skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another one: Any time an agency of the government collects a fine to deter bad behavior, the money must be given to another agency that is significantly removed from the decision making process that sets the fine, or to charity. Likewise for seized goods, etc. If the county police department starts writing more tickets for rolling stops, the money just ends up with the parks department. (Obviously it is possible in principle for different agencies to collude, but the same can be said about all checks and balances. The point is to make coordinating the collusion difficult/dangerous.)

People can complain all they want about individual instances of civil forfeiture or predatory red-light cameras, but those sorts of issues are all caused by the incentives induced when the agency that enacts the fine benefits from the money collected.

(This does not apply to the separate penalties/restitution used to compensate victims, pay for fixing actual damage, etc..)

If some agencies are currently dependent on revenue through fines, then this requires a one-time adjustment to their budget. But this is good as it just means that the cost of running their agencies becomes more transparent.
Not everyone has the same taste in humor as you.
No need to be eloquent!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ding-Dong!_The_Witch_Is_Dead#De...
So much wrong.

- Regarding missing values, if you have a special number in your survey to indicate it, then preprocess your data to replace it with an NA.

- Regarding 80 bit doubles. Adding a few bits of precision may be just all you need in some cases, but that's a crap shoot. If you have catastrophic cancellation, then rewrite your algorithm to avoid the numerical instability. Use compensated sums for instance, or work in log-space. There are many ways to solve this problems in a much more robust way than adding more precision.

- Plenty of algorithms can handle missingness. You can treat them as hidden variables and use something like the EM algorithm or MCMC sampling.
The average longevity of a Kerberos ticket makes it the perfect example for this attack vector, actually.

Are you familiar with something other than NTP as a time source for devices without CMOS? I have a project that desperately needs crypto without a clock.
Yeah, the DPRK actually sank a ROK naval vessel a while ago, and shelled an island, but obviously an InfoSec/Hacker related issue will cause war to break out!
The article seems pretty US focused. There are a lot of countries out there that are less police dominated that could be used as examples. In the UK where I am the policing is fairly light. It would be hard to say society is dominated by it outside a few bad areas where gangs stab each other so the police have to intervene. I was last stopped by the police about 20 years ago for driving 130mph in a 70 limit and let off with a warning.
What Happens If Tor Directory Authorities Are Siezed?
Has anyone had issues upgrading? Alot of our tests that check a value from a the session are failing; haven't been able to figure out why so far.
> If you're going to refactor, don't refactor in the direction of new. Refactor in the direction of coherency.

1000x times this. And making things coherent will make it a lot easier to put the new hotness in too. Add in the new hotness only when you can do it in a coherent way. If you can't do it in a coherent way, you might need to refactor until you can get there.

You might never get there in a legacy codebase, but if everyone took this attitude from the start, you might be less likely to end up there.

You can put new things in and change architecture, but you always have to do so coherently -- which does mean you can put in fewer new things, and sometimes not the new things you want to put in as soon as you want to put them in.

And oh, yes, so very much: "don't treat organizational problems as technical ones." Without understanding the organizational disfunction at the root of your technical issues (it's almost always there), you're doomed. Of course, then you've got to figure out what to do about the organizational problems (or how to operate succesfully in their shadow), which is not what you find the most fun part of your job, but that's how it is.
Nixon invented the freaking Southern Strategy. I think noting "polarization" in HST's polemic is missing the forest for the trees a bit.
I've always thought one of the biggest weaknesses of Tor was that it did rely on a central authority. BitTorrent moved from a centralised tracker model to a decentralised DHT, so I'm quite sure it's theoretically possible. In the worst case, I think a DHT could be used as a routing layer, storing and retrieving encrypted packets in it, and achieve a similar anonymity effect... of course the latencies are going to be horrible, so it might be better to just use it as a way to setup multihop tunnels.
Common consensus today appears to paint Kissinger as the driving force and genius behind the Nixon administration's foreign policy success. I think Thompson expresses this quite well:

> Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure. Nixon was one of those, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.

Whether this is an accurate depiction I have no idea. But if it is, then Nixon seems to deserve credit mainly for getting out of the way.
This is again one of those very interesting distinctions from a legal prospective. Under the War on Terror the US has taken the legal position that it is lawful Use of Force to go into any country where enemy combatants may be (US has openly used drone strikes in countries who are not state sponsors of terror; one example is US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki killed in Yemen). There are some distinctions #1 Anwar al-Awlaki was a non-state actors and #2 politically/militarily China v Yemen.

Maybe even more interestingly, if the Cyberattacks were not N.Koreans, or if in the future they come from non-state actors (terrorists in the US, terrorists abroad, some 15 year old kid) would the US justify the same response as what we are planning now?

Even more basically, what exactly about this attack justifies the Use of Force? If it is what they did? If so, what exactly is it they did that justifies Use of Force? Is it a moral argument that they encroached my and your liberty to see a Seth Rogan movie? Is it because it is Sony? (would the US still react with the Use of Force if North Korea attacked a US porn website)? I guess these are all issues for the UN to decide and vote on through the security council and the resolutions will be adopted to define these things for the future.
Which makes it hard to upgrade the language .. especially if you change the C interface at the same time as you change the language.
If this turns out to be (1) real and (2) linked to the Sony fiasco, then North Korea has triumphed. They have taken down two enemies in a single hack: a film and an internet technology. That puts them ahead of the MPAA and the NSA combined.
> But am I the only one who gets a sort of pit in their stomach every time they hear about a new Rails version?

Welcome to modern software. I'm not on the Rails treadmill, but arbitrary breakage every month/quarter/year, possibly enforced by a hard-to-disable automatic update system, seems to be the new normal. Heaven help you if you write or use software that depends on "modern" software.
Is this how Sony recruits security professionals? A pirate party??
DJ could use a update to be fully Rails 4.2 compatible. I'd love a PR for that and would merge.

https://github.com/tobi/delayed_job
Ask HN: Which services would you pay a little for?
The best way to start something is to scratch your own itch, the 2nd best way is to ask what the users want. So what do you wish exist so you can pay for and solve your problems? Otherwise, which service you're using that you wish for alternatives?
Documenting the first 90 days of my startup
>He wound down the Vietnam War

After getting Kissinger to prolong it by getting the South Vietnamese to torpedo the peace talks, causing the deaths of tens of thousands, simply in order to get elected.[1]

>a rapprochement with China that served to split the PRC/Soviet Union alliance.

The relationship was broken long before rapprochement. Nixon/Kissinger took advantage of the split; they didn't cause it.

As an aside, I'm currently reading Kissinger's World Order. It's a fascinating read by a man who was undeniably a giant of a statesman, despite his many flaws.

[1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nixon-prolonged-vie...
Structured data for effectiveness is on our radar! It's a bigger project than you'd think. Thanks for the comment.
There is very little all programmers should be required to have in common. The field is just that big now.

9 times out of 10 a list like this includes a treatise on floating point number representation, which while useful, probably isn't of utmost importance in the 21st century, but hey, at one time folks thought that was required for 'all programmers' to read. At least this list does seem more up to date and relevant.

I just wish we'd stop with 'all X should' titles. Its demeaning and inaccurate.
You're misunderstanding the attack vector. The exploit is about precisely controlling the delta between a client and server.

There is no problem with using low-resolution time signatures as a cryptographic seed. Using time as an entropy source is only a problem if you sample at a lower resolution than your clock's error rate.
PURE SEXY GAL ,MERRY XMAS
I need to work harder at mapping out our code to understand it as you say. I keep telling myself every codebase is different and none are perfect, but it is so nice to work in fresh or at least clean code.

My project is about 200KLOC C# 2.0; we have a single .cs file 13,000+ lines long and no, it's not generated. We have a single method 900+ lines long in our DAL containing 23 separate hand coded SQL queries and no, it is not a report. Our codebase contains exactly 14 unit tests. 10 of which were written by me. Your prayers are welcome.
Ah, the Gettier case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem
Placed 100 – Popular Businesses Based on Visitors
Debian Jessie: Release Critical Bugs Report for Week 51
From the openntpd.org site at http://www.openntpd.org/goals.html:

Reach a reasonable accuracy. We are not after the last microseconds.

Whereas NTP looks for maximum accuracy.
I can't say as a PhD, but I started my current company as a senior in college. I spent two years working on it as a side project (including building the alpha and talking to users), then jumped the bridge as soon as I was able.

In short, my grades suffered. But school as a whole is less important to me- I am doing what I wanted to after school, just a bit sooner.

If you want to start a company during your PhD, be prepared to give in one way or the other. Wrap up your PhD with as little work as possible and as quickly as possible. Bonus points for aligning your PhD work with your startup work, but be careful about allowing the school to make claims on the startup. If you choose the PhD over the startup, maybe don't go full startup yet but begin quietly building the product and talking to people in your free time. Then launch and grow as soon as your PhD is done.
And the recent pilot-wave experiments. Determinism not dead yet...
It seems to me like the designers really couldn't make up their minds.

Do you want GC or not?
Do you want lightweight threads or not?
What level of runtime requirements do you want?

Its finally converging on something sane, but its taken a while.
> I will confess - I've never read a complete Hunter S Thompson piece before.

He's very hit-and-miss, but try "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" for Thompson at his most coherent. It's not black-and-white, but mostly a colorful character study of the 1968 Presidential candidates.
For a more balanced account, see e.g. this one I got off of Wikipedia: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/us/21bishop.html which details a long history of violent tendencies and likely real violence, note the restaurant assault. A bit from the beginning:

"Over the years, Dr. Bishop had shown evidence that the smallest of slights could set off a disproportionate and occasionally violent reaction, according to numerous interviews with colleagues and others who know her."

A tragic past, alright, but one she created, enabled by the sort of corruption and softness on crime Massachusetts is well known for (e.g. she was sentenced to probation for the restaurant assault, but wasn't technically "convicted" of a crime).

And a technical note, pump shotguns don't "go off" more than once without "pumping", moving the forearm back to eject a shell (and that's one way to unload them, granted, you have to hit a switch if you haven't just fired it), and forward to put in a new shell. Which she did twice: after she went outside and attempted a carjacking, the gun was found with a shell in the chamber.
Typically, the community downvotes comments that don't add to the discussion.
Machine Learning is a fast moving field, and many papers are incremental
improvements, so an always up-to-date list will be unlikely. None the
less, there are quite a few lists out there if you look. Here are some
I've seen posted recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8728112

http://deeplearning.stanford.edu/wiki/index.php/UFLDL_Recomm...

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/deeprefs.html

http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.7828
Spike Bird breaks the AppStore
Ok, it just doesn't seem like you've got a good handle on what UG is.
The reason Nixon will up for a re-assessment is because of the record of the more recent office holders. I don't think Nixon would have thought it was ok to authorize torture.
Go check out the new app hit in the AppStore it is in the AppStore and is really fun and addicting to play https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spike-bird/id945534654?mt=8 it's the new flappy bird
Sony considering a digital release of the Interview
Can you define "what you need to do"?

For instance, if I want to download/parse an html webpage or make some sort of web crawler or bot, why would I need unsafe?
I agree with this: "well, its my body" but not with this: "I don't find it moral to prevent somebody from doing something today, because $HYPOTHETICAL_BAD_THING might happen tomorrow"

You do realize that in many, many countries, you can buy antibiotics over the counter, right? Nearby countries like Mexico, and far away countries like India (with a huge population)? And that people are buying them and using them constantly?

Sure, there's the risk of antibiotic resistant bacteria developing, but the U.S. isn't going to stop that from happening no matter how difficult they make it for people to buy and use the drugs they need.

I'm starting to lose patience with people trying to take away the right of other people to control their own body.

And it's not just antibiotics. Things like prescription drugs being essentially purposefully laced with poison (acetaminophen) to prevent people from "abusing" them and other drugs like cannabis being illegal is utterly ridiculous.

If we don't own our own bodies, what do we get to own?
Ah, so you need them for a trusted calculation, rather than for a trusted static file. The latter would be easy to sign and store on a CDN.
Seems like an easily overlooked and underestimated sector of the world. Most software and tech development happens in cities and away from rural areas and farm-towns. And agriculture doesn't exactly have a reputation for easy profits. There's probably a lot of opportunity for tech and software developers that understand the needs and challenges of the industry.
Flagged because your title "<your app> breaks the AppStore" is click-bait.
NASA Emailed a Wrench to the International Space Station
The antialiased text and raster images are kind of killing the illusion. I feel like they got the look of the guy reasonably 8-bit looking, in sort of a Maniac Mansion way. SVG images probably would have looked a lot better here though.
Floating point behavior still represents a significant portion of new questions asked on stack overflow. I'd say it's still very relevant.
I just started learning Rails and haven't deployed yet, but the thought of upgrading after deploying a project scares me a lot.
Related mailing list post: http://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/luajit-language-toolkit...

"For those who doesn't know about the project, the LuaJIT Language Toolkit is an implementation of the Lua programming language written in Lua iself. It works by generating a LuaJIT's bytecode including the debug informations and use the LuaJIT's virtual machine to run the generated bytecode."
I'm not necessarily "anti-police" but I do agree that treating "criminal" behavior as a mental health issue rather than one to be handled by punitive measures is the best way forward.
Instead of w3-mode, I always thought someone should combine Emacs with a web layout engine.
Sorry there are no shortcuts. Study as hard as you can and spend as many hours you can practicing programming. Then in a few years you'll be able to productively work with other developers.
example:

nWords = liftM (train . lowerWords . B.unpack) (B.readFile "big.txt")

There was recently a very good article[0] about practically using monads that mentioned using liftM.

However whenever using a functor instance is possible it's probably better, since functors can't do as much as monads. I'm not quite sure how much this would help/apply to this small example though.

0: http://softwaresimply.blogspot.com/2014/12/ltmt-part-3-monad...
I think not many people would oppose that statement. Where opinions differ is whether one or the other sex is given an advantage in a particular subject/area of life.
awesome read. This would have satisfied my curiosity and probably saved me an entire day of messing around. Thanks.
Not true at all. web2py is infinitely more capable than rails and has been compatible in all releases since 1.0, over 7 years ago.
And questioning that, pointing out flaws and questioning methodology, is all science, too.

It's just convenient that Everett had the only 'in' with the community and so is the de facto expert. Once the data source is available, we'll know more.
Eight out of ten are about programming languages, and strong on the functional side to boot. It's not that these topics aren't important, or that they're not great papers, but isn't that a bit too heavily skewed toward one area? Shouldn't at least one of those top ten be more directly about security, or performance, or some other kind of idea rather than the notation we use to express ideas?

Yeah, I know, make your own list. Maybe I will. Nonetheless, the author specifically mentions "cover a wide-range of topics" as a goal and this list fails to meet that goal.
how do you find out your hangout number so that people can call you at that number?
No need to "imagine" it. Just come to Europe. I can recommend either the UK or Slovenia based on personal experience, cops are completely domesticated. Portugal, Germany or Netherlands if you want decriminalization. Switzerland for direct democracy. Most EU countries for treating the mentally ill.
Very similar brainstorming from 2 weeks ago led to a couple cool ideas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8721379. Of course that shouldn't keep anybody from adding more ideas here.
There are a few differences #1 here the UN Security Council will pass a resolution authorizing the US's Use of Force; #2 we do not yet know the response (I included an option of taking down the regime, but that was actually on the high end); #3 with a UN resolution here we will learn what triggers the right to respond; specifically, I have a feeling the focus will be a lot more on the technology side of things rather than due to the economic nature as you indicate was the cause of the Guatemala coup de tat. Other interesting questions would arise if the Sony hackers were not North Koreans but non-state actors.
UG is different to different people, and has been different in different ages. Someone into OT might conceive of universal constraints or rankings as being 'UG', whereas x bar era sybtacticians etc might have another view. Feel free to engage in a discussion if you feel like it, but if not thanks anyway - your criticism, such as it is, is noted. I'll try and make time to catch up on some more reading.
Elsevier retracting 16 papers for faked peer review
I think you're probably overestimating the portability of IP addresses, and underestimating the coercive power of the organization that does the seize.

IP addresses are assigned to a network provider, not a customer. If I'm hosted by a US provider and the FBI seizes my server, is that provider going to say "sure, just spin up a new box on the old IP", or are they going to tell me to get off their network? What if the FBI has an opinion on which decision the provider should take? What if the FBI has an opinion on which action the directory operator should take?
I guess you are underestimating just how terrible internal combustion engines are and overestimating charging + driving losses.

Consider that hybrids or HEVs can improve substantially on the efficiency of just a pure ICE. I guess the problem with using an ICE for driving directly is that you are often forced to run it at RPMs and states where it is nowhere near that hypothetical 30% efficiency, simply to get the acceleration the user demands.
The Federal Rail Authority ALREADY requires priority for passenger traffic. It's just not doable due to congestion from freight.

The current rail system is already being used optimally for freight. We need a separate right of way, with modern, HSR ready stock and pantograph ready lines for passenger traffic only. Good luck trying to make that happen!
"X all Y should" is a clickbait title prohibited by HN.
No one should be clocking any underpaid overtime no matter what, that's just crazy talk. I'd rather take the legacy code than deal with that.
This should be re-done with up to date versions of all programs. The authors mention having opened bug reports/existing known bugs. All contestants should have time to react to those, shouldn't they?
UndoManager is an unusual and welcome addition to such libs. Codebase as a whole looks pretty darn clean.
Spend a lot of time reading technical material, and be active on Twitter and other places were engineers hang out. Watching videos also helps. There's a lot of JS/Rails/Python stuff on YouTube etc...
> There is very little all programmers should be required to have in common.

We don't need to say "all must know X things" in order to convey a notion of a well-rounded programmer. Of course we don't have to agree. Still, generally speaking, I think the bare minimum is this: the ability to solve your problems with the languages and tools you know in a reasonable amount of time.

But that doesn't say much, so any list needs to get more specific:

* ability to use your tools
* ability to decompose a problem
* ability to debug a problem
* ability to communicate intent via code
* ability to communicate intent via language
(MDG-er here) On #2, I think you may enjoy browsing https://www.meteor.com/projects. :-) Lots of meaty technical detail on the different subprojects that make up the Meteor stack.
They pointedly didn't mention China in their list of repressive regimes: "Iran, Syria, and Russia".

I think for most people, China is the first country that comes to mind when you think about internet censorship. But my experience is that it is impossible to connect to Tor there. Maybe they are acknowledging that tacitly.

Or maybe they were trying to make the blog post more palatable to US government readers, since Iran, Syria, and Russia are currently bad guys, while things with China are supposed to be fine.
FCC proposes rule change that could kickstart Internet TV
And Scala (a global leader in digital signage software) started out in 1987 on Amiga and only moved to PC in 1996 when Commodore went bankrupt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scala,_Inc