skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
James Hague wrote about Pac-Man in a functional style (http://prog21.dadgum.com/23.html). He also wrote about the speed of an image decoder written in Erlang (a functional language) that was surprisingly fast (http://www.dadgum.com/james/performance.html).
Moncler 2014 New Cheap Sale
Queries like this already work well in my experiments. For a large fraction of useful queries it's mostly a matter of engineering. My current model (which is right now at state of the art performance) doesn't yet take into account the spatial relationships of things, but it would be good at retrieving pictures that have you, backpack and wood logs somewhere in it. Reasoning about relations is harder because in the image space of x,y coordinates spatial relationships don't make too much sense, and we haven't yet figured out good ways to do spatial, 3D understanding from images (this is to a large part a lack of data problem). All we can do is "see" that there is a backpack detection nearby a person detection, and that it seems to be of relatively compatible size in the image plane.

All that being said, a large fraction of queries like this will work _today_, with what we have and the challenge is simply implementing it. However, telling the difference between whether the wood logs are inside your backpack, on your head, or in your hands might take a few more years :)
Anyone buying music in FLAC is deluding themselves if they think they can hear a difference between that and a properly encoded lossy codec like MP3

Because of inadequacies of the MP3 encoding format, no bitrate of MP3, even the max, can encode all possible things that the human ear can distinguish. There is one song I know of with a particular synthesized effect in the upper treble that is very profoundly different from the lossless original even in a VBR0 or 320kbit MP3.

Additionally, I've read that MP3 (I don't know about AAC) doesn't preserve enough phase information for effective use with matrix-encoded (e.g. Dolby Pro Logic) surround sound audio.

But Apple's engineering resources are not infinite, and it would be a flagrant waste of those resources to spend them on issues like this that impact effectively zero Apple users.

What was wasteful was inventing ALAC instead of using FLAC.
My former room mates were from China and I was really surprised to learn that they supported the Great Firewall. They didn't seem to have any issues with it and even thought it was for the greater good.
I had my Ph.D. student (Andrew Ohana) spend a while last summer implementing exactly this using python-inotify, since I wanted it to greatly improve the efficiency of https://cloud.sagemath.com, which makes very frequent snapshots. It's pretty solid and is on github: https://github.com/ohanar/bup/tree/bup-watch He's been busy with his actual math thesis work and teaching, so hasn't got this upstreamed into bup. It also depends on changes he made to bup to store the index using sqlite instead of some custom format.
The buzz-feed guy was not invited. He was a +1 of a guest. Which explains, but doesn't excuse, his ignorance.

That detail makes the author a douchebag.[1]

(And I'm not an Uber fan boy or apologist. Just sayin).

[1] Article source: A BuzzFeed editor was invited to the dinner by the journalist Michael Wolff, who later said that he had failed to communicate that the gathering would be off the record.
I don't think anyone is desperate enough to rely on VPN to access the websites of technology giants already blocked or soon to be blocked by China, as greatfire.org is also mirrored Akamai and CloudFlare. What will more likely happen is that those large technology companies will just realize not to invest too much money into countries hostile towards them, like China.
brewdo: a sandbox for homebrew
When I learned C back in 1992, it felt primitive and clunky when compared to Turbo Pascal 6 (I used 3.0 and 5.5 before).

Unsafe and lacking all the OO and modular features from Turbo Pascal. I kept on using Turbo Pascal up to Turbo Pascal 1.5 for Windows and a little bit of of Delphi afterwards.

Wirth had me, systems programming with safe languages, I also got to learn about Modula-3 and was able to get hold of Native Oberon for PC.

My relationship with C was quickly replaced by C++, which allowed me to regain some of Pascal's type safety in a world that disdained Niklaus Wirth work and now is looking how to replace the security exploits C semantics brought upon us.

At least modern C++ eschews C programming practices.
I legitimately want to know why the "Great Firewall" doesn't block spamming botnets that post to wp-comment.php hundreds of times per hour.
Show HN: Cloud-based Static Code Analysis for Java
Maybe I missed it - but what is stopping spammers from using this technique on their email lists to check they are all correct?
A Guide on How to Outsource a Web Crawls? DaaS
I learnt some great definitions around creativity and innovation at a conference I was involved with recently. To wit, "Creativity is the generation of novel and useful ideas."

The speaker (Dr David Hall) recommended that the search for Creativity often needs to start with generating something novel and useless - this can then inspire the useful application to emerge. Only when we pursue the novel, however useless, do we really open ourselves up to surprising creativity.

This Hackathon seems to fully embrace that principle, so I wouldn't be surprised at all if many of those who participated take the germ of an idea and develop it further into the useful space.

[1] http://jacobaldridge.com/business/3-blockages-to-creativity-...
VC in that context seems to mean "Venture Capital": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_capital
Yes, the project seems stalled,

http://www.ocp.inf.ethz.ch/forum/index.php/topic,726.0.html
Yes, thank you very much. Will definitely do.
The Newsroom: What to Do When the FBI Breaks into Your Encrypted Filing Cabinet
When I was in Hangzhou, it was quite easy. I guess our anecdotes cancel each other out?
Indeed; if the city runs the network, they wouldn't have to request the data from a third party when they want to investigate somebody.
Characters: A Brief Introduction
ISP Provides Free VPN to Protect Customer Privacy
That's called a soft default. It also has negative consequences.
Most definitely not an accident. China throttles every successful foreign internet startup. They prefer the economic benefit confers to Chinese, and political control remains in China - for obvious reasons.
The article spoke about a suspected memory leak in setenv(), I assume it uses uClibc but it was a bit light on the details (no source code links in the article, that I could find).

I dug up this link: http://git.uclibc.org/uClibc/tree/libc/stdlib/setenv.c?id=30... which I believe is the relevant function.

Unsurprisingly for this level of library code, it's not 100% super-obvious or easy to understand. Especially the details on the in-library memory management are unknown to me, but I thought it might be interesting.
Just to address the recursion point that the GP brought up. Here is one of the best explanations I saw where the problem not only lends itself to a recursive solution but where the recursive solution is actually the more intuitive one rather than a loop. Also it explains with 'real-world' problems, albeit in the context of the material (game programming):

http://inventwithpython.com/blog/2011/08/11/recursion-explai...
First of all, I don't think anyone's kids were threatened.

But what is wrong with threatening a woman's children? Other then it being illegal, of course.

If a woman or man is doing something dishonorable, I don't see any problem with suggesting that their behaviour is not in the best interests of their children.
Jessica Alba's 1B dollar company
I've been looking for a space to organize a 'big dada' hackathon for a while. The idea is in a similar vein but more about tech that borders on absurd/Dadaist
> And, decompiled or not; this is not the result of proper C#- or for that matter any modern language- coding:

> r = r + "<code>" + this.hardErrors[i] + "</code>";

What's wrong with this?
Foreign students from China know they'll have a very good chance at becoming one the oligarchs ruling the country, and as such likely think any tool as keeping the people subservient is a good thing.

I find it unlikely that Chinese rulers would want to send abroad anyone but its loyal opposers of democracy.
Well, no, Mélenchon is not a moron, but one the the greatest intellectuals France has at the moment. He is one of the few French politicians to actually develop new ideas, instead of supporting the liberal dogmas which are ruining Europe. And one of the few to take seriously the question of video games. His blog (in French, here, www.jean-luc-melenchon.fr/) is always very interesting read, with in depth analysis of French, European and World situations.

Mélenchon is not a "known soviet Russia supporter" either. Or, known from whom, exactly ?

You are making a very strange use of the word genocide. There was no genocide during the French revolution, since there was no intention to deliberately extinguish any population. There were, though, very hard measures, and of course debatable, taken to try to keep the revolution going against treasons from all places against the republic.

And do not stop there, since even Robespierre was beheaded, shortly after having himself agreed to the arrest and execution of Danton and Desmoulins (which were close friends of him).
The Hidden Dangers of Free Wi-Fi Networks
"Off the record" conversations need approval from both parties to the conversation. You can't just say "don't quote me on this" then reveal something monsterous. The details of anonymity arrangements need to include what information is going to be revealed; how that's going to be ised and why; and how the source is going to be identified.

Anonymity is used to protect the source and to report something of actual interest. Here the source was the story.

http://www.spj.org/ethics-papers-anonymity.asp

http://journalism.nyu.edu/publishing/ethics-handbook/human-s...

> On the record, on background, not for attribution and off the record: These are prearranged agreements between a reporter and a source, which govern how specific information can be used. These deals must be agreed to beforehand, never after. A source can't say something then claim it was "off the record." That's too late. When dealing with individuals who are not experienced in talking with reporters, journalists should make sure ground rules and potential consequences are clear, and then perhaps offer leeway. Of course, if the information isn't integral to the story, a reporter can agree not to use it. If you talk to five journalists, you'll likely get five different definitions for these terms. That's why it's important that a reporter clarify the use of these terms with a source before making any agreements.
Blockstream Raises $21M from Google Chairman, LinkedIn and Yahoo Co-Founders
https://gist.github.com/binux/67b276c51e988f8e2c31
It's just one PR disaster after another with Uber. They have a good business - why do they have to continually act like scumbags?
I think that the firewall is predominantly one way. Restricting access to external information rather than prevention of hackers going out.

But, I agree. I'd also like to see them stop. I now use a geo-IP filter and whitelist the few countries that actually don't appear to spam that much. Needless to say, China is not on that list.

Out of interest Brazil, Ukraine and Russia are also banned for this reason. Does anyone else have loads of comment spam originating from Brazil?
The point of NN is that the ISP shouldn't get to make that decision. Even "allow on request" is very problematic because it's a slippery slope. Many people run SMTP at home mostly to receive mail, because the ISP is legally obligated to retain mail logs for law enforcement etc. (EU data retention law)
That sort of behaviour may well work in Washington. But Uber is a global company. And pulling that kind of crap say here in Australia will not work well for them.

There are plenty of disruptive companies that are successful without acting like pathetic children.
Github will be blocked sooner or later? God bless it!
Ask HN: Best email customer service?
I'm looking at zendesk with there 1$/month/agent, but maybe there is more better (more like start-up style) product?
There's also Sidecar, it's pretty great. It is usually cheaper and let's you select from available drivers. You see their price upfront.
I'm impressed - I didn't even notice the Frisbee in the first picture myself.

This one was funny though...

Human: “A green monster kite soaring in a sunny sky.”
Computer model: “A man flying through the air while riding a snowboard.”
This is false. Mélenchon does not wish media to talk about him (his private life is almost completely unknown, people know he has a daughter, but not much else) . He wants the media to talk about his ideas, and he takes any occasion he has to put them forward.

He is not extreme left either. He is from what was considered the "normal, banal" left in the 1980's, which is now tagged extreme just because they have not stopped to use the phrase 'class struggle'.
Assuming that r contains XML and this.hardErrors[i] is already escaped for XML safety, that is probably what you'd expect to see a code-generated XML generator doing, as well as hand-generated XML (if generating text directly and not an intermediate abstract representation of the XML).
Actually I think the default answer for this is "Send a confirmation link to the email", because you skip almost all the impossible edge cases, like "catch-all address" or using public e-mail address or whatever.

Most important question you have to ask yourself is "What do I want?". If the answer is "This user e-mail address.", there isn't better way than sending a confirmation email.
In few words - whole Polish voting system is dead now and the votes are counted by the people. What is more interesting: in the tender for the software started one company and of course won it - random case? I don't thing so.. greets from Poland:)
A very honest hackathon!
Buzzfeed stories are normally penalized, but we take the penalty off for major stories. We've done that here. HN tends to frown on media controversy, but since this story seems destined to be above the line in any case, it may as well be the original source. We've demoted the other posts on the same story as duplicates.
I think Lua is more related to the Oberon family than Go is. Lua's control constructs are reminiscent of Modula-2. What Lua has done with tables and modules is pretty elegant and I can see more of the highlights of the Oberon family in Lua than I do Go.

The few Oberon-like aspects I see in Go beyond the obvious ':=' operator are things like the 'range' keyword and methods. Both Oberon and Standard ML encourage composition a bit differently when it comes to functions and modules. You're lead to using more locally-defined functions in the context of writing a function. Modules are more at the forefront, with less hesitancy to define simple ones. Go I think more resembles an attempt to make a scripting language out of Plan 9's C and threading with a few odd-and-ends. I do very much like that it avoided objects.

However, I think even Modula-3 which appeared by the end of the late 80s already had things that Go right now is lacking. That said, I've used Go for some production projects. Some projects fit neatly into Go's standard library, which is the star of the language along with its ideas on tooling. The language itself I could take or leave.
Except journalists can just write under a pseudonym?
Someone @Lyft PR needs to be on this stat. I've hardly seen Lyft take any advantage of fuckups like these by Uber.
Why limit your choices to these two? There are more great frameworks and great languages. Ruby on Rails is an obvious candidate. Ruby is a lovely language and Rails is a solid framework, perhaps even the best web framework out there for many tasks. There's also plenty of demand for Ruby/Rails talent.
Rest, Composure Dock for Apple Watch
I personally love the Python environment and community. There is very little you ever need that you can't find a module for. It is also a very well adopted language that many developers know and is increasingly popular in education so the amount of people using it is almost artificially increased.
Django as a framework is used by a ton of big companies and sites and has proven itself to be very scalable and durable.
Node to me is horrible just because of javascript, so take my bias with a grain of salt ;)
I'm sorry for using the word, but they PEE everywhere, then they blame who's trying to clean up and the way of cleaning. Yes, the way of cleaning is absolutely blamable, since the government doesn't own the place where they pee and yet some Chinese do love the pee. But I think whoever is peeing is more to blame. If you could read Chinese, you can see large amounts of content they are providing are hateful, violent and disturbing which against the ToS of many hosting providers (not all of the content are bad tbf, there is good information as well, additionally if you couldn't read Chinese, you can visit Freeweibo, there are lots of pics that express my view).

Well, greatfire.org sure don't think they were peeing anyway, on the contrary, "It's an honor", under the name of freedom of speech, the collateral damage is much more like a weapon against the government, if a website cleans those contents up on its own, the website will be tagged as "the enemy of freedom of speech", "self-censorship" as they call it. The mess keeps going on. I don't know who is winning here. What I do know is users are the losers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8V74N64Q20
There was something in the Snowden leaks about NSA stockpiling vulnerabilities in software instead of helping vendors fix the vulnerabilities. Also, IIRC they requested an extra delay from some software vendor(s?) after revealing a vulnerability, but before the vendor patching it.
I couldn't even install the app - it asks for way too much permissons.
Groovy here. Just because I know it reasonably well, like it a lot, and it's a convenient part of the overall JVM ecosystem.
That may be true but I was questioning the parent comment which said ANY reference frame
Ahhhh this is beautiful :) Reminds of the days when blogs and websites were creative absurdities and programming was a cool hobby.
If you read the story, it mentions digging dirt on Sarah's family. Family includes children.

>> But what is wrong with threatening a woman's children?
Clearly you dont have children. If you dont see anything wrong with this notion, having a thoughtful discussion with you is a moot point. Do you work for uber ?
Interesting that you mention HA/replication, reading the article I was swept along with the pg evangelism but I fully expected at least a grudging concession to mssql on replication.

We use both pg and mssql, I was surprised the article didn't mention replication. While one might be justified in describing pg as more "developer friendly", mssql is more "enterprise friendly". As a developer, I prefer pg, but as a stack designer, I still lean more toward mssql. Put another way, if I'm joining a project as a developer, I hope they're using pg, but if I'm consulting and designing a stack for a company I'll probably recommend mssql, almost definitely if they're doing something that requires replication, and/or the team isn't going to have lots of db expertise.

I guess this is quite self-contradictory on one level but I think it's a fairly common view (having checked with some colleagues).

I know that pg has support for replication, but it certainly isn't as easy to set up as mssql, and you need to do a LOT of reading to figure out what flavor you should use, and it's not entirely obvious what features you get with each, or which ones are really recommended and which are semi-deprecated.

CTO: Do you support replication?
mssql: yes, and it's pretty easy to set up.
pg: well, we've got 3 or 4 ways of doing that, depending on what you want exactly, method A isn't really maintained any more, and method D looks like it's going to be great in a release or two, so maybe that's the one to bet on, but in the meantime you have to put up with a bit of pain.

(dramatisation, probably inaccurate paraphrase, but that's what the cto heard)
They have the location data of everyone using their service. They also have "god view":

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/10/03/god-view-...
In their recent KDD article [1], Etsy used 200 SVD dimensions.

For those interested in trying this out in Python:

* `gensim` contains stochastic SVD for large data (fast online model training) [2]

* I wrote a benchmark of (approximate) nearest neighbour libraries in Python [3]

[1] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2143857/papers/topics.pd...

[2] https://github.com/piskvorky/gensim/

[3] http://radimrehurek.com/2013/12/performance-shootout-of-near...
Build a Reddit Bot Part 2: Reply to Posts
Show HN: Coding on Twitter
Just tweet to @paiza_run, and you will get result as reply.
@paiza_run ruby: puts "Hello" + "World"
Just now, it is quite hot, and people are tweeting like 20 seconds.
Language names available are:
java,ruby,python,php,perl,c,cpp,csharp,javascript,objective-c,scala,go,haskell,coffeescript,bash,erlang,r,cobol,vb,fsharp

This service is provided based on
https://paiza.io/, Handy web-based only coding environment.
Not necessarily a bad idea...

Edit FWIW, I personally do not and refuse to use Uber. I think that they are vile. But...

I find that too many journalist hide behind 'freedom of the press' when they are axe-grinding. A lot of online tech reporting that I encounter is knee-jerk reaction and factless click-bait. Personal blogs, where you'd expect to find this behaviour, in my experience tend to be far more credible...
Uber has powerful customers in Washington
I like to browse HN via https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments

So, I just saw the comment and told why it may have "disappeared." I never read the OP, and don't intend to waste my time reading it. Apparently, many people don't like that I don't care about Uber. At all. Ironically, that just removed my flagging ability.
> Not only that, but by the same token this is in no way "attempted" blackmail.

This is a direct attempt to shut her up -- this an attempt to silence their critics via blackmail -- and they hoped it wouldn't get mainstream press coverage. They hoped she would find out just via whispers from those who were there.
This Is the Innovation That Gave Birth to the Modern World
Hmm, I can't fully follow the logic here but that's alright. agree to disagree.
Facebook wouldn't incur any additional costs operating in China except for the cost of additional server infrastructure, which would be the same for a Chinese company. Their engineering costs are sunk costs. They wouldn't be competing against Chinese engineers for pennies on the dollar (if you could even find Chinese engineers of the same skill set).
A mode for password hashing
First SnapCash, now MICA, it feels like april fools day :-/
And that means the fault (if there is one) is Wolff's, not Ben's.

I say "if" because if there's one instance in which it seems like a journalist can permissibly break his word of confidentiality (or conveniently neglect to mention to another journalist that those rules apply) it's when a high-profile person stands up and publicly declares his plan for using $1 million in company funds to personally violate yet another journalist who had the temerity to write negative stories about his company.

(Maybe if any there are any working journalists reading this thread they can chime in here?)

In the meantime, the original point stands: there's no sign that Ben knowingly broke the rules and even if there were, it's insane to say that this violation is remotely comparable to the one he was reporting.