skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reason they look so 'fractal-like' (e.g. trippy!) is because they actually are fractals!

In the same way a normal fractal is a recursive application of some drawing function, this is a recursive application of different generation or "recognition -> generation" drawing functions built on top of the CNN.

So I believe that, given a random noise image, these networks don't generate the crazy trippy fractal patterns directly. Instead, that happens by feeding the generated image back to the network over and over again (with e.g. zooming in between).

Think of it a bit like a Rorschach test. But instead of ink blots, we'd use random noise and an artificial neural network. And instead of switching to the next Rorschach card after someone thinks they see a pattern, you continuously move the ink blot around until it looks more and more like the image the person thinks they see.

But because we're dealing with ink, and we're just randomly scattering it around, you'd start to see more and more of your original guess, or other recognized patterns, throughout the different parts of the scattered ink. Repeat this over and over again and you have these amazing fractals!
What to the BURNED Customers Get? ZERO?
P&L is not a useful metric for growing startups.

If the lifetime value of an Airbnb customer exceeds their marginal cost (including COA), Airbnb should buy customers all day long.

I strongly suspect Airbnb's marginal returns are fantastic. Their model seems highly profitable on a unit basis.
Multi billion dollar startups are so rare that trying to mimic them is a fools errand. It's the same logic from people that say, "Bill Gates dropped out of college, and look how rich he is!"
The Annotated Version of Eloquent JS (this was mentioned in the article) is similar except the annotations are for a book rather than a library.

https://watchandcode.com/courses/eloquent-javascript-the-ann...
If you don't mind me asking, perhaps you could give a reason why you feel this isn't always the optimal approach?

I can certainly understand that it's not exactly the most pleasant thing to do at times, but I feel as though it's an ideal where the side effects of striving for it are beneficial. It would mean a lot of me to hear your take on it.
Very cool. I wonder if there's some example code on Github to generate images like this?
Crowdpoetry: a webapp for crowd-writing poetry
> Compared to Google Authenticator app, YubiKey (a) makes hardware-based OTPs as opposed to time-based OTPs (does that offer stronger security?)

If I understand the various OTP implementations correctly, they are essentially the same, trading a time-counter for use-counter.

The non-time OTP will give you ds1, ds2, ds3 -- where dsX ("derived secret X") is derived from shared-secret+X, while the time-based OTP will give you dsT1, dsT2 ... derived from shared-secret+TimestampX.

The former is a little more secure, as you need to allow for some drift. And having a proper 128 bit shared secret is probably more secure than something derived from a crackable password/pass phrase.

But AFAIK they're both vulnerable to the shared secret being compromised on the server-side and/or cracked (if it's possible to brute force).

I don't recall the exact details of the TOTP-spec, but in general I think the derived-secret/otp essentially boils down to: truncate(hmac(shared-secret,counter)) where counter is either a timestamp, or a sequence.

If the counter is actually a sequence of used passwords(1,2,3...N), the server can store just N passwords (usable for N logins), and cross them off after use -- so no need to store the shared secret on the server. For TOTP the server needs the shared-secret in order to generate a few +/- values to match against what the client supplied.

In both cases you could use a sniffed one-time password to try and guess the shared-secret, if you can know/guess the counter. The risk for a 128 bit random key is obviously somewhat less than if the shared secret is "hunter2" (modulus stretching etc).
the rumor is a bluetooth dongle will come out before year end...
The post is good, covering many of the aspects, but if you are trying or just started contracting there is not always a need to make the VAT registration and Limited Company. As I have been freelancing for 4 years as a sole trader.
There are some tax benefits but you have to manage your pay and money very differently as a Ltd, i.e. you have to hold money in the bank enough to cover company bills that you cant spend. Unless you are a high paid contractor all year you are unlikely to make £82,000 VAT base rate.
> It would imply they're taking a thousand dollars in sales or so per listing per year at this point. That would more than require every listing be sold out at all times.

I don't follow.

Their take is ~10%, so $1,000 of revenue for them requires $10,000 in annual bookings. If every listing is listed 100% of the time, that would imply an average rate of $27/night. (Highly unlikely.)
In case anyone hasn't read the story this is referring to: "BLIT" by David Langford. http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm
"Actual problems" is a weasel phrase, I don't really know what to do with it. How are you defining "actual problems"?

And can we please separate Monsanto from GMOs? They're two entirely separate things.

It reminds me a bit of creationists who claim they don't accept evolution, when in reality what they don't accept is abiogenesis. Natural selection, genetic drift, gene flow, are not really on their minds.

It may be easier to say "GMOs don't solve actual problems", but it's just not true (bananas are supposed to have seeds, for example -- are you saying bananas aren't useful?), and bleeds your argument dry of rationality, over the course of the conversation, because it pulls focus away from the actual issue, and that's the fucked up way Monsanto is using GMOs to bully people out of their livelihood (and in some cases, their lives).
Lattice is a more minimalist approach, for those who desire the production hardened core of Cloud Foundry but prefer to bring their own PaaS components or simply experiment.

http://lattice.cf/
You can associate multiple U2F keys with a Google account. Since the Yubico's U2F key is really cheap (I think ours were ~15 Euro a pop), it doesn't hurt to associate another key and put it in a safe somewhere.
But OP has expressed suicidal ideation and that is always something that requires help.

It doesn't matter that it's situational, although that should alter the "treatment" options.
Assembly language programming game
C++ on Mars: Incorporating C++ into Mars Rover Flight Software
Aaja Nachle with Anoushka
Simple ASCII Boulder Dash Game in Scala
Not sure if you realize this, but this comment about "impractical" languages reduces your chances of future employment in a number of companies to near zero.

I mean of course the companies that use some of the languages you mentioned to build large software systems every day.
Of course I do not mind. I believe ostracization and marginalization have historically been more effective for this type of objectionable opinion. The main differentiating factor is that misogyny is not rooted in reason. Thus, reason is an ineffective tool for attacking it, especially on the internet.
Simple 4-bit/1 Hz virtual computer for learning purposes
The rise of Africa’s super vegetables
I absolutely do. The fact that a rule mad sense 100 or 200 years ago does not automatically validate it today. History is great, but we should not justify things based purely on the past. Yes, we should consider historical context and evaluate it in today's reality.

The issue here is this business of "independent contractors". Why should the government, today, have a say on the nature of my relationship with my employer? Why? It's not like Uber is the only company where people can get work.

I'll tell you why the government would rather everyone be an employee. Taxes. When someone is an employee they become desensitized to taxation. You never see the money. It evaporates before it hits your bank account. And most people have absolutely no clue how of much money they are handing to their overlords every week. Go ahead, ask around. No clue.

However, in sharp contrast to that, an independent contractor is keenly aware of just how much of what they earn is going to government.

I maintain that if people had to go to the bank once a month to pay taxes rather than having them automatically deducted from their checks we'd riots in every city within two months. Employees are desensitized to the theft taxes have become.

In addition to this, independent contractors have far more opportunities for tax reduction through deductions. Politicians want your money and they don't want this at all.

Take it to an extreme, if next month everyone started to receive 100% of their paycheck and they had to send a check to the state and the feds every month people would wake the fuck up and demand lower taxes and a reduction in spending.
Correct. One of my favourite at the moment is `babel-plugin-rewire`, which is a neat replacement for `rewire` -- allowing easy unit testing in full isolation by hijacking the `import` statements :)

[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/babel-plugin-rewire

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/rewire
Because U2F is much safer than TOTP. TOTP is still sensitive to phishing: the MITM could just ask for the TOTP code and forward it. This is not possible with U2F, since only the original site has the key handle that is necessary to initiate the challenge-response.

https://developers.yubico.com/U2F/Protocol_details/Overview....
It's more like the helium shortage made the existing operation unprofitable, and they needed to increase revenue to stay in operation. Also, during the recession, $400 sightseeing trips didn't sell well.

Airships leak helium. A lot. You can't just inflate the thing once; it needs constant refilling. I met the CEO once at a steampunk convention, before the shutdown. The price of helium was starting to hurt, but hadn't killed them yet. Their two biggest expenses were labor and helium. Fuel cost was relatively small.
Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Others Team Up to Launch WebAssembly
Really nice. I'd be interested in seeing a more in-depth scientific description of how these images were actually generated. Are there any other publications related to this work?
Fixed: https://caudallure.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/1217891347094...
Thinking with Lazy Evaluation
http://tritarget.org/blog/2012/11/28/the-pyramid-of-doom-a-j...
Ask HN: How do you track your personal expenses?
My girlfriend tracks our expenses for each month on a piece of paper as follows:

amount, location, category, date, payment method
$50, Whole Foods, food, May 19th, MasterCard
$19, taxi, transportation, May 23rd, Visa

At the end of the month, she adds up the amounts for different categories and payment methods. It's a bit of a chore to do it manually. I know how to process this with a text file, but I'm wondering if there are any good iPhone apps that will do this. Failing that, a simple browser or cross-platform desktop app. There must be something but I have no idea where to begin. I don't really want anything more complicated than what I've described. Quicken or whatever the heck is too complicated, I would rather try and hack something into Excel.
What I'm requesting is that you don't believe the article hype.

Of course, don't take me at my word. Wait a year, or 2 years, or whatever you think is a reasonable time to wait for results ... and then check the USPTO website, or the FAA website, or the BIS website ... whatever your favorite govt. IT portal is, and see if its better. Better yet, ask a friend in government if things have gotten better in his/her department.
No, pulling into the current valuation all the future profits is not the point of a valuation. If you did that, there would be no return to ever be had for the investors.

Under that premise, Facebook should have been valued at $200 billion at their IPO (or even earlier).

Google should have been worth $300 billion at their IPO in 2004.

Apple should be carrying a $20 trillion market cap using that calculation, pulling all of their future profits into their present valuation.

Investors do not normally reach a valuation for an investment today, based on profits ten years from now, with the expectation that the price paid today is equal to what the profits in ten years will justify. That's a recipe for not yielding any returns for ten years.

The point of a valuation is to invest capital into a company based on speculation of future returns to be yielded based on future profits, not to pay for all of those future profits with your investment today. The value is determined by the near-present estimation of what the business is worth, and with a potential bias elevating the valuation. The investor return comes from all of those future profits not being priced into the current valuation.
On (OAuth) token hijacks for fun and profit (Google/Microsoft integration)
Beside PR talk, technically it's this way:

Bing through Yahoo BOSS API (which isn't free anymore) is the main source (and Yandex is used instead of Bing for certain countries in Europe&Asia). All other sources are smaller sources that augment the main search results. DDG is at the moment a meta search engine.

There was a recent search engine startup with its own large scale crawler, Blekko. Though, recently IBM bought it for their Watson AI, as a knowledge base.
You can't count on a browser session to be particularly short-lived. Even if you don't tie query logs directly to a username, the mere act of correlating different queries from a user inherently compromises privacy, as demonstrated by the AOL leak.
Linux-based Sierra Wireless IoT module has 3G or 4G radios
Can I use it on my site?
Self-replying, since I have no idea what happened to the comment text I _meant_ to write and I can't edit it now. What I meant to say at the beginning of my comment was:

That's because those tables are comparing apples and oranges. StatCounter (and the W3Counter/Wikimedia things in the tables you cite) are measuring website visits. NetApplications/netmarketshare is measuring unique users.
Well fk that.
Nope. Bizarre fantasy.
Banking trojan used in a second round attack against Bundestag
Wrong. The current Etherpad open source project and what you mean are not the same. The first one is the predecessor of Google Wave Java based product, and the current one "Etherpad Lite" is a JavaScript & Node.js based open source project - a reimplementation, possible as Google open sourced the original Java code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherpad
Yea, but that's a better world to live in, because people know what "unlimited" means and will glide right over it, thinking they get the speaker's intended message. I want people to see a new unfamiliar term like "at will" and think for 5 seconds about what the heck that actually means. AT&T would have avoided all the fines and public backlash if they had just made up some new term rather than underhandedly and intentionally misleading people.
I didn't notice any difference in the usability of Gnuk and the Yubikey NEO. I mean, i had to do the same things for both to configure and use them as they are both are "smartcards". What issues did you found with Gnuk?

I'm interested as for our local work (activism related) Gnuk showed up as the best alternative for price, openess and the possibility if something fails to not have to buy new hardware. Yubikey did the right thing with their latest "put your yubikey in the trash bug" giving a new one, but we don't live in the US and time can be a factor.

But still, Gnuk is far from perfect and the better it gets the better for us. Can you tell me about the issues you had so i can talk with gniibe to see if there are solutions for them?

Thanks in advance.
Apparently helium balloons use only about 8% of the annual consumption of helium, and that's just about the highest-margin use there is--hospitals effectively pay less for their helium because it's subsidized by kiddie balloons.
I like having my default search being anonymous DDG. 99% of my searches I never even bother with getting another engine's results.

For Google results, in the very rare case that I need to see what they have, I use "searchthis !sp" to get anonymous Google results from Startpage. I used SP fulltime previously but they've had reliability issues and an odd issue with the back button.

Most !bangs that I use are for !w, !a and !gm. Firefox's dedicated search bar helps a lot with editing a long search string with another bang. Doubtful I'll be moving off DDG due to that feature.
Some of them are truly beautiful
It's a pretty awful term...
Facial-recognition neural nets can also generate creepy spectral faces. For example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNZIN7Jh3Sg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogBPFG6qGLM

(Or if you want to put them full-screen on infinite loop in a darkened room: http://www.infinitelooper.com/?v=XNZIN7Jh3Sg&p=n http://www.infinitelooper.com/?v=ogBPFG6qGLM&p=n )

The code for the 1st is available in a Gist linked from its comments; the creator of the 2nd has a few other videos animating grid 'fantasies' of digit-recognition neural-nets.
Thanks! I really appreciate it. My source image is 1000x1500, which redbubble.com says is not large enough for a poster. I admit, even at 150dpi, it wouldn't be much of a poster. As I upgrade my SEM image acquisition hardware, I'll be able to make higher res images. If you'd like the raw PNG, check out my blog: http://benkrasnow.blogspot.com/
No sane system administrator is going to run a root-privilege program to reconfigure his web server and set-up SSL:

The Let’s Encrypt client is essentially an operating system component. Generically, it requires root privileges to bind to port 443 and (if requested) to reconfigure your webserver for certificate installation and renewal

That also seems like a perfect compromise vector for bad actors to modify the client software.

The Let's Encrypt effort is noble and definitely required but I think they would have been better-focused and quicker to market had they concentrated on establishing themselves as a CA first and leaving the 'auto-configuration magic' to a later stage, for the small subset of users who want that.
Five things the media gets wrong about Bitcoin
last semester a chicago HFT group came to my school (Wisconsin-Madison) and spent a short time trying to tell us why they weren't unethical.

They didn't convince me at all. The gist of what they were saying is that they're merely making the market more efficient. That's such bullshit. The money they're making is surely coming from someone's pocket, and that probably means the middle class day-trader rather than the NYC firms with billions to spend on diversification. Later on in their presentation their tone made me feel that they were so extremely proud of what they were doing. It really irked me.
Strictly speaking, you don't need a mentor to get good at anything. However, it can really help in the areas that are defined more by people than by things working or not.

As a mentor, I have found that is mostly about reviewing others work and thinking and giving feedback. For instance, you don't really need a mentor to get better at solving problems. You may need a mentor to help you communicate details about the solution.

Somewhat related: http://jeffrey.io/writings/apprentice.html
Bad idea IMO. To me that particular phrase is quite meaningless (like rockstar, unicorn, *10 programmer etc.) and arrogant sounding at the same time.

Might as well say "I'm the dog's bollocks"

If 1993 is your year of birth then it is even worse!
Help with server logic for a multiplayer game server in GO/Unity
I am trying to create a simple multiplayer server for a simple game using GO. I currently have it so that users can join, sign in, connect, and see other users. The issue I currently have is that moving around is very laggy because I send user input to the server and all actions are performed on the server rather than on the client. Clients and the server only get and send packets every 20 milliseconds.

I was wondering what the best solution to this is. I feel like I have 2 options: exchange a lot more packets to make the game run a lot smoother for the client, or create some sort of prediction on the client where the client will do what it thinks is right until corrected by the server.

I read somewhere that Agar does not use any client side prediction/correction so it must be possible to continue without that.

What is the down side to sending more packets? Is that a reasonable way to solve this lag issue? And if so should I only send more on one side of the game to be optimized correctly (as in send a lot of packets from the server but not a lot from the client)?
I own a YubiKey Neo. My plan was to use it with KeePass/OATH HOTP (I used it with master password only on my three main devices). Turns out the OtpKeyProv plugin won't work on the OSX version I used before (MyPass Companion, switched to MacPass since because well it's on github). So for now I'm using the non-native Windows version with Mono.

Alas synching between different machines isn't easy (counter gets out of synch) and I'm not all that comfortable with keeping the databse in my owncloud.

If anyone has a good suggestion for a crossplattform (Xubuntu, OSX, Android), synchable and FLOSS OATH HOTP password storage solution that doesn't rely on 3rd party cloud storage I'm all ears. Not exactly a security expert but I feel that's the setup I want :)
I could fallback to challange/response and that would fix some issues but be less secure.

[The Yubikey itself is pretty cool though]
The important question here is: has the github repo been made public?

How can we know what concessions these players have made or what kinds of collusion they have agreed to?

Shouldn't the Web be built in the open -- not subject to a cabal of corporate overlords who won't reveal their intentions or thoughts?
The Airtel Spy Code Case
I suspect the dark area was a piece of lightweight dirt (a tiny lint ball, or sawdust) that began accumulating charge as it was imaged by the electron beam. After 20 minutes or so (20 frames in realtime), the dirt developed enough repulsion force to be launched off the surface of the record. It's sort of like a charged comb or other object repelling styrofoam particles.
Bangs can be used anywhere in the string. I use them at the end so if I want to try another source I can just update "searchingthis !mq" with "searchingthis !gm". No need to go to the front of the query and update the keyword there.

Also, you don't have to configure anything. DDG bangs are intuitive. I find myself searching sites I wouldn't have otherwise.
DDG bangs can be used anywhere in the string. I use them at the end so if I want to try another source I can just update "searchingthis !mq" with "searchingthis !gm". No need to go to the front of the query and update the keyword there.

Also, you don't have to configure anything. DDG bangs are intuitive. I find myself searching sites I wouldn't have otherwise.
R is going to give you some headaches as it relies heavily on the local machine's memory. Using RStudio on a beefed up AWS instance might help make calculation time a bit more palatable.
Happiest Minds Recognized as a Tier 1 Provider for Retail Advance Analytics
And this, basically, is how we get all sorts of environmental/resource collapse. "Bah, I'll be dead before it gets bad, so who cares? I'm sure my grandkids will come up with something, probably. They'll be fine."
http://electricsheep.org/?
Ask HN: Looking for a talk on naming things
I remember seeing a talk by a man online that covered naming things. One of the points he made was that prefixing a method with get for accessing a property is actually weird.
I don't remember the exact arguments he made, which is why I'm looking for it.
An example was that get could mean
> to go after, take hold of, and bring (something) for one's own or for another's purposes; fetch
which then makes no sense for a property because you're not fetching it in the sense that it's not at the other place after you fetched it. Compare it with getting the milk.