skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The viewpoint the author seems to expound reeks of second system syndrome. That is, he seems to argue that incremental evolution is broken, since the state at any given point is suboptimal given what someone building from scratch would build, having all the lessons of hindsight with them.

Of course it is. Yet computer science history is full of overly ambitious projects (Plan9, Vista, Lisp) falling by the wayside as inferior solutions which were more incremental continued to chug along. The author didn't stop to consider why those failed, only to blame a myopic community; as if Lisp being better would have proven itself if only more people gave it a chance.

Incremental changes are how we progress. We take the lessons we have learned from what we're doing now, and then try something a little bit different. We can't try and redesign everything at once, so we pick a few things, and other compromises get left in. Compromise is an essential requirement to getting anything big done.
thanks for your thoughts, appreciated!

re '"but will never be "great" at either" What sort of attitude is that?' - I don't consider this a bad attitude, more of an acknowledgement that my goal is not to be "great". Further, I am of the personal belief that certain things are unattainable to all people - there is such a thing as a truly great writer, where it's not just attitude/hard work, but a certain natural inclination and ability. I believe I can be great at many things (we all can), but I don't think I have the mindset to be a "great" programmer. Does that make more sense?
Claim Your Red Bull: Class Action Settlement
He charges $550 to make the lasts (foot-shaped molds for the leather). And he does about 30 pairs of shoes a yea --, not sure how many lasts. Maybe a 3D printer could pay for itself in a somewhat reasonable amount of time?
I can write *nix command-line utilities with ease in any language that I please. Can the same be said for powershell utilities? My understanding is that you are pretty much restricted to using CLR languages.

If we are accepting that sort of languae lock-in, I'd rather get something like scsh off the ground.
I agree with that. Pay me well and let me work remote and I can handle mostly all the other details that make me happy.
Defaulting to a data serialization scheme like Avro or Protocol Buffers could be used here, especially with a small amount of shell support to automatically convert terminal-destined data serialization streams to a text string.

It would be an interesting to see if any such projects exist, because it would fit very easily into the current pipe IPC infrastructure, with the addition of transformative pipelines for interfacing with the existing string-base utilities, but that's necessary anyway.

I mean to say that there's no need to modify existing IPC mechanisms, just a need to establish a common serialization standard and embed it into a shell.
Highway Guardrail May Be Deadly, States Say
I think that the summary of that story, though, is, "Actually, wolves hardly did anything." Yes, not literally nothing, but that for the most part, plant regrowth didn't happen at all. Where it did happen, it's far from clear that the wolves -> elk predation causality chain was a major factor.
Propaganda?! I am sure, I am not on politico. There were some valid reasons to use Bing, and I use bing for Bing Rewards and donate the points to my local elementary school for Microsoft to donate Surface to them (even though I am far far away from the target). If Google works for you that is great, but the difference in terms of result quality is not stark, but perceptions have stuck and bing is suffering from that.
I always wonder how much weight should be given to the accuracy of "irrelevant" details. I tend to believe that spotting small errors that seem obvious to me mean that there are likely other larger errors that I would recognize if I were more knowledgeable about the subject. I presume that if the author isn't concerned or knowledgeable enough to strive for accuracy in the minor details, they are more likely (intentionally or not) to make errors in the major details.

In the case of this video, Monbiot speaks of 'deer' and then shows pictures of American Elk (Cervus canadensis). This is defensible, as he's British, and the European Red Deer (Cervus elaphus) is very closely related and likely more familiar to his anticipated viewers. But midway through, the video cuts to pictures of a Mule Deer (Odocoileus hemionus), which an expert is unlikely to conflate with an elk.

This could be considered an "irrelevant" detail, but one of the major differences is that the American Elk primarily graze as they have a digestive system that allows them to efficiently digest grasses, but the Mule Deer do not: they eat some grass, but primarily "browse" on woody vegetation. So while they will both have an effect on streamside vegetation, it's going to be a very different effect.

In a piece that purports to explain the science behind the cascading effects of wolves on the ecosystem, this feels like a disconcerting blunder. Should it cause me to doubt the credibility of the piece as a whole? I don't know. But it makes it more difficult for me to treat Monbiot as an authority on the topic.
Nazi Monks Against the Panama Canal (2012)
What, you mean like virtual-dom[1]?

[1] https://github.com/Matt-Esch/virtual-dom
If you want to argue that, at least get your facts straight first. In Europe, the stronger welfare states of Northern Europe and Scandinavia has had much stronger economies during the financial crisis. They have also had much better success retraining their work force when industrial jobs has been lost to the cheaper Asian countries.

There are many reasons why (most of) Europe is in a depression right now. One of the important ones is the financial crisis that started in the US and spread across the world, where European banks were invested up to their ears. Another is the former tiger states of Ireland and Portual, where low company taxes attracted money which was invested in a real estate bubble which popped when the economy tanked. A third is the Euro experiment which didn't really pan out the way politicians had hoped (to put things mildly).

So there is a whole complex of reasons for the current situation and no one can really point out any single one as more important with any confidence. But one of the few things we do know is that welfare states have generally fared better in the crisis, not worse.
Pointing out that just using Tor without changing your behavior might not be enough is definitely important. Using a separate piece of hardware that's dedicated just to routing all your traffic through Tor still has a lot of security benefits, since it limits the target surface just to Tor (and the OS stack required to run Tor), as opposed to your browser, OS or any other software you might use that could potentially leak your true identity.
Windows 10 Attracts 1M Testers in Two Weeks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstrike
You do realize that Thunderbolt has direct memory access right? It doesn't even need drivers to do malicious actions. It can dump and modify memory at will.

In fact all the USB security hoopla also affects Thunderbolt devices, which can also be reflashed without physically modification.

Thunderbolt is even less secure than firewire, which at least required some support from the OS to dump memory.

USB is an iron fortress compared to those kinds of attacks.
> “Worse is Better”, in other words, asks us to accept a false dichotomy: either we write software that is ugly and full of hacks, or we are childish idealists who try to create software artifacts of beauty and elegance.

I think this criticism is slightly misattributed. Ideologues ask us to accept a false dichotomy. Ideologues exist on both sides of an issue usually. For example, there are most definitely ideologues who believe this same dichotomy exists, but believe that the only option is to choose beauty and elegance, even at the expense of practicality. These are the people who (for example) wish Lisp machines had won and that we lived in a monoculture of only Lisp.

I like C++ because I think it's useful, but I'm not a Worse is Better Ideologue. For example, I like Rust as a potential "better is better" replacement for a lot of C++'s use cases. I like Rust particularly because it seriously addresses nearly all of the practical advantages of C++. Many "Better is Better" ideologues would rather just hand-wave away the negatives of the compromises required to achieve their vision (like mandatory GC).

Rust proves that "better is better" design can address real-world practical challenges, while also providing an escape hatch back into a more primitive "Worse is Better" kind of world (unsafe blocks). It will be interesting to see if this approach gains the traction that I hope it will.
Shouldn't the Nautil.us article simply have a reference (link enabled)? It's important for those of us who want to verify the analytical model and what inspired the ideas. For everyone else, it's a link they wouldn't click.

It's not exactly a new practice in the literary world.
Are you expecting encryption of the file in JavaScript on the client before it is uploaded?
Man Builds Gun That Folds and Fires Paper Airplanes
Huh. Bing has definitely improved, but half of the features listed by the author don't seem to work for me. Am I doing it wrong?

Further, I almost always get better results from Google. If I search for "pizza" on Bing, the top local result is an obscure restaurant a few miles away with a one-star rating. The ones that are close to me and have high ratings are at the bottom or not even listed.
he seems to argue that incremental evolution is broken

I think he argues that this sort of absolutism is broken.

The author isn't proposing that we discard incremental change, just the uncritical assumption that incremental is the only reasonable change.

See his analogy with portfolio theory: he's not even challenging incrementalism as the default, any more than he'd suggest putting 90% of your money into emerging markets.
Does anyone know if the following is a good idea:

Run two SSIDs on a router: one regular internet, the other TOR only. TOR would be running on the router itself.

Are routers too underpowered to run TOR?

PORTAL looks good. Not sure why it has to have a separate 3g modem/wireless card. Any good reason to avoid ethernet? Reason to have this as a separate box?
"Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people... in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe"

And they were all clean and free of any diseases? Only the Europeans had these "devastating" diseases?

"The native Americans didn't have the same natural resistances to the diseases the Europeans brought."

How did the European diseases kill off the Native Americans but not the other way around?
I do it accidentally all the time when I multi-touch on my trackpad.
Gregory, you've done it yet again. Amazing work. Thanks.
If "Object references are passed by value", then the "Object" itself is passed by reference, so the statement "In Java, Objects are passed by reference" it is a full true statement.

You can pass "Object references" by value or by reference, anyway, since you're passing a "Object reference", the object itself is being passed as a reference.
They know – Fictional NSA surveillance platform
PowerShell utilities are implemented as CLR classes inheriting from a particular base class. As such, they must be written in a CLR language (or PowerShell itself, of course).

Edit: Of course, you have the option of writing a minimal wrapper in PS that shells out to your other-language command but the interface between PS and non-PS programs is still based on a string commandline.
Brad Feld Interview – What He Would Do Over Again and Startup Advice
Hmm, cheers.
NGINX as a SPDY reverse proxy for Node.js
Spawning a process by passing state explicitly is what Windows does. The CreateProcess call takes 10 parameters, several of which are structures containing even more parameters - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms68...

I do like that fork, then setup functions, then exec keeps the code simpler. If everything is done as a single call like CreateProcess then it needs to have a way of passing what the setup functions need as data - rather a lot of it.
Mailbox Mac App in Open Beta
In cases like this Twitter and the authorities need to move fast and make an example of the culprit. Threats to a person and/or their children/family are absolutely unacceptable.
Distributed is not necessarily more scalable than centralized
They aren't asserting the universe is two entangled particles, they are asserting that they can use two entangled particles to model an effect that may explain the universe.

"time is an illusion might be an even larger stretch"

The word "illusion" should be struck entirely from these articles. Just because a quantity is derived and not "fundamental" doesn't make it not real. Temperature is already known to be an "illusion" by this measure but I've sure been burned before. There's no scenario here where one day you're just walking along, and then bam you're frozen forever because some physicist just realized for the last time that time is an "illusion". If time isn't quite what we may have once naively thought it is, we still clearly live in a universe with before & after relations, just as we live in a universe in which it is perfectly sensible and meaningful to talk about "heat", even if "temperature" does have some behaviors our ancestors wouldn't have anticipated, such as http://www.nature.com/news/quantum-gas-goes-below-absolute-z... .
Interactive map of the Cold War wars
Ah, some more history:

In the '80s, a common startup setup that was more powerful than a PC (for a while) and ASCII terminals to a UNIX(TM) box was 3 or so el-cheapo Sun workstations sharing one disk over an Ethernet (or so I've read, I might well prefer the ASCII terminal to a UNIX box, which is what I tended to use).

Although also think about the PC starting with ones using the 386 (true 32 bits, the 286 was misbegotten and all but useless except as a fast 8086): both these configurations were cheap, but not all that capable, memory was at a premium as well as virtual memory in the workstation case.

So using machine but not programmer efficient C and the like was the zeitgeist. Then about or a bit before the time engineering workstations based on more capable microprocessors were also capable of running Lisp quickly, although without hardly as much error checking, the expert system bubble collapsed. And those promoting it had to find something to blame, and Lisp became it. Or so goes one narrative of it.

There was certainly a ... Slough of Despond in programming languages we mortals could use to earn a living about the time you would have started programming seriously (before college, I assume). For Lisper and programming language guy like myself it was very depressing; I think what got us out of that, besides Moore's Law, was the dot com bust, it upset a lot of the conventional wisdom, coupled with a paucity of resources for development. No longer could you, at the extreme, do a wild IPO with an idea and a plan to hire a bunch of blub programmers using a consensus language running on expensive Sun or whatever hardware. You probably get the idea of what lost favor (ask if not).

Also, as Paul Graham pointed out, in essays who's influence I can't judge, the above will at best get you average results, and the average result of a startup is failure. He also noted that technical failure was a frequent cause of corporate failure. To take one stark example, compare Facebook competitor Friendster. Whatever promise it had, that the company's board used to wheel and deal, didn't matter when it was just too slow to use. Of course (if I remember correctly), its technical founder was purged by that board.

Which also leads into issues of control. We technical people don't need so much money, and the all too common downside of losing control is awful for us, the company, and of course the people we hired for it.

So all in all we more tend to call the shots technically, and are able to pull it off. And wild successes like Facebook with PHP and Twitter with Ruby on Rails didn't hurt.
They're not comparing Dutch pensions to your defined-contribution plan, but to American defined-benefit pensions, which you don't have. Why not? Because it's essentially illegal for anyone to offer one to you without funding it like the Dutch do...except for government pensions.

Personally, I would prefer, as you do, my own defined-contribution 401K, which I invest heavily into low-cost index funds. But I'd much rather have a Dutch-accounted, actually paid for pension instead of a Calpers-like pension where I have an absolute claim...to money that will never actually get put into the system. The Dutch way is a hell of a lot less bad.
Yes I think swapping batteries is a perfectly acceptable solution. It would be no different than changing the tires. I preferred Formula One when they allowed fueling in race.
Diving in head-first is one of the best ways to get that knowledge. 'One day maybe' is awfully close to 'never'.
I wouldn't be surprised to see this happen at some point. Already we're seeing the common app stores show "In-app purchases" next to or instead of the word "Free" to indicate that it's not really free.
If Mallory can install an arbitrary root certificate on Alice’s client, M can do nearly whatever she wants with A’s client.
There's something wrong with the claim of "1Watt idle when connecting to a network", since the maximum power of that module is 1Watt at full performance.

Maybe the person who measured this hasn't used sleep modes properly?
But what you're saying applies to any degree from an elite school -- whether it's a law degree from Harvard, engineering degree from MIT, etc.

In the end, a diploma from a prestigious school reduces the risk of hiring a lower quality candidate, but it is still no guarantee that you're getting a good one.
> Graphic "render nodes" feature enabled by default

This had me excited, until I read the linked description and found that

> It’s also important to know that render-nodes are not bound to a specific card. While internally it’s created by the same driver as the legacy node, user-space should never assume any connection between a render-node and a legacy/mode-setting node. Instead, if user-space requires hardware-acceleration, it should open any node and use it

So my program opens a rendernode and it might run on the discrete GPU or it might run on some shitty integrated GPU. That's kind of useless.
Europeans had domestic animals (horses, pigs, cows, sheep, dogs, chickens), meaning that they had acquired resistance to the many diseases that animals bring with them. The Americas had few animals that were capable of domestication, thus natives did not domesticate animals and did not acquire resistance through close exposure. When Europeans first arrived with their animals, it entailed natives first exposure to these pathogens.
Thanks for taking the time to take a screenie and share it. Looks like I need to investigate why some sites fonts look so bad on this machine.
FDR took the larger U.S. international economy off the gold standard in 1933, so if "bank-controlled fiat" isn't exactly "new". And even that is a highly American-centric POV; other economies have worked on bank controls and fiat long before the U.S. even existed, including China in the 11th century and England starting from the 12th century.
When you think about the differences between human results of North American vs. South American colonization by Europeans, it becomes clear that there was something more at play than just the clean and guilt-free narrative of "disease wiped out the Natives" that is being taught in North American schools.

Today, only in the US and Canada, i.e. Anglo-Saxon colonies, the Native populations are dismally low. Just across the border in Mexico you already start seeing largely Native and mixed Native-European populations thriving, instead of being wiped out. The same story continues throughout Central and Latin Americas.
I've used it before to provide net access to two machines when there's only been one wire, and neither machine was able to run in AP mode. It was really, really awkward....

I think I used it once to connect a pair of PSPs to play a two player game....

I think the use-cases for true Ad-Hoc mode are actually pretty limited and in most cases one system (android or iOS these days) can probably run in AP mode anyway.
My reading of the cost statements is that the sort doesn't matter at all: the sequential scan is what took up virtually all of the time.

But I'm hardly a PG expert.

Excellent article in any event, it's really interesting to see how things work under the hood.
Microsoft handwriting keyboard for Android Wear
>Defaulting to a data serialization scheme like Avro or Protocol Buffers could be used here

>I mean to say that there's no need to modify existing ICP mechanisms, just a need to establish a common serialization standard

PS gives you two things though. It doesn't just give you objects, it also gives you the behaviors of those objects as implemented by the runtime (CLR) that is common between both endpoints of the communication.

For example, consider a command that returns a list of processes running on the current session as a List of Process objects. This list is then piped to a command that filters the list to a sublist of processes that have a particular Name property. Finally, this sublist is passed to a third command that calls the Process.Kill() method on each of those objects.

This requires that all three commands not only agree on the structure of a Process object (as protobuf would provide) but also that it has a Kill() method, etc. This is possible in PS because all three commands are running in the same common runtime, but not possible with generic IPC.

IPC of complex objects has existed on Windows even before the CLR with COM and DCOM, and again both of these are more than serialization mechanisms, since they must support cross-process data as well as behavior.
HAVEN: World's most tricked out smart lock that attaches to the floor
Flare Pans – Cooking pans that claim 40% improvement in energy efficiency
Yeah, re Atlas Shrugged, that was exactly my first thought as I scrolled down. If you want a [nuts] libertarian fantasy, then Weapon Shops of Isher is slightly better written and at least entertainingly camp. And Animal Farm definitely doesn't belong on a scifi list, and I think hammers home the political sympathies of the post's author (yeah, why not Watership Down? Or Shardik even?).
I totally agree, and I think a combination of a vast increase in sequenced human DNA from all living human groups plus many dead ones plus ever-improving algorithms for determining the space-time layout of the taxonomy will tell us some amazing things about the past in the near future.
Likewise, the biggest use I have for things like Dropbox or potentially Hive is to store my personal collection of guitar tabs that I've curated, so wherever I go I can still practice without having to remember to bring my tabs. I also keep a collection of educational PDFs and ebooks as well as some pictures I found on the Internet that I decided to keep for one reason or another in case I need to link to them on Reddit or send a funny gif to a friend. In college, I would put my notes there as well as homework assignments or group projects that I need to share with classmates. Hell, I don't even care if any of that were to be released to the public, let alone if the NSA or private companies are snooping on it.

Then again, I'm fully aware of the dangers of cloud solutions. Others are not. And that's the problem.
this broke the shit out of my pip install until I nuked all the stuff that got dropped in my /usr/local/lib/python2.7 directory. (linuxmint 14)

Also these instructions don't work straight away on linuxmint 14. I suspect some missing deps or incompatible versions or something.

Just FYI.

I'm sure the tool is awesome though! =)