skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are the names on the comments verified? This seems very much out-of-character for Guido, he's generally been quite supportive of efforts to improve Python's speed (eg. Unladen Swallow, PyPy) or add static typing as a library. It occurs to me that with this blog interface, I could post as "Ken Thompson" and nobody would be the wiser.
I'd never be able to write that and mean it.
For well-established projects with high throughput and lots of resources this is likely practical, but those aren't the kind of things that "open source hardware" (a term I personally hate) typically targets.

For niche products being worked on by a small team with shoestring resources, the problems the article points out just scratch the surface. It gets even more fun when you add mechanical systems and sensors to the mix. I work in embedded systems and spend at least as much of my time debugging hardware as software.

The number of ways hardware can go wrong is astonishingly large. As well as all the ones mentioned in the article, there are temperature effects, power supply effects and most of all: noise. Put your system into an industrial environment with lots of big electric motors generating noise on the mains and see what it does to your design, even after it's passed EMC testing.

Noise and grounding (particularly leakage between analog and digital grounds) cause a ridiculous range of hard-to-debug problems. Software by comparison is easy.

My career has been about 80% software/firmware with 20% hardware, and I'm a hardware hobbyist (including time as a mentor for an FIRST Robotics Challenge team, an experience I highly recommend) so I've seen both sides of the coin and found that the typical "open source hardware" electronics problem is the kind of flaky, intermittent weirdness that is really rare in well-designed software these days (it's been years since I've seen a real Heisenbug in software, whereas they used to be a lot more common). Some of that speaks to how well-designed a lot of modern software is, especially open source stuff. Some of it speaks to how difficult it is to predict/ensure the quality of electronics in the real world.
Where is Japan in all this? If North Korea is in fact responsible, it seems like Japan should be the one weighing a "proportional response". They are certainly capable.
It's still a good introduction to the principles: how problems like regression, classification, and reinforcement learning are defined; concepts like overfitting, bias-variance tradeoff, etc.; some general classes of algorithms and how to analyze them.

The age mainly affects its usefulness as an off-the-shelf guide to applied ML, because some of the currently best performing general-purpose algorithms aren't mentioned [1]. It also spends quite a bit of time on algorithms now considered mainly of historical interest, like version spaces.

So imo its main current usefulness is as a foundational text, which it's quite good for. It helps that it's also well written and understandable.

[1] A recent empirical analysis found that random forests and support vector machines seem to perform most consistently well at classification tasks, neither of which are in this book. http://jmlr.org/papers/v15/delgado14a.html
Popularity and a syntax that can be parsed, plus being widely taught. Pretty much the same reason why we had plenty of Pascal compilers back in the days.

And quite unlike why we have that many JavaScript transpilers.

A few of the compilers might be running on the AST, and thus have no complete alternative implementeation. A good module support for that helps, although it's still not close to VM-based languages like Java.
Maybe it's a double secret false flag. The real goal is to pass a cybersecurity bill in the US Congress to counter industrial espionage by Chinese professional crackers targeted against American and multinational businesses.

Or if that wasn't the real goal, never let a good crisis go to waste, and just do that anyway.
I think this is a really solid approach. It's the same thing I was trying to do for PHP with phc (http://phpcompiler.org/) - compiling down to C using the built in stdlib and C API, then using full program optimization.

Long term, it won't be as fast as a full JIT, as the Facebook HPHP team showed, but Python doesn't have a JIT of the same caliber, so this is probably useful for tons of people.

Dunno if the author is around, but they might find some of the stuff from my PhD relevant, especially how the static analysis worked and some of the challenges of compiling using the C API: http://paulbiggar.com/research/#phd-dissertation
I doubt hail storms would be a problem, but tornadoes are another story. Maybe instead of the tube and pylons being exposed, they were covered in such a way that a tornado would go over top rather than through it.
Sorry, I missed this response. If you want to chat about the app I am happy to do so, no charge for that. My email is in my profile.

We don't work with Parse, but it seems like a viable solution. We generally write native apps for each platform without translators, although we have some shared libraries we generally use. This can be more expensive sometimes, but in the end the reduced number of issues and the app capability is vastly better being native. We have used xamarin a few times, but honestly we find a lot of times a hybrid application (like LinkedIn or Facebook) works better from our experience -- e.g. Native app with web services and html served from the server.
Does something like this have even a slightest chance to kick in (mainstream)?

Computers are now used everywhere: defense, business, entertainment, you name it. I don't think anyone's gonna bother changing the layout everywhere.
> People need to understand that money is not the goal there, the goal is to improve transport standards

Which is the really cool thing about Telsa and SpaceX - Elon has said many times if you want to make a quick buck, don't buy Tesla because that's not what they're trying to do.

They're trying to advance the world's knowledge and ability to design and build all-electric cars - making a profit is not the goal, nor is it even important. As long as they break even, they can keep going.

I look forward to a future where more and more companies have the goal of making the world a better place, not the goal of making ever increasing profits.
Chicago to/from any city is great for freight and possibly commuters.
Don't take what a clown like Cheney says as gospel. Many Republicans and most Democrats take these things seriously and do not want to stoop to the level of the Taliban.
With rust-bindgen , you should be able to use vendor supplied HAL written in c quite easily.
Ask HN: How to learn systems architecture? (e.g. microservices arch.)
I think I'm a pretty decent programmer and can write well designed libraries, applications, etc.

That being said, I really suck at system level architecture: how to cleanly separate a monolithic process into smaller processes that communicate with each other, how to chose the right database / message queue / proxy / caching system / asset packaging / etc. How to leverage OS level utilities like crond / upstart / etc. How to deploy / how to scale. And the worse is I don't know what I don't know. I know I'm not the only in this situation given the popularity of Heroku and co. which make a lot of those decisions for us.

What I would really love would be a book with case studies which would explain why a certain architectures/tools were chosen over others.

I'll start with a few resources I have found:

- http://highscalability.com/

- http://microservices.io/

- http://singlepageappbook.com/
Even if their security system was poorly constructed, they're still victims of cyber terrorism.
So that would be U.S. entities, then? Mt. Gox was headquartered in Japan.
> I wrote this code putting brevity over readability, which is something I usually never do

Shouldn't the point of such a post be to show interesting code? I'm having trouble reading through the densely packed source.

In addition to tromp's minor nitpick, I have several major ones.

- the code is full of redundant parentheses. HLint can detect those (and many other style errors) automatically. LPaste has HLint installed so you have a linting pastebin available online. http://lpaste.net/116871

- A lot of the functions are written in a non-idiomatic way. "m >>= return . f" is "fmap", "(.)" can combine functions much more readable than Lisp stacks of parentheses.

- ByteString.Char8 is usually a wrong choice, more on that here: https://github.com/quchen/articles/blob/master/fbut.md#bytes...

- If you count to "length x" then often there's a more elegant solution that avoids calculating the length altogether. For example "splits xs = zip (inits xs) (tails xs)".

- Brevity is never better than readability.

- No top-level definitions should lack a type signature. GHC even has warnings for that (I think they start firing with -W).

- A function should do one thing and then be composed with other functions. "lowerWords" converts to words and then maps them all to lower case, for example. These are two completely different operations in one long line.

- In order of increasing generality: foldr union empty = unions = mconcat = fold

- Use pattern matching, avoid "(!!)". transposes w = [ a ++ [b0,b1] ++ bs | (a, b0:b1:bs) <- splits w] - also see https://github.com/quchen/articles/blob/master/fbut.md#head-...

- For large amounts of words that you split and concatenate again, String is probably not the right type. Text is good for dealing with such things.

- replaces w = [as ++ [c] ++ bs | (as, _:bs) <- splits w , c <- alphabet]

... and so on.
The Song Machine (2012)
Why are so people so fast to trust a new compiler?

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.

full disclosure: link is down for me, so haven't read the article. Been a comment that has been building up for a while for me, and not specific to Nuitka. Same goes for new frameworks/languages/etc.
> The 'evidence' so far is, as others are pointing out, that people in NK wrote similar malware and some of the components used.

I had written a lengthy post pointing out the many pieces of evidence you're ignoring, but I think the FBI release does the job just as well. I find the infrastructure evidence as interesting, if not more interesting than the similar code:

> Technical analysis of the data deletion malware used in this attack revealed links to other malware that the FBI knows North Korean actors previously developed. For example, there were similarities in specific lines of code, encryption algorithms, data deletion methods, and compromised networks.

> The FBI also observed significant overlap between the infrastructure used in this attack and other malicious cyber activity the U.S. government has previously linked directly to North Korea. For example, the FBI discovered that several Internet protocol (IP) addresses associated with known North Korean infrastructure communicated with IP addresses that were hardcoded into the data deletion malware used in this attack.

>Separately, the tools used in the SPE attack have similarities to a cyber attack in March of last year against South Korean banks and media outlets, which was carried out by North Korea.

This also does not mention that some of the code was compiled on a machine configured with Korean language settings. This doesn't establish definitively that North Korea was behind this, but it is consistent with that conclusion.

There is also classified evidence. You may choose to ignore it, but I find the claim deserving of some (though not decisive) weight, and certainly worthy of mention.
Z3d.js – Interactive 3D plotting with a simple function call built on Three.js
I know Zigurd and I'm sure he meant it.

In this case I think he's wrong, but he's honest, and has a certain flair of which this is a rather earthy example. He's of Latvian descent, I think it's allowed ^_^.
Systematizing Sales with Software and Processes
> The irony of this statement is this is one of the primary reasons the department of homeland security was established, so sharing of information between these very offices would enable them to be more on top of stuff like this.

No, it wasn't. Which is evidenced by the fact that neither of these entities were among those moved from other Departments into the new Department of Homeland Security.

Improved information sharing among the parts of the intelligence community that were not consolidated into the DHS is the reason that various changes in the laws governing information sharing in the IC were changed, and that the office of the Director of National Intelligence was created to separate the head of the IC from the Director of a particular agency (the CIA) in that community.
This is something the midwest desperately needs. Unfortunately, we tried high speed trains during the stimulus, but the GOP governors of Wisconsin and Indiana didn't want to play ball with Obama's policies.

Imagine a fast line or a hyperloop between Chicago > Des Moines/Indianapolis/Madison/Cleveland/Memphis, etc.

We've got the flat land, maybe the money, but we don't have the political will. On a more positive note, the 300 mile Chicago > Columbus line is funded and happening:

http://thelantern.com/2014/10/plans-for-train-connecting-col...

>The high-speed train would make the Chicago-to-Columbus travel time three hours and 45 minutes, compared to an almost six-hour drive.

Not bad. No hyperloop, but if this is the begining of high-speed rail in America, it will be a game changer. Shame guys like Musk can't figure out ways to make traditional high-speed rail cheaper. I suspect that's just too unsexy of a problem for him.
Think North Korea Hacked Sony? Think about This
Yeah, i guess Samsung (seriously, that company is a real life ACME) would be quite happy to move into NK.
Honestly, I think Sony did take a big risk with that movie. First, the movie is total crap, and, now, because of all the noise, more people will watch than it deserves when it gets released on DVDs, cable, and so on!

We know CIA and NSA do sabotages as well and have hacked the whole world already - why do we think this right is reserved only for America and North Korea and other countries are not allowed to do this when it serves their interest?
Lessons Learned from Failure: How I Didn't Become the CTO of a Promising Startup
I thought so too, but then there is also this line:

> At some point, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies will likely have to shift from this work-when-you-can-but-don't-expect-money model to something a bit more conventional with, you know, employees.

So no one is actually full time.

I'm thrilled to see people working on this, but the article seems like a mess.
Notice how the discussion is full of edge-cases which this code doesn't handle? That's the argument for letting the operating system handle it unless this is such a key part of what you do that it's worth taking on that expense personally.
The Cold-Medicine Racket
Django-ctemplate: Compile Django templates to C
As long as we’re picking nits…

> I wrote this code putting brevity over readability

Overall, this is not particularly terse, for Haskell code. With all the lambdas, it looks like OCaml! For example, these are equivalent, and I find the latter clearer:

(sortBy (\(_,c1)(_,c2) -> c2 `compare` c1))

sortBy (flip (comparing snd))

Now, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to be explicit, but in cases such as these, it’s less repetitious to just use the standard library functions.
Show HN: Asteroid Squad yet another Asteroids on Steroids Game
It's not that important to talk about language preservation without talking about the anthropological reasons why some languages die out and others gain ascendancy. The birth and death of languages speaks to issues much bigger than the languages themselves, and when we talk about preserving languages, it's those bigger issues we are somehow trying to speak to, but doing so at the abstraction/generalization "layer" we call language. As to the question of why should we care, for me the question is why would we not care?
A statement that almost perfectly captures this effect:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
Very interesting, learned something new about ketchup!
If the FBI is involved and there was significant uncertainty to their conclusion wouldn't they slightly biased against concluding it is an international actor since it takes it out of their jurisdiction?

If the above is true should that cause us Bayesians to slightly believe their conclusion more? Or are they so influenced by governmental interests (who may want cyber warfare) that it really isn't a factor?
A classic. This wasn't the first article about exploiting buffer overruns, but the clear description made it easily understandable. Of course since the introduction of mitigations like non-executable stacks, ASLR, etc. the techniques here no longer work in most situations; but it's still a good read.
EleVR crew talks VR on Chrome and Firefox and stitching 360° video
I was agreeing with him. I read "regret" but think "gleeful childlike joy."
The numerous people with all sorts of typing-related issues may disagree...
I love to see attempts at new keyboard layouts because they are at the same time wonderfully optimistic and utterly hopeless. Good post for a Friday.
How can someone claim they successfully improve transport standards without keeping cost-effectiveness in consideration?
Might want to check out OpenBSD's OpenNTPD:

http://www.openntpd.org/
Didn't mean to be snarky, I just keep seeing all of the "North Korea is behind in technology" talk with not a whole lot of evidence to support it. Thinking that any nation doesn't have the technological capability to perform some complex hack is a little misguided, in my opinion. The average citizen may not be up to snuff technologically, but these are governments we're talking about.
Promises are actually about trust, not syntax. With a callback you have to trust that the function that will invoke your callback (which might not be something you wrote) will only ever call it once, that it will pass through errors, that it won't call both your success and failure callbacks, etc.

With a promise (or rather, following the promise specification) you instead get back an object that you choose how to handle. That object is either pending or else an immutable success or failure result. Either success or failure will be called (not both), and whichever result is called can only be called once. As such, promises allow you to avoid inversion of control and to safely interact with potentially untrusted code.

This great series of articles helped me understand this: http://blog.getify.com/promises-part-2/
You may be interested in going through "A General Theory of Reactivity"[0] from Kris Kowal, creator of the q promise library. It discusses relationships between streams, promises, iterators and generators (although the streams that he discusses are not how Node.js streams are implemented)

[0]: https://github.com/kriskowal/gtor
A bit of fact checking.

1) Tin Mining:

There is an IDH workgroup for Tin. It was founded in August of 2013. The 2013 impact report [1] from the IDH doesn't actually contain the word tin. Also the tin division has released no press releases or news other then its founding.

[1] http://www.idhsustainabletrade.com/impact

:.:.:

2) Supplier Responsibility.

The program has only existed for 8 years.

"Our Supplier Code of Conduct was already one of the
toughest in the electronics industry, and we made it even stronger [...] We drove our suppliers to achieve an average of 95 percent compliance with our maximum 60-hour work week." (This program started in 2012, after the 2010 foxconn suicides).

18 out of 240 factories now have employee eduction programs. This represents ~270,000 out of the estimated 1.5 million workers (18%).

13 out of 240 factories now supply their workers with clean water (5%).

The IDH work group Apple Founded certified all Tin Smelters they source from are "conflict free".

Apple publicly states bonded (indentured labor) that goes on for a time longer then 30 days is a humans rights violation. But only ~16% of its indentured labor follows this guide line.

[1] https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_2...
It is significant that this information is coming from the FBI and not the Pentagon, CIA or NSA. It indicates that this will be treated as a domestic criminal issue and not an act of war. Don't expect an overt military response. Also, since US law doesn't apply to the North Korean government, don't expect much to happen at all besides Sony continuing to cede to the demands of the hackers.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Asuppo...
This article is from 2010. Xah Lee has a comparison of different layouts:

http://xahlee.info/kbd/dvorak_and_all_keyboard_layouts.html

I keep a bunch of .org file notes for keyboards, etc. I don' t have much on alternate keyboards: http://thespanishsite.com/org/ergo/keyboards.html

So, I'd love to hear other people's experiences.
Ireland - everyone speaks English as their first language, but Irish is mandatory in schools

Belarus - everyone speaks Russian, but Belorussian is mandatory in schools

Ukraine - a vast number of people (maybe not majority but too many to be called a minority) speaks Russian as their first language but Ukrainian is mandatory in schools and all attempts to give Russian some sort of official status were meet with fierce opposition for no other reason than to preserve national identity

Tatarstan (not so sure about this one, also not a country) - Tatar is mandatory in schools for all the same reasons

Yes, all of these majority languages where once forced on the peoples of colonies by the empires. But all the people who were forced to learn them are now dead. So the current generations are forced to learn those original languages in the name of historical justice and other bullshit.

And what studies do you need for negative effects? The time learning those languages involuntarily is obviously not spent doing anything else. Is that not negative enough for you?
Number 2 seems most likely, so then the question is: Why would they lie?

2a. They're lying for political reasons. (This seems to be the most common explanation in this discussion and others.)

2b. They're lying to make the real hackers feel safe and potentially make a security mistake.

Some other reason?
It must be incredibly hard to remember how to even use your arms 40 years after not having them. I'm not a neuroscientist, but I would expect that sooner or later the brain would start to rewrite the paths devoted to arm movement to something else. Looks like this guy made a ton of progress though. Very encouraging to see.
"On one hand, it seems incredibly stupid to make a movie (comedy or no) about assassinating a sitting national leader."

Quartz covered that angle:

http://qz.com/315432/this-is-far-from-the-first-time-hollywo...
Thanks for filling me in. I meant no disrespect to the OP, though I did think it was an editorialization. That's my fault.
Do other OSes have an equivalent to User Mode Scheduling? It seems to allow you to get the best of both worlds, if your tasks are amenable to the model.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd62...
> the movie is total crap

That's quite the statement to make despite not watching it
They explicitly mention that they are not sharing all of the evidence.

This is a habit that needs to change if they want greater support among the informed.
Fun article, but re: the interactive planet map...

"A very cloudy Earth-like planet with a dim star and dark vegetation."

Yes, I'd say it goes a bit beyond what we know.
Sorry for the accusation. I did not realize the headline would change like that. That's my fault.
Rails performance scales linearly with money. You save money on the dev side, but you'll need more servers sooner than more performant languages/frameworks.