skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Guido's response, which is entirely unprovoked and rude (given that it is for a small volunteer effort, that has already achieved something admirable, doesn't ask anything from him, and doesn't harm his CPython in any way), seems to me worse than anything I've read from Linus (who's just a dog that barks but doesn't bite, and just uses the insults for emphasis).

This is pure condescending tone...
Ask HN: Advice for online cs degrees
I'm new in the industry and am loving it. I mostly do marketing work but can write some code and build rails apps. I've been taking classes on Udacity and am working on a fun final project (building a distributed python crawler and analyzing web data) and that should really help me learn a lot! I want to dive deeper into coding and improve.

The reason I want to get a degree is:
1) I sometimes lack structure/direction in my self teaching and would like more guidance.
2) I know that I lack some fundamental knowledge of cs and want to fill that.
3) A bit of self gratification.

I understand the usual advice of "If you really want to learn just start building" and am working in that direction, I just need a boost. So does anyone have advice on good programs to take? Also (revealing my ignorance) what is the difference between a CS and IT degree?

Thanks for any advice you guys give. I really appreciate it :)
Lessons from the Sony Hack
No, according to that article, the FDA can only (or only does) ban specific manufacturing facilities. So in Ranbuxy's case, even though it's clear the entire company is totally and utterly corrupt, with contempt for users and disregard for any semblance of proper engineering, they only got a few of their facilities closed. The fact that they were bought by Sun Pharma discredits that entire set of companies.

It's simply not possible to see how such a company can be redeemed; it's rotten to the core.
Sure thing.

The subtle difference (not well articulated by me, I suppose) is that in one case, you are given the go ahead to go and rewrite everything to conform to, say, an interface spec or API or whatever. This year's implementation or architecture may be scrapped, but then you get a cleanish slate.

In the latter case, what's happening is you are usually building an adapter over something that exists, instead of throwing it away completely. What then happens is that there is a lot of stress involved ("Is this wrapping correctly?", "Does this still do what it used to?", "Have my tests covered all the use cases?", "Wait, fuck, this original thing never even had tests...so aren't my tests are kind of pissing in the wind?", etc.) and then inevitably the push is to fix the fixes, and then fix the fixes' fixes, and so on.

And sometimes that's unavoidable (maybe the legacy code is, oh I don't know, numerical simulation of a heat-exchanger in Fortan77 that was cutting edge and now the original author is quite dead and buried). But, the painful thing (as mentioned) is when the person in charge even admits that the whole thing will be rewritten anyways.

In that case, why the fuck is the rewrite being put off? It signals a lack of faith in the development team, and a lack of prior planning to deal with downtime or other issues coming up.
Huh, I can't believe there haven't been _any_ replies on this. Sorry about that.

Here are a few ideas:

* Improve/extend the shoutcast server in Joe's book "Programming Erlang" (1st edition; I haven't read the 2nd edition)

* Make a simple dropbox tool to sync folders across machines

* Make a simple map/reduce tool to learn about that paradigm

* Build a chat server with web interface (this one is fairly common)

* Interested in VOIP? Try making something that can allow you to make VOIP calls between computers in your house

* Build a web server (also common enough to find lots of examples and tutorials)

* Twitter clone

* Log aggregator

* BitTorrent client

* Distributed hash table or NoSQL database

* Something to stream data (logs, newsfeeds, analytics) to or from multiple clients

* ....

I hope this helps :)

[ Edit: formatting is really hard on HN... :( ]
Agree in general but remember the case of Ranbaxy? FDA oversight is not uniform and becomes weak outside the US
Ask HN: Why is gmail so unchanging?
Perhaps this is a matter of opinion, but I am intensely frustrated with gmail. Why is it so awkward to use. Why is the task list so un-intuitive? Why is the calendar and task and email so weirdly separated. Why do I have to make a google plus page to send photos through gchat. I have eight of these things now.

Assuming these things frustrate people as much as they frustrate me; which, admittedly, is presumptuous. My real questions are, and my real interest. Why is this happening in Google? Is this something wrong with management. Design focus? Do they not have a way to get good customer feedback? Is this a legacy support problem? How can a main product get so few updates and be so uninspiring? Is having good design and good UI unimportant after a product become large enough? How do you adequately measure the need for change?
It conditions the population against North Korea. Not saying that that's what's happening right now, but it's kind of our MO. We target a specific place for ulterior motives, generate public animosity among our population of morons who couldn't find X country on a map if their lives depended on it, then we put on the squeeze in order to illicit a reaction, and then when a certain action happens we can manufacture into an excuse for military action, we take military action. And then we proclaim how innocent and unwillingly we were dragged into something we had been gunning for even before the last war we were engaged in was over.
I think Asimov gave a good answer in his story last question http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
I know Show HN's are usually reserved for small, personal projects, but I'm pretty excited to finally make EOS SDK public. Essentially this gives you Python and C++ bindings to write apps that hook directly into Arista's networking stack. Also, since EOS is Linux (Fedora), you can use your standard environment and debugging routine during development, then test on an EOS VM (called vEOS), all of which keeps the barrier to getting started a lot lower.

We're still expanding the number of modules that are available, but already we've seen agents ranging from simple event-driven monitoring, to full-blown controller-driven custom routing protocols. It's pretty awesome to see what people can do when you give them a proper interface to the networking stack!
Skepticism is healthy and encourages discussion. I am not observing a "collective refusal" as you put it, but instead a strong skepticism from the tech community (a community who has a good basis to interpret this story with).

Actually, we don't really have a good basis to interpret the story. The evidence that the US government has used to verify that NK was involved is most likely classified. The most straightforward way to verify the NK government's involvement is a high-level NK spy, or a communications tap on NK's political leadership. If it captured a high-level meeting regarding the "progress of the Sony hack," for example, then that would be pretty strong evidence of NK's involvement. Yet there's no way that any press release could include such info without also compromising their sources.

The point of the US government saying "NK is involved" is to say "We have verified NK is involved," not to give hard proof. Such proof may exist, but it may not be possible to divulge without also causing other consequences, as I mentioned above. It's not a trial, and they're under no obligation to present any of their core evidence or reasoning. It's up to us whether we choose to believe them or not.

The tech community sometimes overestimates how informed it is. For example, consider how someone would be viewed by the tech community if they claimed that governments were writing BIOS malware, and they made that claim before 2013.

So it seems mistaken to believe that the tech community is any better suited to interpret the story than any other community. Various intelligence communities or politics communities might even be better suited than we are at figuring out reasons why the story shouldn't be taken at face value, if any such reasons even exist.
Most people value education because it's a path towards a better job, which is in tern a path towards getting X, screwing X, and living in X. Further, education does not equal intelligence.
The web page looks like a marketing scam ... At least show me a presentation or developing video.
Right, that makes sense. It's so hard to keep track of all the etiquette among the various posting sites like Reddit, HN, and such. Makes my head spin.
I get offended by plenty of things outside my direct sphere of influence, that aren't my problem. Most of them, I can't do anything about. But it's still upsetting.
I'll take the converse argument - there might be more to intelligence than being human (of course, it would be hard for us as "thinking meat" to recognize it). What if the full range of emotions and sensations could be a superset of what humans can actually experience?

It could very well be that we wouldn't even know that kind of intelligence exists - perhaps we're the ones crawling around in the ant farm?
Changed jobs 3 times, including a return to the 1st job of the year. Added 30% to my annual salary in the process.

Wrote a massive iOS Application (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/zonas-find-explore-connect/i...)

Attended WWDC for the first time, and in doing so, finally met a friend of mine whom I've only ever known as a screen name.

Completed my first major freelance project. (First 5-digit invoice.)
Cheap Sun Holidays – Best Selection
Maybe because they are making a new product:

http://www.google.com/inbox/
Perhaps I was mistaken, but I thought this was sort a necessary revelation when learning about QM. It's been years since I took Atomic Physics, so perhaps this is something much ... deeper?

Was it a serious idea that upon measurement the particle literally lost it's wave properties? Like, there were actually two separate approaches to the math? I know we made some efforts to simplify in class, approximating as particles and such due to the drastically simplified math, but we all knew that was happening; the professor was reasonably explicit about it. EDIT: As in, I remember us going over the evolution of a waveform, and how boundaries affect the solutions, and how uncertainty causes the particles to have field distributions that just happen to be the wave solution of the particle.

I'm completely serious about being confused here: QM is super easy to misunderstand, and I'd love to feel the eureka this article is trying to convey.
And, 100x cheaper, if taking consideration of free cloud offerings.

These profound factors keep me working everyday, although I haven't made my millions yet. There was an article about Nokia or Ericsson around early 2000, saying that people tend to overestimate the impact of technology in short term but underestimate in long run. It's the case.
I get so much love from customers when I email them a few days ahead of the renewal and let them know that they're over quota, that I didn't want them to be surprised by the CC bill, and give them an opportunity to pare back down if they want to.

This is one of those areas where "being a good person" is a competitive advantage and drives lots of retention. Plus, after a couple months of this, they'll all upgrade anyway as paring down gets harder and more time-consuming.
How are you doing physically?

Your description resonates with me - physical exercise (a lot of it - back then, it was running 5-10Km 4-5 times a week, in addition to other gym visits and martial arts practice) seemed to be the cure. (Or, it was just coincidence ... who knows).

And I wasn't a sporty person back then, by a long shot - before I took that up (around age 20), I couldn't finish a 2Km run to save my life.
Why do they keep announcing Meteor.js as if it's something new. It came out 2 years ago.

Oh I know why, because it has major funding and they have some marketing blitz going on right now beating into people's mind that Meteor is great/grand.
The point I was making is that considering the huge upside, merely double the cost of a traditional highway seems like a very reasonable price.
You need encrypted time sync when you don't have a local trusted source, and to reduce your susceptibility to to pseudo MITM attacks (though, having just said that, you're right - UTC isn't a secret, so an attacker could just use that. However, and I'm not sure the answer, the key may be in how much information is leaked to the NTP server on current clock drift state. That being said, I'm fairly sure Kerberos etc don't require millisecond level time sync...)
Startups fighting over the word 'zen'
random is just a word for too complex to compute/understand
Its worth reading. It talks about her writing style and history given her chronic fatigue. It also does a nice job of bringing in other voices to give short passages about aspects of her writing process and how she influenced others. It is more bittersweet than a "success" story and is written by a book author.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_wavefunction
The much bigger issue is with hardware that doesn't have a local clock/battery. Critical initialization code should probably compare uptime with current epoch time if it needs a random seed for a long-use token.
Looks like typical impulsive defensiveness, doesn't portray him well as a person
Pretty persistent attacker. It should take something like 100 days to push the clock off by one day.
This also has implications for what spacecraft would be like for such an intelligence. It's very challenging to build rockets and spacecraft for squishy humans (careful with those G-forces) that require air to breathe, space to move around, food, water, toilets...

On the other hand, if you assume that strong AI can exist in a package at least as small as the human brain but without only a dependence on electricity instead of all the physical constraints mentioned above, your spacecraft could look much much smaller. If you give such a civilization 1000 years to iterate on the technology (an insignificant amount of time compared to the timescales involved in evolution), there's no good reason to think they wouldn't be able to shrink the computing technology (and therefore spacecraft technology) by several orders of magnitude. Consider the size difference and computing capacities of our earliest computers and smartwatches today--and we did that in less than 100 years.

The benefits are pretty obvious: it would require vastly fewer resources to travel to other stars, and any intelligence on board the spacecraft would be immortal (plus if it got "bored" on the way, it could power itself down and schedule itself to start up again once it got to where it was going). The stars seem out of reach to us because of the limitations of our lifespans and our bodies, but they would be entirely within the reach of AI. And from the perspective of conserving resources, there would be no reason to send something anywhere near the size of a human being.
I'm actually curious about this too - I've had pretty great success with zinc lozenges, but was off-put by this. Although the study is for some very specific intranasal products from a specific brand, I think.

edit: Link to original study:
http://archotol.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=49648...

It talks about "homeopathic zinc gluconate gel" and some patients reported a burning sensation while applying it.
Ah, gotcha. Ok, in that case, I'll admit - when I was busy learning it, I felt hopeless quite often! It was not until I got visuals in my mind (see my post on that, linked in my previous comment) that my curiosity was piqued.

Being lazy, meh, I'm also lazy. I just noticed that the brain continues to teach itself the dvorak layout after you stop practicing (for the day/week). That made it feel like I was just feeding it the right instructions, and that took almost all of the stress from my experience and it made me patient.

15 years later I can say, it was worth the frustration those first three weeks. :)
Hah! I live in a pineapple under the sea apparently.
AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition: Now Shipping to Dealers
>Have you audited that compiler's source and building the compiler from it with a known good compiler? Are you inspecting the resulting .pyc, and in this case, the resulting PEs? It's a super easy way to inject a compromise into a package that will probably get widely distributed.

Because nobody is that paranoid?
Brian Krebs has just posted his analysis of the incident and the FBI's response: http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/12/fbi-north-korea-to-blame-...
I don't think I need to control your clock when I can just look at my watch and know what your clock says. Why do things the hard way?
Surely you jest. Let me skip the well regulated, well-tested, reliable, precisely dosed, quality controlled and impurities-removed, time-released (if you so desire), mass-market product in favor of a plant that I have to take care of, and cross my fingers when the time comes that it delivers what I need, without potentially dangerous impurities, in the proper dosage and assume that it will be safer?

It would be like ripping out the perfectly functional seatbelt in my car and replacing it with a home-made duct-tape based mechanism for reduced side effects.
The absence of recursion would not actually "refute Chomsky" (whatever the hell that means; it's not like Chomsky only has one angle). "Universal grammar" just means "whatever linguists think all human languages have in common", it would just mean that clausal recursion is not one of these things.
I'm no theoretical physicist, but I thought wave-particle duality was solved a long time ago by quantum field theory. Feynman, for instance, was able to formulate electromagnetism fully in terms of particles, using his path integral formulation. Since this formulation computes probability amplitudes, it seems to fit well with the uncertainty principle. This approach gave rise to QED, the most accurate physical theory ever developed.

In other words, without more detail, and not being a physicist myself, I can't tell what's actually new here.
Seems like it would be much easier to just install a solar-powered charger at work.
A), ambitious and unrealistic are not mutually exclusive. It was ambitious and unrealistic to attempt a moon landing in under a decade.

B) Again, I believe fantastical implies a rational person would think it highly improbably. I'm a rational person, but so is Elon Musk; what appears fantastical to me appears ambitious to someone with a better understanding of the situation. I suspect this would apply to you, too.
Not knowing what to believe is probably the best thing right now. Everett (the linguist who made the claims) is quite insistent that this is the case, many other linguists are not. It's definitely a big controversy right now, particularly Everett's claim that Piraha does not allow recursion (many linguistic theories, notably Chomsky's, seem to make recursion a pretty fundamental feature of human language). A lot of the arguments are pretty technical, and they're all ham strung by the fact that the Piraha are so remote there isn't a whole lot of research on them besides Everett's, and even he has trouble going back now.

This blog post has a nice set of links about the controversy, and Everett and one of his major critics both appear in the comments to argue, so definitely read those if you are interested:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3857
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8763955
@rezistik: I've been working on a site called The Meteor Chef for the past couple of months and think some of the stuff I've covered will give you a solid idea of Meteor's power. The focus is on implementations of features for Meteor apps in the form of "recipes," so it's much less about _why_ Meteor is cool and more of a demonstration.

http://themeteorchef.com/
So you agree with me that prescription drugs should be permitted to be sold online as long as there are quality controls in place?

EDIT: Because the problem isn't QC (although that's what its disguised as). The problem is that every other first world country has price controls, so pharma rapes the one economy that allows them to, the USA. Region locking DVDs? Hilarious. Region locking life critical drugs? I don't have words for that level of evil and greed.
Nice job for releasing this. However, seems hard to compete with pingdom, who have exponentially more features and integrations and are relatively inexpensive. Kuddos on shipping!
This kind of attack should be difficult, because NTP clients should be configured to ignore large offsets. See the (dangerous) -g option in the ntpd manpage, for example.
"As soon as a civilization invents radio, they’re within fifty years of computers, then, probably, only another fifty to a hundred years from inventing AI,” Shostak said. “At that point, soft, squishy brains become an outdated model.”

While I am inclined to agree with the overall premise here, this sort of thinking strikes me as a bit naive. Technological progress is not teleological, just as evolution is not teleological. (Technological development is not as random as evolution, certainly, but neither is it teleological.) There is no "best" way to develop technology, and there is certainly no predetermined, given course that technological development must inherently follow. Progress is heavily influenced by local circumstances, context, goals, and constraints. Even in studying human history, you encounter certain civilizations (the Mayans, for example, or the Greeks) who had remarkably "advanced" technologies in some domains, and the complete absence of expected technologies in other domains.

Instead, we should be talking about probabilities and correlations. The development of radio technology seems inherently linked to an understanding of the properties of electromagnetic radiation. We can probably assume that with some confidence. From there, what other technologies seem likely to be correlated to that knowledge, and with what degree of confidence? Etc.
What would the ulterior motive be for taking on the cost of a war against NK? They have little to no oil or other super-valuable commodities as far as I know, so there's little financial motive. They're a risk to their neighbors but are not a credible global threat, and they're less likely to attack the U.S. than more dangerous and ideologically fervent enemies like ISIS.

They're more of an annoyance than anything else. The strategy so far seems to have been to wait it out and hope their crazy cult-regime finally collapses. I don't see any reason anyone would want to expedite this unless they thought there was a clear and present danger of NK escalating in both belligerence and power in the near future. I can imagine the former, but not the latter.
Haha, I'll probably take you up on that offer..
<armchair physicist>

I love reading about these things. It seems like information is slowly being raised to the same level as energy and matter (All being different ways to look at the same phenomenon)

The universe does care about preserving information, and there are physical limits on it's propagation and consumption. This is similar to formalizing energy as a concept, which can manifest itself in many different ways (kinetic, potential, radiation, etc) Once we wrapped it up in a concept we were able to reason about it in a more abstract way. The same process is now happening with the concept of information. This is leading to breakthroughs in computing (ML, pattern recognition, etc) and physics. I am excited for the future of information theory.

</armchair physicist>
I'm pretty sure you're wrong. Mind citing a source on that the connection should terminate?

I'm fairly certain that the connection stays alive and that SSHd doesn't need to care about this, all handled on OS-level.
That's why if you change IP or something like that, it doesn't "reattach" as you call it.