skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Freebase doesn't have an ontology in the Semantic Web sense. It's always been a specialized tool with non standard protocols like MQL. Schema.org is somewhat related but not tied whatsoever to Freebase.

Wikidata is fully editable and has an ecosystem for updating data so concerns about stale data aren't valid. Since Wikipedia will be pulling from it (is already in some cases) you could argue that their will be more sunlight on the data.

There's been a lot of code written against Freebase APIs (me included) but it isn't sad it's going away. It's the risk you take when relying on 3rd party services. I think your confusing short term developer convenience with a real loss of open data.
I haven't seen a single MVC-style framework that I liked. I don't understand how such an awful idea can be so popular. It sucks to be in an industry that chases fads over substance.

MVC frameworks I have tried at work:

Java/Spring/jsp/beans

Ruby on Rails

angular.js

zend

All were awful.

I do like libraries, things you can plug and play and use where you want (like jQuery). A framework demands that your whole application be written in its style.

For example, the Ruby on Rails project used a legacy database, which was not written in primary key autoincrement integer Rails style. That project was a disaster and that startup failed. With financial data, demanding the primary key to be autoincrement integer forces a lot of unnecessary joins, when you already have natural keys like Ticker or CUSIP.
> The US and Europe alone use about 100 tons of oxycodone, annually. Where is that all going?

Use, or dispense?

I've had two Achilles tendon surgeries, and for each surgery I was prescribed a fair-sized bottle (30?) of oxycodone. So that's about 60 tablets that were dispensed to me. I've taken probably less than five. Why not just dispense five? Because it's a bureaucratic rigamarole to dispense oxycodone, so they just dispense more than you require and let it go at that.
Obviously it won't make it impossible to decipher, just harder (and perhaps not worth the effort). If the line order of each statement is also randomized and useless attributes are added, they'd have to pretty much compile the CSS and compare the attributes.

The alternative way to beat all email obfuscation techniques is of course taking a snapshot and running OCR on it, but certainly not worth the effort/CPU time.
We need screenshots here! :D
Oh, I learned today that VHDL has (had?) a standardization group called VASG, which is quite a nested acronym:

VASG →
VHDL Analysis and Standardization Group →
VHSIC Hardware Description Language Analysis and Standardization Group →
Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language Analysis and Standardization Group
Trying to figure out control flow with more than one goto label in a function is going to get complicated.
I prefer to use `do { } while 0`:

int foo(void)
{
int ret = -1; /* Variable we return to indicate
success or failure. Defaults to -1,
which is failure. */

FILE *inf;
FILE *outf;

if (!(inf = fopen("foo", "rb"))) {
ret = -1;
return ret;
}

do {
if (!(outf = fopen("bar", "wb"))) {
ret = -2;
break;
}

do {
/* Do the actual work, now that you know you have
all the resources you need.
Use break if something fails.
*/
ret = 0;
} while(0);
fclose(outf);
} while(0);
fclose(inf);
return ret;
}

If you really must use gotos then just one suffices if you initialize all your
variables to NULL:

int foo(void)
{
int ret = 0; /* Variable we return to indicate
success or failure. Defaults to 0,
which is success. */

FILE *inf = NULL;
FILE *outf = NULL;

if ((inf = fopen("foo", "rb")) == NULL) {
ret = -1;
goto foo_fail;
}

if ((outf = fopen("bar", "wb")) == NULL) {
ret = -2;
goto foo_fail;
}

/* Do the actual work, now that you know you have
all the resources you need. */

foo_fail:
if (outf) {
fclose(outf);
outf = NULL;
}
if (inf) {
fclose(inf);
inf = NULL;
}
return ret;
}

P.S. the return code of fclose() should also be checked, as I/O errors might only be reported on close
Yeah that stuck out like a sore thumb for me as well. Pretty tacky example. I'm sure it was just meant to convey a tongue-in-cheek sarcastic tone, but it's in pretty poor taste.
An article introducing Geometric Algebra (A Unified Mathematical Language for Physics and Engineering) was posted to HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8192054) and may be of interest.

It's authors also have other articles and teaching resources on their website: http://geometry.mrao.cam.ac.uk/
A coworker in grad school used a giant roll of paper, but in a vertical setting rather than a horizontal setting. The paper scrolled underneath the table rather than across it.
So if you are in an impoverished area your packets are different from first world packets, magically making it harder to send them to 207.241.224.2 (archive.org) than 173.252.120.6 (facebook.com)?

No, that is not the case. Instead, Facebook will pay for you to get Internet if that is Internet that only lets you access Facebook. And that is not an Internet at all. The infrastructure, the physical reality, means that if you have any connection, you can have all connections, and in these circumstances only profit hungry greedy monsters would consider effectively blacklisting every site but their own to guarantee them revenues to show to shareholders for providing network connectivity to you - or I guess it should be more appropriately called Facebook connectivity.
I wonder why they chose Java for substring search. Why not C (strstr) or grep?

http://www.arstdesign.com/articles/fastsearch.html
Could you make the argument that pleasure is good?
Unless it's a clever ruse, and the real camera is somewhere else, to watch the watchers watching the watchers.
> Symmetric encryption does not have the concept of a "private key".

In the early days of public key cryptography, the NSA referred to it as "non-private key cryptography".

Even today, people often refer to symmetric vs asymmetric and private vs public interchangeably. (Yes, it can cause confusion and you will probably never see professional cryptographers like Bernstein, Green, Lange, Schwabe, Schneier, or Wilcox-O'hearn refer to it that way.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric-key_algorithm#cite_n...

The author had multiple errors; it isn't beyond the limits of intellectual generosity to assume they meant symmetric key instead of private key.

> A 128 bits private key in TLS can only vary from almost useless (if it's some ECC algorithm) to completely useless (in case it's RSA).

128 bit EdDSA would have about the same security as a 64 bit block cipher, which we would consider broken. So I'm in full agreement there.

128 bit RSA? Totally useless.

128 bit AES? Not a concern. Usually you look at the padding, block mode, and authentication instead.
I think it's weird that Kuhn never realized that things work. Could have saved himself a lot of work.
Free Programming Books Part-2
Dynamic Static Inventory for Ansible Tower
I was a little disturbed by that as well, I don't think that this is appropriate or funny.
This is the kind of thing which could very easily turn into a flame war, and is much further off-topic. I'm not interested in that kind of argument right now, so all I will say in this thread is this:

My personal experience with Less Wrong-style rationalism, to simplify the situation aggressively, is that it has a core of good, useful tools (Bayesian reasoning, strict positivism, utilitarianism) that I have no problem with. However, when pushed too far, those tools tend to break down—but the rationalist answer to that breakdown is all too often to embrace the model and discount the reality. This general refusal to regard their core tools with suspicion results in beliefs which are paradoxically irrational: when faced with e.g., utilitarianism condoning torture to prevent mild discomfort, the rationalist response is not, "Perhaps human experience does not map straightforwardly to integers—we should re-examine our tools," but rather, "As our mathematical tools are of course correct, we must believe in this conclusion." This belief in math-over-matter is a major part (though not the only factor) in my skepticism towards the kind of rationalism promoted by Less Wrong.
For a time I used noprocrast here on HN.

It's been a while though.
Would you look at that beast! The bigger PDF image is on the post:

https://ptrthomas.wordpress.com/2006/06/06/java-call-stack-f...
Fan fiction at best is a grey area and at worst is blatant copyright infringement.

The community seems more than happy to leave it in that place rather than put it to the test by publishing something like that or attempting to make money from that.

As soon as someone tries to make money from it, even if just to recoup self-publishing costs there will be a lawsuit and it'll be decided concretely, probably not in the community's favor.
Why so serious?

EDIT: I knew that would get a laugh. It was a good joke. I chortled. I don't get offended by every off-hand phrase in life when no one's hurt in the process. If you're offended by the joke then you are the one with issues, not the joke.
We started with Java because the rest of our backend is written in Java. We stuck with it because it has not turned out to be much of a bottleneck in practice. This came as a surprise; I had expected that we'd need to rewrite the substring search loop in native code. We may still do so eventually, but we're able to get very high performance in pure Java. (1.25GB / second / core, as noted in the post.)

Edit to add: "good enough is not good enough" -- very well put! Yes, it would be good to move this loop to native code. However, with our current design, the overhead of calling out from Java to native code would probably outweigh any benefits. We're planning to move our core database storage to off-Java-heap memory buffers, at which point it will become much more feasible to call out to native code.

The inner loop speedup on this particular code will be more like 2x than 3x, and the speedup of the overall system will be quite a bit less than that. But your point is still correct.
Also, some instructions of modern CPUs are implemented in software that resides on the CPU.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcode
At my last job I mapped Reddit to localhost this way. It seemed to work pretty well...
Thank you, Eliezer. It's been a great run and the last few weeks have been indeed special
Ask HN: Interactive programming lessons for Kids (Offline)?
I have a little cousin brother who really loves learning about computers. According to him, he loves computer classes. I found out in "computer class" all they do is teach the poor kids how to use word and excel and how to save files in windows.

He is a very smart kid, and I tried to ask their parents to let him spend time online so that he could learn more about computers.

The parents are unfortunately scared of the internet, I tried to tell them about parental controls with no success so unfortunately, I don't see him using the internet for the next 4-5 years.

Is there any interactive programming lessons which I could download, put in a drive and give him so he could follow them without having to use the internet.

It honestly breaks my heart to see a very intelligent kid spend all of his free time watching soap operas with his mom.
The FAQ has the canonical answer:

Why is a web server included? It isn't needed by many people!

Because the developers want it. [1]

[1] http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq1.html#HowAbout
Yes but you can also build functional or cycle accurate simulator in software which can give you some information on how the processor could potentially perform. Of course having a soft-core running on an FPGA will most likely give you a more accurate idea of how the processor actually works.
You could. There was a keyboard kit for the 400 and I remember it being decent. But the kit may not have been very well known.
You're assuming your anecdote is the norm. Angular is pretty popular because it makes some people more productive.

The average woodworker probably doesn't know how to properly use a lathe, but they don't go on WoodHacker News saying that lathes suck.
I don't think that "do what you want" is going to cut it. The world of ubiquitous-automation is going to need an ethics. Some principles to guide people toward wise activities and away from unwise activities. Addictive, abusive, and destructive patterns of behavior are bad. In the 20th century we explained their unwisdom by saying things like, "if you become an alcoholic, your children will starve because you didn't work to feed them" or "compulsively binge-viewing TV will keep you from your studies."
These activities are still unwise, but "do what you want" doesn't give us the ontological or moral tools to explain their unwisdom to each other (especially to children).
Yes, but music is even harder. I doubt most FPS shooters would suffer much at 60ms latency, but that's an 1/8 note at 120bpm. I would guess that for a jam session to feel OK, you'd want to be <15ms.

Musical tracking has to take special measures to keep the latency low enough even when its all local; see the need for ASIO, jackd, etc.
Why is a web server included? It isn't needed by many people!

Because the developers want it. [1]

[1] http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq1.html#HowAbout
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges-Eug%C3%A8ne_Haussmann rebuilt Paris. That was partly for artistic reasons, but the wide boulevards had the nice benefit of being riot-safe.

Looking at a map of Kairo, this may be a similar approach, just that they build it next to the city (since they expect massive expansion in any case) instead of remodelling existing parts: whatever they will build will be more structured, and thus easier to lock down than the maze of the current city.
A transparent solar cell that could make every window and screen a power source
What about this?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mai...
Couldn't you just use Facebook's "Fetch as FacebookBot" feature and just fetch the pages yourself? Example: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/echo?q=https%... I was thinking about doing this since on my network Facebook access is free but Internet isn't. (2nd world country, but barely)
With custom code, there usually is just enough code to solve the specific problem. With a framework, there's also the code that comes with the framework that this project doesn't use. The framework is a super-generalized solution, and it comes with a lot of code my use case doesn't need, which makes it a lot harder if I need to trace through the framework to find the problem.

My boss wants the bug fixed in a couple hours. I can't spend a couple weeks reading the framework source so I can fix the bug. (For the zend form example, I wound up writing my own form instead of reusing what was already there.)

If I have a problem with a website written in PHP, I read the PHP source and can fix the problem. If I have a problem with a website written in PHP plus a framework, now I'm expected to read the PHP code PLUS the code for the framework? That's several orders of magnitude more work.
Product Managers transitioning to Developers
I'm a PM who transitioned to full time developer 3 years ago. We are a rare breed. It's been an interesting journey to say the least. I'd like to connect with others who've made similar transitions to share our experiences and potentially create working relationships. Comment with your blog/story or email me at pmdevelopr@gmail.com, thanks.
Yeah, that's nice but about 9 years too late while the rest of the FLOSS world had moved on from qmail to Exim or Postfix.
The broader point is those that run the economy are also those who need no "job" or "work" at all. They already have everything and are the arbiters of its dissemination. You are told to find a passion, but for the children of the privileged elite there is no need for passion or pursuit, because its already in your hands on a silver plate from birth or from graduation.
Photoshop Live – Street Retouch Prank
Fadecandy – makes LED art easier, tastier, and more creative
Milton Keynes in the UK

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Keynes
Why Inkscape doesn't work well for artists
Rebuilding "The Legend of Zelda" w HTML5 Canvas
Kuhn never denies that there are facts about the universe that we can observe. And I agree with you about this general class of example: no number of scientific discoveries or paradigm shifts will ever make the photoelectric effect cease occurring.

Kuhn's argument is that science occasionally undergoes what he calls "paradigm shifts" -- a low-level shift in assumptions about a certain realm of scientific thought that fundamentally changes the way we approach a particular field. One example Kuhn gives is the Copernican Revolution. Copernicus, as we all know, proposed the heliocentric solar model. Before Copernicus, most people used Ptolemy's epicycles to model the movement of planetary bodies. Initially, it worked, but the cracks started to show as observations accumulated. A major shift in our assumptions about the organization and modeling of planetary bodies had to occur before scientific progress could move forward.

In this sense, scientific knowledge progresses in giant shifts, rather than linearly or incrementally. Consider the theory of atomism how it was disrupted by the Rutherford Gold Foil experiment, or the Double-Slit experiment and what that did for physics. A dominant paradigm must always make way for a new paradigm in order for scientific progress to occur.

The upshot of all of this, according to Kuhn, is that the criteria for scientific truth are always caught up in certain historical assumptions and that we have to take these assumptions into account when assessing the veracity of a given theory. He doesn't say that there aren't facts about the universe, but rather, that the scientific approach to understanding the universe is caught up in a paradigmatic frame which makes it impossible to derive a simple, objective algorithm/process for scientific discovery.

Does that make sense?
There are some larger perl programs (pkg) and some smaller awk/sh/etc. floating around. Not sure about using them for a web server though.
I thinks its up to every persons responsibility to learn to deal with rough language. The world isn't easy, and we need to learn to deal with it contents.
This is a fairly uncharitable interpretation of Kuhn's thought. Please read my above explanation of Kuhn's thought or, better yet, skip the middleman and read "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and get it from the man himself :)
The summary:

> A new intensive survey of the Messak Settafet escarpment, a massive outcrop of sandstone in the middle of the Saharan desert, has shown that stone tools occur "ubiquitously" across the entire landscape: averaging 75 artefacts per square meter, or 75 million per square kilometer.

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around these numbers. But if you figure a population density of maybe 1 hominin per every 10 square kilometers times hundreds of stone tools per hominin per year times 1 million years, maybe the numbers work out. I'm kind of wondering if they're counting discarded flakes from stone tool production and not just the stone tools themselves.
Well, if you can triple your performance, you will require 1/3 of the servers, and your clients will enjoy faster responses. I thought that was the idea, good enough is not good enough.

Anyways, congrats on your success. I would love to read more about the business side - finding clients, profits, expenses, etc.
Ah I didn't see those so I'll have to take a look. The reason I thought it was very difficult and maybe even impossible was mostly because passing through to GO changes the behavior or Java to a point where it could cause some adverse affects in applications tuned or expecting it to work as the other JVMs work.

Still a cool project either way.
Science Fairs Aren't So Fair
This article reads like a proposal for journeying to the moon that was designed without knowledge of the theory of gravitation.

For example, the author does not appear to realize that the reason most people work is to exchange their time and efforts for something they value more, which is usually money but could be experience or other things, in any combination.
The Fat-Fueled Brain
Measuring line size has nothing to do with security or security theater.
There are two very good introductory textbooks
on the subject by the same author:

http://faculty.luther.edu/~macdonal/laga/
http://faculty.luther.edu/~macdonal/vagc/index.html
“The Missing Link: Bethel '94”
Finally, a legitimate reason for IE 6 to exist.
I'm not sure what the goal of this project is. It seems to be to produce psilocybin and MDMA, but it fails to mention why this would be necessary, or why they'd need any money to do so at all (apart from the modest cost of precursor). I'll admit that I don't know much about synthetic psilocybin manufacturing, so I'm talking about MDMA mostly. (but until last year, you could buy 'only add water' growing sets for shrooms in smart shops here (=Netherlands), so how hard can it be?) Either way, there are many syntheses known, most of them (although I'm not a chemist, so I don't have first hand knowledge) available to chemists with very modest understandings of chemistry and rudimentary equipment needs. I'd imagine they already have labs in which they can produce high quality product using high-yield syntheses.

With the right paperwork (which you'd need to get access to this project's product), any researcher could just as easily get access to precursor and make exactly what they want (be it MDMA, MDA, MDME, or any other variation Shulgin described, or invented afterwards by others). Plus it's easier to get licensed for owning e.g. saffrole than it is to import MDMA!

So maybe he's saying that they can do it cheaper? I doubt so, or at least I doubt that the price difference would be relevant. MDMA available underground in Europe has been more pure and cheaper than it ever was before; a gram of pure MDMA costs 20 euros retail (that's about 10 doses) if you're buying from the most expensive guy you can find. If you buy by the 100 grams, you can get it for half or a quarter of that price. So we're talking less than a euro per dose here - at a worst case estimate. After taking everything into account, I have a hard time imagining cost being a factor here (the low price on the underground market being a fascinating topic itself here - how can these clandestine manufacturing gangs make real money on their operations, after counting for the high cost of doing business?) (and before anyone says that you don't know the quality of what you buy on the black market, these people are professional pharmacologists, they could easily check quality of a sample - until a few years ago, you could get your pills checked at raves for free FFS).

Now if they're looking for a million dollars to fund drug legalization work, then fine, that's a worthy goal in itself - but that's listed only in passing in the project. So the only conclusion left is that this project is a PR stunt, where they're using a headline grabbing project description to fund much less exotic advocacy work.

(my comments in this thread make it seem that I have first hand knowledge about these things, but it's been well over 15 years since I last used or even saw illegal drugs. I just have a an interest in the economics and law of underground (drug) markets, and I read case law, reports from our equivalent of the DoJ, papers from academic researchers and government drug monitoring agencies to keep up to date. Hey, other people collect stamps.)
KMail sends HTML emails just fine. With a nice WYSIWYG editor.