skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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It's not because you had more time that you will be able to crack a 1024bits RSA public key.
I've wanted something like this for years. So many times I've tried to use a Google spreadsheet to store data, because I needed the web-based UI and mobile access... but it never works out well, because it's just not a relational database. Airtable seems to get it right.

Also, the API docs being automatically customised per-table is awesome.
> Did we stop the surveillance? Did we continue it?

Continued. Now companies just have to hand over their data to companies like fireye who will have legal immunity to handle our data and hand it off to the NSA.
If you've SSH'd into your Windows machine, as it seems Microsoft is working towards, you would not need to interact with the desktop environment.
minor edit for you since you're not English: it's Russell's Paradox. It's amazing how much going along with accepted spelling conventions helps people like a piece, especially a short one. Good luck!
From my understanding it comes down to part politics, part feasibility. When nuclear power first started becoming popular light water reactors were easier to make and their fuel/byproducts aligned with the production of nuclear weapons. As years went on regulation and inertia did a great job of cementing us into our old ways. Today, advances in (material) science have made producing molten salt reactors more feasible. They also seem more attractive now that the public is generally very adverse to nuclear waste and power plant failures. I'm paraphrasing what was explained to me so someone that knows more please chime in.

Kirk Sorensen has been a major advocate of molten-salt reactors and gave a great Google tech talk on the subject.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbyr7jZOllI
I actually agree with this remark:
"In the talk.origins newsgroup someone made an offhand remark that they didn't see how anybody, no matter how klutzy their programming, could write an O(n^3) sort."

The examples were all constructed by smart people who are deliberately trying to invent slow algorithms. I don't think that a klutzy programmer would stumble upon any of them by chance.

The slowest sorting algorithm that I've seen in production was something like this:

def sort(l):
s = []
while len(l) > 0:
m = max(l)
s.append(m)
l.remove(m)
s.reverse()
return s

I looked like a hero when I reduced the main page load time for our biggest customer by 90% in one afternoon :-)
Why did you jump from research to the startup world?
All in all, I think it's a bit premature to do a "One year where do we go" article the week before WWDC.

It is an interesting language, but I've found a couple of things while starting to use it that have driven me crazy, and not really made me want to continue delving; the two that come to mind are

a) Error messages are awful, and often nothing to do with the actual error

b) Was driven crazy trying to append a tuple to a list. E.g.

A tuple of type (Int,String) is expressed (2, "a")
var aTuple : (Int,String) = (2,"Some")
A list of these is
var l : [(Int,String)] = []
This does not work:
l.append((2,"a")) // ERROR: missing argument for parameter #2 in call
This ALSO does not work:
l.append(aTuple)
but this does:
l.append(2,"a")
"Medical scientists hate it!"
The Jingle Sort is the best.
I think there is a tendency to think of fuel rods as a problem rather than the solution to a problem, which is raw spent fuel is nasty. The cheapest and easiest way to deal with spent fuel is to store it for decades while the worst of the radio-isotopes decay. Fuel rod technology allows you to do that, a molten salt design doesn't. I'm okay with this argument but is seems to bother people that you can't recover spent fuel now rather than waiting 25 years so they cast about for solutions to what is really a psychological annoyance.

See the quest for reusable launch systems like the space shuttle.
How a Trade Can Go So Wrong
> Yet you can't imagine (at least I can't) what benefit or pleasure anybody would get out of knowing such information about a person today. Therefore it's extremely unlikely anyone will care enough to do it - evidenced by the fact that practically nobody does. Why will this change in the future?

I'm paid to profile people and discover facts about their lives from their habits and the stream of data their phones collect.

Quite literally, there's hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to get that information about you, because it allows people like me to teach computers to manipulate you in to doing what other people want (statistically).

> Taken to the extreme, ask yourself even if you could retrieve this information about any given person instantly, for zero cost or effort, would you even care enough to do it?

The data about people stalking their exes on Facebook strongly suggests that people would peep on each other all the time, given an easy way to do so. However, it doesn't suggest that such habits are healthy.

> Are the things you could do with that information more exciting or interesting than what you were otherwise going to do today? For how many people is that answer going to be yes?

I'm not worried about most people; I'm worried about the people for whom that information is useful, because it can be used against me in effective and highly problematic ways.
What boggled my mind is that in this day and age there could still be tubes within the human body that we don't know about! How is this possible?
I'm in the database camp but I can see the use case for spreadsheets.

The big problem is unless you are very disciplined it is easy for a large spreadsheet to become unmaintanable. I've come across this a lot when I've been approached by people in my work place asking me to automate a spreadsheet for them. Inevitably someone will insert, delete or just move a column around and the whole fragile mess will come crashing down.

I've found when someone comes to me and says "I spend X amount of time every morning updating this spreadsheet can you automate it for me." The answer is almost always to migrate to a database.

Spreadsheets also seems to encourage people to lazily paste data in without much thought. I've seen some real nightmares - spreadsheets that are 100's of mb in size and contain almost a complete copy of portions of the company's database inside them, which take minutes to open and load.

Pasting data has some other disadvantages as well over time minor changes sneak in due to the mutable nature of cells in excel. Which leads to phone calls like "Can you check the figures for last FY Mike our Accountant is telling me X while Bill our Engineer is convinced it should be Y" eventually you find out Mike is getting his data out of a giant spreadsheet and one of the cells has 'inadvertantly' been modified so it no longer agrees with the source database. Eventually you learn to head off phone calls like this with "The number in the database is correct if you sourced it from anywhere else its likely to be wrong." But still frustrating to deal with.
And how exactly is a dumb TV with no WiFi radio, ethernet port, or any other forms of outgoing communication going to phone home? Please enlighten me.
Yeah, they should just stop developing USB technology for other people to use.
> USA Freedom has some reforms, and shifts the collection to the telcos rather than the NSA.

It also shifts the legal liability, which I believe was the purpose. I don't know if I would call this a win.
That's kind of what happened last year. Here's EFF's discussion from May 2014. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/eff-dismayed-houses-gu...

This year, the House Intelligence Committee worked with the administration, the intelligence community, and privacy advocates to come up with a compromise "USA Freedom" that everybody could live with. The House Judiciary Committee wanted to strengthen it but was concerned that would lead to the compromise falling apart and so didn't amend. The House then passed it, fairly overwhelmingly (although 50ish representatives who voted against wrote a letter to the Senate saying it should be stronger). All the amendments failed in the Senate, so they passed it as well.

And yeah, it's really disappointing. The leadership in both the House and Senate has a huge amount of control over what bills make it to the floor, and they defer to the Intelligence committees (who tend to overwhelmingly support the NSA) so the cards are strongly stacked against reformers. And this isn't just a party-line issue; when the Democrats were in control, it was a very similar dynamic.
I'm assuming the "Molten Salt Reactor" method is the same principle as the "Sodium Reactor" that was experimented with around 50 years ago?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_Reactor_Experiment
>I have a hard time believing the durability presented for a process that involves movement and contact points.

Since the contact points are CNTs I would believe it. Only diamond has a stronger lattice binding those carbon atoms.
Surgical Sex – Why We Stopped Doing Sex Change Operations (2004)
Yep. Secret courts stay, data collection stays, nothing has changed. Well, one thing has changed. They've raised the bar yet again for becoming a telecommunications company...
> Myhrvold then turned to what he called “the truly personal computer—something which has the size and weight appropriate to be carried with you at all times.” This wireless “digital wallet,” as he called it, would allow anyone to communicate, untethered to a wire, by voice, video, fax, E-mail, or pager. The device would be a clock, an alarm, a schedule manager, a notepad, an archive of phone numbers and records, and a library of music and books. The digital signature produced by this wallet would have a personal I.D. for security, and could replace cash, credit cards, checks, and keys. He believed that the obstacles were economic and human, not technological. “The cost will not be very high—it is pretty easy to imagine a total cost of manufacture in the range of $100 to $250 on introduction, which means $400 to $1000 retail price,” he wrote.

Well, it probably took a bit longer than expected, but that pretty much describes the smartphone and where it's headed.
This is a reasonably comprehensive description of the House bill that the Senate just agreed to:

http://www.lawfareblog.com/2015/05/so-whats-in-the-new-usa-f...

The substantive part of the post starts at the header "Bulk Collection Under Section 215"
SourceForge Commits Reputational Suicide
Show HN: A Worldwide Community of Growth Hackers
The only real long-term solution is to keep moving toward decentralization and encryption everywhere, making it close to impossible for anyone to conduct mass or targeted surveillance. Even if we assume the NSA (U.S. National Security Agency) follows orders, there are still 190+ other NSAs (Nation-State Actors) doing their own thing - not to mention the private and quasi private entities running the infrastructure. If someone can peep, someone will peep.
There's also http://www.lbreyer.com/xml-coreutils.html which is interesting.

But I've never tried it; just came across it recently as a homebrew update.
Gawker to Vote on Unionizing, Because New Media Is Old Now
Live in a faraday cage. I'm only semi-joking; I think that it could be a solution to your issue if you're that concerned about it. Whatever the outcome technology is going to be persistently ubiquitous.
I'd like to C++ support added to Swift, similar to Objective-C with Objective-C++. There are some C++ frameworks which are nice to use in Obj-C, like Box2D. Currently to get them to work with Swift, you have to write an Obj-C or C wrapper around a C++ framework, and then import that into Swift.
I am not a nuclear physicist, but isn't this concept proven and well-understood already?

Now, a sales pitch is indeed a missing piece. Given the regulations, the nuclear industry is stuck with power plants whose designs date from decades back.

I didn't see anything about handling the waste heat though. Dumping it into rivers would be atrocious. Ingesting large amounts of water to use evaporation towers is also environmentally terrible. I hope they thought of that.

I am all for the responsible use of nuclear power. Greenpeace and the like made so much noise that the public is afraid of anything called "nuclear". The media doesn't help, either.

The result is far more deaths every year due to coal and other fossil burning. Let's do more solar and wind, sure, microgrids and other cool stuff. Nuclear can provide the baseline power and power for power-hungry industries, such as aluminium refineries.
Indeed - the "surveillance as a business model" corporations finally got their letter of marque.

It is a very nice arrangement. Google/Facebook/telcos/etc get an official justification to continue their piracy of personal data ("we are only saving what the government requires us to save"). Meanwhile, the government gets to get all the data they want without a warrant: they simply give the appropriate corporation a wink and nudge and corporation volunteers the data.
And the mosquito laser

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_laser
RAIDs are in place to for your guaranteed uptime in the SLA. With the current storage density RAID5/6 is probably more fragile than single disks because UREs are very likely during a rebuild. Nonetheless having a degraded array is probably better than having an offline system and it will buy you some time to migrate. Mirrors are ideal, but it is hard to justify the upfront cost.
>The last time we "had to" intervene in the Middle East because "waiting it out is not an option", we generated the conditions giving rise to the Islamic State.

America did not intervene militarily in Syria (covertly, perhaps, but not militarily) yet Syria managed to fall apart. Similar to Syria, Iraq was an autocracy/oligarchy in which a religious minority ruled over a religious majority with pretenses of secularism. If these conditions were sufficient for the destabilization of Syria, it seems to me unclear whether the conditions for destabilization of Iraq were introduced with American invasion or were simply dormant.
It might be valuable to expand the definitions of things a bit.

First, we talk about characteristic functions. As noted, they are merely functions which return either 1 or 0, True or False. They represent sets by examining their argument and returning True if and only if the set they represent contains that thing.

So, if x is a characteristic function and (x x) is True, then x "contains" itself. Then N is just negation, so if N (x x) is True then x does not "contain" itself. That much is simple.

Now we form a special new characteristic function, R, defined as

R x = N (x x)

When is (R x) True? Exactly when x is "contained" in R. When does that happen? When N (x x), e.g., when x does not "contain" itself.

So this is a well-defined characteristic function and therefore represents what we might think is a well-defined set.

But what happens when we check (R R), i.e. to see if R contains itself?

Well, R, by definition, contains all things which are not members of themselves. If R is in R then (R R) is True, but then N (R R) is False and (R R) = False. Contradiction!

We can inline R into (R R) in order to take a look at the functional form.

(\x -> N (x x)) (\x -> N (x x))

and the author notes that this is the same form as the Y-combinator with its first argument specialized to N.

Y f = (\x -> f (x x)) (\x -> f (x x))
Y N = R R

And there we go!
Here's How Apple Adapted Retina Technology for the New MacBook
Measuring data structure sizes: Firefox (C++) vs. Servo (Rust)
Why Did the Mass Effect 3 Ending Ruin the Whole Series?
> Because it isn't true

Did you not see the other person who just said that?

> Strawman ... the comment was about scripting languages.

I do not have a clue what you are trying to say...
Serve the Web Like It's 2015
I think the main problem I'm having is that any law we pass won't change anything. If our government can't even follow our own constitution, how do we expect the NSA to start following the law re: spying on US citizens?
they don't need to prove that it would work - that is pretty well known. What they would need to prove for the idea to make any progress toward real-world implementation is that their good economy of neutrons isn't that good as to allow say to dissolve additional amount of U-238 (widely available to almost anybody anywhere) and get Pu-239 on the other end or any similar reaction :) Their ability to consume very low-enriched U-235 isn't an advantage here as the typical reactors necessity for the high-enrichment is what blocks and allow to identify weapons programs around the world.
You write to your RAM, or even more pertinently, your SSD, on every CPU clock cycle?!

How many times have you written to the same cell on your SSD? Current NAND chips have a write cycle limitation of somewhere around 10^6. Apparently a Taiwanese firm got it to 10^9 in 2012, but I'm guessing that hasn't arrived in production yet. So they have raised the write cycle limit by somewhere between 1000 and 1,0000,000. If you're wearing out your SSD once a year (I'll assume you are using it for swap or something), they've increased it to 1000 yrs. That's pretty much the minimum. So "almost infinite" seems reasonable.
I'm a little confused about what you're trying to say.

Light googling indicates that this is an extant system that has been fitted to aircraft since 2009:

"DARPA, working in partnership with the Army Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate, Air Force, Air Force Research Laboratory and National Geospatial Agency, conducted its first test flights using the ARGUS system last year [2009]."

The DoD indicates that the system was operationally deployed to Afghanistan in Q1 2011. [0]

LLNL has an article describing the system's optics, technical specs, and their work on processing the data streams it generates. [1]

BAE released an IR upgrade in 2010:

"BAE System's first flight tests of ARGUS-IR's predecessor, ARGUS-IS, concluded last October aboard a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter." [2]

[0] http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=62138

[1] https://str.llnl.gov/AprMay11/vaidya.html

[2] http://www.baesystems.com/article/BAES_028152/bae-systems-wi...?
Do note that the article is pretty far away from real-world, day to day use of Scala in mainstream programming. The author is merely having fun with types.

Having said that, what evidence do you have that Twitter is backing away from Scala? What are they supposed to be replacing it with? My own experience is that mainstream jobs in my country are very slowly and timidly starting to adopt Scala, and only in the most controlled fashion, as "just a better Java".
We wait for Apple to improve it I guess.
I had a quick skim of the Project Gutenberg link another poster gave. I wouldn't recommend this book if you are looking for a modern understanding(from within the past 50 years), as it only covers classical thermodynamics, and not statistical mechanics. This book feels like it's over a century old, and while classical thermodynamics may seem simple and pure, it's not at all how scientists in the past 50 yrs would think about, model, or analyse such systems and processes.

It's really ironic that it's authored by Fermi but doesn't touch on quantum mechanical distributions, for example his own Fermi-Dirac distribution for ensembles of fermions such as electrons in a metal.

Modern approaches typically derive the thermodynamic laws from the underlying statistical properties of large system sizes. And are much more powerful since you can handle variances and higher moments beyond just the mean. And also let you apply quantum mechanics and to see how Fermions differ from Bosons, and derive cool things like the Blackbody spectrum, or Fermi energy of an electron gas.

Decent books are Reif, Kittel & Kroemer (we've used both these at undergrad level classes), or Landau Lifshitz volume 5, and one by Feynmann at the grad level.

Disclaimer - I TA'd stat mech / thermo four times during my PhD.
SEEKING WORK: SF / Remote

* Full stack dev for ~6 years.

* Python, Dajngo, Flask, Angular, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Ansible, Vagrant, Docker.

* Currently getting on the functional programming bandwagon.

* Currently available for freelance and short-medium term contracts.

* wimicirca2015 at gmail
I'm currently on the job market after spending two years working with Scala. There's definitely no shortage of companies out there hiring Scala talent. In the last two days I've been contact by at least five companies using Scala. Over the course of my job search it's been many more. Just last week I found out that Verizon has at least 300 Scala developers on staff.

An added benefit: due to the scarcity, lots of Scala shops are open to remote developers. I abhor the idea of moving back to the Bay Area so that's important to me.
Maybe. That's one of the problems, that the NSA is trying to get everything that hasn't explicitly been labeled as private to be considered public - from phone metadata to emails stored in the cloud.

Although that said, they read ALL emails, and have said [0] that they require no authorization or warrant to listen to your calls, read your text messages, and read your email. So no, without explicit reigning in, those things the GP lists are not all as they once were.

[0] http://www.cnet.com/news/nsa-spying-flap-extends-to-contents...
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Since when were we comparing Nim and Rust? yes Rust is more safe than Nim, but that comes with tradeoffs. You are obviously not reading the whole thread about me bringing up (multiple times) the fact that you can avoid these and will be even easier to avoid in the future.
The problem with Scala is that architects can and sometimes will get giddy and create monsters. Scala is not like C++ where some features are dangerous, but Scala has features that should be used with caution. The amount of times where defining a partially applied higher-order function is the best way to solve a problem is nonzero, but still really really low. So you let a team of giddy developers eager to learn and apply new concepts loose and soon you have a monster of a code base.