skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you think there are only 4 bases and then later find out that there are others, the first reaction t that is to feel short-changed about your previous education

That's exactly how I felt when reading that headline and it's why I posted my comment.

> You don't have to give a big long-winded explanation, but there's nothing wrong with sketching out in very general terms where the frontiers of our scientific knowledge lie. Likewise you don't have to teach small children comparative linguistics, but it's a good thing to make them aware early on that there are many different languages that originate in different countries. Not talking about the existence of things when trying to introduce a field really stifles curiosity, by obscuring the fact that that there are many interesting avenues of inquiry that have yet to be explored.

I strongly agree. Discovering exceptions to the rigid belief structures I was being taught in school (and honeslty, even at university) was one of the things that made me stop believing in formal education (and realizing some of the teachers have no fucking clue what they're talking about). Teaching is not about forcing kids to memorize a bunch of facts; it's about creating mental models. You can say that kids just need to get the basic structure of the field, but a good structure has attachment points to which one can add something in the future.
The JustDecompile .NET decompiler engine has been open-sourced
Yes, we agree that adding unspecified handling results in the system being in an unspecified state. It's also a good thinking that every system is a sub system of another system, so at some point a crash is meaningful because it tells the higher level system that something went wrong and the higher level system should know that so that it can start to handle the error.

The problem space which I like to add is the scenario in which the higher level system is a human.

In a sense humans are like old code, they do odd things, are unable to specify their expectations and sometimes prioritize expectations that are utterly wrong. But we as smart programmers, who want to succeed with our program, can not be satisfied with "scientifically correct" code. We need to produce code that humans use. Therefore we can not always crash when entering unspecified states. That's not "cowboy coding", that's handling the imperfection of the higher level system. Sometimes the additional error handler is good, because the crash itself is worse than an undefined state.
>Legalized marijuana will surely cause cops to ease up on suburban white kids

Pot is hugely prevalent in the black community. This is what I hate about the uber-politically correct attitudes popular here. If we weren't discussing legal pot, we would be discussing how illegal pot is ruining the black community. Now that we're legalizing pot, we can't just pretend this isn't a win for them. Hell, its a net win for every socio-economic group in my opinion.

Not to mention suburban white kids weren't getting shit from the cops to begin with. They were getting breaks or their parents' wealth and influence kept them out of trouble if they did actually run afoul of the law.

> 80-90% want to keep everything else illegal. That is a problem.

No its not. Strongly physically addictive drugs cause social harm. We're not legalizing heroin or cocaine or meth. The number of people who consider those drugs harmless that need to be made legal immediately are a tiny extremist minority with zero political power. That's the system working the same way its working now to make pot legal because attitudes have changed greatly in the past few decades.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out with things like MDMA and psychedlics, but we need to make baby steps first with pot. Pretending legal pot is bad policy just because you can't buy a gallon of liquid acid at Walmart is asinine. I think so many internet commentors have internalized negativity for things like upvotes and attention that they literally cannot applaud a good thing when its happening. Its sad to see all these sour attitudes here at HN and reddit. The realistic alternative here isn't some paradise of legal everything; its more drug war nonsense. This is our first step to stop the drug war. It should be applauded as such.
My hope was that flagging bad calls would allow the FCC to aggregate call records and focus on the worst offenders (sources or intermediaries), but I guess if they can't (edit: won't) hold intermediaries or service providers liable in some way then it's not scalable.
Sort of. 'NaN' is one of the IEEE 754 floating point constants, along with 'Inf' for infinity. They are numeric types, in that they can be returned via operations on numbers, such as dividing zero by zero or adding '-Inf' to 'Inf'. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaN

I always understood that the 'isNaN()' function was required to check if a numeric variable is equal to 'NaN' directly, since normal equality cannot be used as there are multiple valid bitwise representations of 'NaN' in the standard - it is a float with an exponent of all ones and a non-zero fraction. However, 'isNaN()' now seems to have been co-opted into being used to check if a string is not a number, i.e. does not represent a numeric value, and in fact I believe this is now the documented description of the function in ECMAScript?
It's usually heavily frowned upon to setup a local shop in Michigan like that, and sometimes illegal.

Retail creates undesirable traffic and crime (at least, that's their common assumption). The suburbs fight hard to keep that as far away from residential areas as possible.

Sometimes they push this to the logical extreme conclusion -- zoning commercial spaces almost exclusively at the edge of their limits.

Here's examples of the actual zoning permitted in Kentwood and Grandville, (suburbs of Grand Rapids, Michigan).

http://www.ci.kentwood.mi.us/CityOfKentwood/media/files/orig...

http://www.cityofgrandville.com/images/pdf/Zoning%20Map%20Ap...

On both maps, you'll see almost all of the red (commercial) areas are near various edge boundaries, and there's little-to-no commercial activity allowed near any central neighborhood(s).
I don't know--good for this guy, but there's no way I'd do it. I got into technology in order to avoid a life of back-breaking manual labor. When I was a kid I had to go help bail hay on a farm, and then graduated to assisting my father doing construction jobs. Nailing shingles to a roof under the sun all day in the middle of the summer is great motivation to go for that job in an air conditioned office.
That's very interesting information. The article itself doesn't say much Erlang specific so I didn't even put it in that context. But you are right, the article is an Erlang article. Thanks for the Erlang lesson!
Gemnasium security alerts are now free for opensource projets
Americans care a lot more about ideals (though often ones that are in retrospect misguided) than money.

For example, in the decades preceding Prohibition, 30-40% of the federal government's income came from excise taxes on alcohol: http://taxfoundation.org/blog/how-taxes-enabled-alcohol-proh.... Prohibition overnight eliminated that revenue. The government gave up a lot of money to indulge moralistic fervor.
I know I'm coming to this a little late, but I'd be really interested in knowing what the Node creators think is happening with node currently. The current top comment here[0] cites an active community with iojs, and a not so active community with node . However, I can't imagine that the node creators would say that node is stagnant or perfect, so before we start comparing node to IE, has anyone done any kind of reconciliation with the node devs?

I understand why iojs forked, but I really hate to see communities get abandoned or go stagnant like this.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9490843#9490962
Seems like we've moved from calling out companies for long standing bad practises to some kind of tribal behaviour where people are almost looking for a reason to call a company out for "bad security."

Let me be clear: Phone passwords are superior to phone pins, phone secret question/answers are superior to both, and the agent needs to be able to verify the secret question/answer set, and also the password. You CAN design it so the agent cannot see the whole password, but that means the agent cannot use common sense to account for differences in spelling, or interpretation e.g. "to" as 2, to, two, and too (plus "the third digit of your password" is hard for humans, we aren't designed that way).

People saying things like: "an agent cannot be trusted!" Are missing the point, that the entire system is built on agent trust. When you call you're purposely giving this agent access to your account, making the password useless, there's no proof they logged off when you hang up, there's also no proof that they aren't writing down your responses and will then relay it to another agent later.

A lot of people who whine about plain text in particular don't really seem to understand what it is that hashing even does. They seem to think things like: "if you get hacked, someone cannot steal passwords" (nope) or "then someone cannot sniff your password over free wifi" (nope). All hashing does is add time between the hack, and when the hacker can start using the stolen credentials, that's it. It is there to give the company time to detect the leak and to notify/reset, if the company fails to detect then it has done absolutely nothing of worth.

To be honest I find "HTTP offenders" (e.g. HTTP web-sites that redirect to HTTPS login forms, essentially breaking HTTPS's MitM protections) far worse than "plain text offenders." But none of this has anything to do with calling out security issues at this point. A bunch of people who don't seem to understand the technicals here feel like they're doing "good" by calling out companies for things that don't even make sense.
> ... but even more are our ties to France and the EU, which should be our number one priority by a large margin.

I don't think Germany considers the EU as its number one priority. There may be a number of reasons, namely: a) The growth in exports to China; b) The long-term European crisis; c) The notion that EU countries are an already conquered market, with little penetration growth left.

Regardless of reasons, Germany's behaviour is clear: The 2011 crisis presented Germany with a unique opportunity to lead Europe. Germany could have financially supported Euro-bonds, leveraging this support to mandate fiscal policy in countries that bought said bonds. This would have effectively placed Germany in a leader role for fiscal policy. Even if this had to formally be done by EU institutions, those with the money have the power. This had virtually no costs for Germany. In a success scenario would be a cash-positive move, as it'd be acting as a development bank: borrowing cheap on one end, lending with a margin on the other, with the added bonus of Euro-wide fiscal policy control.

By skipping this clear opportunity, Germany has signaled it is not interested in further developing the EU. I think this is a strategic mistake with a multi-decade horizon. The opportunity presented by the 2011 crisis won't happen again. Worse, there is now the very real scenario that monetary pressures, coupled with a Grexit trigger will breakup the Euro area and really weaken the EU.
Very interested, subscribed for an invitation.

Your pricing model seems unconventional: I'd not cap at $50, let bigger companies pay your salaries. Also maybe consider letting small teams (e.g. 5) have a free plan.
Presumably you were abusing it despite the fact it is criminalised. And numbers from Portugal shows no massive rise in use after decriminalisation. Even assuming your claims are right about the damage potential (which is far from obvious), it does not present a good reason for the current method of dealing with it, which in addition to clearly not preventing abuse causes substantial criminal involvement.
Ask HN: Safely share SSH access to my server
A consultant needs SSH access to my server (Debian 7).

How can I safely, and temporarily, give him access - and keep an eye on what he is doing?

I thought about setting up a VM and installing Teamviewer. Then he can work through the terminal in the VM and I can see what he's doing. After he's done, I'll change passwords on the server.

Any ideas?
The FCC’s chairman has a killer plan to fight its net neutrality lawsuits
IBIS: A powerful, Drupal-based info gathering tool
We Will Become the Robots We Fear
Sadly I was able to find various great solutions to my take home programming assignments after the fact. I submitted my own original solutions, but I'm sure there are others that didn't bother/know how and submitted the other solutions they found online. I'd like to think the interviewer had an exhaustive list of Google search results for the problem, but I sadly doubt it.
I'll tell you the real, but awful, reason why we have such restrictive zoning in the U.S. The idea behind zoning is to make sure that different classes and races don't have to see each other if they don't want to. Putting commercial retail in a residential area would give outsiders an excuse to be there. The whole "white flight" from the cities has left it's mark on zoning ever since the 1960s. IMHO, this is also the reason for really bad public transit.
another "burn out" case...
Sure, you can prove it is complex by measuring cyclomatic complexity. But, the harder part is to prove that complexity matters. (I don't think it does myself).

Have you considered that maybe it doesn't matter? Is his code well tested, easily maintainable, ships with few bugs, and is produced on time? If so, who cares about complexity?
I think the assumption, which is so basic that other commenters don't bother to mention it, is that every family has two cars. Suburbs in US are car-oriented to the extreme. Having a car changes shopping habits, because you can bring back much more things with you in a single trip to shop.
I am looking for a newsletter that covers sales funnels>

Craig Rosenberg's The Funnelholic may be just the thing you're looking for, unusually good coverage of the sales space > http://www.funnelholic.com/
Just out of curiosity, is Power Point really a critical component of your use? Don't get me wrong, there are advantages to using PowerPoint. But the big goal is to prepare information with a computer and then to present that information in various forms. In terms of the big goal, PowerPoint compatibility can be an XY problem. It's one possible means [and perhaps the best means] to the end. There are alternatives...and all this was a round about way to point out Racket's SlideShow library.

http://docs.racket-lang.org/slideshow/index.html
I'm writing code that is used by the people next door in the same office. So while I haven't worked in user support in some regard it's about 95% of my work. So what I write is really experience directly from the users. Some users might be different though. Thinking about my mother/grandfather etc, they also hate crashes, though. "UI freaks out and then restarts" is definitely better than losing data, but the word "crash" for me means not to restart. If Word crashes it doesn't come back. You are left with your desktop and an error message if at all.
I am a bit envious.
#Rombertik, a complex malware that also wipes hard drive to prevent analysis
They could give you a 2 factor auth device when you set up the account.
Okay I've read many comments like yours, apparently for some reason "crash" here obviously means "per process" not "per program" which I didn't catch somehow.
I did not mean dangerous in terms of dictatorship or something like that, more in the terms of doing a very very bad job. There was the Schill Party in Hamburg, which comes to mind. Small party, got elected on tough speech alone, then went on to fail miserably.

The AfD is running in Bremen, as is "Die Linke". Both could be a disaster waiting to happen.
The streetcar lines were removed in the west, but all of East-Berlin (about 1/4th of the city) still has them.

Related: https://www.facebook.com/IFeakingLoveScience/photos/a.456449...
WORA for Real on Mobile Devices
Yeah I set up my mom with GNOME 3 on Fedora. All she does is browse the internet and play solitaire. That's pretty much a zero maintenance computer right there.

Somehow they always manage to destroy windows.
New tutorials, developments in open digital humanities
Totally agree with that one. If I have a program, the program keeps running, but a subsystem dies, for me that simply wasn't "crashing". I'm unclear about why most people understand that "crashing" does not mean the whole program dies. I have only learned the word in that context. If a subprocess/thread/function dies on me because of an error that's not a "crash" in my terms.
How the NSA converts spoken words into searchable text
A Day in the Life of a Data Scientist
Internet Service Providers That Tolerate Web Traffic Spammers
Relaying an on-topic comment from a hellbanned user[1]:

Please check my hobby, I hope to start writing on it again this summer: https://github.com/berntb/attorg

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9492289
Blast from the past. I remember being taught to include that in 2001
Elance-oDesk Rebrands As Upwork, Debuts Slack-Like Chat Platform
> I am happy that I have data safe in mongodb

Oh no.

So you are protecting your data from unsafe Elasticsearch by storing it in an even more unsafe MongoDB[1]? You should probably put a database that knows how to store data somewhere in your stack and learn to use that.

[1]: https://aphyr.com/posts/322-call-me-maybe-mongodb-stale-read...
True. I just suspect that it's closer in terms of technical complexity to growing tomatoes or selling tomato sauce than it is to making beer. And, yeah, I'm sure a lot of investors will jump at the chance to invest in the "Prego" or "Classico" or even "GardenFresh" of pot. But I also suspect that if tomato sauce was $100 a jar, there would be a much more robust community of homegrowers. I just find the economics/incentives fun to think about.
The commit message:

"The copyright and license notice is already in the LICENSE file. There is no justifiable reason to also require that it be included in every file, since the individual files are not individually distributed except as part of the entire package."
Wow, this is really good. I like the style: lots of links, and a lot of explanation without a lot of over explanation - the author seems to say "i assume you know this, but I'll link if you need more background or refresher".
I started by trying it out on Firefox (nightly), but after a few minutes, my laptop's fan started ramping up as the CPU usage climbed and then the sound became all distorted until it was unplayable. :/ I was playing the first Rachmaninov piece when it happened.
Yes, I didn't (/don't) know about that. I believed the charging cycle would have become intelligent by now, but thought then this whole thread wouldn't come up if that was the case.
Memorable word! That's the term I was trying to think of, thank you! If they called it that in the tweets this whole thing probably could have been avoided.
What's interesting about the civil litigation system is that it is used to dealing with sociopaths and narcissists. After all, they are the ones most likely to wind up in civil litigation. Most people can be deceived by a sociopath's slick manipulations and lies because they naively believe that all people are generally good. Judges in the civil litigation arena are under no such illusions.
Cubicle != programmer. One can program and run company from a farm.
Devastating. See also Damascus a few years ago and present day.
Life is way too short to not do what your soul tells you to do, no matter what that may be.

Congrats on finding something that soothes yours.
Show HN: HackerNews for Travel Content, Now on Android
NoviCap | Barcelona | Rubyists

NoviCap is on a mission to help small and medium sized businesses get access to finance by providing early payments against their outstanding invoices.

We are looking for ruby developers to join us in sunny Barcelona.

Ping me at nicolas@novicap.com
Glancing at the org chart is valuable to me because I prefer working for companies with a flat management structure rather than one with multiple levels of middle management. Knowing how many people are between you and the CEO can hint to you you something about the culture. Memorizing the names or anything on it does seem quite pointless though.
This document is largely an artifact from Heroku's early days with a purpose to get people to bend deploying their applications to the way Heroku wants you to deploy your applications. Some of the points are good (use environment variables) but others are blatantly in Heroku's best interests and not yours (preferring process forking on a company that charges by RAM... Hmmmm).
Did someone finally made an usable app for org-mode? Thanks for linking!
Clarifying Throughput vs. Latency
I've never used cannabis, and I certainly couldn't be bothered to grow it even if it was legal. Nor would I be interested in smoking. But I might try it in edible form if only just to have experienced it.

(And this is not down to lack of access - despite never having tried cannabis, I'd have no problem getting hold of some today if I suddenly decided I had to try it, which shows just how much of a total failure criminalisation of it has been)

I definitively agree with you. There'll be plenty of people who'll want to grow their own, but also plenty of people like me or somewhat more interested, that'd be interesting in trying or indulging in it now and again, but who's not interested in tending for a plant (just like I'm not growing my own vegetables...), not interested in smoking, and not interested enough to pay attention to how to find a good quality product, who'd prefer to be able to just recognise a large brand that'd be a sign of sufficient quality and trust.

For that kind of market segment price matters less than recognition - I'd happily pay a "not having to spend time researching what to look for on the internet" premium of 100% or more if I at some point decide to try, the same way I drink alcohol so rarely that when/if I do I stick to a handful of well known brands that I'm comfortable with.
I grew up in the city. As I got older I realized that I didn't want my children to have to deal with the dirt, crime, rats, and noise that I had to deal with when I was growing up. Hopefully, they will appreciate the things I didn't have as a kid. A backyard, nice neighbors, low crime,and better schools.
I would be interested in something like this as well.
Online Marketing Basics: How to Make a Squeeze Page
Still, the common implementation in my country is you are forwarded to an automatic service which inputs your pin.