skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
awareness is good. but what i want to know is how do we start defending ourselves against excessive, and unjustified, surveillance. what countermeasures are we supposed to take/adopt? or is it too late already? sure hope not.
Show HN: Redlink, Linked Data made easy
Million-Dollar-Plus Home Sales Grew 9% as Total Sales Fell 1.2% in the 3rd Qtr
YouTube Updates Apple TV App, Adds Ads
Colour Theory: The Basics, Useful Tools and Further Resources – TrackDuck
Meet KVM, Your Linux Based Hypervisor
The presentation does not specify by car. It does take pretty much 4h by train.
Using SVG Loaders and Spinners Is More Easy Than You Think
In Europe, car is rarely the best way to move around.

Thalys high-speed trains get you from Paris to Amsterdam in 3h; add another hour to move to/from the train stations, and here are your 4 hours.
Off-topic, but the site gets all wonky when trying to zoom in/out/reset with ff34.. looks like it's the backstretch jquery plugin causing it.
Great app! Please add the option to add the artist and title of the work to the desktop somewhere in the corner, perhaps even with a link, so that we may learn a little about the work itself also.

Edit : I see you already do this in the menubar. :)
What do you mean, but not higher? If you want a base-256 digit, calculate the two base-16 digits that make it up. That's actually a simpler process than you'd have to go through for the nth octal digit (compare -- the second octal digit of pi is composed of, as high bit, the low bit of the first hex digit, followed by the two high bits of the second hex digit. But the 8th 256-ary digit of pi is just the concatenation of the 15th and 16th hex digits). In general, since you can calculate any adjacent 4 bits of the binary expansion, you can then aggregate those bits however you like, making it easy to get the nth digit in any power of two. The only complication is that, since you generate bits in blocks of four, you may end up having calculated as many as 6 bits that you didn't need.

You object to my characterizing the pi-reading function you describe as an infinite lookup table. But it can't be implemented as an "intuitive" algorithm either. No matter how you code a function to solve that problem, it will always be trivial to provide input that your function cannot handle (if you have a representation of pi that you search, then you're relying on an infinite lookup table. If you calculate pi on the fly, you won't be able to handle large numbers as input). So I don't see why a defective (because you don't have enough time, or space, to run it) algorithm tranforming into a defective (because you don't have enough space to store it, but hey, time is no longer a concern) formula is a big problem for the equivalence between algorithms and formulae.

Also, I have to note that you've referred to the following mathematical result:

pi = \sum_{k=0}^\infty (16^{-k} * [4/(8k+1) - 2/(8k+4) - 1/(8k+5) - 1/(8k+6)])

as an "algorithm" instead of a "formula" ;)
They had people manually pushing it back up the last two humps, and then they had a rope they hooked to the cart to pull it up the last hump.

Source: was one of the people pushing it back over the humps. Surprisingly a sketchy job - you have to really go for it to get it over the middle hump, and if you don't make it then you have to bail really quickly.
I agree with your take on things generally speaking, but I don't think it's necessarily correlated with the crime rate.

It's hard to color outside the lines when your brain is being flooded with chemical compliance, but think about the people who are going to be on psychoactive prescriptions in the first place: people who can afford very expensive and time consuming behavioral healthcare. The subset of people who can afford behavioral healthcare are probably much better off than the people who would resort to crime in an economic downturn.
Made in Space: Mankinds first extraterrestrial 3D print
This is even worst than lost money for big companies : it makes it look like that people actually watch the ads, reinforcing the fallacy that we need more ads to make more money.
I'm a developer at a company called PriceWaiter[1] that provides a similar “Make an Offer” service to existing eCommerce stores. Our API allows retailers to add a button to any product on their site to get offers from customers.

We welcome Amazon into this space, and are really glad to see this idea catching on.

Check out our developer docs and integration plugins[2], or feel free to ask any questions you have here.

[1] https://www.pricewaiter.com/

[2] https://docs.pricewaiter.com/
I just finished Business Adventures, although I got it on Audible when it came out. Amazing piece of literature. It's pretty crazy to know that each chapter is based on real life interviews and real events since they read like a novel.

Very well written. I've doubled back over most chapters to hear them a second time, picking up new things. The lessons in each chapter are still valuable today and really do stand the test of time. Highly recommended.
Lenticrypt: A Provably Plausibly Deniable Cryptosystem
That's a great point! My test monitors don't rotate, but I used to have a config like that. I'll add orientation preferences to a future version!

If you have a mixed set of monitor orientations, would you prefer to have a different art piece on each one, suited to the respective orientation, or a piece that tries to fit both (restricting the art to near-square works)?
I'd choose rails and pick up a copy of Ryan Bigg's book - https://leanpub.com/multi-tenancy-rails

Django is also a fine choice but Django lacks learning resources. I mean seriously, why aren't you Django guys writing books and recording screencasts?
His argument, if you read his work, isn't based solely on the increasing speed of computers.

His idea is that progress is exponential in all of the requisite areas. That includes algorithms, hardware, biology, neuroscience, and more.

> Siri, etc, are nothing more than text parsers that give a canned set of responses

We say the same about everything once we can do it with computers, because progress doesn't come magically. It's incremental. Yet much of what we have already is what used to be "science fiction" and, before that, "magic". I'm sure when AIs are passing the Turing test, we won't think any more of computers, but less of the Turing test.

This isn't an argument against Kurzweil's predictions, it's just moving the goalposts as you say. If strong AI comes, we'll move them all the way there and maybe even a bit past.

I disagree that we'll know it when we see it though. I think we'll deny it until we die and the new generation grows up in a world in which computers have rights.

> I'm not saying it won't happen, but it will require a type of conceptual breakthrough that we simply haven't had yet.

Finally, Kurzweil's arguments do not require a breakthrough as a premise. Kurzweil's idea is to scan the brain at the neuronal level, then brute-force its simulation at the biochemical level. It's straightforward extrapolation.

You could propose that we will come across some roadblock in our exponential progress towards that goal, but in the absence of one, the null hypothesis is that progress will continue as it has. Then indeed, the singularity is nigh.
I worked on some safety critical systems in C. The philosophy was treat the code like a little person running around. The person (the code) always wanted to know where the fire escape was. The fire escape always needed to be very easy to use and very reliable. Every function had little fire escape handler to clean up on error. Higher level functions had to decide how to put out the fire (speaking metaphorically here but we really could have started fires) or to raise the alarm to a higher level.

At the very top level, the only thing we could do was save a log then reset (least worst option). Too many resets too fast and we'd take ourselves offline and scream for a human (again, least worst option).
Do slower programmers get there faster?
America is falling down
Oh yes, please send a code to alandarev _at_ gmail.com :)

Once for having no other option, I glued together RSS feeds + deviant arts + rotate background from a folder... It worked quite well, but some unfiltered deviant art publications were upsetting me, plus a painful maintenance...
I am on IPv6-only (Kabel BW, Germany), IPv4 goes over DS-Lite.
I don't think I've ever read an opinion piece where I so completely disagree with every single point made or believed the author has completely inversely represented the reality he is trying to change. Interesting. Perhaps when I get home I shall expound on it.
Another one he got right was that we wouldn't think more of computers when it happened -- we would simply think less of chess.
This article states that "the Federal Aviation Authority bans the flying of unmanned aircraft, including hobby drones, above 400ft."

This is incorrect. The 400ft "limit" is a guideline for safe separation from manned aircraft (which are generally restricted from operating below 500ft).

It is true that the Advisory Circular 91-57, Model Aircraft Operating Standards (June 9, 1981) restricts operation above 400 feet, but this is document is explicitly non-binding and has never been given the force of law. A hard 400' limit was considered and rejected in both the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 and the FAA's pending Interpretation of the Special Rule for Model Aircraft.

If you are interested in the details of pending U.S. legislation, I suggest following the Academy of Model Aeronautics' Government Relations blog: http://amablog.modelaircraft.org/amagov/
Google-backed password-killer crosses major milestone
I only meant for my statement to apply to consumer devices. Servers are a completely different matter, and IMHO you should never store that kind of data on a laptop or desktop. That's what VPNs are for.
I've written an article about this: http://blog.honzabrabec.cz/2014/07/06/the-power-of-algorithm...
I'm confused about the motivation here. Are the companies serving these ads running the bots, or paying others surreptitiously to run them? Why not just directly fake numbers if you're going to cheat customers? I feel I must be missing something...
This sounds great. I've starting looking at the CIS 194 lectures, though, and so far not a single example works in ghci. Googling around indicates that you need to use 'let' or define things in a module and load them . . .

Is this tutorial already out of date?
Everyone should ignore my advice.
Show HN: Optional – A simple option type for C#
It is "politically correct" in that it is a high status well connected white man brought low by the bureaucracy and a mere student who also happens to be a woman.
As said in another comment, Kabel BW too. IPv6 with IPv4 tunnelling over DS-Lite.
5W '07 checking in. I think the first roller coaster for EC rush was around my junior year. I'm glad to see the tradition is still going strong!
Thanks for the feedback--added to my feature ToDos. I didn't include artist text already because I did not want to overlay anything that would get in the way of the art, but enough people have requested it that it is something I'm planning to add as an option. For now, the artist name is available in the menu bar drop down, and it opens the wikipedia page for the artist (and clicking the name of the work opens the URL to the image file). Optionally, turning on notifications will also show the artist name.
As a skateboarder I could see this being a lot of fun. It would be great if the project could be donated to a local skatepark once taken down.
I haven't had any luck so far with rmsprop, adagrad and adadelta. SGD + Nesterov momentum has served me best.
Why are objects so hard to debug?
3-D Printed Plastic, but Flows Like Fabric
A woman had complained to Uber on Nov26 about the Uber driver who raped a woman
If we look back 30 years to 1984 and try to estimate how much progress we've made that might give us some indication on how much change we'll make in the next 30 years.

I'd argue, however, that since the rate of change is accelerating, maybe we should actually compare to 60 years ago. In 1954 we were practically in the stone ages.
Try it with optimizations on:

gcc -std=c99 -O3 -Wall -Wextra test.c -o test

g++ -std=c++11 -O3 -Wall -Wextra test.cpp -o test

In my experience, C++ compilers are great at eliding temporaries and various constructor calls (and related memory allocations), but only if optimizations are turned on.
How much art would you be comfortable caching locally? The full collection is over 30GB.
I wish people would not blog as experts about things they don't know a great deal about.
"You can easily run out of address space in 32-bit processes, since you only have 4GB of address space, or less."

Ah, 21st Century problems.
cool. Out of curiosity, where do you get the art from?
This assumes that Edward Snowden continues posting in the same geofence as well. Using a GPS spoofer, you can just pick a random geofence each time.

Further, you can obtain a new userID just by reinstalling the app, so the information can be totally destroyed by the user as well.

It's very hard to leverage this attack into anything more interesting than getting a userID banned.
Making a Mockery of Python
One practical definition of an expert is someone who can achieve good outcomes even while, or because of, breaking the rules. Great writers break "rules" of grammer all the time, sometimes even basic ones in the case of folks like e.e. cummings or Cormac McCarthy.

Why do we have rules at all? If we all knew everything about everything, then we wouldn't need rules; we'd just make every decision correctly on our own. But we don't know everything about everything, so rules provide simple heuristics to guide our behavior.

But sometimes a person knows everything about 1 or 2 things. And in those things, if they really know what we're doing, they don't need rules, because their understanding exceeds simple heuristics.

So, I think the word "expert" is misplaced here, which is IMO part of the problem. Just because you've done something for a long time, that doesn't make you an expert. And expertise is a narrow lane--an expert in bricklaying might not be an expert in construction safety.

All that said, I have found that teaching is a great way to develop personal competence. But it's not because I'm lazy, it's because teaching forces me to examine the rules, and the basis for their creation, which builds real competence and ultimately expertise.
Just as a note: I am aware that this is yet another maybe monad implementation in C#. However, this is one that suits my needs, while staying simple and easy to use.
It looks pretty cool, if you still have any promotional codes I'd love one.

As a random suggestion I feel like if your 'WHY' is something like to "effortlessly inspire with great art during normal computer use" rather than just focussing on an app that changes your desktop background. I like your collaborative filtering idea, and if you're taking feature requests a screensaver/multiplatform port would be nice (e.g. if every time I open my phone the lockscreen background is a different work of art its a pretty effortless way to get more exposure) ;)
Nice app - saves the hassle looking for hi-res art.

Would love the ability to add a folder of my own images, to mix it up a bit.
Like the concept here. Would love a trial version, though.

Slightly off-topic, but this reminds me of what Electric Objects are trying to achieve: essentially, this same app, but hanging on your wall. The future of art consumption for the masses.
I feel like I have taken the red pill while watching Inception.
Do you cache art locally once you've used it, for cases when I might not want to download new backgrounds (such as when tethered)?

If not, might I make it a feature request?
‘Bot’ Traffic Triggers 11% of Digital Ads
> you ultimately should come to Paris because you can cut your payroll by 20%.

Don't forget that your employees enjoy perks such as free healthcare or unemployment insurance from the government. Moreover, they had their MSc for free or almost, which means they don't have any student loan to pay back. If they have kids, their school is probably both decent and free. If it isn't, what's meant by "expensive private school" around there is a couple thousand euros a year. Also, 5-7 weeks of paid vacation are included.

Most US workers would be better off getting all of this for a 20% pay cut.
Would it be illegal to use this and post photos of the idiots using this app on my campus with their associated comments?
Um, the whole point of this discussion is about the claim that C++ is a good language for beginners to learn.

I have problems with using C++ to build real projects with experienced programmers too, but those are mostly different problems.
Because it's unclear and it's a moving target and it's a localisation challenge.
> that's a great deal of french bashing

Can we stop with this? I'm tired of French people always responding to any kind of critics with the "French bashing" strawman. I'm French myself by the way.

> and government grants are here too to help

Most entrepreneurs don't want the government to help, they want the government to stay out of the way. A concept many of my fellow French have a hard time understanding the benefits.
With the recent updates to the standard C++ is actually a really pleasant language to use. You just have to know a lot, but the reward is there.
Thanks for the suggestion on copy. Please email me for a code (info is in my HN profile).

I'll have to learn more about what it would take to make a screensaver. Unfortunately the iOS APIs do not seem to expose any programmatic way to change the background or lock screen (I'd love it on my phone too!).
Looks nice!

I'm on Windows though, and currently very happy about Amazing Lock Screen[0], which takes the daily photo from Bing.com and puts it on your lock screen. If anyone knows a similar app but for public domain art, I'd be very interested.

[0] http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/amazing-lock-scr...
Memory leaks in Firefox/Chrome might belie that notion.

I've had Python throw MemoryError at me while I was doing some video processing with NumPy. 8GB RAM, 64GB swap. I wasn't careful with my refs and I confused Python's garbage collection (memory leak).
I'd like to try the App. If you have codes left, please consider sending one to schmooser _at_ gmail.com
> Well, in France we don't have the culture of junk food and fast-food

Are you sure you live in Paris? Cause I see kebab and nutella crepes stands at every corner.
Because people have only so much cognitive load, adding to that to the list of things they would have to do on a daily basis is simply daunting.

This just seems like another way to rip off people who don't know better and are disadvantaged; imagine the haggling difference at the poor shops vs the rich shops. The rich person may be able to afford the extra cash and you may think the poor person would be incentive to haggle harder, but the rich can also afford to leave to go to another shop with the car they own instead of spend another hour on the bus to get to another place. They can also afford to be informed of the prices.
That professors are human is hardly a revelation.

Did you just equate being human to forcing unwanted sexual interactions on individuals under your power and stewardship? Wow. Just wow.

cutting off students in the middle of study...

It may cut off a few students this one time but the overall effect is to improve study conditions for multiple students for years to come.
There's two reasons that spring to mind:

1. The companies faking adviews don't directly control the ad management system, so they need to fake a page view on their servers in order to get the 3rd party ad manager (e.g. Doubleclick/Adsense) to record it.

2. The most obvious way of detecting fake traffic is to see that your ad click-through numbers don't match up with the actual traffic hitting your server. So to obfuscate this, you'll have your bot click through the advert then land on the advertisers page and spider through a few links before bouncing.
The Infamous Windows “Hello World” Program
By "junk food culture absence" in France, it means that junk food in France is most often very very bad.
Said it before, but: if you hold shift, you can navigate the 'map'.
By "hack", you mean "discover the userIDs of users launching the app in your {office/home/coffee shop}." But this does not equate to a deanonymization of ANY past posts necessarily. userIDs are generated on app install, so anyone hoping to be anonymous needs only connect via a VPN to avoid a MITM on that particular connection, post the anonymous secret, and re-install the app. Then any further use of the app will not leak that they posted the secret, and in fact the information has been destroyed.
I'm going to try it now. Who cares if it's 5 bucks if I get some value out of it.

Will you be looking into tying this in with a screensaver? It would awesome for the office if it can pull up art into a screensaver.
Only if you consider a half unfrozen meal in the microwave to be worth €10/€13.
I'm doubtful that it's a billion dollar industry. As a prior commenter noted, shippers will likely raise rates to compensate (particularly when you're a large shipper, rates tend to be negotiated anyway), or adjust policies to make refunds scarcer.

It may be a clever hack for a few early adopters, but is likely to be somewhat self-defeating if/as it grows. (Though in fairness, "shipment auditing" is a much bigger and more interesting play than refund harvesting specifically).
Top Real Estate Producer – Tips on How to Succeed
We're based in Atlanta. Not sure there's anything of the sort in the states but good thought.
I know its random and not cheap enough with current tech, but wall hanging tablets/digital photo-frames that present an ever changing (and possibly sync'd) set of art in the same style as a museum would be seriously awesome. Needs a lot of screen estate to have title underneath. E.g. a bit like http://www.artofwildlife.com/Miniature_Paintings_Exhibition3...
It may not be the point of the example but it's mentioned explicitly by the article's author as a feature. Doesn't that make allocations in the example fair to comment on?
There are some UAV-focused lobbying organizations:

* The Small UAV Coalition (Amazon, AirWare, etc.) http://www.smalluavcoalition.org/

* Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (trade association): http://www.auvsi.org/home

Lots of individual universities, media companies, and tech companies have also been lobbying for UAV use.

There is also the Academy of Model Aeronautics, which is focused on hobby flying, including "drones."
Not fully automated, but http://camelcamelcamel.com/ will send you notifications
Replacing Throwing Exceptions with Notification in Validations
You have to install make some how. That's the problem. You're tying all these cross platform tools together with something that isn't cross platform. Grats.
20 years on
I know, right!? Kids these days. Sheesh. :-)
Well, to be fair, with "auto x = { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}" you will get a variable named "x", but it won't be a std::vector<int> (it'll be a std::initializerList<int>).
If the ad fraud rate were uniform across all websites, then advertisers would simply pay less CPM because its less converting traffic.

If website A is all fraud, and website B is 0% fraud. Then on the same network, you'd have a 50% fraud rate, and website A would be paid money it doesn't deserve (as it deserves nothing for its 100% fraud traffic).

Fraudsters are being subsidized by legitimate traffic.