skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
MIT Computer Scientists Demonstrate the Hard Way That Gender Still Matters
I really like the idea, that it compiles Python but is (99,9%) compatible to CPython -- since so you can still use the many C extensions (I don't want to do my projects any more without my own Python extensions written in C).
awesome! here's the story behind it in case you're interested: https://medium.com/@jibly/how-producthunt-helped-me-go-from-...
Until someone breaks into a company via a personal mobile device and steals a whole bunch of data, and now companies are liable for security faults on mobile devices they don't have any control over. Oh, wait ...

Anytime someone asks me to use their personal whatever to do "work" my reply is twofold: "Okay, 1) the company now gets to scan and archive everything on your personal device--please do make sure that there are no naked pictures, including those of you, your partner or your children taking baths, etc. or we will have to fire you and likely report you to the police and 2) the service you are requesting will be promoted to a public facing service and will be available outside the firewall with our standard security features--I will take that up with the CxO levels."

1) generally stops people cold and it should.

Generally you get "You can DO that?" followed by an "Ummmmmmmmm..." as they think about what is on their phone. I don't want to scan your personal device. I don't want to know what you do, really. Please, spare me. I was an email admin in the early days of the Internet; I didn't want to see it then, and I certainly don't want to see it now.

2) this causes an actual discussion about need and risk.

This is going to be outside and is a security hazard; how much risk is really involved? Do we really need this service available to multiple people, or is this a one-off request? I'm not even averse to a one-off, but I'll keep an eye on it (I always have sunset deadlines for outside services if I can). If, after say 6 months, it's still just one person using it, it's probably going to get shut back down.

I understand that firewalls aren't magic. I try to harden things inside the firewall to the same levels as outside. However, work needs to get done, people take shortcuts, etc. "Secure" is not absolute--my goal is to try to align the risks with the benefits while only being about 1/2 an asshole about it.

Sorry, but if I'm always nice, nobody listens. :)
Exactly. I recently wanted to build a task tracking app for the company I work at. I initially decided on writing it in Python as a server-based app (Flask + SQLAlchemy) since I am familiar with it. Once I found out how damn difficult it is for end users to actually deploy the app, I opted for node-webkit (Backbone.js + nedb) instead. I definitely have no regrets.
80-bit floats are just annoying and non-portable, and doesn't even help in the case mentioned. But double-double representation is nice and portable.

Also, if you need 200 significant digits, you're probably doing something wrong...
Lots of great memories with the Amiga. It was my first computer. I remember the day my dad had told me he was selling my Amiga for a PC. I had cried and told him not to do it. I had maybe a dozen drawers filled with floppy disks mostly of games. It lasted maybe for another year before I gave in for a PC. Can't remember what year that was but I know I had about two or three Amiga's and at least two in the house always.
Show HN: Happy Holidays from Clari
Why is the project relying on boost::random, instead of using std::random? Is there a specifically reason for such a choice?
Did Google started this document when the leak was revealed only a week ago?

The number of cases cited in the Table of Authorities [1] is impressive! Do Google's lawyers have some sort of Google Lawsuit search engine to find the relevant cases?

[1] https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2746012/G...
It's not "CS knowledge" that causes tech fashion to change over time. CS knowledge hasn't actually changed very much in the last 30 years. The people that designed SQL knew all about the advantages and tradeoffs of "NoSQL" key-value stores. The impedance mismatch of ORM Object-SQL systems has been studied for decades.

If anything changes it's the engineering "best practices", like unit testing methodologies. But mostly it's just fashion, and who has the biggest platforms and marketing budgets for pushing their framework.

Software development as a field sucks, no one really knows what they're doing. We're all just figuring it out as we go along.

As he says in the article: "We think that the current shiny best way is the end of history; that it will never be superseded or seen to be suspect with hindsight."
I recently ended up rewriting large parts of a python project in common-lisp due to this exact issue; in this case it was one stage of a pipeline that I prototyped with an existing python library that could output to xml, but delivery of python applications on windows is painful.
Ironically in countries unfriendly to privacy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosures...
> I'd call it one to two decades away. There are some major substantial problems remaining to research

Hopefully including what to do with the humans still dependent on the labor market that would immediately collapse on availability of that kind of AI.
> Learning that the uncertainty principle gives rise to phenomena that popular science calls "wave-particle" duality was taught to me in quantum 101.

Agreed, just to expand on that: The hand-wavey relationship between wave-particle duality and the uncertainty principle was taught to me like this...

Imagine you have a sine wave. It has a well-defined momentum, p, given by its wavelength. However, since it's infinitely periodic in space, it has no well-defined position, x.

Now consider a wave-packet[1]. This has a very well-defined position, given by the centre of the packet, but no well-defined wavelength/momentum.

These are the limiting cases. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, ΔpΔx >= ħ/2, just quantifies this relationship. If you try and measure x, the wavefunction ends up more 'packet-like' and you can no longer measure p as well, and if you try and measure p, the wavefunction ends up more 'wave-like' and you can no longer measure x as well. That's all there is to it.

It's not exactly rigorous, but I don't think this explanation is too misleading either (though I'd be happy to learn otherwise!).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_packet
I think that depends on what you call 'meaning'. Is meaning an intuitive, instinctive representation of something?

What I mean is, for every word that exists, do those words trace back to a reality origin through a pattern of substitutions? Substitutions of symbol to reality are really just an associative relation. Substitutions between symbol to symbol are functionally operative the same way in which a substitution between reality and symbol works.

So then my question is, is language really anything more than remembering that the cherry came from the tree? Once the cherry is disconnected from the tree, we have two things - cherry and tree. But before we distinguish them as parts, we recognize them as a whole. When I walk away from the tree, taking with me, the cherry - what happens if I still use the tree in my mind to represent the concept of fruit? It's a choice function. Does it matter whether I remember these things using sounds, symbols, images, experiences, or feelings? Language is interpreted and expressed across and using all of these domains. A poem carries greater meaning than the words do individually, and that is because there is emotional association that maps to the selection of words. We don't really call 'emotion' language, nor do we call 'art/music/math' language, yet these things arguably can have a strong influence across how we 'know' what language represents.
I meant IPSec, ND is functionally the same as ARP. Also IPSec support is no longer required with IPv6 so IPv6 might not really help with that.
The paper[1] cited for that quote is specifically about PersonalJava 1.1.3 on Linux 2.2 on PowerPC. It may not be relevant to implementations from this century.

[1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.8.9...
Alert (TA14-353A) Targeted Destructive Malware
I like that first 1000 customers you must touch them personally.

My biggest hinderance is getting a phone number that won't cost a fortune to call people in US or abroad from Canada. some Canadian telecom companies absolutely adore ripping people off when it comes to dialing other countries as if we were in the 1980s.

Basically I want to approach my customers with a call me number that won't cost them a lot and won't cost me a lot to talk on.

I'm still reading through this wonderful guide it is ripe with useful information.
If you packaged it correctly, you could get by just requiring Python and pip to be installed. But still, the zip and single executable is still faster.
Words cannot express how much I dislike almost everything this article represents.

Aside from the obvious bias and numerous questionable assumptions about how effective this kind of technology can be, there is a fundamental position summed up by the lines:

"Enterprise Mobility and Bring Your own Device (BYOD) have created a huge shift in the Enterprise, with more and more employees requesting access to data anytime, anywhere."

and

"Mobile technology has created a workforce that never stops working."

It's hard to dispute the basic principle that you should make business decisions based on solid data where you have it, and that it is therefore useful to have good tools that present data in a useful way.

None of that changes the fact that small, touchscreen devices are not particularly good tools for exploring data in detail and performing the kinds of detailed analysis this article implies. In short, if you need to make a critical business decision Right Now when you're out of the office, and that business decision requires serious analysis of detailed data on the spot, you're already doing so much so badly wrong that no pretty smartphone UI is going to help you.

I leave you all with this food for thought. The article tells us:

"According to Nielsen, 83% of millennials sleep with their smartphones close by."

And yet, if you search for a simple phrase like "sleeping with smartphone" and read what numerous other sources who don't make their money pushing this stuff have reported, many with proper scientific studies behind them, you'll find that the always-online culture is causing staggering amounts of damage to our society, from all the well-known negative effects of sleep deprivation to a general lack of ability to concentrate on productive work the way everyone routinely did a few years ago via all kinds of new and disturbing reports from opticians about how these Millenials' eyes are developing (degrading might be more accurate) compared to previous generations.

The kind of culture this article promotes is toxic, and ironically should be opposed by any rational person who has access to the facts, including anyone who runs a business and wants their staff to be productive.
Great, that allows you to very easily compare that vehicle to one with a chemical battery, and evaluate it on cost, range, engine power, "battery replacement", etc! And then we can avoid all this "but it runs on water" nonsense and look at the actual capabilities.
STEEEEEVE!

Edit: What, you never saw "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs"?
So it's ok if you have a verb and an adjective first?
No matter what you believe, some group just caused massive damage to Sony. If the US was looking to justify "cyber defense" spending, how would a rogue group not be a bigger threat? A rogue group better fits the terrorism narrative that has justified much of the last decade's military and intelligence spending. You're reaching.
Even as a lawyer, one becomes weary after a time in seeing how people use the law to abuse others.

The key to this sort of trademark claim is likelihood of confusion or perhaps implied endorsement in having a common-sounding name. Where it is obvious that two companies are in entirely unrelated fields, then the holder of the mark who wants to shut others down had better have a very strong mark such that any use by others of something that sounds similar implies affiliation or endorsement.

There is no way that this is the case with the "zen" prefix.

Even on a personal level, I represented companies known as Zentek Strategy and Zentek Technology, the latter of which became a $2B market cap company before having issues in 2008. We filed and got a registered trademark for "Zentek" and held this from about 1990 through 2008 when the company had some problems and shut its operations. The mark that we registered was not even in Class 9 (where most tech companies file for marks) but in another class because there was already another long-established "zentek" company that held a registered mark in Class 9.

So, wow, the claimant here says, in effect, "we have been using 'zen' since 2007 and so we have a right to claim this exclusively as our own." And it then proceeds to file formal proceedings against all sort of other companies to force them to spend large sums of money or else give up using their marks that share only a common prefix.

Call it what you will. I call this abuse, pure and simple. I can only hope that the people doing this take pride in their coolness as zen proponents even as display the height of arrogance in how they choose to act.
This is amazing- we hadn't noticed this! It feels like they are A/B testing different boxes. I particularly like the MLB logo in the corner of one of those boxes.
I think we can guess we're about to be told the North Koreans used TOR so decisive action needs to be taken against the network as part of the retaliation measures just announced.
Also I believe there were some traffic correlation attacks where the attacker was able to get netflow data from both entrance nodes and (?) the traffic destination outside of Tor.
It is hard to be convinced that North Korea were responsible. I think people just can't see them having a sophisticated enough hacker culture within government to pull this off. Sure, maybe it was outsourced to Russia. But an internal op like this seems so unlikely given what we know.
How “The Interview” Handled the Assassination of Kim Jong-Un
I agree, but I'd add one thing. In addition to the mediocre and unmotivated students, there is a depressing number of motivated but somewhat unprepared students who get crushed as well. I really think a lot of these students would have thrived at a university that was more supportive.

I'm not advocating hand holding or coddling, but I do think that impacted majors at very strong public universities aren't really doing right by the talent level they enroll. They do society no favors by enrolling a student who didn't have a strong high school calculus curriculum, giving her a C her first semester, and then telling her that her GPA is too low for engineering now.
0.2.6.1-alpha-dev doesn't seem to contain anything earth shattering.

https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git
Ask HN: App idea
I have an awesome app idea, if you interested in help making an app, please leave your email address and I'll contact you with the details and also please tell me how you'll be able to contribute.
Thank you!
I'm really excited about this!!! :)
And after that happens, it'll still be cheaper to charge at work than to have a personal battery swap station.
Sony's decision might also be a good marketing plan. Remember when they took down the Twinikies and everybody wanted to buy them and then after a few months they put it in circulation again.
I believe Sony is trying to'milk' the fact that they got hacked and make some profit out of it
Many non R&D-ish rendering software came from people doing experiments on Amiga. I believe 3D Studio, Lightwave, probably others, had their roots in Amiga demo/game/3d scene.
Ah, but if you check out the Common Core page they go on and on about student performance being comparable between states, which is why the two standardized tests in effect are inseparable from CCSS. btw, I know what you meant by the rhetorical "people...do not want", but the problem is precisely that "accountability" is the other dog whistle never far from any CCSS discussion.

I am afraid your healthy view of CCSS is not widely shared, and the discussion would be much better if CC was offered purely as PD. Teachers love anything that works.
> This article gets the paper totally wrong. Learning that the uncertainty principle gives rise to phenomena that popular science calls "wave-particle" duality was taught to me in quantum 101.

This is how it was taught to peers and I as well. I do not remember ever reading about any debate or uncertainty on the issue either.
Mumon said, 'Those who cling onto words are fools who believe that they can catch the moon with a stick or can scratch their itchy foot through a leather shoe.'

http://www.csudh.edu/phenom_studies/mumonkan/mumonkan.htm If this is new to you, I recommend starting out with #29.
Tips on How to Easily Qualify for Commercial Mortgage Loan
Tor is designed with a specific threat model.

That threat model explicitly does not provide protection against a global observer.

That means tor is NOT safe against a state level attacker with an extensive surveillance network.
Skip a trip to jail and punch this virtual Monet painting instead
Slow TV Is Here
This seems so weird.

The problem with Julia for statistics is that it doesn't add a bunch of hacks for treating missing values like 0 in dot products? Really?
Is it purely nostalgia?

I'm pretty sure the answer is yes. I loved the Amiga for what it was, but it's hard to see why anyone would get a "modern Amiga" for any reason other than to say that they had a "modern Amiga." I don't think any Amiga has shipped in quantity since the Amiga 4000 in 1996; I don't know if it's fair to say that the PowerPC-based designs were obsolete before they shipped, but I don't know that it's unfair, either. (The X1000 became available in 2012, using a CPU that was released in 2007 and will never be updated again.) I could imagine someone whose business still depended on Amiga-specific software getting new hardware back in 2000, but 2014?

Personally, my nostalgia for old computers tends to last roughly long enough for me to download an emulator, get whatever virtual machine I'm trying to emulate working, and be disappointed. A computer may have been years ahead of its time for the late 1980s, but it'll likely still feel like banging rocks together in the mid 2010s.
> There is absolutely no way that Hydrogen would be produced via electrolysis.

You mean, other than the fact that it absolutely is produced that way in existing fueling stations, and much of the drive for hydrogen as part of a clean energy solution relies on the use of electrolysis (or, possibly, splitting water with nuclear reactor heat) as the generation mechanism.

> The process is horribly inefficient but more importantly the cheapest way to produce hydrogen is through steam reformation of coal (or organic material to a way lesser extent).

Its certainly a cheaper way to produce it, but its not necessarily cheaper as an overall process, because then you do need an expensive distribution infrastructure. More, the necessary distribution infrastructure, even if end-to-end efficiency including distribution costs is better, has a much higher startup cost than distributed electrolysis.

Also, distributed electrolysis buys you directly in to any improvements in efficiency, greenhouse gas reduction, etc., for large scale energy production, whereas relying on steam reformation of coal, natural gas, etc., leaves you not only maintaining more dedicated distribution infrastructure, but with a separate carbon-intensive generation infrastructure that needs its own improvements.
I only did a little bit of research, and the average speed was hard to find, with most official sources preferring to concentrate on highest speed achieved. I'm willing to accept your numbers, but I am curious as to your sources. It's a moot point to me though, as high speed rail, at 140 MPH or 150 MPH or even only 100 MPH will not come to California any time soon, and even then, it's not likely to positively affect the commute up and down the SF peninsula.
The world's largest open-source company doesn't sell software
Thank you so much for making this tool, it's seriously awesome. (and thank you for converting OPs page into Markdown!)
Could you share some of the lessons learned?
Ask HN: Most difficult programming challenge you solved in 2014?
What is your most difficult programming or software engineering challenge you done in 2014? Be it any Algorithm, Project Deadline or anything related to Software.
Mine is setting up Apache Nutch along with Apache Solr and Hbase for large crawling project.

Thanks
LA's New LED Streetlights Are Changing the Way Movies Look
unregulated prescription drugs

You realize if the drug requires a prescription, then it's regulated?
Seconded. This is my 5th bookmark of the year. Wonderful resource.
Use the dialer in Hangouts (Android's default messaging app), and calls to US and Canada are free. VOIP is the answer to free or nearly free calls with all your customers. You can get an 800 number for ~$2/month to make it toll-free for them.
Someone posted a somewhat toxic but somewhat valid point, and the project responded with more details about their 'source'. I add their response but it may be best to read the original post.

To be sure to keep our source safe, we're not providing more details quite yet.

But actually, we don't know many more details than the ones we posted. And as for your 'why', that's an excellent question, and one we've been wrestling with too. There are nine directory authorities, spread around the US and Europe. If they're trying to hunt down particular Tor users, most possible attacks on directory authorities would be unproductive, since those relays don't know anything about what particular Tor users are doing.

Our previous plan had been to sit tight and hope nothing happens. Then we realized that was a silly plan when we could do this one [post the warning] instead.
Personally I also like the one about installing software on any personal device that is used to access company systems so any company sysadmin can instantly remote wipe it at their own discretion if they decide security is at risk.

It turns out that some people didn't realise that the above story was supposed to be satirical and actually built tools that will do that. Whatever you do, don't ask those people about stats on things like legitimate vs. accidental, malicious or negligent wipes. Certainly don't ask about the proportion of employees who were subject to "bad" wipes but got no apology or compensation, just an HR or legal goon pointing to an agreement they signed but did not even slightly understand in which they explicitly consented to exactly that.

If a business has a genuine need for someone to have mobile access to its systems -- which is sometimes reasonable, though not nearly as often as a certain kind of manager pretends -- then the business should provide a completely independent device under its own control for that purpose. It's really that simple.
EFF: Feds can’t get around Fourth Amendment via automated data capture
Then again bluelisting is the goal of SJWs these days.

Rule 12 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals#Themes
Is it worth observing how quickly we have stopped talking about rectal feeding of Guantanamo Bay detainees?
By "implementation" I mean everything that followed the authoring of CC. (But I do have a big problem with the few authors and absence of meaningful feedback from educators.) The thing is untested, mandated, used as a threat, and more untested. I also think the absence of feedback from real teachers was an act of arrogance and ignorance: teachers are actually pretty good at what they do, and the best teachers could have totally schooled the CC authors. They never really asked. CC reminds me of what Yeltsin said about Communism: "It was a beautiful dream."