\.apple\.com/apple-store.com/g. Now, apple-store.com has its own valid SSL cert, so you get the nice green bar when you get to https://apple-store.com. This site is mine, and all it does is serve the content from the legitimate store.apple.com, except it also injects a small script into the payment form. As soon as you type in your credit card info, it is mine. Moreover, I know exactly how much you spent, and maybe I even allow you to place the order, get all the confirmations, etc. You won't know that something went wrong until I sell your CC number on the black market and some guy in Uzbekistan buys himself an iPhone 6 Plus with your money.

Edit: apple-store.com is obviously a real site, so let's say I find something just as legitimately looking as that.
Software is eating software
I prefer to consume mailing lists via Gmane's NNTP gateway: http://gmane.org/

It's a surprisingly nice experience. You can really easily pull archives, nntp clients tend to handle threading well, etc.
Right, I'm pretty sure we're taking about SMS-based (or perhaps email-based).

Even in cases where that token is intercepted, it's a one-time use token, so you know if it's been intercepted.
Same with Hollow-point bullets. Legal for Police to use but illegal in war:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow-point_bullet

> Despite the ban on military use, hollow-point bullets are one of the most common types of bullets used by civilians and police,[4] which is due largely to the reduced risk of bystanders being hit by over-penetrating or ricocheted bullets, and the increased speed of incapacitation.
Yep, this exactly. Your estimates will get better as you have more information, so keep everyone updated as you get into the thick of it. This is why Agile has daily standups. If you don't have a daily status call, do try to get into some sort of routine update.

It also helps if you know what is the highest priority and what can get sacrificed.

If you're late, talk about it in your retrospective. Taking time to look back will help you make better estimates in the future. Often times I gauge how reliable an engineer's estimate is based off of how many questions he/she asked me during the kick off meeting.
Endorfun App
Can I ask if you consider yourself smart money, then? Because in almost 15 years of investing, fundamental research, and technical analysis [edit: and associated community participation, consumption of research products, and reading investment literature and publications] I have not seen anyone take issue with calling a 3-year low on a stock on the basis of an intraday low. It's a 3 year low. I didn't say that was particularly important, but it's true by any reasonable definition of the term (which is a common one). It might be important on the basis of the volume, as it crossed a technical level that it's held for quite a while and may be forming a downtrend, which is frequently interpreted as a sign of institutional selling.

edit: FYI, IBM hasn't traded below 170 since Oct 4, 2011. It hasn't closed below 170 since Sep 23, 2011.
Targeted Customer Acquisition for B2B Startups
You're both getting downvoted because you're coming off as both obtuse and heartless.

When things go wrong at 60mph, people panic. When you're panicking, it's hard to remember skills you were taught in calmer circumstances--and nobody practices high-speed power failures, so you don't even have muscle memory to fall back on.

It is an engineer's responsibility to prevent dangerous situations from occurring, as far as is practical. "Dangerous situations" include those which are likely to induce panic in an average driver, even if a particularly skilled driver could handle them. Often it isn't practical, which is why so many people die in traffic accidents every day, but in this case the problem with the ignition switch was known and deliberately ignored. There's no excuse.
Would you be bothered if full video of your browser window was constantly streamed to Apple by default, with no ability to erase footage? If not, I don't know what to say. But if so, being told "It's just communicating with the web, what'd you expect from a browser?" wouldn't help, would it?

Obviously this is the extreme, and I'm not likening sending search queries to fulltime video surveillance, but the point is people have different thresholds of what they will tolerate. Apparently most HN users' tolerance is high, or at least they are willing to defend Apple on this for whatever reasons. Some of ours is low, so that's why we are complaining.
Not nice.