skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reverse breakdown voltage is all over the place due to avalanche effects. You might get as much as 50 mV of pure noise out of a single Zener junction if you're lucky and it won't take much amplification at all (which might negatively affect your randomness) to get to a level that you can quantize easily. You could even do it un-amplified with the right biasing.
15x stronger than steel: Scientists develop strongest, lightest glass nanofibres
Because if I can only recharge 80 miles of range every night then the effective range I can cover daily is 80 miles,not 250 miles you can do on a full battery. And please, even if my work commute is only 50 miles(25 each way) then it's very common that by driving to the shops or the gym in the afternoon I will make more than 80,even if my work commute is not that long. And yeah, vast majority of people will have a work commute shorter than 80 miles,but most people drive to other places than work too. It becomes pretty ridiculous if I had to say to my girlfriend "sorry honey, we won't be able to go and see your mother in the afternoon,because the car won't recharge enough overnight for me to go to work tomorrow". It's a major problem - they absolutely have to charge faster to be usable, I have no other complaints about electric cars other than this.
I do not understand why this is news. All CA (cellular automata) simulations tend to diverge in various ways as they run forward. In fact, the unusual situation is where they have some sort of stability. With the degree to which CA is being used, why hasn't this become common knowledge? All these folks going on and on about "mathematical models" of this or that, and they don't even understand the nature of the math? Huh?

More counter-intuitiveness follows. The more complicated you make the model, oddly enough, the less likely it is to be stable. (I'm looking at you, weather model)

I suspect that differences are random so that on average they are performing statistically about the same.

Oddly enough, nope! Nice try, though. The rate of divergence is unpredictable and not guaranteed to average out to anything. In fact, that's the definition of chaotic. Unless you've discovered an attractor, you just have unpredictable noise. Add that with CA and you have systems that diverge in various ways at various rates. Sure if you're sample size was huge, it'd probably all work out. But 2-3 or even a few dozen? Not so much.
I'm writing a book like that. Well, it's been on hiatus for about a year, but I am technically still writing it. Just that most activity happens on the mailing list.
Windows 8 is horrible on the desktop, I think you even mention this. But then you ignore that and talk about how great it is on the surface.
You talked about loss aversion, but I don't see how you tied that in to the windows design. I thought you were going to discuss things that were removed from win 7, like the start button. But it just seems like the topic of loss aversion was another article that you included in this one.
The real issue is trying to resolve both a touch screen environment with a keyboard and mouse environment. Win 8 is the former, with win 7 the latter. I don't know much about 10 but it seems to be more of a mouse and keyboard and less of a touch.
Erlang has the steepest learning curve of any programming language I've ever studied and Frank Hebert does an excellent job of grading that curve to the point where mere mortals can walk upwards. I'm tremendously grateful for all the work he's put into his books if you're going to spend time on Erlang start with 'Learn you some Erlang' and work your way into the libraries from there.
Bootstrap 3.2 markup snippets for vim-snipmate
Nice to see someone turn around in such an articulate way.
So OK - much of these things sounds crazy. But it's a free service and if you don't really care if Facebook tracks you or your web-surfs, I don't really see how it matters.

All these "Get off Facebook, they are doing a lot of things you don't like"-posts are getting crazy. It's like a mechanic running around screaming at people they are using the wrong oil in their cars or a lawyer running around acting crazy about people not suing everybody.

Some people are just that: They don't care.
I'd have to check in detail, but just looking at the profiler, about half of the time is in the actual setter code and half in bounds checking. One would think that bounds checking is a faster operation than the set if copy-on-write is the culprit? But maybe it does some other magic as well. Something you notice though is that release/retains are everywhere.
In our office it is popular because we have 3 or 4 different kinds of coffee. Everyone can get a fresh cup of their favorite flavor. No one has to "make the coffee" before everyone can get some. Instead everyone makes their own cup on demand. You don't have to wonder whether you should make a fresh pot at 5PM on Friday if you need more coffee to finish up a project. You don't find half-full pots of cold coffee on Monday mornings. It is a low mess, quick and convenient alternative to the old fashioned bulk coffee pot.
I don't know that under-charging small companies last all that long. When we first started out we were greatly undercharging, and after a few years almost went under. Luckily for us we figured it out just in time.

Nobody should aspire to be a replaceable unit in any case. If Joe down the road can replace you, yeah, it is going to be tough being a small company.

There is another side to this that I think is worth exploring. For a long time capital has had a significant advantage over labour (see rising inequality). I think we might be at the inflection point where the capital costs of so many businesses are dropping to the extent that capital's advantage is eroding. I'm thinking of bootstrappers and so on. Obviously capital still helps, and the relative advantage isn't uniform across all sectors or industries (if you want to do something for consumers you probably need capital; likewise space exploration or bio-tech), but I think a sizable number of people are in the situation where they can own their output.
Most likely not, it's just power in hands of those who control the infrastructure or those who have carefully selected who they could entrust with selected information, so as to imitate the really honest (who, as you claim, don't really exist - for one becaue it's an ideal). It's inherent to the social system, not just google or facebook.
Sorry, but no cigar from me. I like the code and it is well written, but I think clarity means something different to me.

"Clarity" does not come from putting comments and blank lines in the code. Properly naming your variables and functions will clear things up. For example fnv32a is a pretty poor name for a function, as it is not even pronouncable.

A good rule of thumb is to move the explanations in the comments to become the names of your functions.

For example "fnv32a" could be named "compression_quality_hash"
I doubt that this is really the perfect name, but at least it is what the comment says; you get the idea.

Even if the authors of an original paper used names like this in their definition of an algorithm (so an argument for the poor names would be to stick to the reference impl), your code and your contribution could be to make things clearer, rather than sticking to their poor, mathematical naming schemas.

However I really like the interface of the algorithm. While your code looks quite complicated on the inside, it is nicely usable from the outside; much like a wristwatch.

Random Examples of variables that I would rename:

https://bitbucket.org/tkatchev/yalz77/src/a9a8fab4ba706b5633...

https://bitbucket.org/tkatchev/yalz77/src/a9a8fab4ba706b5633...
Cultures of Code
Fashion Tips for Women
I've been cold brewing my coffee. I dump a bunch of grounds in a big jar and pour water over them. After a couple of days I pour it through the funnel-filter I use for home brewing. Each day for the next few days I mix the 1/3 dark coffee with 2/3 water, pop it in the microwave for 3 minutes and enjoy.

Cold brew is much lower acid and less bitter than hot brewed, and much less "plastic" flavored than the Keurig at work.

I used to roast my beans in a skillet on my charcoal grill. It gave them a nice smoky flavor. I haven't done that in a while. (Too much effort.)
Google still hasn't patched this full name leak vulnerability
Underpromotion happens in tournament chess, and en passant is fundamental. Without it it's a different game as pawn blockades work differently.
The only way I'd ever make it past the "ballpark figure" requirement is by working in finance in London, which I don't really want to do.

I mostly work for less than that, deliberately work maybe 50% of the time, and consider myself embarrassingly well off compared to most of my peers. I don't think my plumber friend earns as much as I do, but I'm not bothered by the idea that he might.

I am down with the idea that we should avoid racing to the bottom, I don't think "union" is a dirty word, and maybe there's even some kind of argument that I have an ethical responsibility to work full time even though I don't want to. But from where I stand this piece seems a little divorced from (my) reality.

Maybe it's something to do with being called Joe.
How many of these uncaring people actually know even a half of this? Or have thought through the implications?

It is a "free service" as in you're not paying them with dollars, but you are paying with something else.

I'm not a tin foil hat (I use Gmail, for instance), but the point of the article is valid.

At least that should be a conscious decision on user's part.
It's more like a traffic cop jumping up and down pointing out the wall you're headed for.

Facebook is emphatically not a free service, you pay but not in a way that is visible to you. Privacy as a means of exchange is a relatively new concept and we have not yet learned to put a proper value on it. It will take some major expose rather than individuals coming around like this person did to change that.
Smartphones are still key to innovation, just not how you think
Adding HTTPS Support to Static Site Hosted in S3
And others don't realize what's going on, but they do care when they find out. So, they ought to know.
Tax Breaks (for the Rich) Are Forever
P2P Synchronization of files with minimal index transfers
This is one of the reasons why, back in 2005, I set up www.famipix.com
Verizon Wireless to Allow Complete Opt Out of Mobile ‘Supercookies’
Sorry about the formulas not being rendered in github markdown, is there a better alternative to writing these kind of documents? I can't say I enjoy latex too much. I used this: https://github.com/yoavram/markx Any suggestions?
Ask HN: Which tools do you use to make development easier?
For instance, it could be Sublime Text, SourceTree, Vagrant, etc.
The thing that is annoying, you see a post, that you are interested in. It has 36 comments. You open the comments to read what people have to say, then you have to sit there scrolling through a list of names. In the end there is a half dozen comments. Surely there has to be a better way to tell your friend about the post.
It's a "boy who cried wolf" attitude with too much "fake" emotional appeal.

It's not so much "get out of fb" it's how you use it.

"but but but it's your privacy!!111" yeah, exactly, that's why I limit the information I share with FB, no location checkins, no "picture every other minute", no "fill your missing data" BS, etc
Facebook has been invaluable to me for keeping in touch with friends and family from my entire life time. I've rekindled contact with lost friends, kept in touch with family living abroad, made new friends. Its a tool and like any tool there are instructions and warning labels. What more, this tool is free, and to be fair, costs millions of dollars a month to run. And we mustn't forget Facebook is also a business, and yes, we are not the customers - we are the product used to keep the machine running and make some people a healthy profit in the process. That is the nature of business. Remember that, accept that and use it right, and Facebook is great. You don't like - get off it but don't expect everybody to follow suit. There has been (are still are) many attempts to move the party else where. They all failed or will fail since the point of the 'party' is having everybody attend and attend all at once.
People using facebook has externalities, those externalities affect me, which is why it matters to me. Most obviously, it's a proprietary communication service, and communication services tend to exhibit a network effect[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
I've never been a fan of Facebook, although as an early adopter I've been on it for a long while. In fact, I've always said (and still say) that Facebook is the closest thing the modern world has to a devil, because it uses your friends against you to encourage you to do things you would not normally do. It's really, really bad.

But I'm still on. Why? Well, because, like I said, all my friends are on there. It's a faustian choice: give up hearing from and relating to all of those people I have put so much emotional capital in all these years? Or stay and hold my nose?

I do not feel that the hype against Facebook is overblown. In fact, looking at it over a period of decades, it's probably understated.
Carl Djerassi, 91, a Creator of the Birth Control Pill, Dies
Most of this gets really technical, however the idea that you can see an order and get a ahead of it is clearly front running even if it's legal. The issue is exchanges have an incentive to sell "early" access to information so generally people do X for a while, that becomes illegal or the people being taken advantage of swap to another approach.
> I just hope the Rust crowd doesn't screw up.

If i had a pound for every time i'd heard this sentiment, i'd be a rich man!
I can imagine it being odd for some foreign visitors, but plenty of other languages use similar constructs, so it should be familiar to many visitors. The American usage of how are you? or how's it going? as a friendly greeting isn't much different from the Greek τι κάνεις;, the Spanish ¿cómo estás?, the German wie geht's?, etc. In all those cases the type of answer that's expected depends on social context, ranging from a quick "fine, you?" to varying degrees of an actual answer.
could you give an example of things it encourages me to do?
The mouse was already in 'the mother of all demos'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

31:54
> Moreover when I say "buy my beer to drink whilst you watch the Super Bowl" I'm not using the trademark, I'm using a description of a sports event

I think you would also have a difficult time convincing a judge you were not talking about the NFL championship. Application of the law is rarely a "check the dictionary, guys, he's technically correct" thing. Especially when it comes to things like trademark violations (where it's about confusion to the general public)
Installing plan9 is about as close as you can get without reading but actually using those concepts. There is quite a strong link between all those projects.
I have tried almost all of these arguments and simply put, the benefit that facebook gives most people is a much higher value than their perceived cost of privacy (or so they think).

Until the house is burning down across the street, it is often difficult to sell fire insurance, and they dont see the massive data mart that fb is.
it is interesting that the most popular number is 7. unfortunately the author didn't explain why. However maybe not everything has a reasonable reason.
Lost me at the "I have nothing to hide" section. The first few paragraphs are trying to convince you that you actually do have stuff to hide.
missed the point. its how facebook uses you
This is about an implementation issue, not really a language issue. Like saying a bug in GHC proves we need to think about types

That said, it's an interesting breakdown of the bug, though I wonder how they arrived to it (Wouldn't have minded more steps in the discovery phase)
I don't understand? That was his point, I thought.
As of a decade ago the intelligence community loved open source, and in the domain I was in it took more than a song and dance to get them to accept Windows as an OS for your stuff instead of Linux.

We should rather be surprised if they aren't using wildly popular tools like Python (although not any particular one, since like in the civilian world different communities tend to pick out a small set of tools to work with, e.g. Google has only 4 or so blessed languages).
Any vendor of hardware RNGs can easily and secretly be forced to build in a backdoor (including the one we're discussing here, as you kinda need to trust that these tiny little microchips do what they claim to do). Actually, selling fake TRNGs would be a low cost, high reward excercise for any intelligence agency anyway.

Corrupted TRNGs don't make things worse, but also not better, and you keep depending on your existing entropy sources, whatever their quality may be.

Therefore providing computers with TRNGs made by Intel etc. would only create a false sense of security.
The article points out that it doesn't matter if you share it, that data is collected regardless on you.
I agree. Thanks, it's a great suggestion.
23 Unmissable Digital Marketing Blogs for 2015 [+ OPML File]
> "It's like a mechanic running around screaming at people they are using the wrong oil in their cars or a lawyer running around acting crazy about people not suing everybody."

These are awful analogies. A better one might be people (a long time ago) jumping up and down telling you that smoking is linked to cancer/death. Imagine being that guy during a time when smoking was considered healthy! Now, of course, everybody knows - and people are free to make an informed choice about their behaviour. The current situation is compounded by the fact that most users simply don't understand the power of machines and algorithms to draw inferences.

Until there are viable distributed alternatives for non sys-admins, the options seem to be to either give all over to The Man or go live in a cave. The former is too nihilistic for my liking so I'm working towards alternatives http://amirchaudhry.com/brewing-miso-to-serve-nymote/
I filled "missing data" with fake, conflicting information
so how does this key help? How can you know this isn't backdoored somehow?
"[...] we are the product used to keep the machine running and make some people a healthy profit in the process. That is the nature of business."

Making a profit is the nature of business. Requiring payment in giving up privacy and control over your perception as the only options is not, and being a monopoly also is not.

"They all failed or will fail since the point of the 'party' is having everybody attend and attend all at once."

That is exactly why facebook must be faught, the name economics has for this is "network externality"[1] - the monopolization of a dominant communication system by one entity has a cost for those who don't participate, which is not acceptable.

Also, you might want to consider that "having everybody attend and attend all at once" technically does not require a monopoly. The telephone network, for example, is also one telephone network where every participant can call every other participant, but still, there are multiple telcos offering access to the network, competing with one another. Something similar is true for most traditional internet services, and the internet itself. Every machine on the internet can send packets to every other machine on the internet, but there are plenty of providers to choose from. You can send email from every email account to every other, but there are plenty of email providers, and it's relatively easy to open your own. Every website hosted anywhere can be read by anyone, not matter which provider they connect through ... all of those technologies allow you access through one single telephone, email client, and web browser, but there is no single entity that controls all of it, and that is vital in order to avoid an unhealthy concentration of power that in the end is likely to affect not just those who choose to use facebook, but all of society.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
> unfortunately the author didn't explain why.

It was a vote, what is there to explain?
Wait, Facebook comments have "value?" I think you're asking a little to much
this article is not very accurate, it' like the author just found out about the data he is giving up:

-all your private financial transactions.

no, my private financial transactions are private, how can Facebook access them?

-...the right to privacy, and the right to have a say in how information about us is used. We've giving up those rights forever by using Facebook.

No, you are giving up a small part of your privacy using Facebook. You give up privacy basically using any online service, and a lot of offline as well (loyalty cards, phone number, ...). And it's not forever.

-In reality, lots of your posts are never seen by anyone!

I think the article refers to the "Top Stories" features, but you can change it to "Most recent". The problem is not facebook, but the amount of material available. They are not hiding posts, it's just that they are too many for the average user
The UI will become more AJAXy before 1.0, we're doing it progressively instead of making the whole thing JS only. So we get the UI working as a static page, and then progressively enhance. If you want to see it in action, you can try `plugins/load autoajax` on the CLI and see a lot of things go much, much faster. It's not done though, so lots of functionality breaks, which is why it is not yet the default.

Regarding the security stuff - supporting GPG is one thing. Making it usable is an entirely different beast, one which most mail clients have more or less failed at so far.

Sorry you feel disappointed (or are you just pissing on the competition?), but it turns out that this project is actually a rather large task.

We've been working roughly full time for about a year and a half, most of the time with one programmer (myself) for all the low level tech stuff (security, mail handling, packaging, you name it) and one person to do UI design and interface work. Life got in the way of our third team member contributing a lot of code, I'm afraid.
Hmmmm, maybe. I assumed the "right to privacy" part was the actual point. Or the next paragraph saying that you might not want to hide stuff now but maybe in the future. Such a spray and pray approach.
How to Improve Your Code Pairing Experience
I don't know much about Hoffman or the author, but the piece was pretty interesting. I really liked the advice about having a single main reason to do things, if you're listing a bunch as a reason, then its not enough to do something.
"They said high level languages relieved us from thinking about memory issues" nobody said that. I'd even claim the opposite. For example, to develop a game on Android (Java) or in the browser (JavaScript) you need to work around the garbage collector the best you can with techniques like object pooling, or else your entire program stops every 3 seconds. It's just nasty. Know thine enemy, know thine garbage collector.
Yes, I'd love to get some constructive criticism to work with (we do listen), but that's not helpful.
Google Earth Pro drops $399 subscription, now available for free
This has nothing to do with me:

- I wouldn't be eligible to most of these purported benefits in Greece
- My standards of living would likely be lower even with funny welfare
- Moving there would theoretically make it worse since theoretically I'm currently helping/paying

So, why not write another open letter that discusses reasonable ways to save some money, OR debunk myths that discourage peope from helping?