skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
@obastani : very good comment.

Aside: If |Psi> is a state with wavefunction <x|Psi>, then is there a linear operator A such that <x|A|Psi> = log(<x|Psi>)?

Note: Logarithm of a complex function.
Ntpd should be replaced with something different, not rewritten. There is no reason to rewrite it. But I agree, there is no good reason to write such things in C anymore.
Tor has a network of unpublished bridges it provides via offline methods in high risk countries. You can also request unpublished bridges via email [1]. Pluggable transports [2] allow your tor traffic to look like Skype or SSL. These tools combined allow most of the "noble use cases" of tor to operate without being hunted down.

1. https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html.en

2. https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html.en#PluggableTra...
Feynman on the "work" of gravity theorists: "something correct that is obvious and self-evident, but worked out by a long and difficult analysis, and presented as an important discovery"

To be fair, this case is the fault of the journalist(s), not necessarily the research itself.
NK may be a sideshow as far as a lot of interested parties are concerned. The benefit (if you can call it that) is that the presently-tapering security contractor gravy train gets a new shot in the arm, the Feds have a chance to set up "partnership" agreements with any number of tech firms that they just alienated during the NSA fiasco, and a much higher level of generalized network surveillance becomes a thing that plenty of companies start thinking they want.

I obviously don't know the story behind this. The point is, there are plenty of opportunistic and self-serving domestic interests who probably don't either but can nevertheless turn this hack into a very beneficial event, regardless of who did it. From their perspective, NK being the source is actually the best-case scenario.
You seriously think that your debit card is on the same playing field as this attack? Get real, the FBI doesn't care about your checking account, nor should they.
Test StackOverflow Domain
Stephen Colbert's daily routine
It's also open source. Can we stop with this fucking red herring already? He's talking about a service, right now, under the direct control of the US military. You're talking about grant funding for an open source tool.

Stop.
Unfortunately, thats not scalable for a whole bunch of problems. I agree its a headache, but the solution is not to stay away from machine intelligence.
I think it unlikely someone would design something complicated like a new compiler / programming language, open source it and attach their real name to the project just to hide an exploit in it.

There's much lower hanging fruit.
Are there any power-ups? Does it get much more difficult? The demo video didn't seem to show all that much in the way of gameplay, and the description is rather spartan as well...

Basically, why should I try this and not one of the myriad other Asteroids clones?
That's exactly the issue. There are lots of people who can imagine that. They can also imagine corporate boards having a much harder time saying no to them in an environment that the Feds have described as dangerous. If nothing else, not (literally) buying into the scare opens companies to even more expensive liability.
Why its best to get out of freelancer.com (NOW)
'Revolving door' spins between AT&T, GSA
When it comes to defining what a word means, the popular consensus is always right, and the media both reflects and influences that.

The exception to that is technical terms used in a technical context. That doesn't apply here.
It's not like people are saying "Rust will never have M:N threading", it's that the current implementation didn't offer enough advantages for the disadvantages it brought. https://github.com/aturon/rfcs/blob/remove-runtime/active/00...

Having done some things with libgreen threads myself, they really didn't give anything over proper threads (especially without segmented stacks). So I am curious how this will evolve in the future.
Solving discrete problems with discrete answers is just not the hard part of real life, at least not the entrepreneurial part which I am the most familiar with.

Starting and completing a huge project that doesn't have deadlines where you have to figure out how to bring it from idea to market is real, and it rarely takes a semester and it isn't at the discretion of a single person to look at it for 30 minutes and then put a letter grade on it, and then throw it in the garbage. The most important difference though is that amount of effort only loosely correlates with the success of a venture in the real world. In school you can really just brute force most problems.
I don't find Bohmian mechanics any more satisfying than regular QM. In an effort to formulate a 'hidden state' that makes QM make.. sense.. you add a guiding wave equation that depends on the state of the universe? That's not better at all.

I'm all for trying to formulate QM in a way that doesn't offend basic sensibility, but I'm not convinced this is it. I don't think deterministic-but-nonlocal is better than nondeterministic-but-local.
Bitcoin does this by storing a list of DNS hostnames, run by a set of the maintainers, that return periodically-updated lists of peers.

Previously, it also joined an IRC channel and got the list of hostnames from all of the other users in the channel.
How old is this deck? AWS has 28 availability zones, and averages 4 datacenters per AZ. Way more than the 9 you claim...
it's not as though plants just take care of themselves to be productive

Some do and some don't. Whoever built the house we are renting planted persimmon, pomegranate, tangerine, orange, and lemon trees in the front and backyard. We do nothing for them: trim, water, or fertilize. And this is California, so no water during the drought for the last few years. Yet our biggest problem is the mess the fruit makes when it drops, and the rats and squirrels and raccoons that are rooting around eating the fruit. We probably have to throw away around 100 pounds of fruit a year. I'm sure experiences vary depending what and where you grow.
For Argument sake, What if this is another WMD, of NK which did not exist in Iraq, and Did not Originate from NK. Not saying NK is not behind the attack, but what if they are not?

Haven't we lost the hope and trust on Media and Agencies already?
There isn't a lot of money to be made in fleeing from economies of scale

Unless people flee economies of scale in large numbers, which can create its own economy of scale. That's how you have viable interesting business in things like 3d printing, or things craft/DIY oriented.
>Posting it to Github isn't implicit permission, but it would probably be a factor if the author did try to sue people for using his or her copyrighted work without license/permission.

No, but it doesn't seem to keep you from talking out your as.
I like the mainstream media. I certainly trust the New York Times or The Economist much more than my Facebook or Twitter feed.
The United States may occasionally do some shady shit, but the Chinese will frequently conduct blatant theft of intellectual property off your servers. This is why very few tech companies will host within China proper.
How to Implement Color Search
They haven't been sent an NSL at the time of the writing of that post. They don't have details on what the attack is, only that they think there is going to be one.
If I understand the changelog, they introduced memory protection only in this release, in 2014.

I was an Amigan back in the 80s and early 90s and have fond memories of the platform, but I think they should just remain memories.
I have 0 Trust on MIT, since Aaron Swartz incident.
I consider that place no more than deep shit.

I Don't want to believe, if I can trust a Tor Network passing through that gate in MIT
This video will change your view about life.
> Well, they should be allowed to buy things, but not sell things and not allowed to own stock, bonds or anything else than cash and the real estate they live in.

That is highly unreasonable. They can't sell their car? They have to live in one house until they die or get foreclosed on? What do you think we would gain by chasing everybody who is remotely sane out of the field?

> You say that as if the death of advertisement-funded media would necessarily be a bad thing. To the contrary, it might be a really good thing.

If there were a better alternative, sure. But there is not. If you cut off the only source of revenue available, just about the only sources of information remaining will be run by rich people who are willing to pay to push their views onto the masses.
I'm very impressed that PyPy got their JIT working. But it took 10 years from initial funding by the European Union. It's a hard problem. They had to come up with some new, elegant solutions to make it work. See "https://pypy.readthedocs.org/en/release-2.3.x/jit/pyjitpl5.h...

JavaScript is a bit easier because it doesn't have concurrency. In Python, you can change a method of an object while an instance of that object is being executed in another thread. So you have to worry about invalidating code currently being executed asynchronously.
I'd be concerned about receiving a battery that has had more charge cycles than mine. Kind of a good way to unwittingly shorten your vehicle's life span.
Would love to hear how issues like these can be handled where the platform blames the user for issues with itself.
Would like to understand reason for downvotes...
Which framework will you be using now?
By the way, what made you switch? (And also, did you got the $40 version or..?)

I'm thinking about migrating (gmail just feels sluggish), but I'm a little afraid of all the potential gotchas vs my current gmail setup, which makes me reluctant.

(I redirect + pop fetch several school addresses to gmail, plus have a long list of filters to help me navigate all the ads I get)
ISS astronaut uses 3D printer to make socket wrench in space
"... Engineers at Made in Space, which built the experimental printer, overheard space station astronaut Barry “Butch” Wilmore mention on the radio that he needed a socket wrench. The company used computer-aided design (CAD) to draw up plans, produced an earthbound version of the spanner for safety certification by Nasa, then had the plans relayed to the ISS, where it took four hours to print out the finished product. ..."

The future is here, it's just distributed unevenly.
Real Live Grey Alien Caught on Tape
Are you sure the tiny hard pustules aren't just keratosis pilaris[0]? I've always had tiny, hard red bumps on my arms and thighs. It's genetic and harmless. The body just overproduces keratin in the skin and it gets trapped in the hair follicles, plugging them up. Keratin is hard - it's the same protein that makes hair and fingernails.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keratosis_pilaris
Meet the Dogged Researchers Who Try to Unmask Haters Online
I use martini, I know it's notoriously the most hated framework for go, but I find myself very productive. With martini and gorm/mgo I can get apps up and running VERY quickly. Its never been a bottleneck for performance for me. I know down the line I'll try something more efficient, but the fact I'm able to develop CRUD apps at a rapid rate helps my job and helps me find more work.
Lol what? You seem to be grasping at straws.
> yes...imagine if samsung or hyundai gain unprecedented access to this ultra ultra cheap labor force.

s/cheap/free

and what makes you think they dont already?
I found http://samsaffron.com/archive/2014/12/01/speeding-up-rails-4... (from the post's comments) interesting.

It looks like there were initially quite a few performance regressions in the new release. Adequate Record looks great for rails scaffolds, but (at this stage) doesn't look like it will very useful for production apps that probably have more complex queries. For example, it stops working if your query has a `where`.

Big thanks to Sam et al for their work in speeding things up.
So I opened my fastmail account for about a year. I have to say ever blog post, chock full of technical content, your dedication to showing up front your patched versons of Cyrus IMAP, and other stuff you brongondwana and the company at large do, are very badass. I give you often as an example of transparency in the marketplace and I love what you guys do.

Thank you for taking me away from Google! I have had no downtime, but your work has gotten me interested in many mail clients I have tried and I intend to host my own Cyrus IMAP instance to learn more about email in general. Thanks for that too!
Wow. That really is a quite revealing comparison.
That's a good read. Some of those problems are known from quantitative finance, where trying to extract statistical signals from data has been going on for decades. After much effort, all the easy wins (easy to find correlations) have been found and are no longer easy wins, because too many players have found them.

Some of the other problems listed are new, coming from taking what used to be research techniques and putting them into production programs. Those are more like ordinary big system problems, such as configuration management. The article points out, though, that your huge training set is now part of your configuration.

Then there's the problem of systems assigning excessive significance to features which happen to work but are really irrelevant. Those image recognition demos on HN last week illustrated this problem. At least there, though, there's a way to visualize what's happening. For many ML systems, humans have no clue what the system is actually recognizing. If your ML algorithm has locked onto the wrong features, it can become drastically wrong due to a minor change in the data. I saw an example of this in a web spam filter that was doing fairly well, working on 4-character sequences taken from web pages. It was actually recognizing specific code text used by one ad service. The page content seen by humans was totally irrelevant.
Reactive REST at Netflix [video]
I was really hoping this article was going to discuss how Rome was somehow more open or prone to invasions due to their water networks. Instead, I was treated to the fairly unexciting conclusion of Rome traded a lot, causing its various regions to be interdependent, therefore possibly vulnerable because of additional risks inherent in relying on a trade network to supply your city with food.
And then there's the tldr version that everyone seems to be actually using:

1. Send at least one mail per day to urge your user to try out a random feature that he doesn't care about.

2. Make sure every mail claims to be "not a bot", "not automatic", "I'm a real human!!1".

3. Close every mail with an offer to be available at any time for everything and anything.
Make sure your user knows that he can call your CEO at 5 in the morning if he feels a sudden urge to have a personal product tour.

4. Mention at least two awesome webinars in every e-mail. Send regular reminders about webinars.

5. Also send invitations for every congress, meetup, bbq party, that you are however involved with.
Oh I hadn't thought about going to YouTube for videos - I'll certainly check that out. Thanks for your tips - definitely helpful!
Actually, you're wrong.

Most of that source code is there for different and wrong reasons.

It doesn't take much source code to steer your clock precisly, we are talking less than 100 lines.

What takes up space is all the "extras" and "nice to haves".
Part of it might be that this was dropped on a Friday night, US time.
Considering JavaScript makes it difficult to avoid, that's not surprising... And since js is probably one of the common denominators of much activity on the fringes of programming it seems like floating point should be widely discussed.

Unrelated to numeric computing, my favourite thing would be Butler Lampson's Hints for Computer System Design.
Can you say more about why you aren't happy with Angular anymore?
Reminds me now of the wonder I felt as after a few classes that had us doing integrals of various tedious geometries for EM fields, we come to QM - the really hard course - and we just pop a Dirac delta in to trivialize some integrals.

It's like suddenly being able to say, "Enough! Just tell me the value right there!" Which turns out to reduce to your friendly neighborhood point particle model. (Pretty much by design, if I'm not forgetting my history correctly - it's sort of a made up tool that sort of abuses notation, like the Heaviside step function.)

But deep down I never trusted that a particle was actually a basically zero dimensional-like point, though. It was just useful to think of it as one.
(ಠ ಠ)
3 PHP loops gotchas
Yup, it does. I do have a quick working example, with a plain multipart form :) You can check it out here: https://github.com/gabipurcaru/peggy

While this is not exactly what you are talking about, I think it demonstrates that node.js streams can do that too.
SNTP is close to useless. Your time server could be off and you'd happily follow along.
I like the fact your signup boils down to one HTTP GET and a verification email. That's some revolutionary stuff.
Sigh... I wish HN would prevent replies to deleted comments. I deleted it, checked that there were no new replies, waited a few minutes, checked again, and now checked a couple hours later and sure enough, a reply has appeared.

I deleted my comment because I don't like calling people out, especially when it comes to politics. We may disagree on the value of mentioning specific hot-button issues, and that's fine. I shouldn't have brought it up as a slight against you specifically. Sorry. I was also probably wrong that it was impossible to address the comment without starting a flamewar.

The purpose of my comment was to point out that social media may be as controlled as more-mainstream media. It may be slightly harder to control or influence the conversation, but influence happens from Facebook to HN. HN's is preferable, but only because of the people piloting it.

Why do you feel social media is any less shackled than mainstream media? In many ways, it's more influential, and therefore influencing social media acts as sort of a "force multiplier." If you convince just a few people to start convincing their friends, who convince their friends, etc, the effect is quite strong.
Whenever I see claims of animal language, I remember the Far Side cartoon where everything the dogs say translates to "hey!"
I'm not op, but I switched to fastmail for my family hosting a year ago. I was driven away because of the continual UI changes Google were making. I don't want to re-explain the interface to my mum every three months. Fastmail has nice buttons with words on - when I switched the first conversation I had was "so how do I send an ema… oh there it is!"

Also fastmail is faster! You get email, contacts and file storage. If you are on the $40/yr plan you get caldav support as well. Works very well on all my devices.

Only downside is spamassassin isn't as effective as gmail's spam filters, but I no longer have to cope with mailing lists being marked as spam by the masses who can't work an unsubscribe button.

On that note, you can also write your own seive rules for filtering, and there's the 'if matched stop running filters' option that is so glaringly absent from gmail.

So I'm a happy customer.
Ultimately, I would love if I could build a very basic prototype (of a web app) so that I can scrappily build a product to test. I recognize that that is not an easy task and would take a significant investment to get to proficiency, let alone mastery. But as someone that is analytical but not "technical", it can be exceedingly frustrating to have an idea that you want to implement and create but you don't have the know-how to do so. So I'm trying to find a way to teach myself to fish without becoming a master fisherman.
And in the process I also hope that I can become a more effective entrepreneur because I will be able to communicate not only intent and design to the engineers, but appreciate the feasibility and development path.
Yup. Never even showed a leaf!

Around here, there are also lots of mice, wabbits, squirrels, deer, etc. A successful garden would likely need to be completely enclosed.
Really good advice here. One thing I particularly liked is the advice to email the first 1000 users manually and only set up automated drip campaigns as a way to automate what you find yourself sending over and over.

I'd also like to add this PSA: Don't send automated emails that pretend to be from a human. http://blog.beeminder.com/smarmbot (Blog post, "Don't Be a Smarmbot", in which I argue with @patio11 about this.)
Actually I'd argue that there are quite a few things that programmers should have in common, if by programmers we're talking about serious engineers/computer scientis[1] and not "amateur-hour web designers"[2].

Knowledge of the fundamental concepts talked about on that list of papers, and the history therewith, is what allows us to go past the current level of engineering and actually reach greater heights. Most of the emphasis nowadays is spent on knowledge of specific toolchains, frameworks, etc, instead of actually learning WHY and HOW these things work.

From that basic foundation you can then go into any field and learn the semantics, details, and problem-specific techniques to deal with the problems presented. Without that foundation, we're all just floundering around, becoming proficient in using these tools without actually KNOWING how they work and therefore unable to take them to the next level.

[1] - A conversation with Alan Kay https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
[2] - JavaScript isn't Scheme http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/07/18/javascript-isnt...
It refers to a smaller bus used to ferry students to special education programs, with the implication that they're all dumb and so is the person being insulted.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ride_the_short_bus

So, yeah, please don't use it :) (if you really want to see the context of the common usage, you can do a google image search for "short bus".)
I'm hoping to be able to release Cyrus 2.5 soon. We just rebased the FastMail branch on top of the current master tree and rolled it to 2% of our users with no issue - it was months behind until recently. Planning to roll that out to everyone very soon. I've been testing it just with a few of my own users and patching issues for the last month.
For that to work you need to compromise _all_ the NTP servers those servers sync to for an extended period of time (years). It's simply not a realistic attack.

NTP does not sync time. NTP measures time drift across groups of servers, and sprinkles in known time. I'm not saying authentication is useless, you should turn it on for your known time sources, but it's not so simple as you make it out to be.

Unless you use SNTP on your servers. Don't do that. Ever.
I don't think I am, and you haven't given me any reason to believe I am.

Why don't you list some of those "extras" and "nice to haves"? Some of them are probably absolutely critical to my services. All of them are probably critical to somebody's.

I don't think you're understanding that I'm not in any way disputing that we need something orders of magnitude smaller for the most common case of a simple desktop or server keeping an approximately accurate clock.

If your response to me talks about just steering a clock, you are not responding to me.
Were you actually being serious?
Most of code is hardware support for a multitude of GPS receivers and other clocks.