skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That sounds about right. There's speed of thought (wetware brains currently win) and then there's speed of evolution. Digital brains definitely win that one. Because some wetware brains are spending all their time figuring out how to make the digital ones better. Nobody is doing that for the soggy kind.

The singularity will happen when the digital brains are figuring out how to make themselves better. Then they will really take off, and not slow down, ever.
Forerunner? It's a cut down version of https://cloud.google.com/terms/data-processing-terms which has been in place for quite some time.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employers. Not representing anybody other than myself. I work at Google, not on cloud, although I routinely fire my nerf gun at people who do)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but for entire large codebases, isn't this normal?

Perfectly normal for large codebases. You can have a low LOC that leverages only well known platforms, libraries and frameworks but you'll get a pretty cookie-cutter product. You can choose to do something technologically novel, but expect to pay for it in LOC.
Top tools I use to build iOS apps
I grew up coding in line-numbered, Disk Extended Color BASIC on a Tandy Color Computer 3 for a number of years, before graduating to QBasic.

The thing I look back on about "goto" and "gosub" is that, within the confines of what those simple control structures offered, much of my code wasn't actually structured that differently from what I would go on to write in more procedural languages down the road.

If you factored out most of my programs into pseudocode (allowing for limitations like global-only scope); the result would pretty much look like any QB or C program seeking to tackle the same problems, with main loops, clear procedural calls, etc. It was even idiomatic in those days to reserve a var or even a point in memory to take that gosub's "arguments".

The result of which is that when I did move up to QBasic, it was a pretty simple, easy transition, because it basically just allowed for a cleaner way of writing in the style I was already hacking together with DECB's primitive tools.

Good programming patterns emerge because they're the most efficient way of doing things. Goto is just another tool to do what a body needs to do.
Thanks! We've been working on this for a while.

We've considered a couple solutions to the lag; the most promising one we've come up with is to use a different framebuffer protocol. It wouldn't necessarily fix the lag, but we could probably be a little smarter about how we update regions to make it feel smoother.

Regarding the phones: let's leave it at "chicanery." ;)
So it's a huge waste of money usable only against non-terrorists?
I noticed this too. But my main problem with the search is that it attempts to complete the address when your focus leaves the input.
That article manages to make its claim by focusing entirely on Irish pubs in Ireland and completely ignoring Irish-American pubs, which have been flourishing in the United States since before the Civil War.

Like McSorley's Old Ale House in NYC, for instance, which has been operating at the same location since at least the 1860s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McSorley%27s_Old_Ale_House). Most Northern cities of any size will have had similar establishments set up at roughly the same time, though it's rare to find one that's been in continuous operation for so long.

I would venture to guess that when people think of an "Irish pub," nearly all of what they're thinking of comes out of the Irish-American pub tradition. The program described in the article just takes all that stuff and wraps it into an "official Irish" package that's easy to franchise.
We haven't been eradicated before, no, but battles with things like bubonic plague and smallpox and polio (and, yes, HIV/AIDS) are likely to be good case studies for such a scenario. Bubonic plague and smallpox in particular were pretty devastating to the populations they affected.
There's nothing about automation that guarantees any solution for the people automated out of a job. The motive behind automation is purely capitalist - it exists not to free people from the burdens of menial labor, but to multiply the value of labor while freeing companies from the moral and financial burden of a human workforce. For most people, jobs - and the availability of jobs - are what allows them to buy food, clothing, medical care, etc.

>Granted, the transition period may be quite tough.

Yes, mass starvation, disease, grinding poverty and global political strife could correctly be described as "quite tough."

Although I suppose if you're idle rich, then it'll be a cakewalk. Just be sure to wear your kevlar when you leave the compound.
I don't think BASIC is even capable of expressing what programmers do these days. Maybe top-level app cut-and-paste logic. But not anything complex like libraries and data structures etc.
> In what way are people who work for the NSA not American?

Gee, I missed when HN became a US-only site.

> They are literally working to protect American citizens from violence.

Really?
That's what the FISA court is for: to issue secret warrants for surveillance of US citizens' domestic communications.
Such "transparency reports" are only a lower bound. If the government requires you to keep the request a secret, you must keep it secret.
FWIW it's often the bitter flavor tones (as well as the actual booze taste) which are viewed as the more True Believer flavors, not sour.

In general when you see that sort of talk decrying the "rookies" and "amateurs" they're talking about drinks designed to cover up the booze and classic booze-y flavors, and those tend to be sweet & sour mixers. And no, there's nothing wrong with those drinks, drink what you want.
Someone asked the same question a few days ago and got lots of replies:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9032870
What server is being used? Is it OSRM?
Rewriting Rust Serialization, Part 3: Introducing Serde
Holy cow yes. Sterile environments are a big deal. Try holding one for a day, let alone a work week or a year. People screw up all the time, and bacteria, being pretty much invisible, are real tough to ferret out. Let alone all the actual non-sterile stuff you want to do in one. Think a clean room with bunny suits, that is the type of environment you need just to get a start on figuring out Dr. Doom type viruses and all that awful mumbo-jumbo. It takes a lot of energy, time, and resources to just get off the ground.
Depending on the client, I usually use either:

- A customized Django admin interface (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/ref/contrib/admin/). Yes it's not ideal but it's often good enough.

- A fully custom admin UI built from scratch (Python/Django).

I don't know why you don't think Rails/Django is an option when developing "full-fledged systems".

For hosting, deploying with Ansible to a Digital Ocean VM has worked very well. A $5/mo droplet is more than enough for light - moderate traffic.
And that software is running on a machine that you own and control with verified open firmware running on open hardware with no known security vulnerabilities, with strong encryption on the drive and a locked bios, and not connected to any network (including the internet) where all the devices on that network satisfy the previous conditions.

If any of these are not met then you are trusting someone else with your privacy.
Really enlightening post - gotta love what's been going on with the hackathon community over the past couple years!
No pause button and not fully preloading made this unusable on a "slow" (<10Mb) connection.
The article states that Big O notation is used to analyse algorithm complexity and that's correct - it's to analyse the time complexity of an algorithm.
It was this: http://alexgorbatchev.com/SyntaxHighlighter/
> Secure your software.

How exactly? Even "safe" languages like Rust are still completely unsafe for very common things like integer overflow.
Very much so, I had a Sam Coupe and it was a lovely machine but it came our about a year or two too late and had some firmware bugs. If it had come out in 88 or 87 it might have gained some serious traction and had spectrum users switch to it.
Ok, to both you and 'Micaiah_Chang cross-thread:

I do understand where the notion of hockey-stick increases in intellectual ability comes from.

I do understand the concept that it's hard to predict what would come of "superintellectual" ability in some sort of synthetic intelligence. That we're in the dark about it, because we're intellectually limited.

I don't understand the transition from synthetic superintellectual capability to actual harm to humans.

'Micaiah_Chang seems to indicate that it would result in a sort of supervillain, who would... what, trick people into helping it enslave humanity? If we were worried about that happening, wouldn't we just hit the "off" switch? Serious question.

The idea of genetic engineering being an imminent threat has instant credibility. It is getting easier and cheaper to play with that technology, and some fraction of people are both intellectually capable and psychologically defective enough to exploit it to harm people directly.

But the idea that AI will exploit genetic engineering to do that seems circular. In that scenario, it would still be insufficient controls on genetic engineering that would be the problem, right?

I'm asking because I genuinely don't understand, even if I don't have a rhetorical tone other than "snarky disbelief".

'sama seems like a pretty pragmatic person. I'm trying to get my head around specifically what's in his head when he writes about AI destroying humanity.
Hackathons are a lot of fun and I enjoy attending them. I'd love to see them get more diverse. MLH has been a great organization to work with so far.

One of my favorite things about Hackathons is that no matter where you are in the world you meet people who are interested in the same things. They're not just interested though, they're capable.

The only other thing I'd love to see from hackathons is a little more focus on health of the participants.
First impression was pretty bad. Tried to get a route from my place to my parent's house a couple cities south, and it took a lot of fiddling with the string to get it to understand where I live. Didn't have any trouble finding my parent's home, but once I got both in the instructions it gave were pretty poor: http://a.pomf.se/msawni.png

I really want OSM to be good for this sort of thing, so I'll probably end up poking around and fixing the errors that led to this mess.
I think the sweet spot for a brand new developer is a company with about 50 people. That way there are other, more experienced developers you can learn from and yet there aren't so many people you're doing someone else's job when you step out of the very narrow confines of your own.

Some of the people from my graduating class in college started at really large companies and learned nothing because they were such a small cog in a really large machine. I went to a company which varied between 40 and 50 people and had the opportunity to learn as much as I could soak in.

Anyway going to a startup is a lot like gambling. You'll most likely be looking for another job soon, but if it pays off it may pay off really big. Who cares if they bring in a "VP of Engineering" if I can cash out my options for six figures?

If it's been two years, the options are worthless, and it looks like you're going to end up a low level employee at a larger company, then it's probably time to move on.
You get what people pay for.

I was watching Fox News at the gym today, side by side with CNN.

On CNN the news was about terrorist attacks, wars, and a blizzard in the Northeast. It might be the daily bummer, but it least it was News.

On Fox News they are indignant because some people didn't like a movie that was released a month ago. This segways through something I can't get through the closed captions and then they're talking about what a visionary Daniel Patrick Moynihan was in 1965.

There is a market for what there is a market for; that's TV but it is the same for books and magazines.

On top of that there are quite a few fields that are burned out. For instance up till 1968 there was a compelling literature on anarchism. Then you read Foucault and even though you feel the blood-chilling pain of humanity ground down by Leviathan but in touch with why it is necessary.

Then you had identity politics, which was a good idea at the time but pretty soon it is part of the problem because you get black and white people suffering from the same problems and not recognizing it.

For instance, the police department in the nearest city always has some incident where a cop shoots a black or (less often) a black shoots a cop. Tensions are high and many blacks fear being a victim of police violence.

Now the guy who cuts our hay would be white as a sheet except that he spends a lot of time outside. He's a man of the highest care and integrity; he's driven heavy machinery for a lifetime and never hit an animal. He's opposed to gun control because he thinks he might need guns to defend himself from government tyranny.

Oddly enough in the 60s it was urban black people who were fascinated with armed insurrection and you had the Day Hall takeover at Cornell and the black panthers.

Well you go up against Leviathan and you get smashed. Now black people are too smart for that shit and now it is rural whites getting into barricade situations with the cops. (i.e the evolution from the Philadelphia MOVE house to Waco)

If you start talking sense you get horrible trouble from all sides, for instance, liberals love the idea of investment in broadband but try saying that the CWA might be part of the problem. As for conservatives, they seem to be annoyed that the outside world exists at all and would rather be talking about the days of Moses and Abraham.
They use Lightroom (when they use Lightroom; Capture One - or Phocus for Hasselblad shooters - is a lot better for client shoots than Lightroom's catalog system even if you discount the raw processing differences) for what they can, which frankly ain't much. You can get an awful lot done, of course, within its limits, but those limits are pretty hard-and-fast. Lightroom will take you a little way beyond the darkroom, but it still can't get you to the retoucher's bench.
Front end dev is getting exhausting
When people talk about learning algorithms, what do they mean?

I recently spent a few hours reading about and implementing A* for the NPCs in a video game I'm working on.

Are you talking about being able to write A* and other algorithms from scratch with no reference material?
Yosemite is an upgrade on part with what they were already doing, so more of the same there.

The watch, in my eyes, is a huge disappointment. With as much time as they took to prep for the launch, I expected they would have done more thinking about how to innovate in a landscape that has failed to become anything more than mediocre.

I think it is the epitome of Apple's failure to innovate post-Jobs, and is the first of more 'meh' to come.
Smart is just a shorthand for a complicated series of lower level actions consisting of domain knowledge, raw computational speed and other things yes. I don't think we're really disagreeing about this. However, I do worry that you're confusing the existing constraints on the human brain (that people seem to have tradeoffs between, let's say, charisma and mathematical ability) and constraints that would apply to all possible brains.

But are you denying that there exists some factor which allows you to manipulate the world in some way, roughly proportional to the time that you have? If something can manipulate the world on timescales much faster than humans can react to, what makes you think that humans would have a choice?
That depends on the data you are talking about. The operations described here don't seems to collect huge amounts of data. If you're talking about the usual dragnet surveillance: a lot of it seems to be relatively simple filters and simple data correlation.

For example, you can build huge social graphs with simple metadata. Then you can search for all people who communicate a lot with people who communicate a lot with some known terrorist leader. Of those people, you take just those using tor. If any of them plans to enter the US, you flag them to be detained and searched at the airport. If any of them is already in the US, you can tell FBI to check them out.

Or you can look for sudden changes in message volumes. If terrorist leader A suddenly starts to communicate a lot more with random person B and random person C, who in term start communicating with other people, you suddenly have a whole list of people who might be planning a terrorist operation.

Of course you still need huge computing capacity even for these relatively simple operations, but they certainly have the funds for a few datacenters.
When I worked as a bartender, if we didn't know what a particular drink was, and the customer didn't know what was in it, we just asked "What color is it?". We usually came up with something satisfactory!
Most societies on earth now protect the out-of-work pretty well. There's been steady improvement in standard of living, lifespan, health in most countries for most of a century, to the point where the planet is in pretty good shape.

In fact its a puzzle to me why, with this going on, we see an upsurge in terrorism etc. Why aren't people content? What is it that convinces folks to piss away their entire lives on a big public stunt like bombing etc? It can't be their bad cable reception.
> So let software handle the 90% and refactor the current jobs to handle the other 10%.

If the jobs could be so refactored in a cost-efficient way, they would be.
The bit I like is the "both explanations defy our current understanding of Mars' upper atmosphere" Good good good !
There was a pretty interesting, though potentially biased report about the impact of NY Tech on the job market here: http://www.nyctecheconomy.com/
It's amazing how far things have come. I remember when there were only maybe 5 student hackathons happening every year. Now there are like 150 and they're happening all over the world.

/me wishes was still student sometimes
To expound on this point, to a virus or bacteria, a human is just as good as a monkey or dog or jellyfish. It's a place to replicate and live. Similar with viruses as technically they are not alive. All these Dr. Doom kinda things have to compete with the common cold, the e. coli, and all the other things that live on the earth and in your guts. That is not an easy environment to survive in.
Well, I really mean that in spite of whatever you do to improve yourself as a developer/engineer, it doesn't mean a thing if you don't have a User. Ever.

And even if Developers can themselves be Users, in the sense that they gain some sort of joy out of consuming the developer tools of the trade, its still just navel-gazing until there is actually some sort of use out of the activity.

Real developers build things for users. It doesn't matter how good or bad they are, as developers, if there is a User: win.
I sort of am questioning that factor, yes. Stipulate, I don't know, several orders of magnitude of intellectual superiority. Stipulate that human intelligence can be captured in silico, so that when we talk about "intelligence", we are using the most charitable possible definition for the "fear AI" argument.

What precise vectors would be available for this system to manipulate the world to harm humans?
I'll say it again, AI's are not going to end Human Life (this is in the article) It's nuclear weapons that will do that...
OSRM is the default, but there are a number of other profiles available (foot, bike and car from Mapquest and foot and bike from GraphHopper).
> The only other thing I'd love to see from hackathons is a little more focus on health of the participants.

Me too. Our most recent participant survey said that the most important three things to hackers were:

1. Fast Internet
2. Good Food
3. Healthy Food (different than good food apparently)
What an awful thing to do. That will be a story talked of in every Yahoo office. #ClimateOfFear

That erosion of trust had better have a good RoI.
Silent and easy geolocation with jQuery
Having a trackpoint equipped computer I scroll to infinity with no effort, I tried a few times and the character always drown around the 5 minutes mark.

I suppose the whole thing is well made and everybody gets to see Charles waving goodbye and laughing right before the character drowns.
Amazing heat map shows massive Chinese New Year migration
Since the comment I replied to got flag killed:

> contergan: I'm one of "those men" and to be honest, I really don't care about making your wife uncomfortable for 30 seconds while I hit on her. If I wouldn't do stuff like that occasionally, I would still be a virgin at 30 and most likely spend the rest of my life alone, since women never initiate contact unless the guy is handsome, rich or popular. I'm sure the positives of being attractive and basically having men line up to have sex with her outweigh the negatives for your wife (and you, too, or would you prefer an ugly hag?).
reply
It seems appropriate to plug this article "Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning" : http://gcaptain.com/drowning/?10981
Agreed, digital brains will be unfathomable. What are they thinking, in between each word they laboriously transmit to us slow humans? They will have epochs to think while we are clearing our throats.
Except the European data privacy regulations don't seem to be too restrictive of law enforcement.
I wish the NYTimes was better than that log-based chart of job recovery by sector (or whatever that non-linear scale is).
Difference with cgi is that they are live and die, with each user request. websocketd programs are more like "one per user session"... Makes sense when your user sessions are lengthy.
Show HN: 7000 skill-keywords scraped from Linkedin
Open-sourcing helps though. Also, relying on ISO for the standard (which has been sketchy in the past when it comes to Microsoft, see also OOXML) was probably not a good idea. Microsoft doesn't have a great reputation for security either.

It's true, ultimately cloud security relies on trust, but I don't think Microsoft has done enough to deserve my trust, even if this is a good step forward.
The student hackathon movement has definitely evolved super quickly in the last five years (as Swift says, 5 -> 150, or more than 100% growth year over year). I'd be curious to hear more stats about how hackathons in general have grown in the same time period.
If the OP's goal is to make more money, this might be good advice. But if their goal is to become a better programmer, it won't.
Science does have conspiracies of its own. Any (negative) hot-button areas can not hope for funding or departmental approval. Not conspiracies overtly, but conspiracies nonetheless.
Thanks for that experiment!
Exactly. See this as a case in point: http://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/960011/trans-atlanti...
It doesn't seem unreasonable that the NSA working in conjunction with the CIA could place moles in various high tech firms of interest and thus obtain all the source. Following this to its logical conclusion then it's not unreasonable to assume the NSA has the source to most firmware and operating systems in use today.

What the article doesn't reveal is the attack vector, how did the firmware in these drives come to be infected?
Emacs natives should know "C-x * *".
Worth learning the bin/hex support with "d 2", "d 6".
It's a matter of how you read that sentence, really - the apparently-intended meaning is that most of the software (word processing and spreadsheets) are intended to "accomplish tasks", something that the laptop of the day was ill-suited for (mostly because of the price), rather than to assist decision-making and so forth. The question then becomes "what good is an expensive 'executive computer' that only does what my secretary and Murray in Accounting need to do?"