skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Phoenix strikes a really great balance with its abstractions. I also think great things happens when a community adopts the same conventions. Rails has shown that beyond anything in my opinion. Things like our project bootstrap command `mix phoenix.new my_app` lets you get a bare app up and running in seconds. With a quick guide on the Router and Controller layer, most folks can get up and running very quickly, but our guides have lagged behind development. It's something we're working hard to improve. Lance has been working hard on full-featured guides and we should have them live very soon.
Off-topic, but this page took almost 10 seconds to load - and from what I can tell, this website is largely focused on text content. How someone considers this acceptable (in 2014) is beyond me. Normally, I dismiss the angry sentiments about "text content sites with megabytes of Javascript that take ages to load" as baseless and strawman-centered; now, however, I'm more inclined to sympathize.
Can someone de-patentese this?

It sounds like it's talking about the idea of having an emulator recognize that it's on a 3DS playing a copy of Pokemon Blue for the GB and then running special code that may be built into the emulator to enhance the presentation of Pokemon Blue, perhaps by overlaying 3D models of the attacks during battle.

Sort of like the auto-coloring that the SuperGB and GBC added to games but taken to a much further level.

Not a bad idea to have built in enhancement for popular/'important' games.

(I'm ignoring any 'should this be patentable' issues for the purposes of my post).
> the Wyoming one is a good primary residence.

Something to note: Wyoming doesn't shield either traditional or Roth IRAs (although ERISA-protected assets like 401ks are) from creditors, unlike other no-income tax states such as Texas and Florida.
Common emulator features ranging from game specific hacks to cheat injectors that detect the game being played have been around a long time.

If that is all that is left, the patent should be toast.
Just do it! You need to pick a pet/side project of something you want to work on and try to figure out how to get there with code. Perhaps start with a framework and go from there. If you can't come up with a project, find yourself a product person friend who can brainstorm ideas with you and work on it together. Where are you based?
Looks like IBM had the contract for it. Who knows was the scope of the original RFP was though. http://www.opseu.org/information/we-can-do-it-information-sh...
Green usernames indicate new, or "green," accounts.
Pick a problem you need a solution to . . .

a todo list app
shopping list app
blog/cms
simple crm
tracking lego minifigures in your collection

Basically pick anything you would use, then dive in and start developing it.

You'll be creating a basic CRUD app initially but you can expand and improve on that as you go/learn more skills.

I'm not sure js/node is the best starting point but use what you know. Typically I recommend learning

html/css/js/jquery/php/mysql/(rails or laravel) then top it off with angular.

I recommend rails or laravel.

railscast.com or laracasts.com have lots of great tuts.

Coding something up from scratch before diving in to a framework is probably a good idea. The first time a started learning rails it was tough to follow what was going on behind the scenes. But after creating a few apps from scratch in php/mysql rails was a lot easier to learn.

Good luck, have fun.
When this is all, then it really sounds as a generic emulator for some foreign hardware. I read nothing here about specific Nintendo Hardware.

Really sounds like "just another trivial patent" ... and one that is not only trivial, but also has plenty of prior art.

If this is so, one might ask, what a job the patent office does.
Probably an add-on item in a tune-up bundle that will show up when you buy a new bike from Amazon.
What to do to solve the pollution problem? :D
Some things on Linux were broken from Day 1 like drivers and X because it they were easier. I doubt a coherent team could have fixed these without rewritting which taks too much time. It took MS 6 years to make XP into Vista, I doubt OSS people operate on that kind of timeframe.
I was hoping that an article about "reverse engineering facial recognition, facial detection, and image correlation techniques in order to reveal how they represent human identity" would have at least one mention of eigenfaces:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenface
A State of Change [slides]
50% of the problem is that all the old tutorials are broken

50% of the problem is that there is no appreciable advantage to me (as a Gentoo, XFCE user)
A brief history of Online Terra Mystica
I have been planning to move to SV in December. But every time I read an article like this, it makes me not want to live there.

Should I get a job in somewhere else like Boulder, CO? I'm a senior CS major living in Iowa.
They could set their sight on controlling the services, or they could just treat the services availability/price as a gateway to selling bulkier and more expensive products.

Buying anything like refrigerators, pianos, dishwashers, or car audio systems involves some (sometimes heavy) amount of pre- and post-delivery service.

Sometimes that friction might prevent the consumer from clicking the "Buy" button, as shopping around, contacting and then scheduling haul-away, delivery or installation jobs is not something people get excited about.
Someone was trying to add MySQL support - https://github.com/elixir-lang/ecto/pull/193

It is possible to write an Ecto adapter for Riak, with some workarounds. I tried it once, but the motivation to continue...
San Francisco's homeless problem has little to do with the tech industry.

1) Are we shocked that a temperate city that offers a wealth of social programs for the homeless sees an influx of homeless from elsewhere in the nation?

2) In the 1970s California closed many mental institutions and made it harder for people to be admitted involuntarily. Guess where mentally ill Californians end up?

3) The San Franciscan government has spent decades fighting development to keep the city's beautiful, famous and in many cases historic housing intact. And now we are shocked when housing prices skyrocket after we deny development of new high density housing.

SF's housing and homeless debate is infuriating.

Affordable housing in a desirable neighborhood in one of the most expensive cities on earth is not a basic human right.
Does that syntactic choice make it easier to understand the connection between normal expressions and their quoted forms? (http://elixir-lang.org/getting_started/meta/1.html)

As a newbie coming into Elixir without either Ruby or Erlang background, I didn't find anything in the syntax to be a real pain point (although understanding optional parenthesis usage in CoffeeScript did help).
His wrap-up is gold:

"I find it interesting that it really did basically take a year of real time (and maybe 2 months of hacking time) before the implementation was in a shape where I would've thought about publishing it. And there's no way I'd put that amount of time into a project like this up front. Usually these projects are active for a couple of weekends before getting abandoned; fun parts are done but all the hard work of making it really usable remains."

"In this case people were eager to use even the incredibly crude early versions, so I got over that hump very quickly. And at that point every incremental improvement to the site was affecting tens, hundreds, or thousands of people. This is of course always more motivating than working on polishing the perfect piece of software that nobody is using."

"There were many architectural and design decisions done along the way that I ended up deeply regretting, and which cost me lots of time later on. But without all those early shortcuts there would've been no implementation at all. Easily the best example of Worse is Better that I've been personally involved with."

How it looks: http://terra.snellman.net/game/4pLeague_S3_D3L3_G6/max-row=3...

The Terra Mystica board game: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/120677/terra-mystica

On github: https://github.com/jsnell/terra-mystica/
Homelessness is only a problem in San Francisco itself, which is quite a ways away from SV.
Yes. And I am also upset, that a patent like this (when that what an other poster posted is complete) can go threw the patent process, because what the claims say is nothing more as an generic emulator that can emulate binary software of a different computer --- something that exists in hundreds or thousands of versions ... there exist at least three only for the C64 computer and this software is around for 20 years or so (Vice, one of those is ~21 years old).
Is this because it's really just a different skin on chromium? What is your other browser? If it's chromium, maybe it's just using all the same config and saved state.
Destructuring assignment in CoffeeScript helps with this (not globals, I suppose, but well-scoped locals):

{ use, pipe, get, eq } = R
propEq = use(pipe).over(get, eq)
Just DO! ;) That's why it is named "learning by doing".

No offence: Programming is not worth a dime if you don't have a problem to solve yourself. And either you are the kind of lemming who sits and waits that someone presents you a problem you should solve for him or her or you are as creative to create your own problems as creating problems is a very creative process.

For example take a website. Let's suppose you are using a popular blog system. Then... what? Well you see a spectacular gallery on a site X. You want to have that on your site too. Then sit down, take notes and think over what you need. All you write down is more or less your algorithm (logic). You could do it with database support or without, you could use a JS lightbox or you could do your own. I remember doing my first coding. The example in the book was a basic text editor. So what did I do? I expanded the thing, so I added feature after feature I found very useful. :)

Another example with your blog and an API? Let's say you would like to visualise your data. Get the proper js library and try to connect it with your data. How could you do it? You could use csv files with a cloud space like Dropbox or Google Drive.

At least the problem is what you think of it. There are a lot of problems or none. Noone could tell you what "your" problems should be.

If you get past JS you could use Rails, Python, PHP and code your very own content management system (recurring to Codecademy and CodeSchool's content). Or you could write an app, which aggregates all the news channels you like by storing all rss feed entries, all tweets all Facebook postings by the channels you chose.
We are a pretty big Rails shop (30+) devs and are getting pretty excited about Elixir. We are currently writing a series of blog posts about our Elixir journey, first one here http://blog.oozou.com/why-we-are-excited-about-elixir/
Sure, if everything (including control statements like "if" and "case") is a function, it means the underlying data structure is simpler. That design in itself doesn't preclude other syntaxes such as a more familiar brace syntax.
1. It is not plugin, but more similar to library or collections of them. Like jquery, forge.js and crypto

2. If you send email between scryptmail users, sender creating so called seed, that get scanned by everyone, but only intended recipient will be able to decrypt it, and download message, i.e more people using service and scanning seeds -harder to establish connection between sender and recipient.

I hope it answers your question.
emacs + scala
I just took a journey down a horrible article by a person that wasn't very knowledgeable.
What? How is that wrong? It doesn't say anything about mass, did you read it correctly?
That sale was nuts. I think everything was like $12 or something insane like that. Picked up RedMine and AppCode myself.
love the humblebrag he snuck in there
Reminds me of this Australian (Qld) Govt project that cost $1.2bn - for a health payroll system, which failed ... http://www.govtechreview.com.au/qld-health-payroll-report-sl...
> Can someone de-patentese this?

No. Because there's really nothing novel there. It's as generic as it sounds, and absolutely unenforceable - but it got through anyway. No surprise there.
Not surprised. The Ontario government is probably one of the most inefficient government bodies in the world. Province debt size is twice the size of California, living there is like being in a communist state, can't really expect much from them.
Guilty of having used those services...
Its sounds from the limited info in the article that they didn't run the old and new systems side by side for a period of time ... which I thought would have been standard practice with this sort of thing?
Ask HN: Why does Google not offer an API to its search results?
> and is identical to the scheme outlined in this article

Would you care to elaborate?

In your example, the Verifier (line 2) already has a solution to the problem (the number 2). Therefore the Solver (line 1) can't possibly give more information about the solution.

In the article's example (graph colouring), the Verifier doesn't know the solution to the problem and just verifies a small part of the solution provided by the Solver (2 vertex each time). The Solver doesn't leak any information about its solution at each iteration since the colours are randomised each time.

> I still think calculation is being performed

Yes, but this is the whole point of ZKPs. It's called Zero Knowledge, not Zero Computation.

> I would argue it is the same as performing a random search on the search space

I agree but the fatal flaw in your reasoning is that the Verifier already knows the solution and therefore doesn't learn "new" information. The Solver is just wasting CPU cycles.

Disclaimer: I just read the article and have no prior knowledge of ZKPs. This is just my basic understanding.
I meant: it's not possible to statically link programs on Linux anymore, is it?
> systemd replaces a large number of startup and utility programs (specifically: sysvinit, pm-utils, inetd, acpid, syslog, watchdog, cron and atd). It also adds new daemons for logs, logins, locales, hostnames and a few other services.

> But there are other objections from people who think systemd is too big in scope or too controlling or focussed on one technology or another or... some kind of conspiratorial trap or something (http://boycottsystemd.org). I think these arguments are a little hyperbolic since systemd isn't actually a single monolithic system and is really an overarching project to update a lot of major system utilities.

The problems start when those replacement system utilities become (more or less) tightly coupled, so if you want to change one of them (say, I want to use my own DHCP client) then you need to change all of them (and it's increasingly looking like you can't).
This is definitely speaking to me. I started with .NET almost a year ago and I said I'm going to learn everything about the framework inside and out. I said it was my goal to be employed as a C# developer and love what I do. .. I haven't touched C# in almost 3 months. I got interested in Android which led to Java which led to Spring which led to Grails then I said "Hey whats Node JS?" then Ember and Angular .. and one book after the next. I test drive a framework to see what it can do and I have spent about a month digging into about 10 different frameworks and do you know what I discovered?

They all do the same fucking thing. So with that I feel on one level I like being exposed to different languages on my personal time (Perl programmer/Sys Admin professionally) and I thought that this was really helping my programming skills in general. But now I'm wondering if I've caused more trouble than good. I know I have to pick a technology and literally stick with it. I have to see what I'm most passionate about. I am thankful for everything I have observed but its time to publish some apps. I feel like I do a lot of studying and have nothing to show for it. Rails, ASP.NET MVC, Spring MVC, and Grails all do the same thing. It just depends on what eco system and what language you're most comfortable with and of course your work environment. All of this for me is personal exploration. At work we have a LAMP environment and our web apps are written in PHP. I'm just there to build my resume. I can't stand PHP and am not passionate about the technology we work with. So yeah. Lost in a sea of code.
From the sample chapter:

"Some charismatic leaders in Rails core dislike encapsulation. The Fear Of The Class, the freedom
of a dynamically typed programming language and the strong will to make it different to Java and
its “over-abstraction” has led a generation of developers to unlearn what object-orientation really is
about - and neglect this ingenius concept."

I've had similar thoughts myself. It's almost as if, at this point, the renegade, hip thing to do is to start proudly wearing "enterprisy-ness," like a faded, well-worn MC Hammer t-shirt.
Cartel enforcement notwithstanding, it's really tough to artificially inflate prices above the cost of available substitutes.

The price of oil has just been set at the breakeven cost of shale, maybe for a long time.
Gameboy gizmo connects handheld to HDMI device
Who’s Behind the E-paper FES Watch?
The point isn't the absolute amount of mass, but how deep the gravitational wells go -- how rapidly objects can orbit. It's not only about massive objects; it's about compact ones.

If you have only one supermassive black hole, then the 2nd and 3rd objects are a binary star, and the interaction between them is very weak. Stars can't orbit each other faster than ~100's of km/s (~1,000's for white dwarfs): they're limited by their low density -- they can't get very close or they'll collide. If, instead, you have a star orbiting a black hole -- that's a very dense object, it allows much closer approaches, much deeper into the potential well, with orbit speeds approaching the speed of light.

Don't forget this is a three body interaction. You want a star kicked out of a black hole, with much more kinetic energy than it had going in. This kinetic energy comes from the potential energy of some other object falling into the black hole. How strongly the hypervelocity star gets kicked out, depends on how strongly it can interact with the infalling object, to transfer its energy.

(This idea is I think implicit in the paper (page 3): the "kick" velocity of a binary object falling into a black hole (v_kick) is at most a small constant times their mutual escape velocity (v_23)).

http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.5022
OP here. Seeing as this question is getting asked a lot, I'll edit something into the post, but I wanted to answer you here as well.

So, there are a few problems with this technique.

1. It ignores the local timing leak

An attacker who can get code running on the server (shared hosts for example), can carefully monitor the CPU usage to see when the process is actually doing work, vs when it sleeps. So really, its not hiding anything.

2. The resolution of the sleep call is WAY too high. We're talking about detecting differences down to 15 nanoseconds. Sleeping for blocks of microseconds or even milliseconds will be far to granular. It will introduce block-like patterns in the requests that should be pretty easy to detect with statistical means.

3. It's basically identical to a random delay. Considering it depends on the system clock, and the original request comes in at a random point, it's functionally identical to calling sleep(random(1, 100)). And over time (many requests), that will average out.

Now, what if we took a different approach. What if we made the operation fixed-time?

execstart = utime()
// whatever code
// clamp to always take 500 microseconds
sleep( 500 - utime() - execduration)

That might work (assuming you have a high enough resolution sleep function). Again, it suffers the local attacker problem (which may or may not matter in your case).

However, there are two reasons I wouldn't recommend it: It requires guesswork and idle CPU.

You would either need to actively guess every single operation (and remember to clamp it) or clamp the overall application.

If you do it for every operation, that sleep time can become expensive (if you have a lot of them).

If you do it on the application level, and if you do too little, an attacker can use other expensive control (like larger input introducing memory allocation latency) to increase the runtime past the sleep clamp (hence allowing them to attack the vulnerability anyway). If you do too much, the attacker can leverage it to DOS your site (since even a sleeping process is non-trivially expensive).

There are two valid ways of protection IMHO:

1. Make sensitive operations actually constant time.

2. Implement strong IP based protections to prevent the large amount of requests that would be needed to collect enough data to analyze noisy environments. (I need to add this to the post now that I write it).

Personally, you should be doing #2 anyway. But since I also believe in defense-in-depth, I'd do #1 as well.
They aren't directly tied to merit. They may be indirectly tied to merit; that's the argument many people make. But we also know college attendance, especially at elite schools, and GPA are correlated with other things... things like economic background.

You also have to consider how bias can be self-reinforcing. We know people with stereotypical African-American names are less likely to be hired then people with the same resume but names associated with Caucasians. And black children are much more likely to be suspended or expelled then white counterparts, and to get lower grades, even if their performance and behavior is on par with white students. So credentials like a degree at a good school, and good grades, are not always free of bias.

If you are an employer, you have to consider a number of factors. You may need to fill the position immediately. You may have a certain pay scale in mind without flexibility. You want to avoid hiring a weak or bad employee, and you want to avoid not hiring a good employee who merely looks bad on paper.

In science, we often use randomized samples. You might try taking a random sample of the people who you wouldn't ordinarily pick, the no pile, and interviewing them at technical skills. Or better yet, having somebody who doesn't know who is who interview them purely on technical skills, and not letting them see the resume.
Inline PGP signatures considered harmful
If you are a manager in web hiring people based on how well they did in school/college, you are going to have a lot of issues. As someone else posted, not even Google adopts this kind of hiring approach themselves and they arguably have some of the smartest minds in the business working for them.

Some of the smartest minds in web/of our time are actually college dropouts/never attended who have never completed formal education in their lives. The only true way you become a great developer is to teach yourself, hustle and continuously learn. You can study the basics, but an evolving industry such as IT/web development can not give you all of the skills needed for the future.

I have seen many developers formally educated with all kinds of degrees from degrees in mathematics to computer science absolutely struggle in a proper work environment. Just because you can succeed academically does not mean you will succeed professionally, two different worlds with two different kinds of expectations.

I have regularly seen uneducated developers absolutely wipe the floor with educated developers more times than I can count throughout my career. Perceptions are one thing, reality is another.