skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It isn't surprising. Click fraud has always been an easy way for a creative programmer to generate "free" money. That said, it has also always been a complaint for ever that advertisers don't think they are getting their money's worth[1].

One answer is to switch to a pay for performance model like affiliates do, basically only pay when something is purchased not just on click or view. But brand advertising doesn't really have a good 'performance' metric.

As others have said though, its a 'fake' problem, just like credit card fraud is a 'fake' problem. The costs are baked into the charges so the vendors get their money either way. But having a story that BigCorp is taking pennies from its legitimate customers to pay for ads being clicked on by robots is a hard story to get sympathy for the advertiser :-)

[1] "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." -- John Wanamaker
Where is a 'report a user' button when you need one?
the first paragraph makes it clear:

"On April 3, 2014, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted to send the Findings and Conclusions and the Executive Summary of its final Study on the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program to the President for declassification and subsequent public release"...

EDIT: also the fact that it's stamped "Unclassified" everywhere. If it was stamped as still classified and had been leaked, anyone with a clearance would risk losing it by reading the file.
global variables make it harder to figure out which code modified the value that you suspect is now incorrect

I think this is largely a moot point with debuggers that can (conditionally) breakpoint-on-write -- if you see a global variable being set to a wrong value, put a breakpoint-on-write to that variable with condition to trigger when that wrong value is written, and you'll stop exactly in the code that wrote to it. Then trace back the computation from there to see where that value came from.

What really makes programs hard to debug is their total size and complexity; in object-oriented programs that tend to favour emphasis on reducing local complexity, global complexity increases. Tracing through layers of indirection whose only purpose is seemingly to call other layers is tedious, and the flow of data --- something which is important to see --- becomes more obfuscated.
I suspect that the time investments for "getting a Ph.D." versus "getting a job in industry" don't quite match up.
This is only going to grow as ISP's start running out of IPv4 space and deploy IPv6 with IPv4 over CGN or some other solution!
Younger generation does, although not as good as the Dutch or Germens who are pretty much fluent speakers. It is true that they dislike speaking English though as they feel French is the superior language.
I'm referring to the eventual depletion of oil and other fossil fuels, which is the single greatest existential threat faced by humanity. It's far greater than worst case climate change scenarios.

A good way to think about fossil fuel depletion:

Imagine that there is a planet killer asteroid heading toward us. We've known about it since at least the 1950s, and there it is... heading slowly inexorably toward us. But for various reasons our math isn't perfect, so we don't know exactly when it's going to hit. It might be in the 2030s, or the 2050s, but almost certainly no later than 2100. When it does we all die. Nobody is talking about it, and very few are doing anything about it.

Right now if we started to really run out of fossil fuels, everyone would starve to death. Our population is at least two orders of magnitude larger than what can be supported without that level of energy use. There would also probably be a global war, possibly thermonuclear, as every economy collapses at once and various warmongers and crackpots take over every country's leadership. There's an article about post-9/11 CIA torture on HN's front page right now... that was after an attack that just killed a few thousand people. Imagine the political lunacy that would ensue as the whole of modern civilization collapses in on itself, everyone's savings evaporates in a series of hyper-deflations, stock markets crash and then crash and then crash some more, etc. Every major nation would get a Hitler.

Like I said... if you aren't afraid of this you haven't looked into it deeply or thought about it very much.
I'm not sure what you mean by a "specific thing." Take the absolute simplest case, Fibonaccis. You accidentally write somewhere:

fibs n
| n <= 1 = n
| otherwise = fibs n + fibs (n - 1)

Whoops, that's an error because you had three Ints you needed to keep track of and you chose the wrong two to go into the recursive call. Are you really claiming that types make this sort of semantic error better?

You get similar problems if you were looking for the max of two mins of two lists of Ints and you accidentally wrote the min of the two mins, or if you have two functions

findMinBefore :: (Ord x) => Array Int x -> Int -> x
findMinAfter :: (Ord x) => Array Int x -> Int -> x

and you accidentally use the wrong one.

Ultimately you're responding to a claim which says that there exist semantic errors, by saying that no, that's "a drastically limited idea" of what syntax can do, and results from people "choosing not to use the type system". That's a bit baffling to me. Could you clarify, so that I could see how I can eliminate these sorts of semantic errors entirely?
Uber doesn't fear a fine for its drivers, since the drivers take the hit and not the company.
And why not just rope?
At least in Germany the general rule is "as long as there's no law forbidding it, it's permitted." The problem is that there's a regulation that explicitly puts restrictions on what requirements you need to fulfill to transport other people for money - one of them being "needs authorization". And UberPop fails to meet these requirements.
This is horrific. Just reading the findings and conclusions section is astounding. Embarrassing and shameful day for the USA.
Oil is declining because the Saudis are dumping it.

Their oil is cheap to produce because it is near the surface and plentiful and "good quality".

They probably figured they better halt development in other parts of the world by making it unprofitable for others to produce.

The question is how long they will keep it up.

Just imagine how much every extra penny on the cost of oil/gas squeezes out of the economy every day.

http://i.imgur.com/hi9pTsQ.png
I guess this boils down to something similar to the approximation of a continuous function by polynomials: given any finite number of values (x_i, y_i), you can always find a polynomial passing through them. However, there are continuous functions which are nowhere differentiable and which have unbounded variation between x_i and x_{i+1} for each i.

The "polynomials" are the "nice images" and the "continuous with unbounded variation" are the "noisy ones".

Disclaimer: I am neither a lawyer not an expert on NN.

Edit: I would like to be corrected if I the similitude is wrong.
I think every audience has its peculiarities. What I discovered in an english spoken environment: if you write something destructive, not positive or cheerful (there are situations when this is appropriate), you are almost certainly ignored.

Germans do this a lot. Positive stuff is noticed without comment and secretly nodded to. What germans like is to point at problems. Do that with an english audience and you are dead. Nobody shouts at you (don't misinterpret that as niceness), but you are downvoted, if possible.
This is wrong. There is no evidence "malinvestment" exists at economy scale in any significant way.

Money is a government made artificial store of value made to make transactions and contracts easier. It has no intrinsic value in itself and it should not artificially keep value at a rate that makes it desirable enough so that it displaces private stores of value, such as private bonds, stocks, commodities, or even buying now what you will need later.

It is a sad state that a lot of countries currently let the risk adjusted value of their money have better returns than private market stores of value thus making people invest in fiat instead of in the real economy. This causes unemployment and low productivity.

When people, businesses and banks invest in government sponsored fiat instead of the real economy because fiat has a better return, it is a subsidy to economic idleness that jams the private markets. In Europe they desperately need inflation to overshoot a bit to unjam their markets.

Otherwise all this idle money that accumulates without sufficient production capacity to back it up will create problems in the future. Idle money that starts chasing few goods is a risk of spikes in inflation, that or painful corrective high interest rates. In general a little overshoot of inflation early in a recession prevents more inflation later by making money less desirable compared to private investments and preventing it from accumulating idly too much.
Many misleading statements here (paraphrased):

With imperative code, you can just hop up the stack!

...unless something screws up your stack frames, in which case you win nothing good day sir.

With OOP code, you alternate framework code with application code, which never happens with imperative libraries!

...except any sort of nontrivial library that has proper abstraction via callbacks, in which case you very much do end up alternating application code with libraries.

Inheriting from a framework object can do things you don't expect!

...except that in languages that aren't C++, it's usually pretty easy to control whether or not you execute parent class code instead of/in addition to your extended function.

The technical term for a programming paradigm which uses neither inheritance nor instance variables is imperative (or functional) programming.

ahahahahha what? no.

Imperative != functional programming. At all. Had a CTO try to convince me this was case, was dead wrong. Imperative code allows for mutation of global state and perhaps no functions-as-first-class-citizens. Functional code (in theory) allows for no mutation of global state and always has functions-as-first-class-citizens.

Author has also left out declarative languages, which also somewhat fit that definition, but hey, who's counting?

The best way to illustrate the issue with debugging multi-threaded programs is to describe the debugging scenario as consisting of multiple stacks.

What? Fuck no. The biggest issue with debugging multi-threaded programs is having shared mutable state. The fact that thread A can write and screw up something depended upon by thread B, which is totally supported in imperative programming and is hard to protect against, is the problem. Second would be the magic of race conditions, live locks, dead locks, and all of that jazz.

OOP is, other than pure functional programming, perhaps the only sane way of dealing with mutlithreaded programs when you aren't subscribing whole-hog to actor-style message passing.

~

This is a bad article, and displays both a fundamental lack of understanding as well as a sort of arrogance in the profession of the aforementioned ignorance.

EDIT:

And no, OOP/actor programming is not a panacea for all of your problems either.

There is quite a lot of room in the world for simple imperative programs (which are basically objects interfaced with from the command line) or chained functional programs (very useful for data transformation pipelines).

That said, there are reasons why we invented OOP. There are use cases for it. There are places where it is the right thing, and to pretend otherwise makes it all the harder to know when not to use it.
The Strandbeests Arrive at Art Basel
What scares me about AI is the omnipresence it can give small groups. Imagine that you are a government keen on preventing a particular argument from gaining traction in the media. AI gives you a tool that can listen for the argument becoming developed in chatrooms, forums, comment threads, etc. Once detected, AI also gives you a strategy to attack the credibility of the argument. Governments apparently do something similar to this today, although it seems like a much more manual process [1]. Society will continue to see benefits from developments in AI through software like Google' Search, Apple's Siri, Spam Detection, Network Security, just to name a few. Although certain uses of AI will only be available to small and elite groups, and the fear probably stems from the one-sidedness of this powerful technology.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/world-cracks-internet
I am pretty sure today isn't the shameful day.
Brings back horrid memories of learning Windows programming back in the mid nineties. From the very first line of code, Microsoft had you doing it their (nonstandard) way, making you use WinMain() instead of main(). That style, too... Yuck! Even today, I can somewhat reliably identify folks who were raised on the Windows SDK by looking for lpszHungarianNotation and UNREADABLEALLCAPSTYPEDEFS.

Does anyone remember why the original samples allocated structures on the heap, did stuff with them, then immediately freed them, rather than just using them on the stack directly? Was that a thing? Were early Windows systems stack constrained or something?
Not only do I fail to see the relevance to this link, but I've never heard anyone say "I've won you" in my life, and I doubt I ever will, because that is a stupid thing to say.
This has to be one of the first times I've seen functional programming called imperative. I think it was just last week I was in a debate where people were basically calling functional as the same as !imperative.

This one goes further and argues that oop is !imperative. Have popular definitions changed while I wasn't paying attention?
I'm genuinely curious as to how Uber is an example of crony capitalism.

If anything, aren't the established interests fighting to keep the old taxi medallion system in place an actual example of crony capitalism?
I have to say I loved the way you illustrate the sizes of the prints - having people hold them for scale. That's very very neat.
Show HN: Hacker Daily – 6 sources all in one place
I'm pleasantly surprised too. Next on my wish list is for the Nobel Committee to rescind their Obama peace prize. Fingers crossed...
Show HN: Typefonts – A curated font search engine
Nice. Have you considered making a version for the browser to show art in the new tab? I never see my desktop but do see new tabs all day long.

I currently use and love Momentum - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/momentum/laookkfkn...
Syscall overhead and VMs
Really?

Whenever I read about the organisation structures of US companies (valve, base camp, etc.) I feel like working in the last century here with german companies. As if they don't even notice what's going on out there :\
If anyone has senators on the Intelligence Committee (like Feinstein D-CA), write or call your senator and tell them that they made the right choice.

Members: http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/memberscurrent.html
Why do they insist on saying 'enhanced interrogation technique' instead of torture? Even when it obviously means torture: "Another senior CIA officer stated that COBALT was itself an enhanced interrogation technique."

When talking about a physical place. That is so blatant word replacement that I find it hard to take it seriously.
I welcome any hack that involves consenting parties
Just downloaded it. I have 3 monitors and having different art on each would be a great feature.
(Page 56) Specifically, the interrogation techniques that went unreported in CIA cables included standing sleep deprivation in which a detainee's arms were shackled above his head, nudity, dietary manipulation, exposure to cold temperatures, cold showers, "rough takedowns," and, in at least two instances, the use of mock executions

Mock executions...
"enhanced interrogation techniques"

I hate this bullshit language. Just use the real word: Torture.
Rise of the Machines: Downfall of the Economy?
Amazing video, but even more fascinating is how it evolved with the help of a computer program.

"Fifteen hundred legs with rods of random length were generated in the computer. It then assessed which of these approached the ideal walking curve. Out of the 1500, the computer selected the best 100. These were awarded the privilege of reproduction. Their rods were copied and combined into 1500 new legs. These 1500 new legs exhibited similarities with their parent legs and once again were assessed on their resemblance to the ideal curve. This process went through many generations during which the computer was on for weeks, months even, day and night. It finally resulted in eleven numbers denoting the ideal lengths of the required rods. The ultimate outcome of all this was the leg of Animaris Currens Vulgaris" - http://www.strandbeest.com/beests_leg.php
It's very old.
From the section "The Committee makes the following findings and conclusions:" on page 9 number 10 is interesting "#10: The CIA coordinated the release of classified information to the media, including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques." I have assumed that's the case with many of their operations, are there more public accounts of them doing this?
I'm pretty ashamed today as a US citizen, but I get what you are saying. Sad thing is I bet we are still doing this.
While there is no proof that this is the smallest number, you can find an rough upper bound by shedding digits

After a couple minutes of playing I worked it down to
210000041821
before getting bored.

A tenth of this and you are in telephone number space.
Numbers a bit smaller than this and you are in valid parcel tracking numbers. Either Google indexing this page or more packages being sent will eventually invalidate this post.
Does anyone have a mirror? The link appears to be dead.
Yeah, I just left the game
Make it configurable? But I'd probably suggest a default somewhere around the 1GB mark - Apple are still selling machines with as little as ~120GB storage.
Rails Is an Old Hat, and That's Okay
Your 'big difference' is _intent_, a flighty, volatile emotion that no rational person will ever care to account for.
Huh? Playing by the rules - however bad the rules are - is NOT crony capitalism. Bribing officials to not follow them is (or one among many aspects of crony capitalism).
Glad that it's released but years too late.

The idea that policy-makers did not know what was going on is ridiculous. The reality is many did not want to know and where more concerned about the post 9/11 political environment instead of standing up for what was right.
I'm going to assume you are a grammar Nazi of the American variety.

thEn is a correct and acceptable spelling in Canada.

###########

As I was typing this up I was looking for references to back up statement. BUT I was wrong. (damn my 4rd grade english teacher!)

I was taught that the two words were grammatically the same it was just a difference in US vs 'British/Canadian' spelling. (i.e. grey vs gray)

So, please ignore my indignant reply. (Which I left in for reference.)

For future versions of myself who will make this mistake again:

THAN = a comparison

Golf balls are smaller THAN bowling balls.

THEN = a statement relating to time.

I went golfing THEN bowling.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/than
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/then
“Why I shunned the US and started up in London”
> the primary focus of the legal system is to protect citizens/consumers, not companies ... You can't escape this [by lobbying]

This is somewhat incongruous with the Spanish court talking about "unfair competition"; and with "the move follows a complaint by the Madrid Taxi Association."
Not all members of the committee deserve your appreciation..

> The 6,000-page report was researched and written by Democratic staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee between 2009 and 2013 after committee Republicans chose not to participate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/us/politics/q-and-a-about-...
I came to make a similar comment regarding my hobby; skydiving.

I've been falling out of planes for over 20 years, and have seen the equipment progress in design and function such that people don't die due to the same things which used to claim skydivers. However the yearly rate of death remains about the same. The dark joke is that as the sport has gotten safer people have had to come up with new, more stupid ways to die.

Smarter people than me point to the theory of risk homeostasis. Basically, you accept a level of risk of an activity, if the safety of this act increases you'll find new ways to make it as risky as it was previously.

https://www.google.com/search?q=risk+homeostasis

In skydiving this is jumping smaller and smaller canopies (aka parachutes), swooping, base jumping, big way formations, aggressive angle flying, etc.
Nobody is forcing the drivers to drive, though.
Simplicity and Utility, or Why SOAP Lost
There's some more details at http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/tools/snappy and a walkthrough of using it at http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2014/12/its-a-snap.html
I know it's art, but I'm having trouble explaining "Torso of Venus" to my coworkers... :)
Just anecdotally, I've found that the second round trip overwhelms any performance gains from not rendering on the server, especially if you have to boot up a heavy framework such as e.g. angular before even starting it.

The isomorphic model is that the first page load happens on the server (1 round trip), and that any additional page loads hit the api directly and re-render the page in the browser (also 1 round trip).
Or the same piece split across them, for large horizontal pieces.
I couldn't even imagine the breath of fresh air it must have been to have worked with Windows programming in the 80's and then discovered something like NeXTSTEP.
Drivers Ed 2.0: inside the fight to modernize training on and off the road
+1 for Darude's Sandstorm on the last screenshot
I'm a huge Ubuntu fan, and use it every day on both my laptop and primary workstation. But I dunno how much more of this "we're pulling a piece of what is traditionally considered 'Linux' out and replacing it with our own shizz" I can take.
Local and national news TV programs have been going on for days about how all of our embassies are on "High Alert" in anticipation of violence directed at them/us on the basis of what's in the report. I take that by itself as an admission that the government's conduct has been what should be considered unacceptable, and is probably only "lawful" in the most meaningless sense of the word (if at all).
> However, for a complex SaaS (any SaaS can get here really), you will need to make some sane choices around modularity and building separate, loosely coupled services before things get out of hand. Node.js (or any of its lightweight frameworks on top) is probably a little stronger than Rails in this regard.

Huh? This is a load of crap. Frameworks, and even languages, have nothing to do with modularity and building services. You can do this in any language and any framework. Modularity and loose coupling are decided by the developer(s) writing the code and if you think a particular tool will solve this for you then you have a grave future.
Best part is page 403:

"most of them [CIA personnel] do not know that when the wpost/ny times
quotes 'senior intel official,' it's us... authorized and directed by opa [Office of Public Affairs]."

Of course everyone with half a brain knows this, it's funny 1) CIA personnel don't and 2) the WPost and NYT continue this practice of citing anonymous sources that are in reality public speakers, giving a carefully designed statement.
Silly HN clickbait headline generator
They earn more while doing their PhD. They earn 27-28k(GBP) a year while I make 18k a year. All of their PhDs are in Computer Science+Statistics so from I hear they have very high chance of being hired afterwards(one of them got hired by Google already, 80k/pa + relocation to US).
Parse Crash Reporting
I think one of the conditions for the release of this report was to erase any mention of the word "torture".