skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the tech field were evenly split 50/50, do you think women wouldn't comment on the attractiveness of guys?

Maybe, but how would that make a person's (of either gender) physical attractiveness (which is completely subjective, by the way) relevant to a discussion of an article about their technical accomplishments?

You're basically saying "We may, in a hypothetical future, have two wrongs", but remember that 2 * wrong != right.

People have been mentioning that sometimes there are discussions of male entrepreneurs or technical folk that comment on their appearance, but I like to think that HN is above that level of discourse.
I think that when you are doing exploratory programming and you're not quite sure about what you're doing you should have a language that gets out of the way as much as possible, which Python does.
Ada and other bondage languages are for when correctness is most important or you need structure because you know the codebase will become large.
This is the angle on the Sony hack that I find most interesting/troubling/etc. (from http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/12/05...):

Jason Spaltro, then executive director of information security at Sony Pictures, called it a "valid business decision to accept the risk of a security breach" in a 2007 interview with CIO Magazine, adding he would not invest "$10 million to avoid a possible $1 million loss."

So basically their thinking was that getting hacked was just the cost of doing business. Of course, they are now discovering that the cost of a really serious hack is much higher than they thought it was.

Which makes me wonder if, at some point, we're going to have to have some kind of controls on who can legally hold personally identifiable information on their systems and who cannot. Right now pretty much anybody can, regardless of whether they're competent enough to protect it. And as a result there's a huge volume of critical information out there stored on systems that are either poorly secured or whose admins have decided, like Sony's, that the ROI on real security is too poor to justify having any, which creates a target-rich environment for hackers to take advantage of.

Attaching serious liability to holding data on systems that aren't secured, or requiring proof of competency/minimum-acceptable-effort in order to avoid such, might shift the ROI calculation on security enough to convince even idiots that it's worthwhile; or, at least, that it's better to outsource holding the data to someone who knows what they're doing (and is willing to back that up by accepting liability) than it is to keep everything in-house on a dusty Windows NT4 box under someone's desk and just cross their fingers.

We already sort of do this sort of thing for financial information, via PCI; but the universe of "data that could do serious damage if it got loose" is much larger than that which PCI covers, as this hack demonstrates. So I wonder how many of these types of giant hacks people will be willing to accept before they start calling for some kind of protection.
Your Kickstarter campaign appears to only show gas burners.

Is your pan useless with an electric element?
Type Safety and RNGs
Also, stuff like light doesn't need explicit interaction most of the time.

If there are people in a room and it's dark, the light should go on.

That's the default case I want almost every time for every room.

I don't want to use my smartphone or do any activities for this.
I understand why you'd say that, but the cure would be much worse than the disease—the top subthreads would all be about the edits and editing practices.
What's that second picture? The entire internet, on disks, up on a shelf?
Assuming this acts only as a glorified replacement for a memorized license number, it seems like a nice convenience.

But the nice thing (from a law-enforcement perspective) about plastic IDs is that they can be made expensive to forge/alter, and (forgeries aside) it's fairly easy to restrict the number of copies.
You're not missing something. The dump / restore is the operationally simple answer, but not the best for availability.
Note that using a sqlite wrapper like https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3, you also don't have any external dependencies and your application still ships as a single binary. However, there are other advantages of a Go-native storage library (e.g., doesn't require cgo, better integration with tools like pprof, etc.)
Perl indeed. I know there are a lot of modern compilers out there, but speaking about parsing files I think perl suits me the most in terms of code readability/speed balance.
This seems like a lot of work to avoid implementing the best practice of encapsulating database logic in user-defined functions, views, and stored procedures rather than hard-coding queries.

With that (probably controversial) criticism aside, does this library support multiple conditions in a JOIN predicate?
Hi Erik,

I've been associated with computer chess for a while, and was even given a shout-out by Vas Rajlich for optimization discussion prior to the release of Rybka 3.

I think this critic's view on the primacy of fast evaluation, at the expense in accuracy is off base. Looking at the two top engines today, Stockfish and Komodo, Stockfish has a great search function, but a poor eval, while Komodo's eval is better, but it's search isn't as good. It's pretty clear that bad evaluation is limiting, even at the leaves of a deep search.

Anyway, I have more basic questions about why you did what you did. First, it seems that your use of 12 x 64 sets of values to represent state information is non-optimal and even not sufficient. It seems that you are introducing a lot of unnecessary and undesirable additional degrees of freedom by duplicating the piece-square state inputs for white and black. When I've done this in the past, I used 6 x 64 sets with positive ones for squares with a white piece and negative ones for squares with a black piece. Do you see any advantage in not taking advantage of this symmetry?

Second, you really need side to move, castling state for each side, and the pesky en passant indicator (just as is required in a FEN representation). Luckily these don't significantly increase the number of inputs.

I worked on a similar project with a friend at University of Warsaw a number of years back. We generated static evals using FANN based on the complete input state, and trained with the value of the search plus eval after 30 seconds per move We used Rybka 2.2n for this, which was the strongest engine available at the time.

We both moved on after some preliminary success, mainly because there wasn't any way to conceivably make a top engine due to the closed nature of the top engines at that time. This is no longer an issue, and if someone had a black box evaluation function that produced a better eval than the current Stockfish static eval, it would be trivial to do the substitution.

Best Regards,
Alan
Miss California on Social Media and Branding
The DCOS utility looks great. I've spent way too long trying to get distributed systems installed and configured in the past. If this works as well as the demo shows, it'll be as magical as brew install for OS X.

I wonder how the interface scales with thousands of nodes - at some point you'd have too many doughnut charts for this to be meaningful, right?
I completely agree with the author here, far too much weight has been placed on the smartphone as the control device and UI for everything.

This problem has even spread to Sonos which discontinued the dedicated controller a year or so ago. You now have to use either a phone, tablet, or a full computer to select and choose the music you want to play. Granted their apps are well done but the overall experience is nowhere as responsive as the dedicated controller.

I really do not understand their decision, and would think it would be possible to offer a dedicated controller device these days at a reasonable price that they can make profitable.
MoonMail by Astrobotic
It's not basal metabolic rate that makes people fat. It's either unhealthy cracings or low energy (and yes, I know that this sense of "energy" is psychological to some degree) levels.

It's not low BMR alone that's the problem and, of course, if you have a high BMR but cravings/appetite issues or lethargy, you're still likely to gain weight.
When I go to my local bar, they scan the code on the back of my ID to ensure it's not a fake. At a bar down the road, they swipe it through a computer. Sure, they look at it to see the age and compare the picture, but the computer does the verification of it's legitimacy. We're already there.

Let me tell you about the state tracking you, since you're worried about your ID being tracked. You know those signs on the freeway that say "15 minutes to Taylor Street" or "25 minutes to I-94"? Nice and handy, you know if it says 20 minutes when it normally says 5, there's a traffic jam. You know how they get that info? I learned this recently while working for a client that was involved in those signs being installed in that area. They scan the Bluetooth on drivers phones, and time how long it takes for a unique phone to get from one sign to the next. The average of that is the time that gets displayed on the sign.

So don't worry about your ID being scanned. They already know where you are. But obviously they're not sharing the information real widely, since the police took three days to find the person who hit my car and drove off even though I told them the description of the car, the driver, and the license plate number. So there's a little comfort I guess.
From the paper's abstract (published by Nature Medicine, 08 December 2014):

"These preclinical studies suggest that, so far, this unimolecular, polypharmaceutical strategy
has potential to be the most effective pharmacological approach to reversing obesity and related metabolic disorders."
Best practices in Android development
Those are rack mount servers.
The Case for Making Stuff
link being fixed. public API still in development. thanks.
Experiment in Repression
I worked for FedEx early in my career but I don't know what they are trying to do here. Maybe leverage the FedEx Services workforce to squeeze some more revenue?
Google Removes Amazon’s App Listing from Google Play Search
How and Why to use unsafe in java?
You might be thinking of ParrotVM. Guido van Rossum and Larry Wall had an April Fool's joke in which they announced they would combine Python and Perl into a single new language, "Parrot". In spirit with the joke, ParrotVM strives to be a good target many dynamic languages in general (such as Perl and Python) rather than any specific language.
tldr; it doesn't, but offline vendors that collect your contact information they can anonymously check the proportion of purchasers which might [incidentally?] have been shown their ad on Facebook's network. Only a media buyer with a budget bigger than their brain would assume causality.
I like the idea of all of these things working together (phone, Pebble, Flow) to enable people to control their devices with whatever is available.
Dalvik has had a JIT from Android 2.2, you're not running interpreted code.
I have no sympathy for Sony, but I feel deeply for the honest people who are just trying to earn a living working there. More so after reading about how some of them were openly complaining internally about things they saw as problems - many of these people were trying to make the company better from within.

I'm torn. On one hand, I want to see Sony the company suffer, but it still feels unfair to attack and expose the people who work there - the folks who are just trying to pay their bills.

I wonder at what point it becomes necessary for a person to judge the risk that joining a company with a questionable history will have on their privacy and personal security. I think the sad fact is though, in all likelihood Sony didn't have especially poor security, they likely had moderate to good security but failed when facing a persistent threat. I get the impression many other companies (large to small) would have failed a lot sooner.

Is there anything employees can do to protect themselves from these kinds of breaches? Is the answer to sue our employers who fail to protect this info?
If you want an actual introduction to the topic, "Conceptual Mathematics: A First Introduction to Categories" by Lawvere and Schanuel is the right choice.
No one should have any expectation of privacy for anything they put on the Internet. Privacy is something you have to work for, and unless you have those controls (PGP, encryption at rest) in place, privacy doesn't exist. Even if you have those things in place, your privacy is only as strong as the privacy of the people you are communicating with.

We should work towards strong privacy as a default, but the service delivering targeted ads is not incentivized to protect your privacy.
It's not too slow, it just takes discipline that most developers/companies don't have, primarily because the tools aren't widely available.
To me, it looks like some hotshot business-type decided that their internal IT didn't have enough work or wasn't close to fully "utilized" in their view so they decided to basically contract their internal IT dept. out to consumers....

"Our technicians keep a vast global network of technology running smoothly. Let us do the same for you. Call us when you have a problem with your computer or system."
I've sat in on Chris' class at Stanford.

I think the answer is probably closer to weeks to months if working with field experts, depending on how deep you want to go.

The core of it is open source.

I think the most exciting thing about it is it brings more sophisticated computation to the more qualitative sciences.
You might want to mention you are carefully working around a slew of webkit bugs.

1) Rather than efficiently referencing a single sprite.svg, the svg source must be inefficiently inlined, page after page.

2) Rather than use SVG's animated transforms, the spinners must be animated using CSS instead. Don't forget the CSS dependencies or the sprites won't animate!

3) Everything is flat. Not because that's the style, but because webkit won't properly render gradients, drop shadows, inner shadows, etc.

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105904

But hey, at least webkit does kinda work with <use> that reference an external file. I just checked, and Chrome/blink doesn't work at all. It seems Firefox doesn't do animated transforms anymore. It did once. Opera (before it switched to blink rendering engine) was the only browser that worked nearly flawlessly with SVG.

SVG would be so great, if it actually worked. Why do we need ruby/node to do this? See above.
It's in the CA DMV handbook that the roads are most dangerous in "first rain" conditions. You get tested on it!
Why and for what do you use that architecture?
Are you saying you don't believe he went off insulin, and that his data was fabricated?

You can also just look into the decades of research done on carbohydrates and diabetes http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899900714...
I tried out the faulty javascript code, and found even more fun:

var a = new Array();
var b;
a[b++] = 1;
a // === []
b // === NaN
a[NaN] // === 1
A pseudonym like, say, Evan Miller?
What about privacy when applying for a job?

When I apply for a job, I'm not putting my content online. But that's all the Sony employees have done, and now they're directly in the crossfire.
One tip to save a bit of time: Most browsers have plugins that let you automatically send a magnet link to your remote transmission daemon when clicked on (the chrome plugin also shows your transmission activity in a popover).
Indeed. Since we can so easily measure empathy, perseverance, innovativeness, drive and confidence (to name just a few more) with simple numerical scales, it does seem strange that intelligence is this weird exception. I blame political correctness myself.
I think the only thing you can take from that is that Jason Spaltro is an idiot. When you have a billion dollar company, there's no such thing as a million dollar loss. Even the Sony Exchange address book is probably worth millions to the right people.
Great things going on in Dallas for startups. Check it out!
Thanks. Missed it in the for-comprehension just before the yield.
> I have no sympathy for Sony, but I feel deeply for the honest people who are just trying to earn a living working there.

I don't understand this statement. Sony is not a person, it's a company comprised of the people who are earning a living working there. This is true from CEO down to the temp workers. Did you mean just the executive team? The employee roster in any company is a state that is constantly shifting as people leave and join new places. There has been a lot change in who works at sony since 2005. Do you have no sympathy for the people who did not leave after 2005? Do you have no sympathy for new executives? Like what are you even saying? Maybe you just dislike all executives and managers.
While I see what you are saying, it strikes me as advice that would make him fade into, if not irrelevance, some kind of "Sages of Yesteryear" status. It's safe, but you don't generate good ideas by being safe. (I don't have anything against pseudonyms but they are hard to keep secret.)

Part of the point of writing essays is to explore ideas honestly, and honesty is often not safe. I hope he stays honest.
Staffers Walk Out of Congress in Protest Over Brown and Garner Cases
What do you mean by "not widely available"? Just as examples, Coq and Idris are both free:

https://coq.inria.fr

http://www.idris-lang.org/

Did you mean they're not in wide use?
Works great with gas & electric stovetops, both resistive coils or flat-top glass. (But not inductive at the moment.)

Half of our team has electric stovetops at home; I think it's particularly a superpower there to know the real cooking surface temperature. Why Pantelligent is especially great on electric stovetops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRwQgvod2t4
The case against human rights law
It's not. The copyright case is about Google implementing Java standard library APIs, not anything about compilers/toolchains.
Thank you for saying this. Events like this make it clear how much everyone exercises extreme wishful thinking in these situations. Nothing about these systems is secure, and no one should have that expectation.

It's unfortunate, but it's true.
Sorry it took 12 days for me to see this reply.

In case you hadn't figured it out, yeah. The Toshiba Chromebook 2 with the IPS 1080p screen is what I was referring to.
And a lot of this wasn't even "online", where online is defined as "internet-facing". Once someone it in your network, it doesn't matter what is internet-facing anymore.
Am I blind or does the article linked in relation to the DDOS attack by Sony not mention DDOS at all?

I found did this: http://www.zdnet.com/article/sony-strikes-back-at-data-thiev... and this: http://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-denies-sony-counterattac... that mentions the DDOS attack.
Couldn't Facebook easily demonstrate causality by running an RCT? Just randomly select half of a certain demographic to show the ad to, and then show that those users are more likely to make a purchase later.
There has to be a range of options. Strong privacy is simply expensive to do well and not everyone cares to do it well. We should expect strong privacy from institutions that need it (any government, including municipal, and organizations such as AT&T) and give out pseudonyms to others.

Your employer should be competent to keep your personal data secured as well, and they likely will have to do that by selecting a reputable provider for HR operations services.

Yes, we should "work towards" strong privacy by default, but since we'll never get there we need to accept alternative models.
Point 1 - there is no way to reverse a transaction in bitcoin. If you make mistake you make a mistake. You can request the funds be returned and these things have happened. But let me ask you how often do you send bank payments to the wrong person. Most people will check the details, be it sort code and account number or bitcoin address. Even getting a transaction reversed with a bank is not a simple process and it is not always possible otherwise carders would not be able to withdraw funds successfully because at some point a bank can stop the outflow of money, the difference is the bank takes the loss not you. However when banks take a loss we all take a loss.

You don't need constant Internet access to use bitcoin. If you have an address for payment you can receive payment to it without being online. Next time you check the address the funds are there.

There is recourse to theft, the same ones available to people now, law enforcement. Yes you cannot guarantee the return of funds at present however insurance and insured wallets will be available and in some cases already are. Also security in the area is improving significantly all the time.

Western union make about $200 million a year in profits. So it is making a good profit. But transaction fees are high because the infrastructure needed to send payments internationally is extremely entice to build. Or it was before bitcoin came along. People forget that bitcoin is as much about the Blockchain technology as it is the currency. It is the Blockchain that makes transaction fees low and it is one of the primary reasons that bitcoin will "kill it" in the end.
I believe the strategy of FedEx (and indeed other major shipping companies) is to ‘get inside’ the companies they serve and help with various sorts of logistics and processes. They don’t just want to be on the outside carrying your packages to-​and-​fro. IT services would be a natural extension of such a strategy.
Although he miscalculated the cost here, the general point is somewhat valid I think. There's always going to be a trade-off between security and convenience / productivity / revenue / values / etc. And it's a good thing to think about that trade-off, because not thinking about the trade-off justifies things like mandatory strip searches of everyone boarding a plane (because terrorism!).

The bigger issue (which I think you're getting at) is whether this trade-off accurately accounts for externalities. Even if a security vulnerability only costs Sony $1 million, it could cost their customers, credit card companies, and any number of third parties a lot more than that.
This article was a great summarization of the problems we face in our startup.

We actually haven't yet built a smartphone app, even though our customers have asked for it, simply because we don't know a good way to solve these problems.

Do you take the money and build the app anyway, or come back to them with a new and very different solution to what they asked for?

Take this problem, and apply it to an entire building of office tenants, and you can see why this is valuable to them. But it's one thing for us to create a product and make the sale. It's more important to me that they actually use what we sell them.
I have a really great UX for controlling lighting in my home. So simple my 2 year old understood it when she was just 12 months.

Maybe it's top secret, worthy of some serious VC. But you can probably guess what it is :-)

Now smart phones - she gets those too but she finds it so annoying. Adverts on youtube serve to cause confusion. That action bar on the Android is annoying. She says 'waaah' when the screen is locked. Etc.
A few of the code modules that mention Hamilton:

Artemis072/ASSEMBLY_AND_OPERATION_INFORMATION.agc

https://code.google.com/p/virtualagc/source/browse/trunk/Art...

Artemis072/SERVICER207.agc

https://code.google.com/p/virtualagc/source/browse/trunk/Art...

Comanche055/CONTRACT_AND_APPROVALS.agc

https://code.google.com/p/virtualagc/source/browse/trunk/Com...

---

An overview of the code:

http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Colossus.html