skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to me that the entire concept of air war is designed around a presumption of human pilots. That you can only have a limited number of aircraft that have to be very capable. This rules still seems to apply to drones, even though they could be made cheap enough to be expendable. At that point a drone is just a very cheap missile and the more you have the better.

Is 1 fighter/bomber aircraft more useful than 10,000 single use drones? Only if you are flying from a secure base; and any serious adversary will try and prevent that. Lets hope we only ever have to fight people in pick up trucks with those billion dollar fighters.
The potential of cryptocurriences seems pretty amazing, but the killer to me is the incentive to horde as an "investment" rather then spend.

Also the ease and unfairness of early adopters accumulating a mass of the imaginary bitpoints that they can later sell for dramatically inflated "value" once it becomes harder to mine is absurd.
I just finished Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A32NYYE)

Next I'm picking up Working Effectively with Legacy Code (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0131177052). It's been in my reading list for years and I can finally get to it!
Certs from Let’s Encrypt will be free.
Don't forget that, back then, systems were small enough to be understood easily on your own. Nowadays, that's not really the case anymore.
Besides, we kind of find ourselves in a situation where most people have simply accepted being beholden to closed source software providers.
Android should be coming up soon! :)

Thanks ssscottiegood.
Would you consider Java developers that have had extensive exposure to C++ in a university setting (OS development, Comp Architecture, etc.)?
Google anti-trust foes see friend in new EU competition chief
TODO: conduct this comparison when 9p specification is not full of "TODOs"...
What I can say is (i) I don't see anybody succeeding at this an academic environment (TREC took two years to get better than chance, but this nothing to be proud of) and (ii) I don't see anybody succeeding at it commercially.

It's very connected to the problem of scoring in search. In almost all IR systems, the relevance score is meaningless except in that if you sort by it descending you will see results that get worse as you go down the list.

What you really want is to get a probability score as a relevance value and you can convert a conventional score into that with logistic regression but if your system is honest you wind up with 70% or so precision at your maximum score and that is not so good, particularly in the filtering scenario.

I'd imagine a system based on today's machine learning techniques might do pretty good if you supplied a training set of 1000 or so articles (think of it as developing a classifier) and you could probably use dimensional reduction to do better-than-chance with 50 articles, but I think most people would expect to be able to learn from 10 or so examples and would judge the system "unintelligent" if it can't do that.
Show HN: Curated list of Slack chats for professionals
Data Science: Industry Allure [pdf]
That's the most awful suggestion I've ever heard.

You want a test to introduce MORE randomness just to please 1 group of people on a test that is supposed to measure your math ability including the ability to understand their simple guessing penalty?

You want everyone to think in the back of their mind that they got screwed by the SAT's random number generator or that some idiots hit the jackpot and get a much higher score than they should have?
Yes, this bothered me as well when reading Permutation City. But for the sake of argument, say we posit infinite computation (let's not worry about how that's possible), then would that objection still apply? Then it seems not all that necessary that the states are in order, but just that they exist at some point, regardless of mechanism.
The system I'm developing is a message passing system, so I've looked mostly at PubNub's pricing model to get the idea for a tiered system. Mine is going to be a lot smaller at the start and it's only me running it so I'm looking at the least hassle and maintenance for collecting fees.
> But, the problem with that for servers is you need to be able to start all of your services as different users. That's really not optional.

Anything with an attack surface also must not be able to replace its own binaries/code. Otherwise a one-time exploit is instantly updated to a permanent infection.
I think it means you can mount an EFS instance on OS X
And yet, the US won't sell Iran nukes or China F-22s.

The world we live in is far from free market, for everything from solar panels to textiles [0].

A really obvious place in which one might actually want the opposite of a free market is in military tech.

Exporting the tech behind a computer that'll presumably be used for mostly military purposes is something that could be expected to be frowned upon in certain circumstances.

[0] - http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-launches-new-trade-challenge...
Wait until you start seeing neverending Lynda.com spam now. "Your LinkedIn contact checked out a new course", or something similar
Purely anecdotal: what I remember from the time the Doc was trying to determine what was making me sick while eating was the list of items totally off my diet. Besides the obvious, no dairy, no carbonated, no caffeine, and limit on other items like fats and salts, was no artificial sweeteners.

I didn't question it at the time as I was desperately in need of getting the situation fixed. Turned out the Ciphro I had taken; as last resort type medicine; had killed all the good bacteria and such in my intestinal tract letting something else move in. Another series of drugs later and that was cleared up but he still left me with a list of items to curtail for the next six months until all tests came clean and one was artificial sweeteners.
This may be a problem for this new service as well, but with windows isn't there a problem getting a network drive to mount without a user physically logging into the machine?
> Thinking, fast and slow

Definitely one of the most mind blowing book I ever read. Loved it.This could be summarised in : "I know that I know nothing". It's incredible how our mind is biased in so many way to the point of being untrustworthy.
Depends on who is the public.
> had 50 percent fewer Bacteroidetes bacteria and 50 percent more Firmicutes bacteria than normal mice did. When they transferred a sample of the Firmicutes bacterial population from the obese mice into normal-weight ones, the normal mice became fatter.

Woah. I assume someone is now doing research on introducing Bacteroidetes into the guts of obese people?
PiTurret now on kickstarter
I almost choked on my pretzel.
Kings of Zero Sum: Strategies from the AI Wars
> bullshit. you always need visual confirmation of your target by a human.

That would rule out the Phoenix missile, and yet it was built, and the Iranians of all people used it to considerable effect against Iraqi aircraft in the 1980s.
This is not considered "nonsense" in Objective-C is part of the issue: having "no receiver" do nothing is well defined behavior that has a long tradition at least back to Smalltalk. People use this to write shorter code, on purpose, causing an effect similar to Haskell's Maybe monad.

(Note: I, myself, do not ever rely on this functionality, and even disagree with it, but the context in which people use it is important to understand when judging it; and with that context, I consider my own objections mostly due to my biases and not something that I would argue is "correct".)
> A better system would be to take the the higher paying of either duration based or view based pay.

I'm not sure how this would work when sharing profits between people.
This kind of thing can creep up when you least expect it. I'm a native speaker, I've had a solid and reliable intellectual understanding of these distinctions since grade school, and yet somehow on a paper a few years back I substituted "weather" for "whether" throughout the whole thing. Not because I had forgotten the distinction, but because I just wasn't paying attention.
> As far as the asshole tax, I don't think Uber's reputation is all that much worse than Facebook or Google, do you?

Absolutely yes. I wouldn't work for Uber for less than a million dollars. Google (and to a lesser extent, Facebook) is seen as a cool company that does (mostly) positive things. Uber are seen as a bunch of libertarian assholes who actively break the law, dodge liability, screw over their ~~employees~~ independent contractors and price-gouge their customers.
I have a similar story. My contact was about to run out, and they offered me a better one. I said, I'd love to stay but I've already booked two months in Brazil.

I knew they didn't like having remote workers, but for a contract extension they were willing to do it. So I spent two months working from beautiful Brazil and had a raise waiting for me when I came back.

Moral of the story - there might be a way to work from a distance for a while after all even with employers that don't normally allow it.
Readwrite.com causes an infinite loop in Chrome with Adblock Plus
One reason I don't think JP Morgan or traditional banks can compete effectively with smaller startups is the regulatory framework that they operate in. New startups can structure themselves outside this framework and be more nimble.

For instance, Lending Club essentially passes through all credit risk to its investors with its assets and liabilities perfectly matched. So every dollar loss in loans is a dollar less to the holders of the notes.

If a bank tried to have this sort of structure, it would be incredibly leveraged and would require a large amount of capital reserves.

There was a great Bloomberg article addressing just this [0]

[0] http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-08-27/lending-clu...
Indeed, I would expect it's viewing duration, otherwise we'd see 20 hour videos with 1 minute of content.
I prefer to run on my workstation whatever is running on the environment I manage. Which is Ubuntu Server. Thus I run the same release on my workstation (14.04.2 LTS), with i3wm.

I find that using the same distro on my workstation aids with local testing, not to mention just improving general familiarity. You could say the workstation is a "pre-dev" environment.

While I haven't necessarily switched "config" OSes, I do run Windows 8.1 at home (because gaming), and tend to use MobaXterm for remote administration. It's frustrating, mostly because I lack the "intermediary" between multiple servers.

Example: I needed to grab a bunch of files from a Mikrotik (no Bash there) with the format "syslog.(number).apr.09.2015.txt", only I wanted them all formatted as "syslog.(number).txt". So I just scp them over to my workstation and:

for $(ls syslog.*); do N=$(echo $i | awk -F"." '{print $2}'); mv $i syslog.$N.txt

This, obviously, is sorely lacking when running a Windows machine, even with the cygwinesque wrapper they so graciously offer.

I suppose this is relevant to all variants of Linux (or rather GNU/Bash), and I'm sure the same could be done on other OSes, but seeing as I work on Linux, gaining this level of familiarity can only be beneficial.
Really? Can you point to a source?

Many people with epilepsy and migraines have discovered different food triggers. In my case Aspartame was the leading trigger. Anyone who has seizures should seek out and eliminate potential triggers to see if it helps. I suppose a high carb diet could be a trigger for someone... I didn't have a high carb diet... but I know eliminating aspartame helped me.

I am still amazed how Donald Rumsfeld was able to influence its approval by the FDA.
The Null Professor (2014)
> How many companies have you experienced?

I can't easily quantify the coverage although I've been thinking about it. Of the several hundred people I felt I knew reasonably well at Intel and Sun through the folks I've interacted with at Xerox and Tandem where my wife worked. LinkedIn's mapping function gives me pretty good coverage but the simple sample of is/is-not retired isn't a good signal.

But the other part which isn't obvious is that a number of people at Sun (for example) were not millionaires when the company IPO'd but became millionaires as the stock increased in value. In a case which is perhaps unique but not unprecedented, the Sun stock I purchased as part of the employee purchase program (basically 10% of my salary buying stock at 85% of the fair market value every 6 months) over 10 years was worth more than a million dollars in 1999[1] Similarly for folks who "only" had $500K worth of stock when Facebook IPO'd that same stock would be > $1.5M today.

The dynamic (which was also well documented in Geoffrey Moore's books) is that companies that make it to an IPO and grow, add value over time and their relative value at a size of <= 1000 employees, to their size at 10,000 employees makes the equity compensation of those 1000 employees a lot more valuable than the later employees got.

And to reiterate the data is out there but not well collated. I'll have to do some more digging to figure out if we can quantify this more precisely.

[1] Not that I still had it in 1999 but there were folks who did.
For a lot of things, there's no substitute for getting a decent quantity of high explosives to the target. A tiny, expendable drone won't be able to carry a 500lb bomb.

Range is another consideration. As you shrink aircraft, their range generally shrinks too. Your 10,000 single-use drones probably won't be able to fly across the Pacific.

Smaller, cheaper, and more numerous may well be better, but it's all relative.

Incidentally, this basic scenario already played out for strategic nuclear bombing. The "drones" there are ballistic missiles, and they gradually supplanted manned bombers in large part because they were cheaper. (Being able to launch on short notice and extremely difficult to intercept were factors too, of course.) Manned nuclear bombers still exist, but are very much secondary to ICBMs now. But note that ICBMs, while quite a bit smaller and cheaper than a B-52 or B-2, are still gigantic and expensive compared to just about anything civilian scale.
Haha. Fair enough. :)
Umm... I can't seem to find Romania. It would have been nice to mention "U.S. only"
So the conclusion is: more development ?
What about to try to organise some events
I'd be surprised if that didn't factor into the equation, although even just regular referrals would be acceptable for many uses where you can do some degree of load-balancing / fail-over with reasonable recovery times.
Amazon just took another step in its plan to make business PCs obsolete
The things I feel deficient at are problems that sound like: 'given an array of prices for a certain stock in a single day, how would you find the maximum profit from one trade?'.

My naive answer to that is ignore the absolute prices, but iterate over the array to get an array of price movements, and then weight those by volume data (if that is available) or select the largest (if not). Could you expand on what it is you find problematic about that sort of question, eg lay out what your thought process is and where it gets blocked?

In terms of suggestions, maybe it would be worth your while considering problems a bit outside the programming domain, and working on them someplace other than your desk, on the theory that a change is as good as rest. Martin Gardner's 'Mathematical Recreations' columns for Scientific American were collected into one or more books, and I think some of Ian Stewarts' as well. These are great because they comprise fairly abtruse problems along with a discussion of strategies for dealing with them.

There are of course lots of 'math pouzzle of the week' sites from various universities, and books of math puzzles. but you should definitely pick up 'How to solve it' by Georg Polya, which is considered a classic education text. http://www.amazon.com/How-Solve-It-Mathematical-Princeton/dp... This is over half a century old but it's a great book, it's like having a patient mathematics teacher that wants to help you succeed at your side. Again, study these things away from your desk - find some other study space, even a park, and practice working with paper and in your head. You will retain things better by changing your environment for study.

Another thing that strikes me about your post is that your abilities are affected by the situation - you feel confident of your ability to get things done when allowed space to think, but you don't deal well with high-pressure environments like interviews. This is normal. Build up a good idea of where your intellectual strengths and weaknesses are and what your best strategies for dealing with them are. Don't be afraid to say in an interview 'I'm good at this sort of problem, I'm always slow at that sort so my first response will be a few brain farts...' Remember too that in a good interview, you're not just being rated for your raw intellectual ability, but on how you deal with your limitations and how you go about decomposing a problem. Nobody knows everything!

Lastly, don't assume you must do it in isolation. Maybe part of the stress at interviews is not the questions themselves but the social context. If you can afford it, consider hiring a graduate student in math or CS at a local university to tutor you a few hours a week. A person with an academic leaning will be better equipped to assess and direct your learning ability than someone who is trying to solve the 'puzzle' of filling an open position at a company and who can only provide limited feedback on your performance.
How to Ensure Your SSL-TLS Connections Are Secure
I wasn't proposing introducing predators as a short term fix, but more as a possible long term solution to reduce the need of other methods of population control. Really, I 'm espousing looking for long term, natural solutions to predator control, rather than allowing humans to fill the need just because they enjoy it. Hunting may be a vital part of population control, but IMHO whether the hunters enjoy it should have zero relevance to how likely we are to use that solution (other than it's effect on cost, which I'll concede is a factor).

In truth, this is all fairly removed from my original statement and intent, which was that if some hunters are no longer allowed to hunt an area and feel disgruntled, I have little sympathy.
Care to explain why not? It works well enough for Google: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...
He seems to see anything that doesn't include pitchforks and torches as apologetic.
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.

Interesting fictional depiction of highly technical/scientific minds.
Well, I'm Scottish.

Most people don't realise that the Scottish wilderness is basically industrial wasteland: originally mostly forested, it's been clearfelled, then intensively farmed, then the farmers were ethnically cleansed and it was converted fairly crudely to grazing, and then when that was no longer viable it's largely been abandoned. Needless to say, all the predators (bear, wolves and lynx, mostly) are dead, while the useful food animals (red deer, roe deer) run wild.

The end result is devastation. It looks beautiful, but ecologically it's awful: there's a huge deer overpopulation, and they eat everything. Trees won't regenerate because saplings don't survive. Without trees the entire bottom of the ecosystem is missing, and without treeroots holding the tiny amount of soil together, it turns into mush.

If you spend a night out in the Scottish wilderness, even in the middle of summer it's _dead silent_. If there's water nearby you might hear a curlew. Occasional skylarks. You'll also probably hear the weird grunting of a herd of red deer across the glen. Contrast with Norway, where every flat surface is covered with dwarf birch and dwarf spruce, and there's birdsong everywhere...

(You do get Forestry Commission forests of Norwegian spruce. These are even worse; the trees are grown commercially, they're extremely fast growing, usually planted way too close together, they're clear cut every decade or so, and they're utterly barren. Not even the deer will go in.)

Every now and again you'll find a small area that's well fenced off enough to keep the deer out, and it'll be full of trees. But a massive, nationwide cull of deer is politically impossible (I know one estate owner who's received hate mail for culling the deer on his estate, as required by law). There are some attempts to reintroduce wolves, but people are understandably a bit leery. Lynx may be viable: apparently they're not big enough to pose much of a threat to the deer, but will at least keep them moving, which will help solve some of the overgrazing problem.

There's also a lot more awareness these days, with more fencing and planting, but it's all piecemeal, and it usually doesn't happen on the high moors and hillsides which are the most at risk.

So, um, yeah. Deer are a goddamned menace.
Show HN: Node.js learning project porn or not [NSFW]
EFS is backed by SSDs.
Do you think people would really accept the banning of certain pieces of code as legitimate?

The US government already lost the battle on "export grade" encryption, and I believe they'd lose any attempts to ban other code as well.
Would it be a good idea to store Mysql db on EFS to be shared among load-balanced instances?
Hi,
Are you looking for summer interns as well ?
You don't fucking say?!
Steal other people's solutions
It is interesting that even nobody think China should sue Uncle Sam at WTO. If it happened in the other direction, American will think go to court first for sure. just like the rare metal affair when China bannned it from US.
I posted this because I strongly agree with Crista on the notion that some people can inherently program, and some cannot. I think that's as ridiculous as she does. However, I see the sentiment repeated here, often. I posted this to present the arguments of a CS professor on the topic, one who has even more experiencing in it than I do.
The problem with starting a new institution these days is that the regulatory & audit issues mean that you'll be a small bank, with the overhead of a large bank.

There's also the package integrations to deal with. Banks tend to buy packages for their core functions, and then (try) and integrate them. There's an opportunity here for someone who can offer a "Bank In A Box" -- all the software needed to start a bank/credit union that is well-integrated and complete -- from GL/AP to lending, depositor management, ACH + Fedwire connections, and disaster recovery.
But for 99% of human history everything put into human bodies was made by nature.
Oops, missed that. This is more complete: http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/5/intro
These are his views, and by extension were the views of the US establishment until at least 10 years ago, but probably until more recently, and are views presumably shared by at least some the people who made the decision - but they still decided to not let the export go ahead.

Which tells me that either the doctrine has changed in the last 10 years, or that this deal doesn't fit into his model, or that this is a diplomatic maneuvre. My guess is one of the latter two, although I could be wrong.
Just finished "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" and "Kafka on the Shore" by Haruki Murakami (as recommended by this HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9127092). Haruki is amazing!
It's definitely fantastic, and one of the books that had the greatest influence on my thinking (I read it as a teenager, 20+ years ago).

If you want something less theoretical, more personal, poetic and emotional, his "Le ton beau de Marot" (English, despite the title) is also fabulous. He takes a short poem and translates it a hundred different ways, all the while musing about what "translation" means (literal, conveying the same emotion, using the same metaphors, between cultures...) as well as about thought, language and meaning more generally. And then, while he writes the book, his wife gets a brain tumor and dies, and the book becomes part of his mourning.