skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The parallel that springs to mind is that they look very similar to the NLQ fonts ('Near Letter Quality') used by dot matrix printers in the 1980s/1990s - and made, for the most part, by Japanese manufacturers: Epson, Star Micronics, etc.

At the time, NLQ was a passable imitation of real typesetting. But somehow it looks like that style has become fossilised as "how you write Roman characters".
Final Makes Credit Card Hacks a Thing of the Past
That's the issue though isn't it - that an attacker would have control over the dataset and have something to gain by providing a modified file under a publicly known "safe" md5. For example, compromised Linux install iso's.
Yes, see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/05/19/13493...
I'd got for a Chromebook and install Ubuntu on it.
Yeah, as far as I've managed to figure out, there are no good mail clients for Android, but k9 is the least bad.
I had a similar experience. Not to discourage or demoralise you, but keep a close check on your cardiovascular system. I had 3 relapses (stenosis) since my first stents in October 2010. Did (and continue to do so) all the right things, have all the right measurements, blood and fat values. Yet every year in January/February I'm taken back to cardio-surgery for yet another stent because of yet another stenosis. Hope you fare better.
Parsing, evaluating, continuations and CPS... it seems similar to this language: https://curiosity-driven.org/continuations#interpreter but the syntax is clearly different. Also, that interpreter is implemented in ~320 lines of JS.
> Actual complexity is rarely justified by requirements I find. Unless I'm the one writing it of course. ;-)

I appreciate your humility, and I largely agree with your approach. You'd probably do quite well in my interview.

With respect to actual complexity rarely being justified, I'm presently a team lead for a system which involves fairly precise modeling of some very piecewise real world processes under very tight performance constraints. There are so many things we just can't generalize, either because there's no clean abstraction, or because abstraction comes with too much inefficiency. We try to keep our processes from smelling too much like old stale spaghetti, but unfortunately some things are just simply complex, and sometimes in the face of such complexity the most elegant and/or performant solution can make purists cringe.
Any Turing complete language can be used for writing compilers/interpreters, it is just harder in some than other.

Python is actually pretty neat for doing it and you even have tools like PyPy (with RPython) to write a JIT for the language if you wish.
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Other interpretations of quantum mechanics do not generally violate Bell's Theorem, since it appears to be confirmed by experiment. There are other interpretations which choose to abandon locality rather than hidden variables, such as the De Broglie-Bohm pilot wave interpretation. But consistent histories doesn't even do that. It's actually pretty similar to the Copenhagen interpretation.
The 3.1 second 0-60 time is the equivalent of a 0-60 distance of 136 feet. That's impressive in comparison with the 113-foot 60-0 stopping distance.

The car is only 20% slower speeding up than it is slowing down. One wonders what they could do in 0-60 and 60-0 times if the tires were replaced with gears and the road with a geared track. It only takes 250' of track, less than a football field, to find out.

Put another way, this four-door sedan reaches 60 mph when it's made it to the 45-yard line of an american football field.
Totally. I'm so sick of hearing people talk about the twenty countries they went to last spring. If you like traveling, that's totally fine, but with a lot of people, it just feels like they're checking boxes to try to seem more interesting.
Whether or not China is socialist or capitalist doesn't really matter: GP said "freer" economies have higher growth. Is China freer than Hong Kong or Singapore?

(BTW: China sure has a market economy, but OTOH it lacks multiple specifics of contemporary Western capitalist economies, e.g. it's not primarily driven by the financial markets, a significant portion of the workforce still works at state owned enterprises, much deeper planned macro economical development than in the West, ...)
I have to disagree: It may be legal and in your self interest, but I don't think you should reneg on your offer. You should treat others the way you want to be treated, which means honouring the email agreement.

And if you do withdraw your offer to company x, don't complain if company y withdraws its offer to you.

If you stick with company x then show them the job offer from company y at your next salary review. It is great leverage in negotiating a higher salary.
Flipping pancakes with mathematics (2013)
I think you can eliminate turbo lag with electrical turbo chargers.

I wish we can take experimental engines and race them.
So you could score points not only for fastest time but also for cleanest engine.

Here is a 450hp 2.0Liter Volvo turbo engine
http://www.speedhunters.com/2014/10/triple-boost-volvos-450h...
My brain always stumbles on the loose-lose pair. I don't usually substitute them for each other, but I always have to think about which one to write. I believe it is because of the odd spelling and pronunciation of the pair. The extra o does not change the vowel sound, instead it changes the sound made by the s (and neither sound like "close"). Typically, the hard and soft s sound depends on the one or two s's [1]: desert and dessert.

Or it could just be the auto-correct (now in desktop apps as well, not just mobile).

[1] I hate 's for plurals, but how else would you write "esses".
You also get a step-wise path to rewrite the applications. Going to Scala would probably be a complete re-write which is risky and time consuming. I don't think Scala usage will grow much more now that Java 8 is released. The benefits of rewriting a Java application to Scala is probably not that great in comparison to the cost. And the C# to Scala re-write is probably even worse from a cost/risk perspective.
there are occasional exceptions, but it's a been a good first approximation for me.
Has that ever been done? I can imagine it'd just skip out of the gears and crash horribly. You know, like square wheels. Fitting warmed-up soft slicks and doing it on an F1 track or specialized tarmac would probably yield better results.
I like this breed of fonts, they remind me of the LaTeX "Computer modern" and Garamond of old.
Converging to a single value (which is a liveness property) and what the values will contain (which are usually safety properties) are different stories... when the partition heals, if the nodes detect they have a different version for a given piece of data, they can just remove it, and the system is convergent, which means it is eventually consistent (a liveness property). What happens in the merge function instead provides additional safety properties. For example in the case of a CRDT that models a Set type, with the merge function that is "union of all the values in the nodes", you can state the safety property that if a Set element X was added into a node, at no time will happen that the nodes will be able to talk again, and the system will converge into a Set which excludes such value X.
There's test suites: http://www.opengroup.org/testing/downloads.html , though I don't know what they cover - posix is highly componentized.
In Docker We Trust? Containerization, Security and Trust Models
I'll come out and say it. With iOS 7, Apple took a step backward and started letting others lead. Microsoft debuted late in the game with an also-ran platform, and suddenly everyone had a flat boxy design. Meanwhile Apple had lost Steve Jobs and fired Scott Forstall, the two people who were pro skeumorphism and would have never allowed Apple to go down that path.

A lot of people liked the skeumorphic designs. It made the technology feel polished, beautiful and natural. Not to mention textures work way better than transparent colors when you're watching, say, a video with a white background so you can't even see the controls. Oh and hey, try swiping up from the bottom in the Camera app - Whoops!

And what's with the puke neon green for status bars during phonecalls that you can hardly read white text on? What's with the complete breakage of the browser UI with a subsequent "minimal-ui" apology all of which is then reverted back in iOS 8?

For that matter, sending group messages in apps is still horribly broken since iOS 7. And iOS 8.1 was a disaster and was recalled quickly.

Yeah, Apple's design changed, and not for the better.
The Guardian Is Being Swamped with 'Dark Traffic'
It isn't frivolous, or impossible, but it is not ready to take customers. Rocket launch failure rate is about 5%.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/11/spa...
Not sure why this is downvoted. I would like to see Google to support Windows Store. Offering the best possible cross-platform support ist definately not evil.
The Stuxnet Dossier (2010) [pdf]
One of the Lectures encouraged new startups to come up with something that other startups would find useful. Indeed, it seems like a good 60-70% of startups fall into this "startup tools" category.
It seems to me there are two components involved in being a successful disruptor:

1. Be competent at what you do.
2. Have your main competitor be grossly incompetent.

What this article and its successor indicate is that Netflix satisfied both of these criteria: when, in 2007, Blockbuster had a fairly sensible Netflix-style plan in place, Carl Icahn instated a new CEO who chose to completely demolish it. Had Blockbuster not done this, it's entirely possible Netflix would have not have had room to grow (as Lyft experienced after Uber launched UberX to muscle out Lyft's not-just-black-car model).

I feel that Hacker Newsies get a little wrapped up in the party line of libertarian economics being the ultimate meritocracy, ignoring that capitalism is essentially just an oligopoly with the meritocratic potential to fail only in the case of gross incompetence (which, incidentally and curiously in practice, happens on a fairly regular basis).

Also, I feel things will work better as we try to structure things in a way that disabuses ourselves of the notion that things are working the way they should. Companies still ask questions in the hiring process under the pretext that their employees should want to perpetuate their current operating procedure. Admitting that things are broken, even slightly, leads to smart, sensible people being cast aside, in favor of those who will blindly go down with the ship. This teaches the workforce to be more lemming-like, in order to be hireable.
This is really an amazing read. I can't wrap my head aroung all the effort that went into creating Stuxnet. Also, in the dossier it's mentioned several times that the attackers compromised two digital certificates. After Snowden, I don't think those were compromised, but more likely "just given" to the attackers.
I couldn't find the exact page the author used, so I took a screenshot of that "ancient virus" story instead. This[1] is how it looks on a standard English Ubuntu 14.04 system (no tweaking and no extra Chinese fonts installed). The English in it doesn't look half bad; there's even kerning!

As an aside, if you look at the top of my screenshot, you'll see a little lyric display on my taskbar. I use it to learn Japanese while I listen to anime songs. I wrote it in Python3 and there was not a single instance where I had to bother with Unicode or encoding issues.

with open(file) as f:
lines = f.readlines()

works as is on Japanese files; I don't even have to supply the encoding. PyGTK and Gnome handles the Japanese text perfectly when I pass it to them. I'm throughly impressed by how far we've come in terms of Unicode support in programming languages, libraries, and the OS.

[1]http://i.imgur.com/rLNVchh.png
I think the theme is really power on demand. I don't like the idea of an electric turbo/compressor for the same reasons I don't like quartz watches. But maybe adding an electric compressor and upgrading the already taxed alternator will offset the parasitic loss?.

Performance and economy are in opposition. It is still all down to Air/Fuel/Spark. You just know that 10% was from DI and fuel cut on the odd cylinder in spite of the eturbo. When you open the throttle plate 100% and get that turbo of any kind running 100K+ rpms, ignition advance drops, fuel flow jumps and there goes your fuel economy. Again, you cut the fuel when you don't need it and/or stop spraying fuel everywhere else but directly in the chamber. Where you fall on the curve before/after MBT can be changed but it's not really possible to run after (lean side) the fuel curve with standard fuel stocks and certainly not under boost, ie you can do it, but you won't be making any power.
Help me out here, because I have a very tough time imagining a world where society is worse off because financial companies didn't exist. Is it really the case that if Goldman Sachs didn't exist, Titan International somehow can't exist either?
How to explore Wikipedia and other Wikimedia offline
Looks like 5000-feet-per-minute gearing was possible in 1922 [1]. Doing it with a linear track will be harder, but I don't think it's impossible.

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=GPNKAAAAMAAJ&lpg=PA87&ots=m...
Awesome post!

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Is there a reason the link is directed to a comment?
MBA stands for "more bad advice". The current MBA curriculum is mainly based on knowledge that we know in the 1980s. Most of the advance science and management processes that we have developed since then are not in the curriculum. So basically the MBA students are unfortunately learning outdated knowledge - half of which is wrong.
I certainly don't understand why any such authority can be given.
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One of the best reads in a while; such a fun and wel written piece!
Ask HN: Career advice sought; am I having a quarter-life crisis?
Hello,

I am a late-twenty-something software engineer who works for one of the major tech companies. Lately I find myself dreaming about having taken a different path; specifically, I wonder what my life would have been like if I had become a scientist. Realistically it is too late for me to do an about-face, but I've been toying with the idea of getting a masters in one of the hard sciences and putting my software engineering skills to work in a research or applied setting. Specifically I am thinking of a masters in Physics, but I'm open to other possibilities.

Assuming that my goal is the loosely defined dream of any good nerd (I want to write code that runs on a rocket or in a component of the LHC, etc.), how practical would a masters in physics be? Is this even necessary? Would another degree be more appropriate? How many jobs like this (I realize that is very vague) actually exist?

...and truthfully, I'm not sure this is even coming from a logical place. I've spent the past few years myopically focused on sharpening my technical skills; when I finally lifted my head up to examine my life, I found myself disappointed with what I am using my skills for. I can't stop thinking about the incredible contributions made by past generations that have altered the course of humanity. I'm haunted by climate change, global hunger and thirst, our crippling dependence on oil, and many other problems for which there is a technical (at least in part) solution. Although nobody can really answer this for me, I would love some perspective on this point. Are these feelings common? I may just be struggling with the burden of an adult conscience and sense of mortality, to which the solution isn't necessarily changing my career.

So; I'm hoping to learn more about software development in applied science and research, and I would love to hear thoughts from others who have felt similarly. Thanks for reading this. :)
You're a very talented writer and I thoroughly enjoyed your post, best of luck with selling your book!
Curious to see how this works out.
"email-instant reflexes" < This isn't the compliment I think they were going for!
Thanks a lot for independent confirmation of the issue.
Interesting, I had never made the relation between referer and advertising, which seems pretty obvious in retrospect.

This parts makes me a bit uneasy.

> The frustration here is that search, apps and HTTPS traffic all represent different types of readers arriving at The Guardian for different reasons — and not knowing that data hurts the Guardian's ability to serve those readers relevant content.

I am not sure I would be interested in a "tailored" news experienced. (Or "relevant content" is a weasel word for "relevant ads")
So, I was actually making a joke :)
A Guide to Developer Contributions in the OpenStack Juno Blueprints
Yes. I'm an idiot, and it's been more than 15 minutes since I posted it, so I can't trim the URL!

If there are any mods about, I'd appreciate their help...
Second Version of the Content Translation Tool
From the comments, the linked SO question is probably better a treat of the title than the article:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1100311/what-is-the-ideal...

I would have guessed by now it is common knowledge that you should grow your buffers exponentially. The only question being by how much?

For general usage it seems 1.5 is usually used but another factor could be better if you have different constraints for reallocating and memory fragmentation or value them differently.
Fair enough. Choose the lesser of all evils. Tells us a lot about humanity and what it has come to. Sad though isn't it.
"they all sucked at tech but thought they didn't"

Gah...these are the worst people!

The worst is one they spew out all their personal assumptions as though its the divine word that all must obey and follow.

People who really know tech share the same trait; they listen and learn. Every engineer knows that learning new things is part of overcoming challenges.

When someone acts like they know it all, that's usually a good indicator that they don't know shit.
I'm surprised this link didn't get any more traction. Optical computing has extremely high potential. If nothing else, it does not need routing.
Not using exponential growth in buffers / vectors / other contiguously allocated collections is a rookie mistake. It shouldn't be made by anyone who's ever studied algorithm complexity, never mind studied CS at any level.

About the only exception is when you have global knowledge about how a buffer is going to be used. But that's rare in modern modular software.
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Aerospace Engineering major here. People may be quick to dismiss space travel, and overall innovations and advancements in space technology due to its high cost and (seemingly) dangerous tests that companies do to test new technologies. Take the very recent Antares launch failure and Virgin Galactic's tragic crash. But don't dismiss it too soon. There are an astounding amount of safety checks, safety factors, test runs, check runs, and more safety checks before an actual launch or test flight is performed.

But these tragedies and tests were experienced in the early stages of within-the-atmosphere flight. While we are still learning about creating a safer and more efficient airliner, we had some bumps and tragedies we had to overcome in the past to get it to where it is now. Take for example the De Havilland Comet aircraft. It was the very first production jet airliner, but within a year of its commercial service, it had tragic accidents that led to 13 crashes with about 440 deaths total. We later learned that the stress in the edges of the square windows compromised the structural integrity of the fuselage which led to catastrophic failure.

This is why the windows on your 737, 747, etc are now rounded.

But through these tragedies and innovation, we not only gained knowledge on how to build a better aircraft, ticket prices also decreased substantially in price.

Space travel right now is right where the air travel industry used to be when it was just starting out: we are still working out the kinks, and to quote Sir Branson, "Space flight is hard, but worth it".
Not even thinking about the buffers being used to actually store your data is more like it.
Can you give some examples of the boring standard font vs. more sophisticated Chinese font faces?
What a remarkably misguided rant.

To each his own. What works for a general-purpose app on a desktop hardware doesn't work for a resource-constrained firmware (that still has to deal with potentially unbounded inputs). Yes, there's exponential reallocation, but there's also a multitude of other strategies, each best fit for its particular application domain. "Rookie mistake".
At a glance this appears to be running linear reads of memory with different alignments and performing the same work. Thus the only difference between the two for any algorithm which fits within (even L1 cache in this case) would be a single additional memory read.
Yes, this is an important issue.

If I lived there I would certainly be more happy living in SF than in some city further away.

My idea is more in the sense of not cramming every new company there. So yeah, maybe you would be alone at first, but convince more people to go there, attracted by the cheap cost of living and maybe SF can get less cramped (and it's still close enough to go once a week, etc)

Of course this also takes some vision from the municipality, unfortunately the most common thing besides high rents is NIMBYism.
Actually both are scripting languages. Still impressive though.
http://www.yes-www.org/why-use-www/

Not that I have strong opinions on the matter, but this is the go-to resource for that side.
Account locking scheme:why it's not?
Pirate bay founder Fredrik Neij arrested in Thailand
I'd think the compressor would still have an efficiency range even if it's electric. Would a compressor that can feed an engine at low rpms 25psi over atmospheric be able to maintain that psi as rpms increase? I'm curious if the electric compressors are turning at 100k rpms like the mechanical turbo they are replacing.
Yep, the flood has subsided. It works now :)
Peter Norvig's lis.py[1] is an oldie but a goodie. It really shows you the beauty and simplicity of Scheme/Lisp interpreters.

[1]: http://norvig.com/lispy.html
An offset counted in single-digit bytes doesn't seem to be particularly 'unaligned' to me.
Bitcoin Has Gone Too Far
Useful Chrome Extensions for Designers and Developers – Code Geekz