skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Papua New Guinea is endlessly studied. Jared Diamond speculates various reasons for why the people there didn't develop into a post-hunter-gatherer civilization (or much beyond that). While much of his work has been disputed, I think it's still an interesting question.

I can't help sometimes when reading anthropological studies or videos of a pre-modern civilization that a terrible amount of time is spent on rituals and dances and other things and perhaps the key is that other, faster developing groups of people simply found a different balance between work and these non-productive activities.

However, the Baining seem to represent the opposite end, doing nothing but productive work, and yet they aren't exactly the unusually advanced Atlanteans of PNG either.

So I was struck by this "and exhibited little curiosity or enthusiasm" and it kind of hits me how important imagination and enthusiasm are in the process of advancing things. Toil gets stuff done, but you're just running in place. Imagination is a kind of play, and it's necessary to move you forward as well.
ReSchedule Med (https://reschedulemed.com) is not devices, but we're tackling the problems caused by the ever increasing cost of healthcare administration.

I see healthcare growing in two directions- better healthcare (through new techniques, medicines, and devices) and more available healthcare (through cheaper administration, new laws, and promoting social responsibility). Growth in either direction means people are getting better care than they could have otherwise; personally I'm interested in the second because we have the care exists, but we don't have the right capabilities to deliver it to everyone who needs it.

Drop me a line if you're interested, my email's in my profile.
A number of us have conformed to higher ones on a budget with small teams. The highest one's are indeed a ton of work to accomplish yet there's been dozens of projects and several products with such correctness proofs. They figured by the 80's they needed their certified TCB to be re-usable in many situations to reduce the issue you mentioned. Firewalls, storage, communications, databases and so on all done with security dependent on same component. Modern work like SAFE (crash-safe.org) takes this closer to the limit by being able to enforce many policies with same mechanism.

So, your claim is understandable but incorrect. Useful work repeatedly got done at higher EAL's. It continues to get done. The real problem is (a) bad choice of mechanism for TCB and (b) bad evaluation process. Most of us skipped high-EAL evaluations for private evaluations instead by people working with us throughout the project. Saves so much time and money while providing even more peer review.

They really need to improve the evaluation process itself so it's not so cumbersome and update their guidance on best mechanisms for policy enforcement. Probably sponsor via funding some of them like they did in the old days. Fortunately, DARPA, NSF, and EU are doing this for many teams so we can just leverage what they create.
Which makes perfect sense to me. Not sure how you thought that would be acceptable.

But then, I am of the unpopular opinion that every car should be tracked, they are far too dangerous, and cause far too many accidents for them not to be.

You want to murder someone and get away with it in our society, the best chance you have is killing them with your car.
Our problem is determining market size; what's the market size for technology hat can predict severe mental illness situations potentially weeks before they happen? What's the market size for tech that can prevent suicides? Since nothing else like that exists, there's no way to predict how much that would be worth in terms of an investment deck.

Look up the number of PTSD-qualified therapists in the USA (or just therapists if "PTSD-qualified" is not a meaningful distinction). Survey a random sample of them and ask if they might use technology to help diagnosis and to prevent suicide. Multiply the percentage who say yes by the total number of therapists. That's your slide deck market size.
Uh, the only person that ever called jihad a 'pillar of Islam' was Maududi, who is hardly a mainstream Islamic figure (a warmed over ex-Marxist clerical fascist journalist with zero formal religious training)
Tell them thanks for the offer, what is your background, I'll reach out to you if we have a problem in that area? That way you're polite, but they'll stay out of your way until you need them?
I understand the reasoning but I don't agree with their implementation, because it essentially favours large sites run by those who can afford the faster infrastructure, while penalising the small ones that may actually have more relevant and detailed content but not very fast servers. Sites which load much faster get a ranking advantage even if they offer only superficial lower-quality content.

Maybe if they didn't look at server response time, and only counted things like JS execution time, it would be a fairer ranking to those looking for substantive content. I'm quite willing to wait a lot longer, if it means I will spend more time reading a lengthy page once it loads, than to find a fast-loading page with little content.

That article was written 5 years ago, and while speed might not have been a huge factor back then, they could've changed it since --- certainly there is no evidence to suggest otherwise, and my experience with how Google's results have changed over time agree.
Anyone working on homomorphic encryption with DNA or peptide sequence data? If so, I'd love to chat about it.
Help 16M K-12 students use educational software at Clever (YC S12)
As someone who also works on this, and thinks about startup possibilities, I understand what you're going through. Sometimes I wonder if it's possible to sustain a business like this at all or if you just have to work toward an insurance company buyout.

Maybe we should all start a therapy group!
Pretty strange to copy a comment word-for-word from the article page itself, especially when that comment was originally made a week ago.
This is why I like C# so much, you can go from LINQ & generics to pointers. So much versatility.
U.S. Senate to let NSA spy program lapse, at least for now
Unseen Wikipedia viewer(paged content reading)
This is an unnecessary fight.

They both are great. I personally strongly prefer R over Python due to libraries and the flexibility. Others hate the flexibility of R and like Python's only one way to correctly do something.

It comes down to preferences. I like the R is for statistical specifically. There are people who call R an aweful horrible language and it isn't. It has grown incredibly over the last 5 years and has major funding from many corporations for a reason.

If it seems passionate for or against either language it is more an emotional response to the question. R works best for me and Python might be someone else's prefer solution.
Yep and I actually never had an answer :-) It was surprising as usually your support is top notch. (Disclaimer: happy customer for 4 years now)
Back when Larry was offering to invest in companies I was thinking of starting, I asked him whether it was more important to be liked or respected. He surprised me by saying, with apparent sincerity, "liked".

What inspired me to ask is that John Cullinane had earlier volunteered the same question to me, and given the opposite answer, which also surprised me.

This was all in the late 1980s. And it was a staple of my conversations with Larry that he blast other people, commonly in quite humorous terms.

Larry's also the person who first told me of the bit about almost everybody thinking they were above average ...
How to Play Blu-Ray Folder with DVDFab Blu-Ray Player Software
Calling all robot startups - prototypes AND software, sensors & component startups.
> Just curious, how much of the constitution would the NSA have to violate for you to consider its actions illegal?

This. What was violated? What has been done that is illegal? Please, I beg you, give me something.
Yes, we should do that. First weekday of the month.
So much more industry interest at ICRA this year!
I use it for all manner of searches. Knowing how to tune a search appropriately helps. Tossing in an additional keyword, or a set of associations can help:

(phrase one| phrase two|phrase three)

Using bang syntax is also quite useful.

In my experience, where a DDG search doesn't turn up good results, an SP or Google search (both bang-searchable) are generally not much better. I'll revise my terms at that point.

Again, date-range is the notable exception, and it's not a minor issue.
There is a definitive movie scene for that -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_KXbKa2crI :) The punchline is around the 1:05 mark.

I believe that set a record for fewest minutes on screen in an Oscar-winning role. (Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love.)
suree.... Luckily we can trust them
http://www.amazon.com/How-Children-Succeed-Curiosity-Charact...
Researchers find “lost” memories
This is exactly why a lot of formal methods work isn't, imho, terribly compelling.

Something like http://vst.cs.princeton.edu/ has a much, much stronger case for enabling "100% correct software".
What surprises me however, is that some sensible people still use DRM.
Are you sarcastically implying that it isn't relevant?
YouTube review channel with “Gabe Newel”?
Because the code will literally not compile if it isn't correct. As opposed to weaker languages where bugs (run-time problems) can exist.

I'm still something of a layman on this, and I know less about formal specification languages like TLA+, but languages like Coq work by using things like dependent types.

Here's an example: if you have a method that takes (through specifying type parameters) an Int and returns an Array of Integers, and it compiles, then you have effectively proven that it is possible to take an Int and return an Array of Integers.

This is not particularly useful to the method author that is only using that method signature to write some more specific business logic. Dependent types allow you to spruce up that method signature until it actually reflects your business logic. So then you know that if it compiles, the actual intent of your method/function is bug free.

Yes, it is true that there is a "turtles all the way down" element to this kind of thing - "how do they prove that this real source code is correct?" The answer is that languages like Coq rely on a small kernel of code that cannot be proven. It's like their axiom from which everything flows. But the kernel is small enough that people verify it with eyeballs. Bugs can still happen there, and I think they even found one a few years ago, but it didn't have any impact on all the mathematical proofs that have been written using Coq.

I'm sure some experts can jump all over what I just wrote but that's the gist as I understand it so far.
> This is the issue that forced Facebook to go public.

I thought they had to go public not because of how many employee shareholders they had, but because of how many employees had sold shares on secondary markets.
Don't worry, with the kind of shaming we're seeing in these comments, homophobic jokes and plain homophobia will be going underground sooner than you think!
I'm happy to add ONSITE (probably best without a complicating hyphen?) but can't say I share your optimism about it fixing the inevitable issues with free-form text.

For the same reason, I think it's a lost cause trying to impose a machine-readable format on text fields, as many have been suggesting. There would be so many exceptions as to make the situation more complicated, not less.
Unfortunately, your best bet is to treat it as a bricked unit and go after it with the tiny little serial pads inside.

I made a little pogo-pin fitting for mine so I can just pop the covers off and stick the rig down into it and send new firmware over serial.
This great! Looks like there's still a bit of a gap wrt passing arguments; like the snippet above does. After skimming the chapter on ffi as well, there appears to be the need for a bit of experimentation (for me/a novice) to get that to work (eg: passing in a string, getting it back reversed, or as a list/array of unique characters/glyps etc).

I'll have a look when I find the time - but this is a great start!
Section 215 Expires For Now
Ask HN: How can I move from domain email address from my host to DO?
I have a info@mydomainname.com email address with my current hosting provider.

I want to move my hosting for site www.mydomainname.com to Digital Ocean but don't want to lose my email address.

Can I use DO to service that email address or is there another solution? I would prefer to not stay with my current hosting provider.

Thanks
I'd like that too, but I'm constraining my suggestion to things I think team-HN might actually implement. They can randomize thread order (or make upvotes on job threads not count, or something like that) very, very easily. It's low hanging fruit, and they should pick it!
From my conversations with some of my clients (who supply Subway franchisees with equipment), the $5 foot longs were virtually sold as loss leaders for the chips and soda. The franchisees were killed by people that bought only the sandwiches and ran.
I hadn't thought about this very much until I read this post, but I got my first job out of college through a "who is hiring" post back in 2011 (so I guess it was one of the first posts!) and that job changed my life. I flew out to California from the east coast, lived in SF, met a large number of incredibly smart and passionate people, and to this day the network I grew out there is hugely influential on my life and my career. So thanks from me as well!
> I indicated that if there was a hacking involved, this might be time-sensitive, and could affect other Equifax accounts. I was told there was no other way to get assistance.

That's typical. A long time ago, I received an offer to sell me 100k stolen credit cards, complete with phone numbers and zip codes of the card owners. This was before the era of mega breaches and so 100k was a pretty impressive list size. The offer included a sample of 10k cards. I did some investigation and was able to determine that the sample, at least, seemed to be legit.

I then contacted the credit card companies, figuring they would be interested in this. I figured they would take the samples, analyze them to find out the common factors to identify where the cards were stolen from, and then flag those cards, and the people they were stolen from and the merchants they were going to be fraudulently used at would be protected by the next day.

Boy, was I wrong.

This was a Friday and it was after 5 PM. The best I got was one card company gave me an email address that I could mail the 10k sample cards and the information about the offer for 100k cards to, and someone would look at it Monday.

I also tried law enforcement. The FBI suggested that I call the Secret Service. The Secret Service was not interested.

I mailed the information to the email that the one credit company provided, and gave up trying to get someone interested.
Give me a ticket number and I'll have a look.

Tbh, I wouldn't be surprised to find the ticket was assigned to me and I never got to it. I have a few CardDAV tickets still lying around. That's part of the "beta" guarantee - support is .. spotty :P
Playing game on your smartphone and learning a (new) language are not necessarily incompatible: I'm addicted to memrise, which is very much like a game in its mechanics, but is teaching me an awful lot of useful Japanese words...
Really?

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/fatal-police-shooting...
And who decides what is right and what is wrong in each and every case?

Is their judgement never wrong? In what percent of cases is it wrong?

Have your ever been wrongly convicted of something? Would you think or say the same things if you were?
Umm, we have lots of lore in this field. "The Graphing Calculator Story" at Apple, "The Story of Mel", the entire site folklore.org, stories about Gates and the early days of Microsoft, the "IBM visiting Gary Kildall" story, the Ariane V exception, Grace Hopper and the moth stuck in a relay (and her nanosecond wire), the "Steve Jobs at Xerox" story, Stallman's description of why he started the GNU project, Torvald's first posting about Linux, the Torvalds/Tannenbaum exchange, the rumors about the CIA wanting popcount on the Cray and about the backdoor in DES, "Better is Worse", "Reflections on Trusting Trust", "Always mount a scratch monkey", anecdote collections like http://www.dodgycoder.net/2012/02/coding-tricks-of-game-deve... .

http://www.filfre.net/ is going through the history of ludic games, including discussion of the lore associated with specific games. There are stories about IBM's "Black Team" ("more than one programmer was reduced to tears while having his code evaluated by the Black Team.") Tracy Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine". Robert X. Cringely's "Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date" shouldn't be read as a history book but a collection of lore about Silicon Valley.

Also, I picked "engineers" and "plumbers" to show real-world examples of non-universal elements. "Architect" is another non-universal.

Regarding naval architects, there's Bushnell's Turtle, Ericsson's Monitor, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Eastern .. and that's just from my general cultural knowledge. I assume that actual naval architects have more lore.
Not only can the compiler make it false. It can assume that the code would never make the comparison in the first place, and optimize away any cases where the undefined behavior is guaranteed to be triggered.

So in a sense undefined behavior can travel back in time :O
Slide 31 says:

Actually, this is how arrays are handled in C.
A C array is a set of consecutive memory addresses.
The first value is pointed to by a pointer.

int a[] = {1, 2, 3}; // create an array
// a is just a pointer to the first element...

No, "a" is an array, not a pointer. Defining an array object does not create a pointer. The expression "a" is implicitly converted to a pointer to the array's first element in most but not all contexts.

If "a" were nothing more than a pointer to the first element of the array, then "sizeof a" would yield the size of a pointer rather than the size of the array object.

This is all explained very well in section 6 of the comp.lang.c FAQ, http://www.c-faq.com/.
Problem with designing in code is that it starts to influence the design too much if there's friction in implementing a certain look.

The advantage with Photoshop is most things take a similar amount of time , so you're not subconsciously changing the design based on what's easy / hard , but just what end result is best.

Ultimately if there are multiple break points then I think each should be 'designed' , not just left up to the whim of how its turns out in css.
It's all definitely worth looking into. Anyone trying to start will find Wheeler's page [1] much more helpful. I also included a book [2] on using dependent types for certified programming. There's also a few examples after of verifications with [3] being pretty cutting-edge in automation & thoroughness. I think we need people to put together a single resource where newcomers can see the various approaches, tools, and practical examples of how to use them. Further, we need to research more on which tools give you the most bug hunting benefit with the least time and expertise. There's some research done already but everything in this field is scattered.

Another point came up in a similar discussion: we need to focus most of our energy on raising the baseline of correctness for the average programmer. This includes things such as automated test generation, design by contract, and better type systems. The developer should be able to specify his or her intention with the code while the type system or runtime catches most of the errors. Maybe we just need a version of BASIC/Pascal with Ada-like safety built-in or similar restrictions on certain constructs. Not sure of the specifics but this is an important problem to solve.

[1] http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/high-assurance-floss.html

[2] http://adam.chlipala.net/cpdt/

[3] https://www.umsec.umn.edu/sites/www.umsec.umn.edu/files/hard...

[4] http://se.inf.ethz.ch/people/morandi/publications/prototypin...

[5] http://compcert.inria.fr/compcert-C.html

[6] http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/vlisp/guide.pdf

[7] http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/122884/pldi117-yang.pdf
iOS 9 Jailbreak and iOS 9 Cydia Download position keep informed
What would they do with it? It's doesn't have very many users. It relies mostly off of Bing. The results aren't as good as even Yahoo's or Bing's.

So they acquire it and promote it as this big privacy alternative to Google search seperate from Yahoo search (which is tied to obligations of their deal with Bing). Assuming that all search engines they make aren't subject to the same obligations with Bing, they get a nitch brand and a opportunity to build a new search engine from the ground up? Oh and for all that work they get no money from targeted ads and user data?
This has been shown by security researchers to be quite possible, and a serious vulnerability in many popular web applications. Not only could pages be guessed, they can build an entire state machine of the web application and use side channel attacks to guess what a user is sending in their HTTP requests.

Side-channel leaks in web applications: A reality today, a challenge tomorrow : http://lasr.cs.ucla.edu/classes/239_1.fall10/papers/WebAppSi...
> for example they buried the story on Hola yesterday

Pretty sure that was because it was a dupe and that the original had massive discussion here. One pattern I've noticed is that a story will often break on HN early, before it hits the main tech press. A day or two later, when more mainstream posts start appearing, we get a new wave of submissions about the story. Anyone who didn't see the original will wonder why those are getting buried. In the current system, there's no good answer to this—other than that a few indomitable users post links to the original discussion. We do have some ideas about how to fix it more systematically.
Interestingly, I first started with C (although I haven't written a line of C code for a long time), and when I first move to higher-level languages, I dislike the fact that I have no idea where the file I just imported is. Moreso when I'm playing with obscure/ new language: if I can just import whatever files I wanted (rather than at package level), it seems that would be much easier to hack on the language/std itself.
Can people comment as to the quality of this article? Would it be a good place for a refresher on statistics? Are there any other such projects that people can recommend?

I like the way it has a strong Python focus.
> Problem with designing in code is that it starts to influence the design too much if there's friction in implementing a certain look.

Depending on the goals of the project, that isn't necessarily a problem per se. One of the things we've been working on at my current employer is finding that nice balance between "amazing, interesting designs" and "not impossible to implement". What's fun is that if you get the balance right, design and development flow into one another so perfectly. Avocode with Sketch helps a lot with that, mind you.
I was shocked to read a EAL4 summary for a product that I know to be extremely hard to secure.

But of course, if you follow all the steps, that only the vendor knows, it can be EAL4. Just don't miss one of the 100s of settings... :/