skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only weird one there is Soma, and that's a Huxley reference you won't find in a thesaurus.

I wish though. A thesaurus would be a most endearing gift.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to use "innocence" as a qualifier for whether or not intelligence should be gathered about a person. Law enforcement uses it, why shouldn't intelligence agencies?

Of course, the problem is that innocence in this case is determined behind closed doors and secret courts, instead of public courts.
That's a very common argument, indeed.

See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_birth_of_Jesus

>The word "virgin" in Christian translations is disputed. The Hebrew word is "עלמה" (almah), which scholars agree means a young woman of child-bearing age, "but has nothing to do with whether she is a virgin", and the context of the passage makes it clear that Isaiah has in mind events in his and Ahaz's near future. The Greek-speaking author of Matthew, however, used the Greek translation of Isaiah, in which the word is given as "παρθένος", parthenos, meaning a virgin.[57] The Encyclopedia Judaica calls this "a two-millennium misunderstanding of Isaiah 7:14", which "indicates nothing concerning the chastity of the woman in question".[50]
The point is that it doesn't work like that. You could make the same argument about all of your office supplies, computers, and office space. "I'll take the extra bump of salary rather than you paying for the office space I will occupy." "Fire the administrative assistant, give us the extra salary, and rotate us all through phone/email/mail company correspondence duty."

They are perks designed to make working there more pleasant and efficient (if you eat there your lunch commute is gone and you are likely to converse with coworkers). They have nothing to do with your compensation.
The new testament was written in Greek, not in Hebrew.
And yes, back then, the word virgin could actually have allegoric meaning(young/innocent/beautiful/... girl). Imagine if she was actually the first ever mammal to asexually reproduce..
Christmas style? :)
FYI: This is against craigslist's TOS.

> Robots, spiders, scripts, scrapers, crawlers, etc. are prohibited
Just for Christmas day I'm sure.

On a side note, HackerWeb (http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/) wasn't able to load posts earlier today, but now it seems it's loading them properly again.
His main argument was actually the Lord Liar Lunatic one, where you need to prescribe one of those descriptions to him (He argues).
There are huge swaths of CS undergrads I could introduce you to that "write java compilers". :)
In that great expanse and time, there may also have been ample time for civilizations to rise, then fall. We might have just missed them on such grand scales. Nobody says we'll be hanging around for a billion years trying to communicate with others... if we even last that long.
Right, but you can afford to be inefficient with your interviews because you don't have north of 2 million applicants a year.
That's among the most downvotes I've ever seen, but I suppose I deserve as much for being a grump.

I do find it fascinating how the spirit of Christmas (effectively read: holiday consumerism) is unshakable in the Western world, possibly more so than any religion.

There might be a business lesson in here.
New Chip Points the Way Beyond Silicon
Dimagi
That's clever! And elegant too, no added uncertainty.
Han unification is one problem; another problem is that not all encodings can be round-tripped losslessly through Unicode. Shift-JIS, for example, has multiple separate characters that convert into the same character in Unicode, and therefore cannot be converted back into their original form reliably.
> as evidenced by the (former, hopefully) widespread use of exploitable php calls

Could someone elaborate on what this is referring to?
Yeah, I found that surprising as well. Most of the other species mentioned in the article (other than the whiptail lizard) produce males when they reproduce asexually, perhaps so that they can return to sexual reproduction once the males are mature. Producing more females when there's a shortage of males doesn't seem to be a particularly useful trait, but maybe it's too early to generalize too much on the basis of what is already highly exceptional.
That depends on how late 'late' is. A bit late, maybe. Weeks late: indefensible. That leaves room for creative interpretations such as deals being struck and compromised identity.

We need a canary monitor service or something to that effect, I imagine of the alarm wasn't raised here then this situation could have gone on for much longer still. Makes you wonder what the value of the canary is if nobody is actively monitoring it.
>Edit: why the downvotes?

You could just have easily have asked why it wasn't written in Lisp. It's just not relevant.
Momentarily, and Matz appeared to feel so bad about it that they have been far more aggressive about tiny-version changes ever since.
> in fact the main reason I'm using nginx over Apache is that I don't want to deal with .htaccess any more.

Wait, you don't use Apache because you don't like .htaccess files?
There's effectively zero information in this article, aside from the already well-known claim that Lizard Squad is behind this, and half of the article is a pointless anecdote about someone who was unable to download a game for their Xbox One and therefore and the "worst Christmas ever" and thinks "Xbox should compensate us all".
Under what rule?
The Perils of an all-digital movie future
How would I use this data-structure in an application? Is it basically a replacement for a byte array with improved space characteristics?
diff --git a/src/shared/xml.h b/src/shared/xml.h
to weed out the less than <C99 compilers? heh
See also: http://www.belowtheboat.com
Ugh, I was under the impression that 'these days' hacking was harder because people/companies are more informed then they used to be compared to back when the internet was newer ... apparently I was wrong. Lately it seems worse then ever, are companies just cutting corners to save costs? Or are (cr/h)ackers just 'smarter' then the average 'professional IT' crowd?
The problem begins to happen a lot in school where history is taught the way it is. At least back home in India the way history books read, you needed to know only two things:

1. A timeline where you ought to remember what happened before and after that thing.

2. Objectify events based on causal reasoning presented in the books itself. For example "America got dragged into WWII because of an unprovoked attack by Japan that caused a massive loss of life and military resources"

And the share volume of world history covered in a year or so makes it so hard to do any justice to a topic.
Great things happen when people come together
Htmlwidgets: JavaScript data visualization for R
One of the co-founders of underdog.io here. Awesome to hear that you talked to 7 different companies through the platform but not so awesome that the salary numbers in NYC didn't line up to your expectations. $160K is relatively high for NYC. We'll be in SF soon so hopefully we'll be able to introduce you to more cofounders/hiring managers that can offer a salary that's more on par with your expectations. :D

'throwawaybcporn' congrats on the new job!
Which is the most underrated profession in India?
Cool. I think I first posted here in 1979, found a lot of useful phreak info.

I don't see any of my posts, but do see my name (pseudo) mentioned by others a couple times.
Exceptions are rare enough to get called out for praise. A few:

Digital Apollo, by David Mindell (development of Apollo guidance and avionics generally)

The Dream Machine by Mitchell Waldrop (technical development leading up to the Arpanet, thence to the Internet)

Colossus, the secrets of Bletchley Park's codebreaking computers, by Jack Copeland et al.

Unfortunately, there's a lot more of the technically unsophisticated junk that Knuth is complaining about, and the excuses offered here rather badly miss the point. ("The history of software is not the history of computer science". Yes, and so? How does a history of software from which all technical detail has been drained away contribute anything of value?)
How would be our life without Google?
I agree with the vast majority of what you've said.

One thing worth noting is that there was a TREMENDOUS effort that I headed up in the Rails 3 era to very aggressively attempt to reduce the number of encoding-related problems in Rails, and to make sure that common mistakes produced clear error messages.

I wrote two somewhat lengthy blog posts at the time[1][2] for a contemporary historical perspective just as the difficulty with encodings started to heat up.

One of the goals of the Rails 3 effort was to make significant efforts to ensure that strings that made their way into Rails came in as UTF-8. That involved being very careful with templates (I wrote a bit of a novel in the docs that remains to this day[3]), figuring out how to ensure that browser forms submitted their data in UTF-8 (even in IE6[4]), and working with Brian Lopez on mysql2 to ensure that all strings coming in from Postgres were properly tagged with encodings.

I also did a lot of person-to-person evangelism to try to get C bindings to respect the `default_internal` encoding setting, which Rails sets to UTF-8.

The net effect of all of that work is that while people experienced a certain amount of encoding-related issues in Rails 3, it was dramatically smaller than the kinds of errors we were seeing when experimental Ruby 1.9 support was first added to Rails 2.3.

---

P.S. I completely agree that the ASCII-7 exception was critical to keeping things rolling in the early days, but I personally would have liked an opt-in setting that would raise an exception when concatenating BINARY that happened to contain ASCII-7-only bytes with an ASCII-compatible string. In practice, this exception allowed a number of obscure C bindings to continue to produce BINARY strings well into the encoding era, and they were responsible for a large percentage (in my experience) of weird production-only bugs.

Specifically, you would have development and test environments that only tested with ASCII characters (people's names, for example). Then, in production, the occasional user would type in something like "José", producing a hard-to-reproduce encoding compatibility exception. This kind of problem is essentially eliminated with libraries that are encoding-aware at the C boundary that respect `default_internal`.

[1]: http://yehudakatz.com/2010/05/05/ruby-1-9-encodings-a-primer...

[2]: http://yehudakatz.com/2010/05/17/encodings-unabridged/

[3]: https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/actionview/lib/ac...

[4]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/3348524
Just curious but wouldn't this do more harm than good?

I'm wondering if the increased exposure from Google having a full index of Archive content would result in past/current copyright owners requesting things get taken down from the Archive as they already do from Google's current index.
Perhaps legacy software is becoming the problem. In any system there's bound to be a dependency or any kind of use of a legacy piece of software with known bugs/exploits. Hackers identify these weakest links/weak spots and use these 0-days as entry points to breach the system further. As more systems are developed, it takes so much more time to track these weak spots, let alone maintain them.

So I think you're right. It's a miracle that the Internet even works. At all.
I use pipelight, and it just uses what seems to be silverlight through wine. Haven't had any problems.
Facebook to face lawsuit for ‘reading’ users’ messages
I had a delightful time reading "A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System".
> Or are (cr/h)ackers just 'smarter' then the average 'professional IT' crowd?

The difference between your average professional cracker and your average sysadmin is that when a cracker doesn't know his stuff, he can't get anywhere... while a sysadmin would be able to slack off all day as long as he keep appearances up. (No offense meant to good sysadmins - they are the most awesome people in the sector)

And a lot of people do that. I've seen it first hand so many times I lost count. Heck, it sometimes happens even to Google. I'm willing to bet a lot of Sony's/Microsoft's teams are filled with incompetents who barely know more than how to reboot the server they handle, let alone know about security and such.

I think the more competent you are, the less you are able to notice incompetence around you (without specifically looking for it). There's an interesting parallel to be drawn with the excellent article on the Fermi paradox currently on the front page: Nobody stops for the anthill.

One of the companies I worked for (no names here) has an absolutely worthless sysadmin. The guy manages fifty linux machines and he doesn't know how to set up SSH. He's been on the team for several years and he's getting carried by the fact that the people who can fire him don't know how to set up SSH any better than he does -- and other people end up cleaning up his messes.

Does that story sound familiar to you? If you have worked in enterprise and haven't encountered it, you've either been very lucky or very blind.
Is it possible that the xbox/playstation servers are overloaded from all the new consoles? Or is it confirmed that both servers are getting ddosed?
Yeah, I noticed the interface types, which seem like a much better/safer design choice. (Again, though, it's entirely possible this is just my strong-typing prejudices coming out.)
No readable content here:
"2 response so far, answer first to see result"
Atlantropa: Dam the Mediterranean
>nginx' configuration format leaves a lot to be desired, as evidenced by the (former, hopefully) widespread use of exploitable php calls.

This has nothing to do with nginx's config format at all. It's simply a vulnerability in FastCGI for PHP and the way PHP file paths are passed.
The primary difference between Ruby and Python, from where I'm sitting, is that Ruby's change was purely at the API level, so it was feature-detectable and shimmable by libraries like Rails. I talk elsewhere in this thread about the effort we had to do, but the point is, we could do it.

In contrast, Python 3 changed the meaning of "foo". It also supported only u"foo" in Python 2 (to opt-in to unicode strings) and only b"foo" in Python 3 (to opt-in to byte-strings) for a fairly long period of time, making it extremely, extremely awkward (at best) to write a program with shims as abstractions that let most of the program remain oblivious to the differences.

Python 3.3 and 2.7 finally landed a lot of fixes to this kind of problem, but it landed fairly late, and after most of the community got a sense of the relative difficulty level of a transition to Python 3 that maintained support for Python 2 at the same time.

Both Ruby and JavaScript have taught me the value of a transition path to a new version that allows people to write libraries that support both the old and new version at the same time. Communities move a little at a time, especially long-term production projects. The best way to move them is via libraries that can serve as a bridge and target both the old and new version together.
No content here; just a survey.
Read through https://nealpoole.com/blog/2011/04/setting-up-php-fastcgi-an...
Show HN: Platon.io slideshows from markdown as a service
Note though that the ambiguity is in the translation of Isiah, the prophet in the Old Testament, NOT in the translation of the gospels where it is unambiguous that Mary was a virgin in the sense that she had not had sex with a man. However the reason the virgin birth is important for Matthew is because it is supposed to fulfill the prophecy in Isiah. Which in turn indicates that the story about the virgin birth probably originated among Greek-speaking Jews.
Did you omit a word? ("Type III __ at best")

I agree that a Type III Civilization is just an assumption of what direction a civilization would advance. The article does mention an alternative (they no longer care about meat space, or something similar).

If we do resolve the Fermi Paradox I suspect we'll be able to express the answer simply enough to not need to bring in Type III Civilizations, the anthropic principle, etc. Note that I find nothing wrong with them as useful tools for discussion, just that the answer likely isn't one we can construct by means of logic, it must be discovered -- as in, observational astronomy.

Which is what I intend to do: go out with a telescope and look at the stars. :)
I've used GAE since its inception, never even heard of anything like this happening. Any updates?
The state of mobile telecommunication protocol design and the way ahead
This is my experience with LaTeX, it's very powerful but I spend more time thinking about formatting in it than I do in Word.
no. I like being able to manage the data as text readable. I like fine control over my formatting... and I especially like not being tied into a clunky 'ide' to manage the document.
I work here and it's great. http://www.dimagi.com.

Dimagi's mission is to use technology to improve the lives of people living in underserved communities everywhere, especially through the use of mobile technology to strengthen programs in many sectors. Dimagi works in over 30 countries, mostly in the Indian subcontinent, Africa. The main product CommCare (http://www.commcarehq.org), allows for NGOs to write and maintain their own mobile applications without programming knowledge, and Dimagi also offers extensive consulting services with our partners as they start to introduce mobile software into their program. CommCare applications are geared toward usage by illiterate and low-literate users in sectors such as community health, clinical settings, agriculture, small business, infectious disease, maternal and child health, counselling for people in stigmatized and vulnerable professions, and can be used for many others; and the underlying software is repeatedly field-tested for usability in these settings. And it is awesome.

Dimagi has strong field teams around the world, with offices in Boston, Delhi, Cape Town, abd Senegal. All of Dimagi's core software developers also routinely spend weeks at a time at at project sites and shadowing a field manager, usually about twice a year per person. In my opinion, Dimagi is the most mature, on-the-ground, and innovative company of its type, but, hey I just work here.
the third and to be precise
Semantically, it's a boolean array. Or, to look at it another way, a set of integers, where a[n] is true if n is in the set.

This representation, and the various others the paper compares it to, are useful when the array is fairly sparse - the introduction suggests the range 1/10000 to 1/64 of the bits being set. They're a lot more compact, but still support key operations - ORing, ANDing, testing a particular bit, enumerating all set bits - fairly efficiently.

The major motivating use of structures like this is for bitmap indexes in databases. Bitmap indexes store a single bit of data per record - it could be "is this person a current employee?", "has this user ever bought anything?", etc. If you can encode these compactly, you can use them to very quickly winnow vast amounts of data down to a small number of interesting records, which you can then retrieve one by one.
Time delay. You're long dead before any profits return. How much current consumption are you willing to give for speculative distant future profit for others?
Aside from occassional incompetence, it's good to recognise that with sysadmins vs. crackers the odds are stacked in the favour of crackers. Sysadmins need to guard against all attacks to do their job, whereas crackers only need to find one attack that has been overlooked. Also, despite the image of crackers as super tech geniuses, as a group they still know that the path of least resistance is often the best, which relies heavily on social engineering, which is far easier to do.
Congratulations! Super-excited to have an open mobile OS making strides forward.
I'm wondering if there's anything along the lines of 'Startups* Without Borders'?

*Or 'Innovators' or 'Technologists', if you prefer.
Here's a better article.

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/games/xbox-playstation-ne...

Lizard Squad is posting about their DDOS attack on twitter via @LizardMafia. They are forcing Sony and Microsoft to read their statements for them to stop the attack.

EDIT: It seems @KimDotCom is working with @SavagexCOD (Lizard Squad Member) to get the network back online in exchange for lifetime mega.co premium membership vouchers.

Kim Dot Com: Hi @LizardMafia, I want to play #Destiny on XBOX Live. I'll give your entire crew Mega lifetime premium vouchers if you let us play. Cool?

Lizard Squad: Attacks have stopped momentarily, awaiting @KimDotCom's response.
Serious question, I'm interested in Smalltalk, is it a viable option in 2014? Does anyone use it professionally? Personally? Open source projects?
I agree that MSR is probably the best CS industrial lab out there right now, but I think Moshe's point is that even the rest of the MSR is probably a bit wary right now given what (and how it) happened to MSR SV. I don't think HP, IBM, and Bell Labs (with a few specific and localized exceptions) are doing basic research as they were doing a few years ago (or in Bell Lab's case, a few decades ago). Maybe you are right about Google, but generally speaking, there are very few papers from Google Research (relative to their strength).
Fascinating! I wonder if these findings scale to larger documents. As a novice user (both self-professed, and by the standards of the report) of both packages I've long found that Word becomes rather inconvenient once you pass a certain number of pages. Its internal structure is rather opaque, so sometimes when formatting goes awry it turns out to be quite difficult to fix. And it won't put non-text items in sensible places itself, though of course if you don't mind carefully positioning each one by hand then you can do that.

I actually much preferred using latex, even though it was so comically horrible in many respects (my Makefile had to run pdflatex 3 times, for example, and needed a whole other step to pre-convert PNGs into PDFs beforehand). More upfront investment, but less ongoing bother.

Or cognitive dissonance, perhaps that was it?
What consistently cracks me up about these stupid job postings from these startups is how so full of bullshit the language is. Like they're all on the verge of discovering the Ark of the Covenant.

"We're here to make a difference that will change the way the world looks at...washing your dog. Yes the Dogwashy app will completely reinvent shampooing and grooming as we know it. Don't you want to spend your X-Mas break working here so you can tell your grandchildren that you were part of the revolution?"
Read the article quickly and they mention that they actually tested LaTeX with the editor used by the participants (not just LaTeX), but they don't mention if they used the orthographic and grammar correction in the editors.
I know the one provided by Word is excellent, so if the other editors' are not as good, that might explain some of the difference in textual errors.
Dreamweaver CS3 crashes with files that are exactly 8KB in size
Almost all scientific papers have more than one author, so collaboration and version control features are also important, but were not considered in this study. (For example, since .tex files are plain text they can be conveniently managed with git)

Also, if the intent is to determine which system should be used to "save time and money", the cost of licensing proprietary software must also be considered.
Once I didn't know
Brilliant response Joel. Merry Christmas!