skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Baust will head to the police station on Monday morning [to comply with the ruling], but [his lawyer] believes police still may be unable to unlock the phone because it should require a password [demanding which is unconstitutional], in addition to a fingerprint, once it has been shut off.

Am I naive for thinking these technicalities are really silly? Is not the goal here to establish whether accessing and searching one's phone is fair game at some point in an investigation / trial?
Workhint: Online Virtual Office to Work from Anywhere
Well feeding the world is a more challenging problem than space flight ever will be. It is not like you can just sign a massive check and deploy some engineers and suddenly poor people in Africa will have enough to eat. But the comparatively trivial challenge of space flight can provide real benefits. Weather satellites can let farmers and governments plan ahead. A single remote sensing satellite can map desertification (which destroy farm land), and track floods (which destroy crops).
He only mentions such groups. His discussion is on the right of all of us to say what we please, no matter what any marginalized group, powerful group, majority group, minority group, or kooky fool calling reasoned commenters out personally thinks, feels, or is triggered about it.
We don't need any networks. Self driving cars will always need to be able to share the road with normal cars. That mechanism will support the case of sharing the road with other self driving cars too. Networks can add fancy features, but they can happen on their own time, incrementally.
Interesting. Apparently my received wisdom is out-of-date. I usually use MySQL on the laptop when I have to clean data for analysis because it's already installed, but I will have to look into replacing it.
Japan has some of the most awesome architecture as house resale value is extremely poor.
> Taxing capital gains reduces the amount that can be allocated into generating new wealth

So does taxing any other form of income. Preferentially low taxes on capital gains favors wealth accumulation by people who already derive income from capital and, at any given present revenue level, relatively disfavors wealth accumulation by people who derive income through means which are more heavily taxed, notably labor income.
Human readability is a concern of a client and is independent of the storage mechanism. Every modern database stores integers in binary format, for instance, but clients display them as a decimal string of characters as opposed to a binary or hexadecimal representation. Timestamps are similarly stored in binary fashion, but often formatted for human readability in the client.
I do have to say, I've also tried some other drugs in the past month or so (MDMA being one of them) and the effect I got was pretty horrific - the exact opposite of the effect most people get.

Even despite my bad experience I'm still interested in drug experimentation. I guess it's important to keep in mind that YMMV and if you try something new, make sure it's in a controlled environment (around people you trust, in a safe space, correct dosage of good quality stuff, etc).
A Programming Language for Games: Demo [video]
What?

Did Venkatesh write this by crashing into the keyboard?

It feels like the author is breathlessly moving on from point to point like a stream of cociousness.
Fact is most people don't care about the init system as long as it works.
Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo Has Been Lost – One Pilot Confirmed Dead
There is a paywall if you go to the link directly. Try going through
https://news.google.com/news?ncl=dkcZSdqad8lGX_MN3eau-UDuh7y...

Which worked for me.
This appears to be the book in question. http://www.amazon.com/American-Deaths-Disasters-Kenneth-Gold...
Fingerprints are usernames, not passwords

http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2013/10/fingerprints-are-user...
Or that you're in a location where GPS reception is difficult, like a city core, like eLoran proponents would likely remind you. Unfortunately, I think the ship sailed when the US decided to decommission its chain. Another weakness of Loran is that it's only available near the coasts (where precise navigation is a necessity for ships), so it won't help you in the middle of the ocean or in Las Vegas.
I think the late Christopher Hitchens put it best in a debate on whether freedom of speech includes the freedom to hate.[1] At the start, he makes the point that freedom of speech is just as much about freedom of hearing:

...it’s not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard. It is the right of everyone in the audience to listen, and to hear. And every time you silence someone you make yourself a prisoner of your own action, because you deny yourself the right to hear something. In other words: Your own right to hear and be exposed is as much involved in all these cases as is the right of the other to voice his or her view.

And later, he asks who will we trust to do the censoring:

Who's going to decide? To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful or who is the harmful speaker, or to determine in advance what are the harmful consequences going to be, that we know enough about in advance to prevent? To whom would you give this job? To whom are you going to award the task of being the censor?

Did you hear any speaker in opposition to this motion (eloquent as... one of them was) to whom you would delegate the task of deciding for you, what you could read? To whom you'd give the job of deciding for you, relieve you of the responsibility of hearing what you might have to hear? Do you know anyone- hands up- to whom you would give this job? Does anyone have a nominee? You mean there's no one in Canada good enough to decide what I can read? Or hear? I had no idea... but there’s a law that says there must be such a person. Or there's a subsection of some piddling law that says it. Well the hell with that law then. It's inviting you to be liars and hypocrites and to deny what you evidently already know already.

At the end, he notices that if you're going to censor hateful speech, you'll need to ban religious texts. Yet most proponents of laws against hate speech and blasphemy seem to be devoutly religious.

Look anywhere you like for the warrant for slavery, for the subjugation of women as chattel, for the burning and flogging of homosexuals, for ethnic cleansing, for antisemitism, for all this you look no further than a famous book that's on every pulpit in this city and in every synagogue and in every mosque. And then just see whether you can square the fact that the force that is the main source of hatred is also the main caller for censorship. And when you've realized this you'll therefore this evening be faced with a gigantic false antithesis. I hope that still won't stop you from giving the motion before you the resounding endorsement that it deserves. Thanks awfully. Night-night. Stay cool!

I highly recommend watching it, as it's arguably the best recorded oration of Hitchens.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIyBZNGH0TY#t=1240
Apparently the list server died. Here's a gmane link for the interim:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.network.tor.user/33957
Funny, weird “prank” video
youtu.be/jrcO7Zlq2S0?list=UUQ9ILYcaz58zD-rUjDfcDDg
Space Tourism Isn’t Worth Dying For
Great,

Do not integrate with I-tunes and bring back Mog! I thought Mog was hard to use, Beats is ridiculous. My need to find a song by saying I am sitting poolside naked, just woke up, and eating a mango is next to nil.
Scream "I have nothing but contempt for this court!" and then attack the shark robots to 80s music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_EFSQPJh8w
>> Note that John O’Sullivan is a zealous conservative commentator of the O'Reilly sort and by spreading this article you are letting him set the narrative, not the marginalized groups he attacks (which he even lists: "[Muslims], Christians, Gays, feminists, [...], ethnic activists").

Okay! I'll definitely not read this. I don't want to let a hateful person set the narrative. If they set the narrative, they win.
I use this simple tool to discover what's on the network around me: http://www.iwaxx.com/lanscan/

(Usually just to figure out which IP some device is on.)
I am surprised that US government has not got this tax idea before Hungary. After all only rich people use Internet more while the poor and welfare dependent people dont use much of internet.
This is a trend in Google search results for forum threads. Especially common (and frustrating) is getting a link to a locked thread with a single response telling the OP to search for the answer to their question.
> Can anyone explain how the advice generalizes?

The factors constrained by the hardware can be generalized -- cacheability, memory bandwidth, etc. The rest is dependent on the performance characteristics of the runtime, especially the GC. While GC is inapplicable to languages with manually managed memory, allocator performance and fragmentation can still be problematic -- but this is usually much easier to tune. OCaml, which has a very well-designed generational GC, is designed for extremely high allocation rates in its minor heap, to the point where the hardware is the bottleneck -- although compaction of the major heap is still a concern sometimes.

While a lot of the recent research into "mechanical sympathy" is fascinating, a lot of it seems driven by the problems brought by high-level languages such as Java. If you're at the point where L1/L2 hit rates are a concern, use a language with inherent control of the memory layout of data structures. The kind of engineering done by Azul, etc is really about making applications utilize the full capabilities of the hardware without being saddled by the underlying platform (eg, JVM).
It was definitely dumb of me to say "read." I meant "spread."
I don't know why this is so downvoted. It's always important to know whence opinions come and any (perceived or otherwise) biases that their authors may have. (And this is literally an opinion piece we're discussing.)
It could do with some comments and doc-strings certainly, but I'd give it a pass for now as it's a new project. As for the code, I imagine that in any language, highly optimised programs can start looking pretty odd after a while. Try understanding "grep" for example:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grep.git/tree/src/grep.c

As a guy not particularly proficient in C, that looks crazy to me. Although it does at least have decent comments, which I'd expect for such a mature project!
> I think they're a little newer than that, but that's a good point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NK-33 says the AJ-26 engines are from the 1960s and 1970s.
This a very interesting development, an OTT* protocol for secure communication that can sit on top of HTTP. Perhaps this was inevitable given that so much of the underlying security infrastructure has been compromised. It appears to be able to function independently of the application layer protocol as well.

[edit] *I originally wrote 'over-the-top protocol', which in the telecom industry just means "on top of HTTP". Puzzled as to why this got down-voted until I realized some people probably interpreted it as a negative remark. On the contrary, I think OTT protocols like this may be a great way to leverage existing infrastructure while layering on new and potentially better approaches to security.
This is not "some point in an investigation / trial", this is a specific point. They have a warrant.

I'm not a big fan of "compelled evidence" (gathering DNA, blood or fingerprints from a suspect), but the courts have been saying it's ok, and that's the approach they're taking here.

They just can't (so far, in the US) compel you to actually produce testimonial evidence like passwords, passcodes, etc.
Possibly, but probably outweighed by the flexible nature of the zoning system, where more is allowed for a given zoning classification and there are fewer classifications. i.e. developers probably end up dealing with the zoning bureaucracy and politics less than they would in the US.
"providing fingerprints and other biometric information is considered outside the protection"

Is it just me, or is there a contradiction here? I'm happy to provide you with a finger print (in ink), but that in itself is not enough to unlock the phone. You need my live hand attached to my live finger.

I think the problem here is that it is an oversimplification to call it a "finger print".
Google Test Automation Conference – Day #2 Recap
An anecdote like that is extremely terrifying. It connects with us emotionally.

It blows our perception of risk out of proportion. I recommend you read the Wikipedia entry. LSD is incredibly safe, particularly when compared to caffeine and alcohol.

I am very sorry for the person you knew because LSD clearly interacted with something.

>There have been no documented human deaths from an LSD overdose. It is physiologically well tolerated and there is no evidence for long-lasting physiological effects on the brain or other parts of the human organism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysergic_acid_diethylamide?oldf...
Effective refactoring should actually be easier to do with a bigger team, one reason, amongst other, is that you have more hands on deck for code reviews.
That quote bring back a thought i had the other day that computing "went to hell" when designers became "programmers". This via Flash, JS and PHP.
Companies aren't valued on features. They're valued on how much money investors think they can make, which is usually a function of how fast they can acquire users, which is often greatly affected by their execution on simple features.
We Landed An Interview At Y Combinator But Decided Not To Go — Here’s Why
I've been using it for a couple of years now, but for simple projects, it's a bit overcomplicated. In other words, it's a great tool for the right projects, but not a silver bullet.
"we" ? There's no we. There's just various groups of people. If one such group of < 10 000 people (spacex) can go off and build transportation to go to Mars, let them - no one should deny them to do that.

Those same < 10 000 people probably doesn't know nor have the ability to fix all the problems on Earth, but they might be able to get to Mars.
In case you're not the only one looking for them:

Michael Jackson - Billie Jean:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi_XLOBDo_Y#t=0

The Honey Drippers - Impeach The President:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqbEsS5kFb8#t=0

Bob James - Take Me to the Mardi Gras:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaoCsmFDLcY#t=0

James Brown - Funky Drummer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNP8tbDMZNE#t=332

The Winstons - Amen Brother:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxZuq57_bYM#t=84
It is not a nice quote, it's douchey, reductionist, and mostly nonsense. What on earth does "costs are fixed" mean? I also did not realize there was an inverse relationship between "blood" and "treasure". Are we pirates?

In case you aren't trolling me, my snark was a reference to http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/in-this-moment-i-am-euphoric

I don't know your friend, but my username is pretty stupid, so if she wants to take credit for it she's 100% welcome.
You can look at my post history and see I'm totally comfortable with getting downvoted. Downvotes or upvotes don't make me right or wrong, though. I'm actually totally shocked that comment is above negative right now. But it doesn't make me any righter.
I remember a prof, I think math, might have been physics (there was one guy in the physics department whose MSc was in mathematical physics, was working on his PhD, taught in both departments, and seems to my shaky memory to be the best match for what happened) who actually had the eraser in the "other hand" one day, applying it as he went. I think he was just excited, cannot remember why. One or more us said something like "uh, professor...?", he noticed, put down the eraser, and continued, somewhat sheepishly.
Are you trying to turd-in-the-punchbowl the neoliberal position here? Because you come off as a bad caricature of it.
I don't think you fully appreciate just how difficult space travel is, especially the kind of space travel where you found a colony that will sustain itself after the Earth is hit by an asteroid. The required scale of technology/economy comfortably puts it in "at least several centuries from now, if we're incredibly lucky and/or devoted".

In this regard, the comment about CO2 is actually much more pertinent than it seems at first. If we manage to screw up the climate in this century (which seems very likely these days), inundating every coastal cities in the world, "sustainable space colony" will have to wait a bit longer. Much longer. If you're worried that an asteroid might hit us 500 years from now, you might want to rethink your priority.

Advancing chemical rockets now is important, but compared to the scale of space colony, it feels somewhat like producing better vacuum tubes to make sure (say) the US is the first to create strong AI. Any sane 50s US leader would have understood that "trying not to have a nuclear war with Soviet" is a much more important goal anyway: you can't fund AI research if your country is a radioactive wasteland.
this is false and boston proved it
For those curious - this is apparently due to laws regarding depreciation: http://www.archdaily.com/450212/why-japan-is-crazy-about-hou...

"Collectively, the write-off equates to an annual loss of 4% of Japan’s total GDP, not to mention mountains of construction waste."
Aviation Week reported it back in May. So, yes. I'll keep an eye out for the accident report.

http://m.aviationweek.com/space/new-fuel-boost-spaceshiptwo
If the ship flies out and comes back immediately, then stops, can it then send information back in time?
Things I wish I knew as a young programmer
For .NET / SQL Server people, check out GuidCombs if you want better Primary Key performance.
These are a great way of making GUIDs sequential for database use, giving indexing performance close to ints on SQL Server.

I imagine this approach could also work on Postgres and other dbs that have made GUID/UUIDs a first class data type.
You'd just have to understand how that database applies its indexing algorithm.

Description of the GuidComb approach here:
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=25862

GuidComb implementation in C# (from NHibernate core) here:
https://github.com/nhibernate/nhibernate-core/blob/master/sr...
I am really sad to hear about this crash. In case anyone is interested in the technology behind SpaceshipTwo here is a brilliant documentary about Burt Rutan, Scaled Composites and the development of SpaceshipOne:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz8wlcUPz90

The documentary includes a very touching interview with a test pilot.
This leaves so many open questions. Foremost: How did they guess his GMail password? Is there a way to access GMail without knowing the password? Ie. by sending a reset password per SMS?
Not really. While there were comments about ‘sub dermal fields’ with the iPhone, it was very quickly shown that you do not need even a reasonable facsimile of flesh, let alone live flesh, to fool the sensor.
I had a similar issue with an app I'm writing now. I wanted short IDs so my URLs wouldn't be fugly, but with a low chance of collisions. The solution I went with (in javascript) is:

// Make a "pretty unique" ID for this session.
// Since RethinkDB doesn't have a way for us to guarantee a _short_
// random unique value (short of trying the insert and regenerating if it
// doesn't save), we'll just have to rely on the unlikeliness of a collision
// with both this time-based ID and the title-based slug.
// I'm sure this will never ever cause any problems ʘ‿ʘ
var alphabet = "0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";
var id = new Date().getTime().toString().match(/.{1,2}/g).map(function(val){return alphabet[val % alphabet.length];}).join('');
var slugPart = slug((this.title || "").substring(0,60).toLowerCase());
this.url_slug = id + "/" + slugPart;

That is, get a current timestamp (in milliseconds), and use every group of 2 digits to pull a letter out of an alphabet string. Then append "/title-of-the-thing-made-url-safe". This results in strings that look like "ee7zrm9/something-goes-here", which is then used as the primary key for the document. It's not perfect by any means, but it gets the job done, and I thing appending the title makes collisions extremely rare.
I didn't mean to suggest only capital taxes incure opportunity cost, you're right that all taxes do. I have been thinking lately as well that we have probably shifted to taxing labour too heavily, but as it is really complicated, Im sure there's a lot that I don't know that I don't know.
I have no desire to have knowledge capture and searchability when I IM a coworker with a password.
Not so much over the US, though.
They enabled call forwarding and got Google to call with a password reset code.
Statement from Virgin Galactic
Sorry, any insights and perspective shifts brought on through tripping can be made just the same if you work on it through life experience instead of relying on a drug to enlighten you.

I say this as someone who has had many psychedelic experiences and programs.
I recently had the experience of listening to Joel Spolsky talk on the subject of seemingly arbitrary and unintuitive rules in large internet communities. Basically what I gathered from it is that in order to keep the quality of the content at a higher level, some of these rules are the best ways that this can happen. Some of these rules sound dumb, but they come from the experience of actually moderating very large communities and still trying to maintain focus on the actual goal of the site. As for your concern on this seemingly monopolizing the space of mathematicians I think this is untrue. If the demand for a place to discuss this content exists enough to have a critical mass community in the first place, surely it can exist outside of stack exchange. There is no overlap there because that is not at all the same content that stack exchange is hosting. I can certainly imagine a scenario in which I would frequent one site to answer and receive answers on questions in mathematics, but also frequent a board for casual community driven math topics.
This talk is way too long and not very information dense. I jumped through it a little and liked what I saw, but I was wondering if anyone had a link to a white paper or an overview that could summarize the language features.
Thanks. I think I'll remove my phone number as a backup option.
Syria War 2014: Syrian Army Eliminate Tank with Tow Missile
Biomentric security is not a "security mechanism"?

This seems pedantic and absurd. A password or a username is no different than any other proxy variable to verify identity and authorizations.

The bigger question is about the implications of "authorized user access" schemata, more generally.

For example, what happens when technology allows intrusive searches of the human brain/memory?

Who is an authorized user and what is a viable way to protect against "unreasonable searches" of the human mind? Obviously the concept of a "password" is anachronistic.
DNA tests are done by cotton swab of your 'live' cheek. Should they only be done on 'dead' dandruff? In any case, it should be pretty easy to recreate a sufficiently-convincing fake finger given an ink fingerprint.

But that all misses the point. The only reason passwords get special treatment is that an order to compel production of a password is an order to testify against oneself. For example, unless the defendant already admits to knowing the password, the fact that the defendent knew the password after production would be obviously prejudicial. It would be tantamount to requiring the defendent to testify, "yes, it was me".

In other words, compulsory production of information whose existence and location is not a foregone conclusion probably falls foul of the Fifth Amendment. Compulsory production of your finger does not require you to provide any information other than information that clearly exists about you.

(IANAL)