skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Police says humongous data to be analysed in pro-Islamic State tweets
Hydroponics would seem to be more amenable to automation though. So much of it (including the plants) can be standardized and monitored.

While it probably doesn't make sense for everyone to have their own, manually maintained hydroponic garden, it might make sense to have large-scale, but local, highly automated gardens that produce food for the surrounding community.
Minor nitpick: surely the title should actually be "How to Send Email as a Startup". The current phrasing seems a bit odd - especially considering the fact that it is a lecture on reaching out to potential future customers :)
Sorry yeah I don't know why I said Eisenhower.

I stand by the assertion that the US was trying to come off as a little crazy in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Worked remotely for the whole year. It has been an interesting ride.
You are halfway proving my point and halfway showing that you don't get what can be done.

In the proving my point camp -- If your goal is to make money, please do not go into agriculture. Go into this arena if you goal is to improve the world. Money can be made elsewhere. Decisions that will impact the ability of people to live or die should NOT be based on the cash it will bring back into the hands of a startup.

And in the not getting it camp - 8 billion people each doing small tasks IS scale. Helping them do those tasks easier decreases the maintenance in their lives. Maybe it is a content-based app to see what has worked for other people. Maybe it is training materials to which people can subscribe. Maybe someone will sell modular garden box kits, with built-in drip irrigation, so you just plug in your hose and you have a system that can work in an arid climate. Or a set of 3D printer designs to print out your own hand tools for gardening.

All of those ideas can scale to be a profitable startup, and they are just off the top of my head. Who knows what could be developed if people really sat down and worked on it?

Finally, as far as gardening not making your life easier, I cannot help you with that. It isn't for everyone. But that is also the reason that communities work better than individuals. In our family, I do little of the farm work, but I make all of the money. It balances out. Find the right people to live with.
DevDraft – Online tech hiring event in Bay Area
Went on a long job hunt, resulting in 6 offers, with the best one paying more than 5x my current current salary. Got a much better understanding of the professional landscape and the opportunities out there.
I don't get it. Doesn't sonny have the money to hire people like Spender, D. Hartmeier, etc. To secure their network?! To they need a hacker community to secure their network?!

I mean it's obvious that they don't care about security or that they do care but they value flexibility more, than tight security. Either way I don't understand the nature of the offer, maybe it's pure irony and I missed it.
To me, this is a big part of what makes machine learning exciting: it's so challenging to implement it well. The result of it is that machine learning touches a lot of computer science, from high-level languages and formal verification to low-level languages and systems concerns (GPU programming, operating systems).

This difficulty is also a reason why machine learning programmers who are, at least, validated tend to get a lot of trust from the business that CommodityScrumDrones don't get (and that's why most good programmers want to redefine themselves as "data scientists"; it's the promise of autonomy and interesting work). No one tells a machine learning engineer to "go in to the backlog and complete 7 Scrum tickets by the end of the sprint". Of course, the downside of all this is that true machine learning positions (which are R&D heavy) are rare, and there are a lot more so-called "data scientists" who spend most of their time benchmarking off-the-shelf products without the freedom to get insight into how they work.

I actually think that the latter approach is more fragile, even if it seems to be the low-risk option (and that's why mediocre tech managers like it). When your development process is glue-heavy, the bulk of your people will never have or take the time to understand what's going on, and even though operational interruptions in the software will be rarer, getting the wrong answer (because of misinterpretation of the systems) will be more common. Of course, sometimes using the off-the-shelf solution is the absolute right answer, especially for non-core work (e.g. full-text search for an app that doesn't need to innovate in search, but just needs the search function to work) but if your environment only allows programmers to play the glue game, you're going to have a gradual loss of talent, insight into the problem and how the systems work, and interest in the outcomes. Reducing employee autonomy is, in truth, the worst kind of technical debt because it drains not only the software but the people who'll have to work with it.

At any rate, I'd say that while this seems to be a problem associated with machine learning, it's just an issue surrounding complex functionality in general. Machine learning, quite often, is something we do to avoid an unmaintainable hand-written program. A "black box" image classifier, even though we can only reason about it empirically (i.e. throw inputs at it and see what comes out) is going to be, at the least, more trustworthy than a hand-written program that has evolved over a decade and had hundreds of special cases, coming from aged business requirements that no longer apply and programmers from a wide spectrum of ability, written in to it. All in all, I'd say that ML reduces total technical debt; it's just that it allows us to reach higher levels of complexity in functionality, and to get to places where even small amounts of technical debt can cause major pain.
Hangups: Third-party IM client for Google Hangouts
The EFF scorecard is technically unsound and not a good place to start. It actually caused a small controversy among crypto and security people when it was released.
I think a lot of the problem is that ML practitioners often don't know much about software engineering. The other half is that people frequently manage programs as if they were projects.
I'm curious about the tests to measure our emotions.

What kind of test is it that can measure an emotional change before and after reading a story, which I guess takes 20min to read. Do they ask the same questions?. Anyone know more about this?
> I guess a movie about two brave maverick North Korean TV stars heading to Washington to assassinate Obama, the evil emperor of the United States could also be a 'funny' comedy movie to watch.

Except from the fact that it's a boring script, I don't see nothing wrong with it and I'm pretty sure that you an do a movie like that anytime you'd like in the US. I'm pretty sure the government will not send hackers to attack the studio... For making fun of any figure. In the late night show the host makes fun of virtually everyone and anything. Satire shows pretty much the level of a democracy.

ps. Consider that I'm very critical of the US gov. But it's absolutely nowhere near N. Korea if that was your point.
First ran into this concept (not exactly the same concept) here http://lesswrong.com/lw/uh/trying_to_try/

I still have a lot of struggle in my life, slowly I'm getting there.
Web Design Advice
Don't just use gray text on white background.
If you really want to make your text difficult to read, you will achieve even better results with white text on white background.
End of Tesla, or End of Oil?
Does this mean if I set up an alert for a server anyone can then add me to any number of alerts without further confirmation?
6. Don't explain/remind in the email what your product does, because "Squinderly" is such an obvious name.
'Depression and Christmas just don't go'
And all Sony had to do was regularly back up, encrypt and delete the emails off their servers. This is the prime thing motivating their actions and driving their fear. And protect sensitive documents better but that seems secondary.

Leaving an ever accumlating pile of embarassing communications for someone to steal and then extort you for is not a national security weakness.
Web content fits better on a tall monitor
What?!?!

When John McCain was tortured and was asked to give up the names of his squad mates, he gave the names of the front line of the green bay packers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_and_military_career_...

Clearly torture is an effective way of getting useless information, you have no way to tell if the info is correct or not, and the prisoner has no incentive to give you the correct information.

People who were cooperating were still tortured, for no apparent reason!

(See the section on Rectal Feeding And Hydration:)

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-senate-is-about-to-releas...

So no, its just people being messed up. There is no logic. There is no reason.
I don't think it's hype or over stating things to suggest that this may be the most significant advance in practical statistics and methodologies for scientific investigation in years, perhaps decades.

Like many brilliant ideas, it seems so obvious in retrospect, another great "Why didn't I think of that?" moment.
Can the bitcoin blockchain be used to somehow store this data?
Personally, I giggle when anyone says that SaaS has changed the way enterprise or b2b software is sold (as opposed to delivered where it has made big changes) - I've been in the business for a while and most deals still require sales people and cocktail hours. This is especially true as the price tag goes up - when you're selling $1m deals, it is just about always done on personal selling basis.

With the exception of Atlassian, most of the low/no-touch companies I've seen are pretty limited in scalability - I don't know many that have reached a $100m in sales without having a traditional sales team. As another example, Mixpanel, which would seem to have a low-touch approach, is building a huge sales team. Zendesk is interesting - but I know they've got salespeople because we just negotiated with them.

I should also differentiate between those that show prices on their website or not - many show pricing - although it is often generalized. Many show pricing up to a certain level and then you have to talk to a rep - Mixpanel goes up to $24k a year and then you have to talk to a rep.

Would love to see more examples other than Atlassian if anyone has them.
How to Create a Free Society
To be honest, I have no interest in seeing the film because everything I've heard about it indicates it's probably a crap film. I furthermore think it was a bad idea to make it in the first place.

However, I applaud 2600's proposal because it points in the right direction: a calm, nonviolent but assertive refusal to be intimidated, rather than the hysterical paranoia and escalation of threats we are seeing all too much of in recent years.
Digitalocean does something similar when you want to use some of their higher powered virtual machines. Even after you provided credit card information and the first invoice was paid. Suddenly they need justification, Twitter handle, blog or other proof that you're real.
It is idiomatic in highly performance-sensitive Java code though. Hopefully it won't be necessary in Java 9 or 10 when unboxing support is brought in.

I've added a note regarding the change, but I'm off to bed in a moment (AEST timezone). I'll separate the Java versions tomorrow.
here is a much faster version:

https://gist.github.com/lispm/6066e1eeadf943910c47

You might want to adapt it...
So what are your recommendations?
Try
http://www.mybb.com/

But the most powerful forum is phpBB
The thing is that from what I can tell this attack is not even in the same order of magnitude as the state sponsored attacks you are referring to.

I haven't found a good write up on the attack, however my understanding is it was mainly due to Sony's lack of security and not the prowess of the hackers.

This was something like SQL Injection and non password protected excel files with employees social security numbers. The state-sponsored APTs you are talking about are hundreds of millions of dollars worth of custom software engineering.

However I agree with your general premise that another government essentially blackmailing one of our private companies is worrying.
A language is not the only part of the technology stack. There's worlds of difference between a JEE application and a Play application, even if both are written in Java.
>And torque is NOT an effective means of extracting information.

Then how do you explain this case in Germany where simply threatening torture resulted in the perpetrator divulging the location of his victim: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/10/world/kidnapping-has-germa...
I don't know about you, but my ability to search and retrieve emails from months or years ago is critical in my job. You make it sound like it's an obvious choice.
That would be almost too stupid, considering how Tor is financed in large by U.S. government grants.
Double Prosthetic Arm with Mind Control
Whoever is telling web companies that it is a good idea to suddenly start mailing "newsletters" to people that signed up for accounts is lying to them. Over the past year or so I've started getting emails from web sites I haven't visited in years - for example I signed into an old hotmail account and apparently fark is sending out newsletters now?

The only thing these things do is make me click unsubscribe and make a mental note that the site sucks.
That's false. This is gradual typing, which is more recent. Gradual typing allows dynamicity, while HM fails if not every type can be statically inferred. Furthermore, IIRC there are reasons why HM is less/not suited for imperative languages, but they escape me at the moment.
How to Do a Successful Lightning Talk
Christmas Lights with Individual LED Control
Picking Season – Behind the scenes at Fanatics.com’s memorabilia warehouse
Bootstrapping POWER8 Little Endian and Common Pitfalls
My experience has been that performant code is very hard to write. In particular, the tools that Angular provides for the most common sorts of things you'd want it to do (ng-repeat, ng-show/hide, ng-click, $on and $watch) all break down for one reason or another when trying to use them in anything but a toy application [0].

When I realized that ng-hide just applies CSS classes I did a huge facepalm. Consider the example of dynamically constructing a table. In Angular:

<tr ng-repeat="child in children">
<td ng-show="foo(child)">Foo</td>
<td ng-hide="foo(child)">Bar</td>
</tr>

This example runs the function foo four (!) times per digest cycle per item. Sure, you could convolute your code to make the Angular more performant, but at the cost of clear and maintainable markup. What's more, this produces rows with two cells, one of them hidden with CSS, which is ripe for creating hard-to-debug issues. The alternative in basically any other framework is written in a way and produces code execution and markup that you'd intuitively expect.

Angular's directive system encourages developers to write illegal markup. Enough said.

Angular's DI system is needlessly complicated, and the basic usage breaks when minifying because it couples identifier names to string values.

That same issue is repeated in many different aspects of Angular: the basic, intuitive usage is (intentionally or not) broken in a production environment. The amount of deep knowledge of the Angular framework that's required to successfully develop apps is absurd.

[0]: https://www.airpair.com/angularjs/posts/angularjs-performanc...
> Why are the vast majority of forums in PHP?

Easy - the vast majority of forums are set up by people who just want a forum, and aren't necessarily technically savvy, and PHP is dead simple to deploy to on a free shared account. Most of the popular forums are dead now because forums in general have been supplanted by social media, and hosted services.

It's kind of unfortunate because I think there is still a place for self-hosted forums.
Why E-Voting Will Always Be a Bad Idea
This is fun:

$ curl ping.gg/monitoring@me.com/127.0.0.1
[ ok ] Ping alert created for host '127.0.0.1' and email 'monitoring@me.com'. Check your email to activate it.
North Korea, Denying Sony Attack, Proposes Joint Investigation With U.S.
people frequently manage programs as if they were projects

That's an interesing point. Could you please elaborate on the specifics of program management?
(b) is possible as well, but it would probably happen in PyPy or Cython, rather than CPython.
Have they lost anything when you do that, though? You weren't really a customer or user anymore anyway, and now they can figure that out.

If they send out that email to 100 people, and 95 inactive users unsubscribe but 5 become active users again, that's a huge net gain for them, right?
if someone knowns your email address and that you've confirmed it, then yes, that someone could set up more, but the limit is 10.

If that ever happens to you, you could:
1) pause the unwanted alerts, and remove some only when you need new ones.
2) if you panic, use the "unsubscribe" button that will block any future emails to your address.

Having such a low barrier of entry does not come without tradeoffs.
Look up descriptive linguistics some time.
"Getting Started. Command Line" -> OK I have java.
"Hello World" -> "Start repl." lost already.
systemd also has a minimalistic ntp client. It does not implement the full ntp spec but is sufficient for most desktop and server systems.
Liu Bolin: Hiding at the Standard
I threw together a little reporting package for these data files, if anyone is interested.

https://github.com/peterkeen/stripe_reporter

The existing reports are pretty basic, but all of the data is in the schema to write really interesting reports.
I agree. Ask any Apple's (high-rank) employees about Tim Cook's silences. They say they may even be worse than Steve's wraths.
Change your data model so that you don't need to aggregate. Duplicate if necessary, handle the resulting potential inconsistency.

Have the right indexes; especially with complex aggregation you might be surprised to find they aren't being used due to a quirk of your query.

A single mongo instance can handle a beefy load, but not if every read is an aggregation over a million by million by who knows how many docs.
No, you can't just have "some guys that specialize in security". That's exactly what 99%+ of software is full of obvious security holes. 99%+ of developers don't know anything about or care anything about security. Security is a process not a product remember? Everyone has to be actively part of it all the time. You don't churn out buggy exploitable software and then expect some "security experts" to somehow magically make it secure.
Want to see other replies as well - but here are some of my thoughts.

1. Run your query with explain - to confirm that your queries are indeed indexed[1]. There have been a couple of times where we discovered that a specific branch of a complex query was not hitting index - so discovering that was useful.

2. One thought on slow reads with aggregation framework and 1M+ documents is that you are bottlenecked on memory. Even though all your queries may be indexed - you may be hitting disk too often (and doing a lot of random I/O) which is expensive. Check out MMS - and specifically the page faults graph - and you will get an idea about how many times a second you hit disk. For my specific application - response time was very important - so we tried to keep our page faults close to zero. Is increasing the RAM in your instance a viable option? If so this would definitely give you some breathing room.

3. You should try and verify if your response is slow because the query processing time itself is high, or if it's because you have several concurrent queries competing for system resources (CPU / memory etc). If it's the latter - the fix is easy - just add more machines to your replicaset (balance this with adding more RAM).

4. Check your lock %. My guess - from your brief description - this will not be an issue for you. If this is an issue - you __may__ need to shard your system - or do 5.

5. I think the most scalable solution would be to rethink your data pipeline. Why do you need to apply complex aggregation queries on 1M+ documents? Can you build a processing pipeline that takes in your data - and builds "prepared views" for the queries you expect out of your aggregation pipeline? In my application - we used stream processing pipeline that aggregated all the messages we got - in all the different ways we needed - and inserted them into different databases (to work around the DB level locking :( ) in mongo. Each collection had exactly ONE type of query that would be executed - this would be an extremely simple query and would be indexed. This pattern is common - even outside of mongo.

Good luck :)

[1] http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/method/cursor.expla...
Work abroad.

Create a startup.

Learn better linux.

Learn c || c++ || rust || java.
Causal discovery has been research subject in statistics and machine learning for years.

See, for example:

Causation, Prediction, and Search
by Spirtes, Glymour and Scheines (1993)
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/learn-43/lib/p...

Computation, Causation, & Discovery
(1999), edited by C. Glymour and G. Cooper,
MIT Press
To clarify, the most criticism that the EFF secure messaging scorecard had was:

* CryptoCat got a perfect rating, despite it's long history of insecurity, attack vectors, and questionable audits.

* Skype got rated more favorably then is likely the truth. It has since been corrected though.

* PGP got buried as a recommendation.

* A good number of tools were missing on initial release.

The big issue with the scorecard is the lack of rigid definitions, such as code audits. Developers will audit and review each other's code all the time. But most won't qualify that as a "security audit". So, does a security audit require a cryptographer to audit the code? A third party security agency? How in depth do audits go? Are there any standards or "best practices" to go by when auditing crypto code, or is it just a rubber stamp?

With that said, it does list (incompletely) a good set of tools that you can investigate, that you may not have heard of.
Probably most people here are smart enough to understand the benefits and drawbacks without reading this article at all, but here's a TLDR: if you routinely look at one long web page at at time (and aren't worried about straining your neck), then you might be better served orienting your monitor vertically.
Haha, I actually thought about replying a "you are an smartass" error when someone subscribes to to 127.. or ping.gg itself :)

There is an alert limit per host, so not everyone will be able to do the same. Congrats!
Is your first paragraph intended to be sarcastic? If so, could you rephrase it without the sarcasm?
Responsive Design ProTip: When screen size decreases it becomes increasingly difficult to read the text, solve this problem by increasing text size in proportion to decrease of screen size.
As a user of dual monitors, one vertical and one horizontal, I have to admit, there's nothing that makes me happier than full screen Vim on the vertical 23" monitor.
Amen to Cython. When used well (eg. with C types for variables and a few compiler directives, which is not very painful at all), Cython emits code that is extremely similar to idiomatic C for my scientific computing workloads.
tbh i like widescreen as i can stack 2 pages of 2 different things. (like 1 terminal + 1 doc)
i dont spent my day reading the news tho so there's that...
I'm off to bed now, I'll pull it in the morning.
We moved to PostgreSQL.

Our performance problems went away, with almost no work other than the initial migration. We fixed many data integrity problems during the migration, and have not noticed any problems since. Our uptime has become near perfect. We now get to use all of the other great features that PostgreSQL offers.