skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This explanation doesn't cover how Bitcoin determines difficulty. I tried to come up with a rewrite that does, but the original example has the "password, which they've learned is a certain number of characters in length", and Bitcoin has no such fixed target; rather, it simply requires reaching consensus on transaction ordering, with the first-in-consensus transaction moving some funds being the only valid one (subsequent transactions are double-spends). This consensus is achieved through a game-theoretic setup, involving a PoW chain, which endeavors to:

1) make an attack as expensive as physically possible, and to

2) provide a rational actor with access to a given amount of computational power a stronger incentive to collaborate, than to attack

Evidence in favor of Bitcoin's setup achieving the second goal is that the system is still alive despite individuals repeatedly having access to sufficient power to perform double spends; in fact, they already have, yet the system as a whole keeps running:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=321630.0
Smoking vs. vaping infographic
Do you have any links regarding what you said about the impossibility of interviewing Pegida. From googling, I found the following interviews with Pegida members by RTL, at what appeared to be a peaceful protest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl0KPaLPL7g and by Phoenix at another apparently peaceful demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp2HKPQpfdg

>And those who try to fall somewhere in between current policy and breaking the constitution, often don't understand the topic worth a damn. If a journalist has even a modest understanding of the topic he will have the greatest difficulty of entertaining opinions and solutions which are based on factual errors.

Well that's a very subjective matter. I see a lot of junk "knowledge" touted by pro immigration groups on this topic. For example, in most European countries immigrants commit more crimes. But there is a lot of obfuscation on this topic, and it's easy to get a smart sounding person to obfuscate the fact that the conditional probability of someone committing a crime given that they are an immigrant (see [0] for an example).

[0] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-05-26/davidsonrefugee/273222...
It's a shame that it doesn't have the mindshare: 27 nim/nimrod questions on SO, 1548 rust. Still not "notable" enough for a Wikipedia entry. I can see nim getting stuck lingering on the margin like Objective-C did before OSX.
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Also merlin is worth mentioning explicitly. It finds and highlights errors during editing (in emacs, vim and co), does autocompletion, shows types and since recently can also write pattern matches automatically.

http://the-lambda-church.github.io/merlin/destruct.ogv
Could anyone summarize how well PureScript and Elm treat sourcemaps/debugging in the browser? For a while I thought that js_of_ocaml didn't support sourcemaps, but it turns out, one of my dependencies wasn't compiled with debug flag (-g) and I was able to get a pretty good sourcemaps/debugging experience in Chrome dev tools once I fixed that issue. Is there something js_of_ocaml can learn from PureScript/Elm's JS compilation toolchain? Or should we look to CLJS (which I'm also really excited about) as the best example?
mac:

brew install mono

run f# console/repl: fsharpi

compile files: fsharpc file.fs

Not sure about linux, but should be simple as well.

And as with Haskell and cabal, you have FAKE ( http://fsharp.github.io/FAKE/ ) which isn't exactly the same but similar

The main difference between those two answers is that for Haskell, the author pointed to generic Haskell resources while F# pointed to windows ones. I've been developing with F# for a while on the Mac and found no issues whatsoever. There is also MonoDevelop/Xamarin if you want a more complete IDE which is better than anything I found for Haskell (but there maybe new stuff I'm missing, having messed with Haskell in a while) but SublimeText and Vim work fine.
GPG Tutorial by Alan Eliasen
Show HN: Create your own animated Valentine's card
The essence of the article:

"He found that the most productive interrogations in terms of information were those in which interrogators essentially acted like therapists. Investigators in Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom are now trained to focus not on extracting admissions of guilt but on gathering evidence. That information can back up an innocent suspect’s story, or it can be used to nail a guilty one."

"Hartwig reasoned, the typical interrogation room—claustrophobic, locked, austere—was exactly the wrong sort of space to get someone to divulge information. In a yet unpublished study, she redesigned the space around the theme of openness: open windows, an open book on the table, open desk drawers, “a picture of open water under an open sky,” as the paper describes it. She found that subjects provided more detail when questioned in the redesigned interrogation room."

In other words, "you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar". If only we had known this before Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. /s
I'm enjoying this thread, albeit in a bittersweet way - its good to hear of a shared struggle but the solution is to get focused and stick with something.

I've been in a similar limbo for the past few years. I was going to a university for computer engineering, but I fizzled out due to compromised discipline (excessive pot use). I liked the way it was described in a previous thread ("makes me excited about the world") because I wouldn't necessarily veg out - my thoughts would go all over the place with the possibilities.

I still get excited about the world and the advancement of our species, but in order to tie all my thoughts together I try and commit them to memory with all things considered. Here's an example:

Electrical engineering involves pathways of distributed current, increasing and decreasing voltage for certain applications, and components that perform work or output corresponding data. I'm about to get a job with the Department of Transportation. Do you see how I can relate these two subjects?

Traffic density = voltage. A traffic jam = increased resistance and effects the flow of the economy. This flow powers components, factories, retail stores, consumers that spend their chemical energy (digested food) to acquire more chemical energy (fresh food).

I'm sure I could tie all that in with the ever increasing toolbox for web development and computing, but you get the idea. Maybe this school of thought is terribly inefficient because one couldn't possibly register the intricacies of each idea. But I'm sure the brain in some way naturally does this anyway. I've read thats what they're trying to achieve with DeepMind (or any other deep learning venture), teaching AI one thing and it learns similar fields on its own.

This entire comment may digress terribly - ADD is natures response to the Information Age.
February Week 2
While I've never worked in banking/financial environments I do know of people who have; they often had two workstations (one for the 'public' network, the other for the systems) and weren't allowed to use software like Synergy to share the keyboard and mouse. I guess not every company does stuff like that, though.
Ask HN: Best way of approaching social groups?
What is the best way (based on experience / research / statistic / etc) of approaching a small (2) / medium (3-5) and large (6<) social groups without making it awkward? What is the best conversation starter? What is a good strategy given some discussion is already in progress? Anything else to think about?
I can't really impose any hard definition, but I was wondering what the oldest server is that's still running on either the original hardware or original software. I don't mind if the software has a minor patch or two to fix bugs or security issues, or hardware has had parts replaced, but no major upgrade to newer hardware or newer versions of software. There are plenty of DNS servers that were set up in the 1980s and still run on the original domain name, but don't run the original software or hardware. So those wouldn't really count. I guess I'm wondering what software or hardware was sufficiently reliable that it didn't need upgrading over all those years (at least for a limited workload).
What about GUIs that need to dynamically create and destroy components at runtime?
The tutorial would provide the reasoning behind why the decisions in the script have been made, allowing people to adapt it to their own needs.
I hope justice was done. I also hope that someday we won't particularly care about the ethnicity of the judge, or of the victim, or of the perpetrators of the crime. In my view, that would be moving even further away from the way things used to be.

> A warning to readers: He uses the word "nigger" 11 times.

I'm not sure what to think about this. I grew up in the south, in a deeply racist community, but I think it's been over 25 years since I heard anyone use that word to demean a black person. But is there any adult who hasn't heard it used hundreds or thousands of times by black people themselves? This seems like a trigger warning, but I have no idea who it might be intended to warn. Who exactly would be offended?
Post as many as character you want and it will work. Here:

http://kaspars.net/blog/web-development/invisible-click-trac...
It's possible. I personally just hope that Araq and others keep working on it. Right now it's quite easy to use without a lot of libraries written in Nim, because of interoperability.

Besides, I see Nim more as a 'secret weapon' sort of language, or something that individual programmers use. Rust is more of a 'big idea' language, so it makes sense a corporation is pushing it.
this is fixed jfyi
Some of those environment-variable "features" were workaround for problems in the past. Many of those could probably be removed outright. All of them should be removed from non-debug builds.
To be fair to Nim, I don't see any reason why it couldn't be made memory safe by using the Boehm GC (though I'm not an expert in Nim by any means). Of course, using the Boehm GC negates the advantages of the thread-local heaps, but I don't think that Nim's implementation of them scales up to large-scale software in any case for the reasons I detailed in my other comments. IMHO, if you have a garbage-collected, multithreaded language that must compile to C (and doesn't need interoperability with a reference-counted object system like e.g. Swift does), the Boehm GC is the best choice.
"What every programmer should know" is only the title of the last chapter, a summary. The book as a whole is called "Coding for SSDs".
It's a stretch to say every programmer should know about this stuff when most apps aren't I/O limited. For my purposes, I care that SSDs are fast, not about the underlying architecture of the NAND, page sizes, or drive controller. I also know absolutely zilch about the inner-workings of the Linux kernel and don't plan on reading a book about it.

The nice thing about so much division of interest in the engineering field is that you don't always need to know everything about what's going on under the hood to use a technology to build other cool stuff. Only in specific situations is that knowledge really necessary.
The basque cider museum http://www.sagardoetxea.com/en/ near Donostia-San Sebastian and now till April in traditional cider house season.
It really only makes sense for organized crime to manage this within their own ranks. You already have trustworthy people, and people with the relevant skills and connections. How would you know if the "startup" you're funding isn't undercover police? If an upstart appears, just "convince" them to share in the profits.
>Not much info

Exactly, not much info, which is subpar of the quality that Google wants to index.
>The problem I have is something akin to paralysis of choice

Yup, had exactly the same problem myself. What I did was to introduce a ranking score for each project I might want to do and then just do the top one. I constantly add to the list and only remove projects if I do them / have learned they are not going to work / get new information which pushes them down/up in the ranking.

Series of questions I use to evaluate the project: What problem does this solve?; How does the MVP look like?; What is potential monetary upside?; What is potential personal-brand upside?; What are the potential risks?; What is the required time / monetary / etc budget?; Who is this project targeted at most?; Will there be new skills-of-interest learned?; Will this project lead to bigger projects?.

Each question has a 1-5 score slide which I later sum up with custom weights to a "final score" which I then use to rank the projects.
I'd like to add that one thing that makes Deeplearning4j's neural networks "not a black box" is the fact that they are open-source. Many deep-learning startups don't have their entire code base available on Github.
The propaganda of RT is pretty easy to spot almost everywhere and is systemic.

> Sometimes all you need to do to create propaganda is just show some unpopular facts in isolation

RT does quite a bit more than that.

In Russia there are less alternatives to state media.

CNN, sure, I would not trust them, too.
There is no pure distribution that is free from any funding besides maybe Debian+Hurd.

I made a point to pick distributions that are merely a base Ubuntu install strapped with different default desktop environments because that's all that ElementaryOS is.
Naw, Harper is SML-all-the-way (AFAICT).

Btw, Haskell is technically not "lazy", it's "non-strict".

Now, I think he has a good point, but I don't think think there's any general consensus within the FP community which one of non-strict/strict is "better". Personally, I don't think there's a "right" answer.

Earlier on in my career, I would have said that "non-strict/strict" should have a part of the type of a term, but after non-trivial experience with O'Caml and Lazy.t, I'm not so sure. I'm definitely sure that it lead to an absurd proliferation of incompatible interfaces.

And, as SPJ has opined, laziness forces you to be honest about side effects, which is not a trivial thing!
People would kill for a 10x speed up in training. You have no idea what you're talking about. How well a neural net performs is partly based on how much data it trains on. If you are able to train on 10x as much data in the same period, you're going to have much better nets. This is very important when you start trying to implement real-time solutions.
Edyn (YC W14) is hiring full stack engineers to build smart sensors
I feel like the "summary of the summary" from the comments is the best.

Thank you for detailing this stuff. I had a quick read.

For the sake of other readers, if you don’t have time to read Part 6, here is the summary of the summary:

If you are using a decent OS like linux, as opposed to direct hardware access (who other than google ever did that?), all you need to worry about is how to co-locate your data. By “using”, I don’t mean using O_DIRECT, which basically says, “OS, please get out of my way.”

If you do use O_DIRECT, do “man 2 open” and search the man page for “monkey”. If that’s not enough, google “Linus O_DIRECT” and look at the war with Oracle and the like. You could probably also google “Linus Braindead” and you are likely to find a post about O_DIRECT.

If you are one of the few people actually working on the kernel’s disk layer, you probably know all this and is unlikely you will ever be reading this.

As for co-locating data, there is no way to do it without knowing your app inside out. So know your app. For some apps, it can make orders of magnitude difference. That’s your domain. Leave the disk to the kernel. Let it use it’s cache and it’s scheduler. They will be better than yours and will benefit the whole system, in case other apps need to get at the data too. You can try to help the kernel by doing vectorized read/writes although that’s a bigger deal with spinning disks.

Ata Roboubi
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Rich people don't get rich by giving away money. I've heard plenty of stories about private non-profits that spend significant percentages of their take on administrative costs and similar. Not to say they're all like that; but then, neither is the government.

http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/admin.html

2% or less admin costs looks pretty good. A universal basic income system would be better, but I'd be interested to see some private charities that do better than this.
Why was Golang not a consideration?
Eric Niebler is still working on it, see his last blogposts at http://ericniebler.com
Calling upon government services and voting isn't a show of faith in the government, it's just a matter of practicality. Do I fundamentally have faith in the police to protect people's safety instead of jeopardizing it? No, because they murder people all the time and get away with it. But I'm still going to file a police report when my laptop gets stolen because that's the only way I can make an insurance claim for it.

As for voting, I'm to the point where I just vote on ballot measures and leave the actual races for elected positions blank, unless there's a socialist running in which case I vote against them.
As I understand it App Store apps are 'sandboxed' - so is there any way to use this to create light, snapshottable containers isolated from the main filesystem?

I've been using Vagrant and Virtualbox, but the lack of speed is painful. And the overhead with a couple running at once.

It just strikes me as odd that Ruby has rbenv, Python has virtualenv - but there's nothing language agnostic and native to the Operating System, that I can use to try out new languages/tools, and nuke if all goes wrong without messing up my OS X filesystem (or versions of installed programs).
> The claim about being able to do "so much more at a low level", like e.g. being able to switch out libc variants, which allegedly is not possible in Rust due to accidental coupling. Is this a temporary difference? If so, it may only be relevant in the short term. I can't answer this question, but it would be interesting if someone did.

It's definitely intended that the Rust standard library can compile against many libc's. I personally hope that it can eventually be completely self contained and not even link to libc in certain configurations.
I doubt that Bulgaria and Romania are 'a lot worse'. The situation in Russia is quite bad.

The free press index lists Russia quite a bit behind Bulgaria or Romania...

http://rsf.org/index2014/data/index2014_en.pdf
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Today is not over yet
I would agree. I don't think they compete directly, the only real similarities is they both compile to native code, and both are fast.

Nim is more of a Pascal/Python/Coffeescript hybrid with easy interoperability with C and nice tooling.
I don't know many people who unconditionally trust both of their parents, actually.
> Besides, I see Nim more as a 'secret weapon' sort of language, or something that individual programmers use. Rust is more of a 'big idea' language, so it makes sense a corporation is pushing it.

I don't think that "big idea" languages [1] are necessarily the provenance of corporations/committees as opposed to individuals. If anything, the opposite tends to be true, as large languages such as C++ and C# have tended to grow to encompass more and more features over time as their feature sets expand to accommodate more and more stakeholders. Rust in particular started out as an individual project, with a set of design constraints—those of low-level memory-safe systems programming—that have remained unchanged throughout its lifetime.

[1] I'm not really a fan of that term anyway, as "big ideas" are just design constraints, things that all languages have. Rust just happens to have a unique (among industry languages, save maybe ATS) set of them.
> Rust is more of a 'big idea' language, so it makes sense a corporation is pushing it.

Araq just announced that Nim has financial backing now: http://forum.nim-lang.org/t/870
Agreed on the ML module system. It's a damn shame that Haskell has this anemic probably-historical-accident namespacing-only module system that we're stuck with. On the plus side, there seems to be some real impetus to implement the Backpack system, though there are still unexplored points in the design space behind Backpack, especially wrt. type classes.

FWIW, I think type classes are actually what make Haskell more appealing to me than O'Caml, even though O'Caml's modules technically subsume type classes (for most purposes anyway). In practice it just gets too verbose.

That, and enforced purity.
Differences to Threema? https://threema.ch
It's just staggering.

I know it's silly to think that banks would be better than anyone else, but good lord, malware running on machines capable of transferring millions of dollars that's able to send out video feeds from the network without anyone noticing?! Your various IT/Security teams should be absolutely ashamed. And then the banks don't even have to stand up and admit their incompetence publicly; that's a total disgrace.

That's the state of corporate security I guess. I've dealt with corporate IT departments over the years where they put these "processes" in place to mitigate these security issues but it's all a load of rubbish. Filling in forms to tick boxes so that everyone can go home happy pretending there's security going on, when really their network is a leaky sieve.

At one point I saw a release by a 3rd party supplier to a large corporate system that included privilege escalation, blatantly, at the start of a T-SQL script. It was done because the IT department refused to carry out the action on request via the official channel but it was work that needed to be done to complete a project. The 3rd party knew the admins would just be running scripts as SA so they escalated their own account to do what they needed to do later.

I know it's silly to be so frustrated about it, but we've all dealt with crappy banking systems for years, with totally insane security measures; meanwhile hackers can just walk away with millions using a bit of malware.
> In my experience IRC channels being rude is the norm rather than the exception.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Rust has a very clear code of conduct (http://www.rust-lang.org/conduct.html) aimed at avoiding exactly that kind of rudeness, and it has so for a long time. As a result the #rust IRC channel is a very pleasant place to be.
If you look for statements like that in RT's media, you are looking for zero content. Much more you can see plain lies, conspiracies, missing facts, ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_the_United_States
> every piece of information a URL and adding untargeted Adsense is

I vaguely recall rap genius (now just Genius) getting in trouble for this.
Two things:

1) Discipline (e.g. dedicate 1 hour daily towards a single project until you finish it)

2) Leverage. Think about which thing / project will provide you with the most leverage in the long run. (e.g. doing ML course will allow you to achieve so much more with new gained skills than (likely) learning discrete mathematics.)

I personally chose to start a business which allows me to have significantly higher learning rate than otherwise would be possible, which compounds over time to significantly more leverage in long term. Do mind, now I am sacrificing my living standards compared to same-age peers (working in big companies), but life is a marathon, not a sprint :)