skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Entirely predictable.

Obama's VP was one of the strongest supporters of all things copyright in Congress during his legislative career. Obama's administration has clearly been on the side of Hollywood etc as well. Given that fact, on any issue you can depend on this administration to come down on the side of the strongest and most expansive possible interpretation of what should be covered by copyright.

In this conflict, Oracle wants copyright to cover more things. Google wants it to only cover what it has historically covered. Therefore this administration will back Oracle.
It certainly is - but with a much narrower intended scope of use. It's really not intended as a data transport mechanism for example. It's also homologous with JSON, XML is more flexible in its data representation. And finally, it makes use of HTML5 conventions, such as prefixing custom tags with a hyphen delimited string, data-* attributes etc.
A Stunningly bad idea if this were ever to stand. A really idiotic move by the Whitehouse - increasing the scope of the Copyright law is probably the last thing people thought of with the whole "Hope & Change" thing.

Something like WINE would be in a whole mess of trouble not to mention that a decision of such magnitude would enrich the Lawyers and decimate the Software industry.
Agreed, the hardware/wetware is just as important as the bits being uploaded. Especially for chemical brains that store much of personality as neural wiring.

But lets say that's uploaded as well, as part of the 'program' details. Then where are we? An 'instance' of this is not actionably different from any other, if it behaves exactly the same. Its arguable that they are the 'same person' in some sense.
[Draft] Let's Encrypt Subscriber Agreement [pdf]
It's one thing to say that people are deluded when they act against their own interests. But how do you think someone would arrive at the conclusion that rioting would be helpful? Where do you think they got these "romantic reasons" that are actually bad for them?
> Would this apply to REST APIs too?

I wouldn't think so. REST APIs are just called APIs, but they're really communication protocols. As those don't have a fixed description (i.e. you can describe the same protocol in different words) -- unlike APIs -- they are not copyrightable.

For good or bad, APIs aren't just a description of how to do something. They are fixed. If you write down how files should be organized in a drawer, then that specific text might be copyrightable; the method itself isn't. APIs (though not protocols) are both a description and a fixed text.
Given tweets like this one (https://twitter.com/jtuple/status/598230043093897216), there doesn't seem to be much to speculate about.
Here's the one-page article - http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/05/27/improbable...

Splitting this article into 5 pages to increase page views is really sad & completely unneeded.
Well it's a good thing you feel safer. I was particularly concerned by this:

"The leader of the red team employed brilliant asymmetric tactics resulting in 16 U.S. ships, including two supercarriers, going to the bottom in a very short span of time. The Navy stopped the war game, prohibited the red team from using these tactics and then reran the exercise declaring victory on the second day."

If true, that's not 'finding weaknesses in strategy and defenses,' that's 'sticking your head in the sand.'
I do data science in my day job. I understand combining datasets.

Again, why does using Facebook make me less intelligent?
Could someone compare Apache Kafka to Eris Industry's centralized blockchain model?
So it will be used 99% negatively and 1% positively. That doesn't sound like a great outcome to me.

Also, killing FOSS reimplementations of proprietary APIs is exactly why Microsoft filed a briefing in favor of Oracle the last time Oracle won at the CAFC. That and also the fact that Microsoft hates Google much more than Google hates Microsoft behind the scenes, which is why it keeps extorting Android OEMs and wants Oracle to win in this case.
It depends on the individual. Plenty of people in Southern California (greater LA, etc) have daily work commutes in excess of an hour each way. But if you don't live that daily lifestyle, I suppose an hour drive may seem excessive.
The best single quality benchmark is the SMHasher test suite. For most purposes it is very thorough at finding defects in non-cryptographic hash function designs. A strong design has good statistical properties regardless of the types of key sets and SMHasher tests many kinds of key sets, including several that are designed to be pathological.

There are two caveats with using SMHasher to be aware of.

First, it does not thoroughly exercise the internals of some hash function constructions that you sometimes see in larger hashes. You can modify the source to add this coverage but it is not there by default.

Second, the speed test implementation is broken. It is good enough to give you a rough idea of what is going on for bulk hashing relative to other algorithms, but the absolute performance measurement deviate from proper testing by a significant amount (up to 20-25% anecdotally). Also really fast small key algorithms can be significantly off. Basically, performance is measured using a method that Intel's performance measurement documentation strongly advises to not do. This can give inconsistent results even across CPUs that are based on the same microarchitecture.
True of Federal grand juries. Less so of state grand juries.
He asked for data and citation. Your claims should be easily documentable since companies did switch and presumably did so for a reason.

So, provide the citation or shut up.
Good point! We'll try to fix that.
If only it worked that way... sadly, we don't do that with Lyme, which is pretty damn hard to kill.
War, Passion and the Origin of Computer Societies
That's certainly one important source of errors. An obvious example would be treating UTF-32 as a fixed-width encoding, which is bad because you might end up cutting grapheme clusters in half, and you can easily forget about normalization if you think about it that way.

Then, it's possible to make mistakes when converting between representations, eg getting endianness wrong.

Some issues are more subtle: In principle, the decision what should be considered a single character may depend on the language, nevermind the debate about Han unification - but as far as I'm concerned, that's a WONTFIX.
Bankruptcy Canada FAQ Will Change Your Life
There's got to be some interesting copyright licensing discussions going on there. Like when Don Knuth declared in 2004 that MacPaint was "the best program ever written", but it took until 2010 to convince Apple to release the source code. https://web.archive.org/web/20100721233205/http://www.busine...
Biggest thing I can't stand about the new overhaul is the barrier for the open source version - I want to evaluate for my purposes, not give you my email.

Been following Riak for some time now, and I'm hopeful this will do good things for Basho.
I've not come across a node or mesh based pathfinding library, though you can roll your own A* with modifications.
> ... but the unnamed people who reported the arthritis are more believable than all those public servants?

And you can be sure that millions are going to die, not because they are stupid, but because the authorities are reluctant to crack down on the minority among their number that are corrupt.

IF one or two politicians are found to break the law, but get away on a technicality, the people will simply assume that all politicians are crooks. If a couple of scientists sell their integrity to corporate interests and the whole of the scientific community does not respond publicly and in full force, at least ruining the careers of the crooked scientist and suing the corporation for the undermining of the scientific method, people will simply assume that Science(TM) is just another racket to keep them down.

What you are seeing is a crisis of legitimacy. I agree that it is a very unfortunate event, but blaming the messenger is not going to fix it.
Sure, I can write code the way I like. But the readability of code affects everyone, not just me.

Still, 4ad's comment above mine changed my mind. I didn't consider that you can do this with structs already (in spite of the fact that I already do that in my code), and I prefer the consistency to the lack of verbosity.
Sure, but this is a part of life on which we have no choice, this is different from actively pursuing something which would not make sense as though it had some sense. I'm not saying living 500 years would be a problem (I'm pretty sure we will have the medical possibility to do this very soon), I'm saying trying to extend it without any limit makes little sense as it is not really different from dying
Going to be contrarian here. I see in other comments

> costs millions of tax payer dollars because of the long appeals processes

Well... yes, but the alternative is that you throw someone in prison for life (likely without parole). And since there is no upcoming "event" to force an appeals process (aka execution), it will just never happen. Is that really a better fate for someone wrongfully accused? If you are sentencing them to life in a cage, be honest and call it a death penalty.

So sure you can save some money by getting rid of the death penalty, but it is not likely to make Justice any better served, it will just make you feel better and leave people in prison forever without a guaranteed appeals process.
Capital punishment still exists for federal crimes, which is why the Boston bomber was given the death penalty despite his offense occurring in Massachusetts, which doesn't have it at the state level.

Also, federal law isn't simply a grab bag of "really important" laws, with states only existing to handle smaller, more trivial things. In theory, federal law is restricted to addressing the things enumerated in the Constitution. In practice, one of those is regulating interstate commerce, which since [1] has steadily increased in scope. Nonetheless, a federal law banning capital punishment would still need to be written with that in mind.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
Avira is usually among the top for free antiviruses and Microsoft's antivirus is last. For some reason I can't find the links anymore right now but I saw it on a recent AV comparison chart.
Has it been a year already?

(This headline has been published approximately once per year by some magazine/newspaper or another every year since 1982, perhaps earlier, and we're not one iota closer to it being possible.)
Didn't get that all the way, but started to. Ah the joys of liking to hike and work in the woods...

Though it is conceivable that the same behavior will get me infected again now that I live in SF instead of CT, the much lower deer population has meant that I've not had a single tick bite in 3 years since living here. The one weekend I went back to visit my mom, I got one helping her clean up fallen tree branches in the lawn whilst being observed by a herd of deer.
Why People Make the Crazy Choice to Go from Megacorp to Startup
It is controlled at the federal level, in a sense, in that it is allowed. The individual states can then decide to abolish it.

Though a Supreme Court ruling did effectively abolish the death penalty federally from 1972-1976.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furman_v._Georgia
By the way, one thing that was slightly unclear to me in the doc. In section 4.2 (https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/#encoding-ill-formed-utf-...):

> If, on the other hand, the input contains a surrogate code point pair, the conversion will be incorrect and the resulting sequence will not represent the original code points.

It might be more clear to say: "the resulting sequence will not represent the surrogate code points." It might be by some fluke that the user actually intends the UTF-16 to interpret the surrogate sequence that was in the input. And this isn't really lossy, since (AFAIK) the surrogate code points exist for the sole purpose of representing surrogate pairs.

The more interesting case here, which isn't mentioned at all, is that the input contains unpaired surrogate code points. That is the case where the UTF-16 will actually end up being ill-formed.
Rafts been around for only about 2 years, and you've implemented it multiple times already?
In short? Wishful thinking.

Those I know who hold to that notion do so because they find riots emotionally satisfying. To them, a thing that is emotionally satisfying must also be objectively productive, because it's incomprehensible that such strong emotions could not move witnesses to share, support, and solidarity.

That, and a bunch of radical pablum about how getting people talking about your cause is the same as actually effecting change and similar. Something about symbolic violence and making a statement usually crops up around this point. Occasionally someone argues that destruction of property is non-violence.

The human capacity for finding a way to ideologically justify whatever it is you want to do is truly remarkable.

In retrospect, I was a lot more tolerant of this flavor of toxic radical thought when I didn't live in an area they regard as a great place to go smashing things.
This is absolutely par for the course in training exercises. Several reasons occur immediately. The persons involved may want to cover their butts, and report a more positive outcome. OR, the value of training for failure is very limited in value; scenarios that allow everyone to practice their skills may fit the mission goals better.

My son, while in the Army in Korea, led a 6-person team as 'insurgents' in an exercise against a company. After the scripted exercises they were allowed to do anything they wanted. Result: rear gate breached after a feint; company HQ tent blown up by 'suicide bomber' (only casualty on his side); and three quarters of the company killed by his roaming snipers. They only stopped the exercise when his 'insurgents' ran out of ammo. This exercise was of course never part of the after-action report :)
Thought that this was going to be about this movie (which I thought was a great watch as an LA transplant): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Plays_Itself

If I recall correctly the first line of the article is almost verbatim from that film as well…

[EDIT: Guess I should have read the whole article before posting. I still think that it's an odd choice to co-opt the name of the film, and then give a throwaway shoutout halfway through.]
It has nothing to do with whether the government is vindictive. Their motivations don't matter in the least. All I'm doing is looking at what the defendants are offered and observing that they are effectively being punished for exercising their right to a trial. It doesn't matter whether that's being done on purpose or whether it's just an unfortunate outcome of completely reasonable motivations.

Why would the alternative be maximums across the board? Doesn't the judge still get discretion in sentencing after a trial?
Yes, but I (obviously) don't think that's actually what's happening. Why do you bring it up?
I think this will cause a lot people to move away from java and ultimately harm Oracle most, causing other companies to not follow their example.
Let's just stay away from java, there are plenty of free languages.
Wow, the swing patent is hilarious, but what I can't figure out is why it is so commonly cited.

https://www.google.com/patents/US8697853
CTRL+f: swing
Gloves that can operate touchscreens have been widely available in my area for years. Hopefully they will be in yours soon too. Most of them are under $10 at grocery/drug stores.
Show HN: Get discounted products, just by texting
> Style-wise and feature-wise, the Pebble Time doesn't quite compare to most modern smartwatches. It doesn't have a touchscreen

Because scratching at your wrist like a heroin addict trying to find a vein is the new cool? I don't get it.
The problem is not "discounts" for lessening the impact on the victim, but that they are the province of negotiations where certain outcomes may be more expedient e.g. for career advancement than seeking justice. It removes a vital check on the power of prosecutors.

Most countries that don't allow or severely curb backroom plea deals will still take into consideration guilty pleas and other behaviour from the defendant that reduces the impact on the victim by e.g. reducing the need for a victim to take the stand.

But importantly, the basis for any request for leniency will then be subject to proper independent scrutiny.

Conversely, coercive attempts at extracting guilty pleas by having prosecutors dangle high sentences in front of someone also creates a substantial risk of miscarriages of justice in the opposite direction too, by getting innocents to accept pleas in the face of overzealous prosecutors or fake allegations.

> Why go through the expense and risk of acquittal for a murder when you can get a manslaughter plea?

Because if acquittal is a genuine risk, then it should be up to a court to determine if the evidence even holds for manslaughter.

The goal should not be the highest number of convictions, but justice. The moment it becomes about the highest number of convictions, justice has already lost.
Yeah, but! You could say most of these things about sysadmins, and some of them were the funniest guys I've ever met.

I think the fact that these stereotypes even exist means that there could be a biological reason behind it. Levels of dopamine and serotonine in the brain, the amount of muscles, a lean or a broad frame, social anxiety,...

These things interest me a lot, mainly because they affect me as well of course, so if there is a place to discuss them I'd love to hear about it. Actually I'm surprised this isn't a regular HN topic .
>The hubris of the “battleship Navy” was such that just nine days before Pearl Harbor, the official program for the 1941 Army-Navy game displayed a full page photograph of the battleship USS Arizona with language virtually extolling its invincibility.

>Of course, the reason that no one had yet sunk a battleship from the air — in combat — was that no one had yet tried.

This is why I can't trust anything from War is Boring. They have too many obvious factual errors, to the point that you wonder if the author has any familiarity with the subject.

The British carrier HMS Illustrious made an air-only attack on the Italian fleet in November of 1940, damaging two battleships that were saved only by grounding and sinking a third.
We don't even have 4 billion characters possible now. The Unicode range is only 0-10FFFF, and UTF-16 can't represent any more than that. So UTF-32 is restricted to that range too, despite what 32 bits would allow, never mind 64.

But we don't seem to be running out -- Planes 3-13 are completely unassigned so far, covering 30000-DFFFF. That's nearly 65% of the Unicode range completely untouched, and planes 1, 2, and 14 still have big gaps too.
> If you are actually innocent, then that can be sorted out when the cops question you...

You can see how well that worked out for Freddie Gray.
I believe it's basically a suggestion that one replaces each `foo` or `bar` API call with a prefix, e.g. `ggl_foo`, `ggl_bar`. I expect that doing so would get one slapped (literally or figuratively?) by a judge for being a wiseass.
Tuning for Speed by Phil Irving - http://tuningforspeed.com/files/Tuning_for_Speed.pdf

Combustion engine tuning. Very accessible yet deep.
What was the wrist device before the pocket watch? A wrist-slide-rule?
Do you misuse the HTML5 placeholder attribute?
Hurray for science behind paywalls!
tldr; asking for a port of a C# app to windows phone and android gets you a lot of xamarin developers
It may not be cause for arrest in of itself, but its definitely cause for suspicion and perhaps detainment (especially if the police have reason to believe that a crime has just been committed). Can you imagine what would happen if police arrive at the scene of a robbery and see someone running away, but can't detain them for questioning because they haven't talked to witnesses that saw the person performing the robbery?

Instead of running away, the more correct approach would be to refuse to be detained for questioning unless the police have reasonable suspicion that you have done the crime and to retain legal counsel, if needed. You can calmly stand up for your rights without acting rashly and invoking suspicion.
> I've been exposed to or worked on a few style guides on this topic. I think pretty much universally, in US media, "White House" means elements of the executive branch outside the cabinet-level departments.

That would mean most non-cabinet and "independent" agencies -- all of which are part of the executive branch and not part of a cabinet-level department -- would be part of the "White House", which assuredly is not the common use.

Usually, it means specifically the Executive Office of the President. (Rarely, it might even more specifically mean the White House Office, which is within the Executive Office of the President and, like the Executive Office, also headed by the White House Chief of Staff.)

> So it includes the Executive Office of the President, the OMB, ONDCP, DoJ, etc.

OMB and ONDCP are part of the Executive Office of the President. [0]

DoJ (which, relevant to the thread, includes the Office of the Solicitor General) is a cabinet-level department (headed by the Attorney-General), and so even if your excessively-broad "outside the cabinet-level departments" rule was correct, would still be excluded.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Office_of_the_Preside...
None of that has happened. An amicus brief has been filed, that is all. An amicus brief is not law and the Supreme Court has not yet ruled one way or another.
$32 seems steep for one article. Does anyone know if Nature allows authors to publish on their websites? Nothing so far on Hinton's, LeCun's, or Bengio's page.
One thing to realize is that a partitioned log is a generalization of an unpartitioned log (i.e. if you set # partitions = 1 in a partitioned log you have an unpartitioned log).

In Kafka the purpose of partitions is to provide computational parallelism not model entities in the world. So if you have 100m users you would map that into a number of partitions based on your computational parallelism (maybe 10-100 machines/processes/threads). In other words you would have a single topic partitioned by user id, not a topic per user.

If you have a centralized relational database that maps reasonably well to a single partition log (both in terms of scalability and guarantees).

For distributed databases you generally don't have a total order over all operations. What you usually have is (at best) a per partition ordering, which maps well to a partitioned log as well.

For applications that record events (logging or whatever) it is natural to think of each application thread or process as a kind of actor with a total order.
In practice, this is how federal change happens: enough states make a policy change so that the perceived cost of a unifying federal change is low --- or, enough states make a policy change that the value in unifying the law around it is high enough to outweigh SCOTUS's presumption in favor of the legislature.

At any rate: every state that abolishes capital punishment gets us closer to a consistent country-wide federally enforced abolition of capital punishment.

7 more states need to defect from capital punishment, and then the majority of US states will have abolished it. Unfortunately, the three most populous US states (California, Texas, and Florida) are all staunchly pro-execution (the next two, NY and IL, have both abolished).