skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This reminds me of the first lab assignment of my OS class. Ah, here it is (but don't trust this link: the professor takes it down and puts it back up again with slight changes every term): http://eecs.wsu.edu/~cs460/LAB1.html

Interesting notes about this class:

1. This is the second of two one-semester systems programming classes. In the first semester, you learn how to implement ext2. The bootloader assignment is mostly a minimal refresher of the same subject, so you're expected to have remembered from last semester how to traverse the filesystem.

2. You have to write the whole boot loader yourself, aside from some assembly code you've been provided. It runs in 16-bit mode, so you can't use gcc, at least not easily. You use bcc; Bruce's C compiler, which doesn't really read ANSI C.

2a. This actually continues throughout the entire class, during which you will eventually build an entire kernel, in 16 bit x86, using Bruce's C compiler. I don't know who Bruce is, but the professor apparently thought that 32-bit mode did too much of the work for you and wanted us to understand how to do some of the stuff (i.e. switching between kernel and user mode, I think?) ourselves.

2b. Bruce's C compiler lacks a lot of interesting features of more modern C compilers, like function signatures. In Bruce's C compiler, much as in early dialects of C, you can call any function you want and pass whatever arguments you want; the only thing the function does is read it off the stack. Downsides: whatever paltry type safety you get from C is gone; you can pass a long to a function that expects a short and it'll just grab enough bits off the stack to make a short. Upsides: variadic functions, like printf, are marginally simpler to implement; when they released some of the very earliest C/Unix code, I found that my printf had a very close resemblance to the original.

3. You have to fit the whole bootloader in 1 KB, which is not the kind of programming challenge I had yet faced.

4. Since the entire class is taught using ancient technology, there's obviously no emphasis on things like git or API keys. I personally took this class as an opportunity to teach myself git in order to maintain my own sanity.

The professor who teaches these classes is a bit of a legend among CS alumni at my school, partially for these lab assignments and partially for his lectures, which involve extended metaphors, and in which he doesn't erase anything he writes on the whiteboard, instead diagramming or writing over whatever he diagrammed or wrote before.
Writing Cross-Platform Software: Getting Started (2002)
hey thanks for posting a link to the archive you made. your efforts to archive and display the material are much appreciated.
How similar is hacking to 21st Century pharma discovery?
Reading this thread on the latest advancement in antibiotics, (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8852487) I noticed several commenters touching on various strategies that seemed eerily similar to hacking...penetration testing, brute force fuzz testing, vulnerability analysis. The language and the medium is different, but at an abstract level, the strategies appear to be similar.

For someone versed in both worlds, how similar is it in reality, and are there advancements in say, white hat hacking that have counterparts in medicine/biology/genomics?
There is also https://github.com/scottferg/Fergulator
It's too easy to hit the sign in button, without knowing it's limited to DC, the first mention of which is below the fold.
Ask HN: Is it okay to create a tool to automate news submission?
I wrote a tool to automate post submission to HN and I was wondering if it was okay to make it public and/or use it. My use case is blogging. I find it a hassle to post news by hand so I automated it with a program I wrote and I want to know if it's okay to use such a program for good. This post has been generated using said program.

It's pretty trivial to write one too, but I was wondering because I never saw such thing in the wild.
Thank you, you are absolutely right! I should have said "f-ratio" everywhere I used "aperture".

I'll leave my previous comment in its incorrect state in the hope that people will see yours to correct and clarify it. :-)

> The camera folks express aperture as an f-ratio, which is extremely confusing.

Isn't it the other way around? I think the mistake we self-proclaimed "knowledgeable" camera folks make is using the term "aperture" where we really should say f-ratio.

For example, I have two Olympus Micro Four Thirds lenses that are both f/1.8: a 45mm and a 75mm. Looking at these lenses it's pretty obvious that the f/1.8 is an f-ratio: the front element of the 75mm is much wider than the 45mm, as you'd expect.

So thanks to your comment, I will endeavor to use "f-ratio" where I've been misusing "aperture".
Yes, you're correct, the point should be the data. However, the projection (not the shape), matters a great deal for a number of reasons. The classic example is to take an orange peel and flatten it. It's impossible to do without tearing or distorting in one way or another. The Earth is of course a 3d shape, and maps are 2d, thus projections to try and map the world as accurately as possible. However, it gets more complicated when you project the data, going back to the distortion. It becomes a problem of "Pick 2 out of 3." That usually means Area, Shape and Direction. You can have an accurate representation of Area and Shape, but not Direction. Or in the case of Mercator, Direction and Shape, but not size. Mercator was used by ocean going navigators so that they could draw a straight line on their navigation charts (as longitude and lattitude lines are represented by rectangles with 90 degree angles). Since then of course, we now have thousands of different projections, used for different purposes so that we can try and create the most accurate mapping of the "real" world as we can. And of course, the projection you choose, should hopefully help you in accurately communicating that geographic information to others. I hope that all makes sense.
I replied in another thread about some of the reasonings behind it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8830058

It's an alternative approach to software design which may feel alien if all you've ever used is copy-pasting for code re-use, or relying on large standard libraries and utility grab-bags.
Who is hiring brainfuck developers these days?
There are numerous interstitiated mechanisms in hearing. I don't see why MBC in particular would be valuable, other than amplifying quiet parts automatically, which could in fact have the opposite effect.

However, I think there is potential for many other mechanisms to be developed, such as automatic filtering, to eliminate masking in frequency and time domains.

The question I have is why other companies, such as Apple and Spotify, don't simply add this DSP technology to their software. What can SoundFocus do that can't be copied? Proprietary algorithms?
In the case of is-object the api is frozen, and with any module it's assumed that any breaking changes would come in via a major version (ie not break your code).

Yeah, sure, if the maintainer becomes evil overnight he can break a lot of apps. If you live in fear then you probably won't enjoy npm very much.
Absolutely. His brand of intellectualism is a blend of self-pity and "intellectual" condescension wrapped in a litany of the same grievances and arguments against the modern culture that technology hath wrought. Where is the originality? Where is the real emotion? If you are so perturbed, write something truly moving and relatable on a human level.
i dont really care that they've been using it responsibly so far - there isn't a guarantee that abuse won't happen.
I disagree. It's like saying crappy musicians make better music.

Development is means to an end. The better you know your tools the more productive you'll be. Its true with anything.
I'm completely deaf in my left ear, and I wear a hearing aid in my right ear. What's really cool is that my hearing aid has BlueTooth, and starting with the iPhone 5S, Apple supports direct-to-hearing-aid technology. That means when I get a phone call, it streams directly from the phone to my hearing aid -- not out of a speaker, directly to my ear. Very, very cool.

Here's more info: https://www.apple.com/accessibility/ios/hearing-aids/

That said, if I had an older hearing aid or didn't have this one, I'd definitely use this app. They are spot on about hearing loss and how it's more than just a volume thing. In fact, most of hearing loss is really an understanding thing. I can hear your voice just fine -- I just can't hear 100% of it, so the words don't make sense to me right away.
There are several emulated devices simply because there's no way around it (the rtc, PCI bus, uart, etc.). Obviously KVM handles a fair amount of emulation (PIT, IOAPIC) which is very nice.

Although the Linux implementation for 9p isn't great, there's nothing "fundamental" that limits the caching in the guest. For many use cases, you will have no shared mutable state in the host. Think docker: you have some shared read-only state, but the write bits are yours alone. You may cache anything freely.

This project was simply about playing with these ideas (and implementing a VMM using Go). You should check the slides out to understand the gap that I was looking at, but suffice to say I think there's a wide opportunity for something that gives you a process-like model but whose interface is that of a virtual machine. The key point is that you don't really want an ultra-quick "machine", you probably want to run a process ala Docker. I still want it to be contained as a VM however, for security and compatibility reasons.
I alias "history | grep" to "hrep" and I'd bet it is one of my top 3-5 commands.
DirecTV and Ice Cream
I admit that my heart grows less tender when people shake their fists at the sky for the cruel turns the world has wrought unto them, without acknowledging the myriad ways they have benefited from the same forces that have given rise to their complaints.

That's basically the description of callousness. You're rather arrogantly assuming that you're capable of judging wether or not they have benefited from these changes. Economic factors and whiz-bang gadgets might not excite people as much as having a stable core of friends and family around them. I'm sure you've seen studies on how uncorrelated economic indicators and happiness are?

I am unaware of this author's poignant appeal on behalf of milkmen, TV repairmen, and gas station attendants

Why is that pertinent?
Came in here to make the same comment. I used to do some work with the author around the time he was writing it. There was much talk about playing Battle Toads in their break room.
I lived in a condo for 4 years and the building had a gym downstairs. It couldn't have been more convenient to workout every day, and yet I only worked out a handful of times. For me, it was just a matter of finding the motivation.
It's limited to U.S. initially. The DC market is where we are based and initially focused but works for all U.S. professionals.
In my experience, people who hold this attitude would look down their noses at a basketball coach who asked for a hundred and ten percent from his players. But this assignment is no different: if you're required to go above and beyond, you aren't really going above and beyond anything in particular. You're just doing what's required to finish an assignment that happens to be specified imprecisely.
Reminds me of NESticles
For purposes of argument:

> Books have never been cheaper.

Thanks to market distortions enforced by a still-growing quasi-monopoly, whose stock price is only propped up by Wall Street's expectation that they will jack those prices way, way up once all the competition has been flattened and customers have nowhere else to go.

> I can video call around the world.

If you and the person on the other end both use the same software out of dozens of options. "Let's see, Jane is on Skype, but Mike uses Google Hangouts..."

> Almost anything can be delivered quickly.

If you live in San Francisco or New York City. If you happen to be among the very few people who live anywhere else, your mileage may vary.

> Email has taken over my life.

As an open platform that can be freely integrated with rather than a closed corporate silo with a cocktail-straw API, email is a remnant of a more civilized age rather than a product of our current one.

> I have free access to an evergrowing encyclopedia.

Whose quality is determined entirely by which obsessive-compulsive editor has the most free time on their hands.
It's a great feel-good story, but the whole thing is just intelligence theater, à la Bruce Schneier's security theater.

That is, the coded message serves no intelligence or military objective. It sounds to me like the government concocted this idea because they felt they should be doing something, anything, no matter how useless( * ).

What's a hostage supposed to conclude from hearing, "19 people rescued. You’re next. Don’t lose hope". Should I run? Run now? Hide in the jungle? Run when the rescue starts? Stay put? Fight during the rescue? Don't fight? If you asked 10 different people what specific action you're supposed to take based on this message, you'd get 10 different answers.

If this message had any tangible effect, why aren't there any first hand accounts from the hostages explaining what they did differently as a result of hearing the message?

So 3 million people heard this song, yet the only ones who understood it were some of the hostages? Not one of the several thousand militants and no one in the public decoded it? This just proves the point that it's un-actionable. Case (1): Lots of people got it besides the hostages, but there's nothing to blow the whistle on. It's not as if the message says, "Raid at dawn". Case (2): Nobody got it, which also implies that the message had no effect.

( * )If the government claimed that the message was simply a way to make the hostages keep up hope, then OK (though it still seems like a lot of expense for little gain). But they're trying to make it sound like a big intelligence or military coup, which it is not.
> Is there any current reason to still use CVS in 2015

It works.
I'm sure there's a point you're making here, but I'm not interested in finding it among all the insults you're slinging my way. Chill out, dude.
Spot on - OP's blog sounded like textbook cargo cultism, imitating the superficial aspects of the SV startup scene (which in itself is fairly cargo cultish). He has learned all the right grandiose rhetoric, but seems to lack the most rudimentary understanding of how a business operates, let alone something as weird as a VC-backed startup.

It looks like we're right back to the bad old days of the dot-com bubble, where there's a total disconnect between the word "startup" and building a business that creates meaningful value for customers.

His idea of a startup seems to map exactly to the old joke:
1) Get funded.
2) Build an UberFaceCrowd clone.
3) ???
4) Profit!
The Blame for the Charlie Hebdo Murders
SMTP is push, POP/IMAP are receiver implementation details.
Algorithms playground in Python 3
I can have my parents as my friends, and friends my age. Is it so odd for a teenage girl to be close to the people that raised her?
I'm skeptical that this is a good thing given how the profit motive motivates people to "externalize" side effects; Environmental damage from antibacterial soaps, disrupting natural biological processes, disease-resistant bacteria, are a few effects.

> Scientists have discovered an antibiotic capable of fighting infections that kill hundreds of thousands of people each year

Given it's potential as a medicine, the media will hype it into public consciousness. Marketers & Entrepreneurs will use this social inertia to sell it in places where it is dangerous to use. The FDA has a history of revolving doors with big pharma & playing loose in pandering to corporate interests, at the expense of the public & environment.

I'm merely presenting a minority view here on Hacker News. It's good to have all your t's crossed and i's dotted.
FBI Director: Sony Hacker Sloppiness Helped Establish North Korea Link
A REST API for Any Postgres Database
leg pulled. maybe because i'm not the only one on this end of the convo?
Thanks and no worries. It's just been one of those days. :)
His brand of intellectualism is a blend of self-pity and "intellectual" condescension wrapped in a litany of the same grievances and arguments against the modern culture that technology hath wrought.

Can you make some citations? I frankly don't see see any self-pity.

Why are you putting "intellectual" in quotes? Because he's talking about the humanities?

Personally, I can see a light at the end of the tunnel because of what I see related to the future of decentralized monetization of digital media, so I can see how we can rebuild industry around intellectual property.

Still, he makes a lot of great points about posthumanist tendencies. We in this industry, an industry that is shaping the world with very little in the way of a conversation, are incredibly obsessed with quantifying things and we seem to think that "improving what we can measure" and economics are going to be the only things we need to think about.

I mean, come on, your first response was about how a machine generated essay would be better than his well argued piece! Unbelievable levels of irony! Fantastic! Haha!

Where is YOUR originality and emotion? Somehow a single snarky paragraph is enough? A quantum of downvote is enough? Open YOUR mind!
One does not have to be in school to learn history. History was my favourite subject, other than my web classes, but just because I'm not in school doesn't mean I can't, you know, read historical literature for fun. Heaven forbid a teenage learns for the heck of it on weekends.
thanks for the suggestion. i still lament the fact that my phone can't do this out of the box. this is a silly limitation, IMO.
I was going to cite Cheese but the point is still valid. Bacteria, eating our leftovers and making our cheese since, well forever.
I now understand about how the system works after someone else explained. But, thank-you for the feedback.
There's nothing to discuss, really. I'm not going to convince you. You're not going to convince me. Steve's not going to convince Akbar, and Akbar's not going to convince Omkar. Nobody's ever read an internet comment and thought, "Holy shit, @deeznutz420 is right. My religion IS a total crock of shit! Well I'll be..." What happened is terrible. It'll happen again, and no amount of pontificating or "nation-building" or foreign aide is going to change the fact that some people hate other people because they're different because their parents raised them to be that way. This is not a religious thing, it's a human thing. Whites in the US killed black people all the time, not too long ago mind you, simply because they were different. And they worshipped the same freaking god!
I also don't get why the specific Java bashing. I agree with you in that Java is awesome for server-side code.
A related and useful article from The Economist (Link at the end). I have reproduced parts of it that I found interesting (Heavily edited for telegraphic brevity):

"Like many of America’s new generation of users, Ms Scudo's ddiction began in 2000 when, after a hip injury, a doctor prescribed her ... a high dose of OxyContin.. Her prescription was later reduced, but she was already hooked. On the black market OxyContin pills cost $80 each, more than she could afford to cover her six-a-day habit; so she began selling her pills and using the proceeds to buy cheaper heroin. As if from nowhere, Ms Scudo had become a heroin addict."

"last year 11m Americans used illicitly-acquired prescription painkillers, more than the number who used cocaine, ecstasy, methamphetamine and LSD combined."

"Though Afghanistan accounts for 80% of global opium production, America gets most of its heroin from Mexico. Mexico is now the world’s third-biggest producer of opium, after Afghanistan and Myanmar."

"More than half are women, and 90% are white. The drug has crept into the suburbs and the middle classes. And although users are still mainly young, the age of initiation has risen"

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21633819-old-sic...
Use hackerpub to publish news to HN
Seems like a great app! Thanks for sharing
Also I'm not entirely sure if this goes against some kind of Code of Conduct. My use case would be so that whenever I publish an article for my blog I can elect to publish it here automatically rather than doing it by hand.

I hate doing things by hand. I love automating all the things, so that's why I wrote this. If it's not a good-enough excuse I'll take down the repository and promise not to use it : )
All of the comments are by armchair biologists about how the scientists are wrong and all bacteria strains will become resistant to it in 2 days.

But anyways, if it is an issue, why can't we just require antibiotics be taken intravenously? The vast majority of bacteria exposed to antibiotics are in your digestive system and that is where resistance develops. Or at least that's how I understand it.
About the terrorist threats, I was referring to, for example, if a terrorist group says "we are going to do ... if you publish that thing" (like what already happened), wouldn't that qualify as 'immediate violence' in order to stop the publication? or does the immediate violence threat has to be something implicit within the published message.

Btw, thanks, those examples are awesome.
Swift Tutorial for iOS: Part 5 – Dwidi Video
3. You have to fit the whole bootloader in 1 KB, which is not the kind of programming challenge I had yet faced.

If you were doing it in Asm, 1KB is a lot of code. The regular DOS bootsector is 512 bytes, of which only ~400 are available for actual code. It doesn't take all that much code to read in a few sectors from disk into memory and jump to it, which is all that a bootloader does.
wow, thanks for the info. lawyers - gah. still, no excuse for apple to limit the speakerphone...no one is at risk of hearing damage from a cell phone's speakerphone...you hear me apple?
Agreed, I am currently attending a state school and very few of the professors emphasize the importance of self study. Learning to learn is more important than any piece of information college has to offer. The fact that MIT puts part of the learning burden on the student is another reason that the students go on to do great things. The professors are in part readying them for the real world.
>I wonder if keeping CVS is not one of the smartest things the OpenBSD project does now.

Given that OpenBSD is supposed to be a security-oriented OS, it's slightly weird that they are using a version control system that does not guarantee that what you put in the repo actually stays there, unchanged. Git guarantees that.

> They are arguably one of the best projects at doing it.

What makes you think that?
For me its difficult to quit. If I don't do any moderate/intense physical activity for a day, I become unbelievably restless and all I can think about is going on that next run or hitting the gym.

Basically its just another habit you need to do consistently if you want to be able to stick with it long term.
What does your company remember?
Normalizing the user preference vector is not necessary in this scheme. The magnitude of the preference vector is a constant scale on all of the comparisons to possible recommendable entities, so it drops out.

Overall, this is a reasonable starting point for recommending user actions.

When you have more data, you can try using collaborative filtering to estimate user preferences more robustly from sparse data. You could also try optimizing user and entity parameters by maximizing a likelihood function on followed recommendations composed of probabilities regressed from a function of the user and entity Mark vectors.