skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Firefox.html, an experiment to re-implement the browser using only HTML
It seems like the gaming equivalent of an anti-joke. Anti-jokes can be funny because they're not funny in the way you expect. The self-similarity and the structure of the map make it seem like you can achieve something but there's really no goal .. maybe that's really a lot more like most video games than one cares to consider.

All it needs is some soothing bloops and beeps to make it that but more of a non-goal oriented Skinner box - akin to Tetris without the scoring.
I thought that was the joke....
> examples where crowd behavior exhibits less "wisdom"

When crowds act irrational there is usually a problem in communication. The crowd would still be able to solve problems better after they repair these communication channels. For instance, some rocket launches failed because information by engineers lower in the chain of command, did not work its way up to the decision makers. The group was too compartmentalized, but launching a rocket is necessarily a group effort. 9/11 could have been prevented, or the aftermath lessened, if communication between intelligence agencies was better. In a market crash we often see a single actor making a decision or prediction, and there is little to no reward for people down the chain to disagree with that prediction, or even adjust it (leading to insufficient variance in the predictions). Everyone is blindly chasing the experts, while in a good group setting there is no need to chase the experts.

> Have we ever looked at a tough scientific problem and came to the conclusion that the best path forward was to collect as many random people off the street and shove them in a room to solve it?

Has a scientist ever solved a tough problem growing up in isolation to other scientists? I consider "standing on the shoulders of giants" to be a form of group intelligence. But yes: We have done something similar at RAND corporation. The problem was: Forecast the impact of future technology on the military. The solution was to collect experts (not random people), put them in a room with an experiment leader, and gradually converge to the best forecast, using anonymous feedback every round. It's called the Delphi Technique and it is still in use.

Also, there is an experiment running right now, that takes random civilians, has them answer intelligence questions ("Will North-Korea launch a nuke within 30 days?") and gives weights to their answers, according to previous results. This way random civilians trickle up to the top, that individually beat a team of trained intelligence analysts, simply using their gut or Google. It's called the "the Good Judgment Project". Put ten of those civilians in a room and you have an intelligence unit that is not afraid to be wrong, does not have a reputation to uphold, and does not care about any group pressure, authorities or restrictive protocols that may hamper a group of real intelligence analysts.

> Also bootstrapping or model parameter selection techniques are already heavily used in AI

I believe the parent was talking about model ensembling/ model averaging, not ensembling techniques used by single models, like the boosting or bagging that random forests use. If you have a single attack as input crafted for a single model, then a voting ensemble of three models (lets say: random forests with Gini split, regularized greedy forests and extremely randomized trees) will not be foiled.
he stopped it.
Getting things done: my Monday morning routine
It isn't so much as they are now playing a dirty game, it is more that OPEC has been playing a dirty game for a long time. Now its members are no longer in lockstep and it is causing a huge correction.
It's funny you read 'hate' into my comment. I certainly don't like living in a place where people who are actively trying to perpetuate a society of domination along class, race, and gender divides dictate the culture, but that doesn't imply that I hate them.

The actual hate, and worse, the cold, seemingly-benign, hate, is in your attacks (you seem to have created this account exclusively to do this) on progressive politics on Hacker News.

Maybe this is actually 'hot' hate. Maybe you truly think that non-whites have no great books of 2014 or no cultural contributions for you. But I don't think so.

I think it's more likely that you just see any divergence from the status quo you grew up used to as "going too far." Because you somehow think that a thousand years of liberatory struggle ended in 1985.

That is a thing worth hating. People will die because of that. The longer we allow white supremacy to exist, the more black children will be gunned down in the streets.

Personally, I don't think areas that are the equivalent of a white rice diet are good areas to raise a child, because I'd think it was cruel to raise a child on a diet of nothing but white rice. But it's a stretch to say that I hate old white people in the country because of that. Plenty of them are fine.

It's just you who isn't.
To be fair,I'd say that Uber doesn't even have (real) offices in most countries where it operates,therefore making it almost impossible to enforce any court decision against it.It's a bit like Airbnb.

Unless one makes the app illegal or block Uber website(which I am against),there is not much the justice can do.

On the other hand,just like with Airbnb,for the hosts and drivers,it's another story...

I would also add that,if a country really want to kick out these "sharing economy" services,they need to fine the service provider as well as the client.Not that I agree with it,just that,as long as there are clients willing to pay for it,with little risk,there will be hosts and drivers willing to take the risk to be fined.
Also, a "Safe for Work" mode would be great.

I know it's art but everyone else just sees nudity.
>Why do they insist on saying 'enhanced interrogation technique' instead of torture?

Because there is an 'unenhanced interrogation technique' that is almost but not quite torture.

Never forget that beneath the violation of human rights is a desire to destroy. Calling something 'enhanced' is just another way of saying 'we forked you'.
That's basically what the author is pushing. Snowdrift.coop[1] is a platform for making small payments to open source projects, with the additional twist of a matching donation mechanism. It's like Patreon with a twist. They plan to fun the platform as a project on the platform, rather than charging a percentage of each transaction like KickStarter does.

I like the idea. If something like this caught on, it would give corporations a centralized place to support open source tools they rely on.

[1] https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/intro
Random in the wild
I've uploaded three versions of the missing source code from floppies, along with windows.h for each.

http://ozz.ie/h31100
Wait what?
>>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.

So a person with clearance can't read a leaked classified document? I'm confused, more explanation please ;-) This IS sounding vaguely familiar in some way, but I don't get it.

EDIT: Thanks for all the replies. Also, I find it interesting how many people here on HN are up to snuff on security clearance issues and ready to answer this question. 5 informative answers in 30 minutes!
Resharper 9 and Resharper Ultimate Available
There's a Wikipedia article on this:

'The jocular saying is that, in England, "everything which is not forbidden is allowed", while, in Germany, the opposite applies, so "everything which is not allowed is forbidden". ... The saying about the Germans is at least partially true. ...'

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_which_is_not_forbi...
Yes, any system where you're not in control of the main loop becomes hard to debug very quickly. Flow of control should be tree-like whenever possible.

Polymorphic virtual methods are also hard to debug because you must figure out what type the object actually is. You must either run the code with breakpoints, or run it mentally in your head.

Don't give up on knowing exactly who's in control and what the data structures look like unless there is a clear benefit.

With heavy OOP in C++, you often end up with code that knows nothing about the data except a heap pointer and a pointer to a virtual method table. Not only does this make debugging a pain, it kills almost every opportunity for compiler optimization.

Of course, this pattern can be really useful. But it should be selected as a very deliberate design process, not "Oh, we put everything behind interfaces because I heard it's good."

The only place where the pattern is really, truly necessary is when a library needs to call user-supplied methods on user-supplied data. In C this looks like:

// library.h
void set_callback(void (*myfunc)(void *, int), void *);

// me.c
struct S { ... };
void update_s(void *s, int new_value); // must cast to struct S *

struct S s;
set_callback(&update_s, &s);

This is ugly but it makes it clear how much information is being lost in such a pattern.
Wonder how long until this is flagkilled.

It wouldn't do well to think too hard about what surveillance software and social graph analysis does when sold to thugs, even if (as in, say, Palantir) it's written by smart people.

Look at it this way: if it contributed to these tortures, it's evil, and if it didn't, it's useless.
> JavaScript is most future-proof.

What does "future-proof" even mean in this context?

> In this day and age you're probably building a single page web app

Uh.. no. A tiny percentage of new web applications are single page applications and of those most of them don't need to be single page applications. The web would be a much better place if people thought in terms of "What functionality does this web application need?" instead of "Does this application need to be a single page application?"
I really like patreon. It lets me support things I care about in a flexible, accountable way.
The names clashes with a compression library, https://code.google.com/p/snappy/ (that's probably enough to disambiguate it in search).
I think you already know the answer to this.

They do this for the same reason that when cops shoot civilians they don't say "Then Officer Smith shot the assailant". They say "Then there was an officer-involved shooting.": To use language as a tool to manipulate the viewpoint of the public.
This is long overdue, and pardon my jade, but there is nothing in here that is at all a surprise. The only news in this release is that the government itself is finally recognizing what civil society has known for years: as soon as you put government and psychologists together, you have trouble.
Out of necessity, I've pretty much always worked with people smarter than I am. ;-)

Intelligence is a multiple axis sort of thing, not a single number. A smart developer benefits from working with the people who are smarter on other axis of intelligence such as business or design.

This not to say that someone can't be attractive, athletic, have great common sense, be artistic and also a math wiz. It's is just not common to be strong on all axis.
Osons La France: YES, France's Got Talent (in Business)
> Interrogation techniques such as slaps and "wallings" (slamming detainees
against a wall) were used in combination, frequently concurrent with sleep deprivation and nudity. Records do not support CIA representations that the CIA initially used an "an open, non-threatening approach," or that interrogations began with the "least coercive technique possible" and escalated to more coercive techniques only as necessary.

> The waterboarding technique was physically harmful, inducing convulsions and vomiting. Abu Zubaydah, for example, became "completely unresponsive, with bubbles
rising through his open, full mouth." Internal CIA records describe the waterboarding of Khalid Shaykh Mohammad as evolving into a "series of near drownings.

> Sleep deprivation involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours, usually standing or in stress positions, at times with their hands shackled above their
heads. At least five detainees experienced disturbing hallucinations during prolonged sleep deprivation and, in at least two of those cases, the CIA nonetheless continued the sleep deprivation.

> Contrary to CIA representations to the Department of Justice, the CIA
instructed personnel that the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah would take "precedence" over his medical care, resulting in the deterioration of a bullet wound Abu Zubaydah incurred during his capture.

> CIA officers also threatened at least three detainees with harm to their families— to include threats to harm the children of a detainee, threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee, and a threat to "cut [a detainee's]
mother's throat."

The list goes on.

I have no words. This stuff would make Gestapo, KGB and Stasi proud. I can only hope more people read this report. Worse imaginable crimes are committed in the heat of passion or because of madness. Those are scary. What is more scary to me is cold institutionalized, calculated, torture, which is what this is.

Not sure who said, maybe it was Slavoj Zizek, about how if we are even debating "is torture right or what advantages it might have" we have already lost. Torture should be like rape. Anyone suggesting debating if rape is acceptable should be slapped on the head and considered an idiot. Torture should be the same in any civilized country. We are not only debating it, we have also done it, we have institutionalized it, and make no mistake, Fox and the like will also be debating its "benefits and how it saved Americans' lives".
Great idea, but doesn't deliver. I use Spotify and sometimes I wish I could add songs into my playlist that are only on Soundcloud. I installed the app, ran several searches for songs and artists that I like, and nothing returned.
Waking Up by Sam Harris http://www.samharris.org/waking-up
Well, this is the debate. OO tends to reduct the total lines of code, but increase the lines of code you have to view when you debug per issue. When you look at the code that triggered the bug, it's hard to tell what is local and what was inherited, patched, subclassed etc.
Resharper "Ultimate": https://www.jetbrains.com/dotnet/. Actually a packaging of their dotNet tools into one purchase (Resharper - including C++, dotMemory, dotTrace and dotCover).
An actor in Erlang is not an object, but a (usually recursive) function where receive is called in each recursion. It's stateful in the sense that Haskell functions are stateful: you pass a new state as an argument to the next function.
Docker without containers, and containers without Docker
Although according to the article it is risking a €100,000 fine on top of €40,000 fine given to the driver. That could rack up pretty quickly if it were on a per-violation basis.
Pugsley from the Addams family has died
I used to have much disgust for hungarian notation. When I worked on my first big C++ codebase though, hungarian notation was standard, and I have to say, it made the code more readable. using 's' for static, 'm' for member, etc brought some extra clarity as to what was happening. It's not that we couldn't determine these thing for ourselves (VS has great code-crawling facilities), but its less time hovering, symbol searching, and jumping-to-declaration.

I don't use it out of choice, but it isn't so bad. Though, this was using a slightly HN slightly differently. complete variable types in the name i have different feelings for!
"...Language can be used politically to deceive and manipulate people, leading to a society in which the people unquestioningly obey their government and mindlessly accept all propaganda as reality. Language becomes a mind-control tool, with the ultimate goal being the destruction of will and imagination." - On George Orwell's 1984.

[1] - http://www.berkes.ca/archive/berkes_1984_language.html
Today we should be embarrassed. Next week when the news moves on to the next celebrity breakup, and nearly everyone forgets about this, that is the real shame.
> in object-oriented programs that tend to favour emphasis on reducing local complexity, global complexity increases.

Yes! This crystallizes the way I feel about many OOP designs.
I think the most important aspect of the object paradigm is that it models real world entities. The real world has a logical consistency so code properly modeled on it will have a logical consistency. This makes it easier to extend as you try to solve more problems in the given domain.

The more you program the more you tend to design with the intent of making it easier to debug. You end up doing a lot of things that borrow from other paradigms like passing more variables to method calls while using fewer instance variables and consciously avoiding side effects.

Honestly, I don;t know enough about the functional paradigm to argue whether it is easier to debug. It looks like it has a lot of features that would make it so.

Definitely agree that inheritance, instance variables, setters make things more difficult. Inheriting from a framework is asking for trouble.
In the foreword:

> Reading them, it is easy to forget the context in which the program began - not that the context should serve as an excuse, but rather as a warning for the future.

Well said.
Big donors, yes. But firms with this motivation are already involved. I think the problem is how to engage the long tail of small / medium firms that rely on OSS but aren't sufficiently engaged to try to shape them.

Actually, you could get the government involved here. There could be a tax break for the first $X of contributions to open source. That would effectively make a public subsidy to OSS, directed by market forces. Pretty cool
I don't see any section called findings and conclusions
The word "torture" is in the document. I happened to just read it in the middle of page 12 (conclusion #5).
Can anyone comment on how this actually works?

Is it mint.com style where they require your username / password and they store them in the back end to do stuff?

Or do they use everyone's API to get this?

Does the music actually play inside their app or does it generate links that open in the other apps?
Planet Money on NPR has a great story on this.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/11/05/361424491/episode-...
(This comment was rightly killed by user flags, but I'm going to unkill it for a while so people who want to can read it as an example [1].)

There's relevant news in some of these Uber stories, but there's also a growing problem in these threads: outrage escalation in which people vie with one another to say ever worse things about an object of hatred. This comment exemplifies this while taking it to a new low.

This is not driven by newfound passion for taxi regulation. It is an internet variant of mob behavior. It triggers an opposing mob of people who like the thing, hating the people who hate the thing. Each side gives the other reason to feel aggrieved. We're past the stage where people throw twigs onto the fire and are about at the point where they're dragging in furniture.

When a topic mechanically induces users into violating Hacker News' values in this way, we penalize that topic. It's a poor solution, but the alternative is worse, and civil and substantive discussion is largely impossible in such threads anyway.

Obviously, we'd rather not penalize the Uber stories. To avoid this, we need everyone to take pains to edit this reflexive outrage out of each comment you post, regardless of the position it takes.

1. If the comment has been flagkilled again, a summary is that it relishes the idea of physical violence against Uber executives. To read the original, turn "showdead" on in your profile.
I don't know if it's pride or lack of mastery of the English language. Even though it's the most taught one after French, it's still not well imprinted in people's mind.
It was pretty amazing although VB probably gave a lot of people the same reaction. NeXTSTEP and the Newton were probably the two biggest reasons I always hated Windows programming. Both had great interface ideas that Microsoft should have stolen.

I swear I muttered "OnOK" in my nightmares for years.
Well, medical personnel in general-when you add them to the apparatus of interrogation, bad things happen.
I use GnuCash and OpenOffice.

GnuCash is quite powerful however it is rather heard to learn. I expect that's because its instructions were written by software engineers.

Before I figured out GnuCash, I kept my checkbook in OpenOffice. Now I use OpenOffice just for budgeting. I have a really good method for it that my ex-wife figured out, and that I expanded on.

I've been intending for eons to write up my method.

I don't use QuickBooks for business finance because it charges money to download the US IRS and state tax tables. Those are provided free of charge, at considerable taxpayer expense, by the tax authorities, yet Intuit has the gall to charge, and of course the QuickBooks tax tables are in an undocumented format.
Best Practices for Developing Cellular Apps:

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Perfor...

Each of the network interfaces have different identifiers and you can get info about them.

Also maybe helpful, many of the apple BSD utilities have a `-C` and `-E` options to prevent binding to a cellular or "expensive" interfaces. For example, `netcat` has this, and is open sourced (part of Darwin), so you can poke around and see how they do it.

http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/netcat/netcat-22/netc...

(By the way, just bought the app - happy to pay $5 for this.. Good luck!)
Ask HN: Is there a service to get code review online?
Is there a service where I can get my code reviewed for some fee? At times I submit a coding exercise which works as per requirements but for some reason is not good enough. I would love to get it reviewed from an expert.
This is probably why:

"While the Office of Legal
Counsel found otherwise between 2002 and 2007, it is my personal conclusion
that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured."
Thanks all for the answers. I find neural networks and AI such an interesting topic, wish I had more time to go beyond science journalism to learn about it...
Async != Fast
In her introductory letter, Feinstein said it: "...it is my personal conclusion that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured." (page 4)
This looks great.

It's often overlooked, but Android devices are really low system administration high availability Linux systems. That they work as well as they do is kind of crazy, and a lot of it is down to the application packaging and isolation mechanism. This Canonical stuff is going to generate a lot of noise, but it is the way forward.

Ultimately between this, containerization and virtualization, we're witnessing the death of the whole dll concept long after dll-hell became a thing.
Yeah, a security clearance prohibits viewing anything like this. Even if you have Top Secret you can't look at things that weren't meant for you to read.
page 9 of the pdf.
Too bad this only covers the CIA and not the military. I was a 97E (interrogator) in the Army during both Bush administrations, who was lucky to never be deployed. I bet the military also has lots and lots of sins that need to be uncovered.
I don't think it's right for you to call what he said crap without backing it up with any evidence. Node.js is essentially the modern poster child of modularity. JavaScript doesn't have inherent modularity--but the devs of Node have made some choices that make it possible to have an extensive module ecosystem for Node. npm is probably one of the best package managers for development right now, as it comes with one of the most popular platforms and is inherently flexible.
How we made a TV ad for our startup part 2 – measuring the impact
since you are a java developer. I did suggest play framework. It is very well documented and pretty easy to use.