skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If we trust the system that pulls the wool over our eyes, should we really trust it?

Blanket statements don't really help to determine if a given set of regulation is useful or not. The system has a lot of bad parts and regulatory capture is a thing, but that does not imply that literally all regulation is poor and need to be ignored. If one wants to make a statement with regards to any set of regulation, it needs to be specific and fact-based; simply issuing blanket statements is useless at best and dishonest at worst.

> A transparent financial blockchain is the core difference in philosophy between backroom decisions made on our behalf supposedly with our best intentions in mind by non-elected appointed people and a mathematical equation that we can all see and test. Math we can all trust because it is true at it's core, can we do the same for people?

This is pretty much nonsense. The statements you are making here are so abstract and broad that they defy any sort of reasonable analysis.

You can consider the Bitcoin algorithm as a mathmatical equation, but that says nothing about whether you can trust the individual entities utilizing Bitcoin. You can't reduce all interactions between people to algorithms, so at some point you're going to have to have rules and norms in place, which will ultimately be decided on by people in some manner. Furthermore, whether the system is encoded as an algorithm (what you're calling math here) is orthogonal to whether it is doing the correct or optimal thing.

The "trust in math" line espoused by Bitcoin advocates does not have the effect they think; it simply makes them appear dogmatic and cultish. Saying that something is math and therefor trustable and unassailable is rather short-sighted.

> Yes some payment processors can be shady, but so can some fed officials who are incharge with our entire financial system.

The existence of shady fed officials has no bearing whatsoever on whether a specific set of rules are good or necessary from a societal standpoint. Its a completely separate discussion. On the other hand, the fact that some payment processors are shady is relevant to the discussion of whether the rules are necessary.

Ultimately, your entire argument is an emotional appeal here. You'd do better to set aside the rhetoric.
Would this bill also remove all implementations of, say, RSA from the Internet?
Gomboc: the only mono-monostatic object
I sure hope his bank's online portal isn't HTTPS or that'd make him a hypocrite.
He's trying to make it sound like they don't want anything bad, they're not 'sneaking in' they want a legal way to see all your stuff.

He clearly knows what it means, what he's asking for and he knows it sounds bad when it's called a back door.
This and other unrelated approaches with similar end goals are why I don't give much credence to the standard issue sky is falling speeches regarding the end of effective antibiotics. Too many people can't look forward, think in terms of a stasis of present resources and technologies, and can't see the possibilities for progress. In this case the research community will soon enough shift to approaches that bacteria simply can't evolve resistance to because they selectively target mechanisms and structures that are vital. That's a theme in cancer research as well these days.
>They bark on anything alive that comes into 0.5miles circumference.

Which means you get so many false positives that you quit taking them seriously.
Merriam-Webster defines terrorism as "the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion" [1].

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/terrorism
Code is like public toilet
Where are L.A. County’s homeless?
My first two jobs out of college were in FinTech -- lots of math there (partial derivatives, linear algebra, numerical analysis methods, stats and more)

Then later, I was in image processing -- a lot of linear algebra. Anything with recognition has mathematical concepts.

I'm tutoring a teen in game programming and keep having to take breaks to teach more and more trig.

Having a good grasp of probability and statistics will serve you in almost anything you do.
I agree completely that many aspects are covered by existing technology. The difficulty is in making it such that all of this can exist as a simple set of open source binaries regular people can run ( not computer experts )

The system has to be brainless to use if it is going to succeed at all, and it has to have enough initial buy in to be worth bothering with initially.

Wikipedia as you have pointed out has arcane crazy policies that restrict it from having user generated content. It claims to only be a replication of printed articles. That is lies, but it is a pain in the butt to actually get valuable content into it and not have it removed.

Usenet suffers from not having structured data, being just chunks of text.

Github suffers from refusing to host binaries except for in weird cases ( there is a binary build hosting I think?? )

Bittorrent suffers from still being attached to hostnames for the most part ( I'm aware of the distributed system it has too but you typically can't get many seeds through it )

Most systems that allow content suffer from having copyrighted data on them. The goal of this would be for it to be publicly known that there is no copyrighted data, such that universities and such would be willing to run the distributed server, and censorship could be stopped by enough people running it globally.

I'm not focusing on funding of libraries so much as the fact that they have an established set of categories to put information into. There is no such standardized list of categories for websites to go into, and the creation of such is important to the future of the internet.
That was really cool.

I wish there had been a single continuos shot that showed the whole development process, with and indication of how fast time is progressing.
That's cool, but microSDs are usually pretty slow and have low long term endurance (their speeds drop by a significant margin after you use them for a bit). I'd like to see higher reliability and faster speeds that are close to matching the speeds of internal flash storage in mobile. Adopting UFS 2.0 should be a priority over increasing the size.

I'd also like to see microSDs adopt an open source file system such as F2FS and dump the patent-encumbered FAT32/exFAT. Yeah, Microsft won't take that lying down, but if all microSD makers and device makers start pushing for it, I'm sure Microsoft will eventually support an open source file system - it is the "new" open-sourcing-loving Microsoft we're talking about, after all!
I guess this means that regular expressions are Turing complete, at least until a patch arrives?
So much useful information. This is great!
Yeah lets forget about taxation without representation, being forced to quarter troops in your home, being controlled from thousands of miles away, and the Boston Massacre. It was all corporations. Got it.
I do find it a pity security organisations like the FBI and NSA are interpreting their remit so narrowly focused on the "attack" side of the role, rather than the "defense" side. It's probably a consequence of the effect of bad publicity on the politicians who provide budget for such things, but I really wish they saw their role as preventative and defensive rather than data gathering. There's so much good could be done to improve the security of critical infrastructure if they put their minds to it.

Also, though I'm not surprised by the fact they're against encryption - They've been against it all through the court case against Phil Zimmerman for example - I am surprised how tone-deaf their arguments are beginning to sound. It's like they don't understand there's a real public debate happening around them.
Ray Kurzweil: I need to say anything that puts my name in the headlines again (2015)
When the US Government stops their encryption of data and makes everything available to the public, then I will agree with them.
There's a course at MIT called Mathematics for Computer Science (6.042). It's available on Open Courseware, http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
I think most/many people could reasonably say this about their company; I currently work at Google and feel quite the same. I'm not convinced that either Google or Twitter[1] qualify as a particularly spectacular example of mismanagement though.

[1] I don't have first-hand experience but one of my best friends work there and we regularly vent to each other about work complaints.
I've cited this message by Franklin in the past but I've since learned that he was making the case for the legislation to have the power to tax wealthy landowners in order to fund the French and Indian war.

He's not saying this in anything like the context we tend to use it now.

http://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous...
> Of course, that means that a method that returns Optional<T> might return an Optional<T>, or null, so now you have 2 things to check instead of one :).

NO. Just don't check for null and let it fail -- that will uncover a bug, namely using `null` when they should have used "None" or whatever it's called in Java.

Do people defensively check for null for every object access in java? I hope not, because that would be really tedious and obfuscate all logic bugs relating to inappropriate uses of null.
Anyone interested in meditation but unsure of where to start should try the app / website Headspace.

I used to meditate once in a while, but I found it difficult to wrangle my thoughts without a guide and I kept falling off the horse. This app has helped me tremendously.
I like to see these projects come to life.
For years, I have had the feeling that progress had slowed down a lot after the boom of smartphones, but seeing what is coming from the robotics and AI field, I get very excited about the future.
Glad to see that I'm not the only one who still likes the JVM after living through the good, the bad, and the ugly with it.

Freeing Java with the GPL was an amazing move by Sun and kudos to everyone who made that happen. Without that action, there likely would not be another 20 years at this point.

I think the article is good and I concur that the JVM's future as a compilation target looks promising. Personally I'm very excited about the prospect of the JVM being a major platform for Perl 6... Perl has an amazing community and I look forward to an influx of true hackers into Javaland.
Well, at least users don't have to worry about open-source selling out...or do they?
Project Ara is only a beginning-2016 brings us Modular Watches, Glasses and more
Humorous, but the most eye-catching think was the modern take on the blink tag. How's that for retro?
You need much more math to survive in the field beyond the appcrap/webcrap level. Here's the description of a 3D SLAM library for robotics. This is what looks at an image from a moving camera and builds a map of where the camera is and of its surroundings.

"RobotVision is a library for techniques used on the intersection of robotics and vision. The current version (1.1) comprises bundle adjustment, feature initialisation pose-graph optimisation, and 2D/3D visualisation among other things.

The bundle adjustment class follows the classical approach - the first order sparseness structure is exploited using the Schur complement. However, compared to other straight-forward implementations, it has the following features: The second-order sparseness structure -- not all landmarks are visible in all frames - is exploited using sparse Cholesky factorisation (using the CSparse library). Optionally, the implementation supports the use of robust kernels in order to guard against spurious matches. Also, the implementation generalises over different transformations, landmarks and observations using template meta programming. Among others, SE3 pose transformation with 3D Euclidean points and 2D image observations are provided as a default implementation for monocular SLAM. Furthermore, the bundle adjustment class also contains an information filter for inverse depth feature points which can be used efficiently for feature initialisation within a keyframe-based monocular SLAM framework.

The pose-graph optimisation framework is using Levenberg-Marquardt, whereas the sparse Hessian is dealt with using sparse Cholesky factorisation (CSparse). Again, it generalises over different transformations. Apart from the standard rigid transformation SE3, it also supports 3D similarity transformations Sim3. In other words, it can also deal with scale drift which occurs in monocular SLAM.

Both, the bundle adjustment class as well as the pose-graph optimisation class uses Lie theory. Poses transformations (SE3, Sim3) are represented on a manifold/ as a Lie group while incremental updates are done in the tangent space around the identity/Lie algebra. In this way, we achieve a minimal representation during optimisation while ensuring that we are always far from singularities."[1]

That's only some of what it takes today to do robotics.

The world is about to change. Tomorrow, everyone will discover that powerful humanoid robots are here.[2]

[1] https://openslam.org/robotvision.html
[2] http://www.theroboticschallenge.org/
They were, actually:

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-history-of-the-...

Arguably, corporations were more powerful then than they are now. Wars were fought because of the British East India Company - in 1778, it had a private army of 67,000 soldiers, over 50% more than the total strength of the American militia at that time.
Here in Germany, we have banking trojans wehich are able to thwart two factor authentication by SMS. This requires considerable skill in synchronizing between the hacked computer and the hacked smart phone. I am pretty sure these guys can come up with decent encryption implementations if these are not available as open source any more. And the latter is pretty unlikely. In the 90's all but the US people had strong encryption after all. Open source projects working on crypto where just moving off-shore.

A ban of end-to-end encryption will need to be enforceable. What will LEO do, if I come up with it? Bust my house? That's unthinkable in Europe. Enforceability also means that all communcations must go unencrypted. This merely would kill all online commercial activity.
From Business Success to Significance
does it understand SQL?
AMA with Zach Sims, Codecademy CEO
I'm going to make a wild ass guess, and say they haven't thought that far ahead.
http://readwrite.com/2015/03/25/apple-foundationdb-github-cl...
Google hit with EU antitrust complaint for banning Disconnect from Play store
And if Apple gave encryption keys to Russia or China I am guessing the USG would be OK with that? Or would that "betray their customers right to privacy"?
Let's be frank, it's a terrible, horrible name.
It's not sarcasm. It's pointing out I can't prove your wrong so why argue it? It's a waste of time for both of us.

For starters that address is empty. The coins from it are on the list at ~174,000 now.

As for Bitstamp remember that they covered a 19000 coin loss with no problem. There are a lot of coins in big wallets but there are a lot more individual entities holding large numbers of coins as well that you are completely discounting. Between the major exchanges own holdings, lucky early adopters(I've heard estimates of Ver having a few hundred thousand coins, Winkeltwins have >100,000), gambling sites which seem to be extremely profitable in the Bitcoin world, etc,etc. There are a lot of entities with lots of coins. So while large wallets exist to see a number like 2.8m coins and assume it means there are at least 2m users is simplistic at best.
Unclear on the concept:

I use the Tor Browser Bundle to read my gmail. I figure it's helpful to those working for legitimate regime change, that I put encrypted traffic on the net.
Show HN: Open Source Star Wars Crawl View for iOS
It's an important one to know when the blank is something already ubiquitous or easy to obtain, like guns, drugs, and encryption (in the US).
Correct and thanks for those links.

Pipes was influenced by unix pipes (hence the name). The UI was influenced by National Instrument's LabView and Apple's Automator.

I wish Pipes was launched in the age of containers (e.g. Docker). We had the idea of one click deployment to what we today call a container.
Python has been doing this forever and it just works. Objective-C has had access modifiers and such but I find nobody uses them either. It's a baroqueism.
haha I thought the same! I made a quick check, and that account popped up

let me know if you'll build something

--

bright minds think alike ;)
> - Assuming metrics are stored in memory, they'll be lost if the app or server recycles.

Similarly if the server dies before sending the metrics, so that's a draw.

> The flip side is no automatic discovery and dynamic scaling where a server going down might not necessarily be a bad thing.

That's more about top-down vs. bottom-up target discovery than the scraping itself, see http://www.boxever.com/push-vs-pull-for-monitoring

As of Prometheus 0.14.0 which was released earlier in the week, Prometheus supports target discovery. http://prometheus.io/blog/2015/06/01/advanced-service-discov...

> Security. Not super thrilled with exposing something that says "Hey come get my data".

That's a fair concern, though I'd expect your metric endpoint not to be internet accessible (and some of the push options will have a HTTP endpoint for debugging).
> Corporations weren't citizens in 1776.

Corporations aren't citizens now. If you mean "corporations weren't considered 'persons' in the scope of the 14th Amendment" in 1776 (or even, say, when the Constitution was first adopted), that's true, but then neither was anyone else.

Corporations, of course, have been legal persons in the general sense since the corporate form was invented; that's the whole point of the form.
I work in quantitative finance and find that basic probability and statistics help a lot in this field. In fact, they are almost like prerequisites for hiring.

That said, I think everyone would benefit by reading a bit about these subjects, whether or not they’re developers. We seem to have a built-in tendency to underestimate the effect of randomness in life (see Fooled by Randomness and How to Lie with Statistics). To counteract that, I find statistical methods (e.g., hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, etc.) to be very useful tools to keep in mind. Having basic familiarity with such tools may not necessarily make us better programmers but it'll probably make us more rational decision makers in the general sense.
Not to mention people typically misquote it like this:

Those who would give up Liberty, to purchase Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

Which completely changes the meaning even aside from context.
Get a lawyer. You can sue them under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). That is the primary recourse you have, not customer service.
That would be Hollywood terrorists, or media channel terrorists. Real terrorists are organized and will use whatever they need to further their goals. It's also known that terrorist groups are recruiting lots of engineers.

Moreover, organized crime groups, which in real life are much more serious problem, are quite adept with advanced technology. They set up their own radio communications networks and use aerial and submersible drones.
It's a power grab, plain and simple. The FBI and CIA are probably happy that 9/11 and neverending terrorism occurred as it gave them the excuse to do it.

"It's for your own good."
Did I say the government was to be trusted?
Strangely the old link works fine for me, but the new one is blocked by my workplace's McAfee filter/firewall.
Onstage at the DRC: Organizers create a disaster zone, competitors go for comedy
> The logical path would to forbid anybody to tap lines. Then, of course, encryption would not be necessary, since data would flow securely.

Why does forbidding someone from tapping somehow make data more secure? Just because it's forbidden doesn't mean it won't happen.

> as long as data does not fall into the hands of private interests

This is a risk because it's impossible to prevent. Especially as wireless networks become more and more common. It's impossible for all practical purposes to prevent wireless signals from being collected.
This seems so horribly wrong that I can't believe this was actually said in public. And the Washington Post apologist writing is very strikingly clear too.
> [T]he defendant should be precluded from arguing or suggesting that the undercover technique the government used in the underlying investigation was improper.

Why not just say: "The defendant should be precluded from arguing he is innocent" while you're at it?
Reasons to Cancel the F-35
I'll echo those sentiments, the UI for that time certainly had a wow factor.

> With any kind of support, or even benign neglect, the product would have been successful.

Look at IFTTT services now and it's easy to realize that pipes even in its original incarnation could have been so much more given its brain dead UI ease.

It's a shame that Yahoo is shutting this down rather than pivoting it as an IFTTT or similar. I'd wager that it's lack of ownership that makes it hard to pivot. I also don't recall it having a premium tier which has got to weigh down the resources--talent always gravitates toward revenue centers it seems.
The original title of the article is "How apps track your location without asking for permission".

Reading the article to the end:

>> The same method also applies to iOS, which has greater user location data privacy protection. Nonetheless, iOS still allows acquiring the current connected wifi BSSID. A user can deny the location requests on an iOS device at will. However, an app using wifi BSSID can still get a user’s static location without asking.

So singling out Android in HN submission title is grossly misleading. Especially since reading this comments shows that people don't read the articles posted -_-
> Moreover, organized crime, which in real life is much more serious problem

Well, sure, in that terrorist organizations are, by definition, a subset of organized crime, so that the problem they pose must be strictly less than that of organized crime more generally.
It's so incredibly disingenuous. We're talking about a long established technical term with a precise meaning, but when world leaders are demanding it, they're uncomfortable using that term because it sounds like exactly what it is.

Saying it's "not a back door" is simply a lie, and I'm sure they or their advisors know it.
4M current, former US federal employees hacked
This is now on CNN.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/04/politics/federal-agency-hacked-personnel-management/index.html
It is very common for companies to not release MAU numbers especially in their initial years, even if they are being very successful. I challenge you to find Gmail's MAU numbers released in the first 3 years of its existence.

If you can't understand why MAU is a sensitive metric, then yeah I understand why you make up theories in your head why they must be "covering up" something.
The Boston Massacre was mostly propaganda to unite a bunch of colonists that weren't all that convinced that the King was such a bad guy... and it didn't work out that well as propaganda goes; most colonists (i.e. more than 50%) weren't convinced that war with England was the right thing to do.

The stories behind the other cases you cite are similarly murky. The US has been manufacturing consent since before it was born.
Closures give you object privacy. Symbols give you class (or whatever other scope you want) privacy. Take a look at this symbol example:

let Person = (() = > {
let firstNameProperty = Symbol('firstName'),
lastNameProperty = Symbol('lastName');

return class Person {
constructor (first, last) {
this[firstNameProperty] = first;
this[lastNameProperty] = last;
}

sameFirstName (otherPerson) {
return this[firstNameProperty] == otherPerson[firstNameProperty];
}
};
)();

Now try implementing sameFirstName() using closures. Good luck! :)