skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Easy way to get this fixed: Every time you buy something online, create a bit.ly link and follow it prior to purchasing. Flood retailers with bit.ly affiliated links until they refuse to pay bit.ly for their wire fraud.

They'll either get sued and/or the backlash will give them the hint to stop trying to be scammers.
that's ok for a portfolio or dev site

for a toy _app_, if it's not up 24/7 it's pretty worthless
Zero-Fee Stock Trading App Robinhood Nabs $50M
stupid twitter spam bots
The Little MAC Attack
I called this in 2009. URL shorteners are the gift that keep on giving.

> We hope the shortener never decides to add interstitials or otherwise "monetize" the link with ads, but we have no guarantee.

http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/04/on-url-shorteners
I dunno, this kind of reminds me of the Flip video camera. Great little device, inexpensive. I bought one. Shortly after, cell phones became just as capable of being fits-in-a-pocket video recorders. Maybe not HD, but good enough. (Though some would argue cell phones had nothing to do with the demise of Flip. [0])

I see a similar pattern with FitBit. It's a 3-axis accelerometer with some firmware and software. Someone smarter than me could probably get something working in a weekend (though weekend prototype to production is admittedly a long road). Worse, plenty of things have accelerometers in them. My iPhone. Your Samsung phone. My Pebble watch, which uses the Misfit app to count steps and track sleep without requiring that I actually buy a Misfit device. Some garage outfit may not put Fitbit out of business, but larger device manufacturers might be just one software update away from doing so.

Fitbit will have to have some serious value-add to stave off competitors, I think. Maybe I'm wrong, probably am. But I won't be buying their stock.

[0] http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/the-tragic-death-o...
Useful resources for creating desktop apps with Electron (atom-shell)
There's an ebook written by HN user riskish on this topic: http://www.sideprojectbook.com/
Software Based Companies Should Be Judged on Their Rate of Innovation
I thought this was like construction nails before I clicked, which is actually an equally interesting topic according to my friend who owns a contract business. Apparently it has been harder to guaranteed high quality nails in recent decades as a result of cheap manufacturing abroad.
Oh cuil. The red herring of race takes hold, distracting people away from the universal brokenness of a clock-punching judicial system that assumes everyone is guilty, police that operate with impunity, and general lack of civil recompense for victims of wrongful arrest and prosecution.

The system is far from the lofty ideal you were taught in civics class, regardless of one's skin color. Fixing the fundamental issues must be done first in order to even make racial bias legible and to have an ideal to work towards.
How do you arrange to never have any transitive dependencies?
I... actually did, a while ago. I got no feedback at all, so I thought I'd do things differently this time around. Might just be a matter of luck.
If personal bias plays a part in increasing the amount of arrests and prosecutions for a certain subpopulation, then by definition reducing the domain of law enforcement reduces the impact of personal bias. Prohibition of substances, gambling and prostitution,the overcriminilization of our society, "zero-tolerance" policies, and increasing regulatory oversight of every facet of our lives have had the net result that the personal biases of government officials have become insufferable to those most affected by it. I just hope that the conversation shifts away from "Who should be in charge?" to "Should we have so many people in charge?".
SEEKING WORK - Remote - Maastricht, the Netherlands.

Full stack developer with a focus on backend

Current weapon of choice: Meteor(1.5y)/Node(2y)

Also well versed in: C#(6y), PHP(8y)

Supplementary skills:
HTML, CSS, RDBMSs, DB designing, DevOps, Hadoop, ML, API design, Security

Some recent comments on me:
https://www.codementor.io/johnsel#/reviews

Recent works:
Server cleanup after hack
Wordpress custom plugins
Mobile Meteor app
Twitter text sentiment analysis engine

Feel free to email me at jammsimons@gmail.com
The Terms Behind the Unicorn Valuations [pdf]
Quick, someone make this a browser extension. We'll kill it the way we killed Amazon's ebook monopoly.

https://torrentfreak.com/chrome-addon-turns-amazon-pirate-eb...
Because folks feel there is a need for them, and it's a really good way to get one's feet wet in the compiler pound. Besides, a programming language (dialect) is to a programmer what different size wenches, pipes, or hoes are to a plumber. You need different tools for different jobs and a lot of it depends on your personal preference and what it will take you to be efficient. Besides, how we as engineers solve problems is just as much an expression of our personality as it is a statement about the correct operation of systems. But that's just my view, and I'm definitely biased on the subject because I'm working on a flavor of coffeescript that will compile to msft's typescript as we speak (well, in my spare time).
I think our solution is pretty similar in concept. We just deploy the base OS (with enough config done to ssh in later) via NetRestore. Then whatever packages or setup tasks are required is done in a post-install step using Ansible.
I would suggest that effects which are "directly" embedded are impure effects (w.r.t. our other thread). Essentially, without reifying them into values with types it's harder to reason about them.

A more interesting dividing line are things like computation effect typing in languages like Bauer and Pretnar's "Eff" or McBride's "Frank".

http://www.eff-lang.org/

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/slindley/papers/frankly-draft-...

But yes, if you consider other "practical, modern" languages, many retain impurity.
After Nearly Claiming His Life, Ebola Lurked in a Doctor’s Eye
See also "An Introduction to Tensors for Students of Physics and Engineering (2002) [pdf]":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8651645
Ultimate Guide to Blogging with Research, Using the Evernote Method
That's a little sad to hear.
Android could finally be getting back à la carte app permissions – Pocketnow
Are you saying that people aren't storing data on github? How large of datasets are you talking about?

It's a shame that Github's large file storage (LFS) mechanism isn't publicly released yet, because I am sure that will appease your problems. (This is assuming your datasets don't fit into a csv (note that the current hard limit for github files is 100MB, and a 100MB CSV file is a lot of data)).
Optimize Python with closures
I mentioned this in another comment, but my understanding (without having worked there) is that they do not use OS X or their own hardware internally.

I think that things can be quite different between orgs though, with some adopting a more enterprise-y appliance setup (NetApp Filers, InfoBlox, etc.) and others building services more like an Internet company (Linux servers and open source based services).
You should probably have your own lawyer draft something for me, but here's some of my own standard language. Basically, it grants the client an unlimited license while maintaining all intellectual property rights. It also acknowledges that I bring intellectual property to the table when I start and that in no way belongs to the client.

"Client shall have a perpetual, irrevocable, nontransferable license to use and copy the materials and deliverables created, discovered, invented, developed or prepared in the course of this agreement (“Deliverables”) and prepare derivative works based on the Deliverables for its internal use. All other rights in the Deliverables remain in and/or are assigned to Consultant. Client acknowledges that the Deliverables may in whole or in part be created using Consultant’s prior acquired knowledge, skill and expertise, and may include Consultant’s proprietary information and prior developed intellectual property of Consultant, which Consultant shall continue to own and have an unrestricted right to use for other purposes. Consultant may retain archival copies of the Deliverables for Consultant's internal use, and nothing herein shall prevent Consultant from continuing to use Consultant's information, knowledge, skill and/or expertise for other purposes."
Some advice about cellphone OPSEC seems appropriate.

Protesters, or at least key organizers, need to be running apps to detect and block IMSI catchers. And everyone not using them needs to put their phones in Faraday bags.

I don't use smartphones, and so don't know what works best. Searching on "detect IMSI catcher" yields hits for Android, but I see no apps for iOS. AIMSICD looks like a good app. Maybe someone who knows this stuff well can recommend one.

It's easy to make Faraday bags from aluminum foil.[0] To test, you just put the phone in the bag, and call it. If it rings, there are leaks. It's important to turn the phone off before putting it in the Faraday bag. That will prevent rapid battery discharge through high-power attempts to reach towers.

The hardest aspect is getting good electrical contact on all seams, including the access flap. The maximum dimension of any hole in the bag must be small, less than 1-2 cm. A gap at the seam that's 1-2 cm long, even if it's very narrow, will leak (re-radiate) a lot.

The other thing to keep in mind is that aluminum foil gets brittle with bending, and will crack. So you need multiple layers, and the layers must be in electrical contact. Narrow strips of double-stick tape between layers are OK to provide structural stability. But it's a trade-off.

[0] http://www.instructables.com/id/RFID-Secure-Wallet
Hi - thanks for sharing and congratulations - sounds like you've made things work.

> I spent Fridays working on a cool idea my brother and I had. That idea proved useful enough to pay the bills so I quit my job.

Regarding this, it sounds like you already had a good idea of what your expenses were, and I think people underestimate how important this is.

I recently quit my job and have jumped into the unknown. Firstly knowing where all my money was going, and secondly spending about 12 months trimming off all the fat was an important part of the process to give me the confidence to try this. These days I live in one of the most expensive cities in the world with my wife for about $2000/month (and over half of that is rent). We want for little. Several years ago this figure was closer to $4000/month.
If an oppressive regime is created or perpetuated by Cold War-era anti-communist policy, that's certainly a bad thing. Especially so if the regime then commits atrocities (e.g. as in Indonesia).

That said, I fail to see how such history should have any bearing on whether or not Indonesia is a valid signals intelligence target today. If anything, it provides compelling justification to continue such programs.

In my opinion, countries that have terrible human rights records generally lose their right to complain about privacy when spied on by countries with significantly better records.
Sure. Search is me actively looking for something. E.g., I want to buy a replacement keyboard for my computer. My goal is to find something that somebody is selling. There, ads may be relevant to my direct intent.

If I am reading a newspaper, I am actively trying to follow the writing on a topic. Somebody trying to sell me something is a distraction from that goal.

Scanning newspaper headlines is in theory in between, in that I am searching for something interesting to read. But in practice, I am scanning a particular set of headlines chosen by particular editors who have an understanding of relevancy and story quality that is similar to mine. Paid advertising bypasses that judgment. So again, it works against my goal and for the goal of the advertisers.

Twitter's in-stream ads are similar to that last case. I have carefully curated list of people whose words I want to read. If I am interested in some brand, I can just follow them. If I might be interested in something not in my feed, I can search for that something or ask people who follow me for help. Ads specifically bypass my meta-editorial judgment in hopes of manipulating my purchasing behaviors.

I understand the theory that ads are providing new, relevant information, but I think it's mainly false in practice. We live in an age of effectively infinite free information with everybody able to publish, edit, and meta-edit. I've already selected a group of people who are telling me what I think I need to hear.

Twitter is inserting the ads not because people are saying, "Hey, I need more relevant stuff." They're getting it whether they want it or not. If ads were really all that valuable, there would be sites where you could just get lots of ads, an online equivalent of the coupon circular. But ads instead mainly intrude on the content that you actually want, and there's no way to get rid of them, because places like Twitter realize that people don't actually want them.
Yes, I understand that argument, but I still find it unconvincing.

Some features you just can't implement with macros, you need a change in the "substrate" (see kazinator's answer below). For the rest, I simply don't see how they are language-level features. They are just things you need for your project, in which case, why can't you simply implement them as a library?

Even if you ignore the above, there's probably a good reason why the language designers don't want to approve your language-level feature. Yes, sometimes it's simply red tape or politics, but it can also be that you -- the applications programmer -- simply aren't well-versed in language design and can't think past your particular use case :) This wouldn't mean the feature is worthless (after all, you need it!) but maybe it's not meant to be a language-level feature, but instead... a library function, which you can write in most general purpose languages.
Hyphens in variable names. It's a bold strategy for a scripting language, Cotton.
fact(match) =
0 or 1 -> 1
n -> n * fact(n - 1)

why not simply

fact(0 or 1) -> 1
fact(n) -> n * fact(n - 1)
Music Technology for Special Needs
"Juries are often justified because they leaven the law with community norms."

"Discussions among juries could lead to more thorough consideration of all aspects of the case." (see: 12 Angry Men)

"Occasionally jurors find the law to be invalid or unfair, and on that basis acquit the defendant, regardless of the evidence presented that the defendant violated the law. This is commonly referred to as "jury nullification of law" or simply jury nullification."

"It may be more difficult to corrupt 12 jurors than one or several judges."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury
I define genomics as the unbiased interrogation of the genome using high throughput technology. Sequencing one mutant locus using Sanger sequencing does not fall under this definition - I don't think IBM's business model is using Watson to interpret that. So when other people point out that HER2 is a useful genomic marker they are missing the point - HER2 can be determined with immunohistochemistry for example which has been around for 50 years.

I'm not sure what your question is... genomics has research value, for sure, it's great.
Is it worth trying to incorporate it into routine care? Yes, probably, if you have enough cash. Should a hospital pay for a black box machine learning algorithm to make recommendations from a highly polluted, often erroneous and hugely incomplete literature corpus? The alternative put forward by people actually doing the science is that we should try and develop large open source databases/repositories about the significance of genomic findings, and then collect the data about what happens to the patients.
It's in everyone's best interest that the world isn't annihilated, that power shouldn't be in the hands of people, yet is. That isn't an excuse to hand over more power.

The biggest direct threat to my freedom, and the freedom of the masses, is the expansion of executive power.

Times I've been arrested for expressing my views: 3

Times I've been murdered, injured or locked up by another person: 0

The government already uses the data the private sector collects. It wants better, real-time data using public and invasive techniques that aren't profitable for consumer businesses yet.

I am against both access to that data collected by the private sector and the expansion of mass surveillance.
The fact that the data exists is a problem and, ideally, we wouldn't live in a world where surveillance at this extreme for advertising was acceptable.
This isn't quite right. Moment methods (that rely on tensor decompositions) have a few problems:

(i) they have convergence bounds, but in practice need more data than we have available

(ii) they don't do as well as EM usually, but using them to initialize parameters for EM sometimes does better than EM with random initialization schemes

(iii) it turns out variational methods can also be embarrassingly parallelized without losing much accuracy in practice

(iv) right now moment methods don't work for arbitrary graphical models
If I would have gotten to the comments section before you I would have written your post (though with probably more mistakes).

I don't understand what their next device or app is because I can't see them staying and competing for the exact reasons you said. Yet I even use their devices right now.

Curious what the future holds for them. I feel like they have to pivot or innovate and I haven't seen any hints of that yet. Then again I could be horribly wrong.
This project generates scaffolding code, that key should be generated too.
If you're shutting off the phone. What's the point?
What does it say about software as a serious career, if tools that are awful are popular and widely used?
>I lived in DC when they first started testing surveillance blimps there around 2005 or so.

Do you mean that they first started testing them in DC ca ~2005? Because they have been around for decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethered_Aerostat_Radar_System

History

>>The first aerostats were assigned to the United States Air Force in December 1980 at Cudjoe Key, Fla. During the 1980s, the U.S. Customs Service operated a network of aerostats to help counter illegal drug trafficking. Their first site was built at High Rock, Grand Bahamas Island, in 1984. The second site was built at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., in 1986. Before 1992, three agencies operated the TARS network: the Air Force, U.S. Customs Service and U.S. Coast Guard. Congress in 1992 transferred management of the system to the Defense Department, with the Air Force as executive agent. Under Air Force management, through contract consolidation and system standardization, the operations and maintenance cost per site was reduced from $6 million in fiscal year 1992 to $3.5 million in 2007.[citation needed] However the Budget Control Act of 2011 slashed funding for the Air Force, which tried to shut down the project.[3] However, the Department of Homeland Security picked up the project and its funding for fiscal year 2014.[4]

edit: PS, the Aerostat/Blimps have been listed on aviation sectionals as well, so no, they don't file flight plans.
Together We Can Solve the Housing Crisis
If we were towing ships, that would make sense to me: the task is simple enough that one person can understand what's going on, and the 4000 people might as well be 4000 chimps or 4000 engines. But that's not Twitter's situation.

Note also that there's an enormous difference between leadership and direction. MLK for example led many people but directed few of them. I think the former is important but rarely happens precisely because CEOs can just direct people and get apparent compliance.
Reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_h...
It always drives me crazy when people that make 50k+ a year complain about not having money. I live on about $500-$600 a month and I'm fine. Granted, not everyone is ablebodied and living within biking distance of their school/work, but most certainly could be, especially with a little effort.

Not needing money is incredibly liberating, I advise everyone to just try it for a year.
You pass a lambda that returns the debug message. With javascripty syntax:

debug( function(){ return "my expensive log message" })

BTW, if your language is lazily evaluated (like Haskell) then you don't need to do this because arguments will only ve evaluated when they are needed.
Imagine being able to type style.border-width in JS instead of style.borderWidth
I think a lot of lisps use hyphens in variable names
Author here. Happy to answer any questions about our setup.
What balls are involved in latching on to this generation's witch hunt, getting rich off of presenting nothing but circumstantial evidence and sitting in a room on the other side of the planet for a decade trying an empty chair?

That isn't justice, it's politically motivated theater. They even rented out a basketball court, seats and all, for their production.

This is a convenient and profitable which hunt fueled by the money we decided to burn witches with.

The amount of time and resources spent on the incident are far out of proportion to crimes occurring all over the world by all sides.

You know how often we take out politically inconvenient people? So often we have a kill list.

The last times tribunals like this were held was Tokyo, Nuremburg, Cambodia then Sierra Leone.

Singling out this incident is not in sync with the esteem we usually hold towards these trials to hold powerful state level actors responsible for the mass crimes against humanity and millions of deaths incurred because of their actions.

If this was about justice people who actually have some control over the matter would be tried. It isn't, so a proxy tribunal with literally no defendants is held.

Justice is served.
FitBit has a brand. You can't build that in a weekend.

In fact, you don't need to build one at all. AliBaba returns over 14k results for "fitness tracker", and I imagine many of them are exact FitBit clones.

However, consumer product businesses are about way more than just the product itself. Marketing matters. Distribution matters. Apple bought Beats not because they couldn't create headphones, but because they wanted the brand. FitBit is Beats for "3-axis accelerometers with some firmware and software that you wear around your wrist".
I have been using it for the last couple of years now and have never had any sort of issue like you are describing. Maybe the site has been injected with something or your friends invite was malicious?
Actually, the language looks and reads great. Keep up!
Yep.

Wifi is easy - any wifi module that can be put into "monitor mode" will let you listen in for SSID probes. Apple have started randomising the MAC address the device uses for those probes in iOS8, which is a start, but there's often a close-to-unique fingerprint that you still get from the set of SSID's that are probed for (how many people do you suppose probe for "Company $A Staff Wifi, Shopping Mall $B free wifi, Cafe's $C $D and $E free wifi, and person $F home wifi") - there's also a trick that I think I heard WifiPineapple uses of listening for common SSID probed (McDonald Free Wifi, Netgear, etc), then responding as that base station - then getting the real MAC address during the negotiation phase).

BlueTooth is only a little more difficult - you only need a hundred or so dollars to start playing there though: http://ubertooth.sourceforge.net/ or https://github.com/mossmann/hackrf/wiki/HackRF-One will both let you see BlueTooth radio traffic - it's somewhat harder to dig into their encrypted traffic, but seeing and measuring the signal strength is easy.
"Behind every great fortune there is a crime" --Balzac (after a fashion)
Do they now prevent manual albums? Google+ seems to support both automatic and manual photo albums.