skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was the longest humblebrag I ever read! Still, I'm impressed the the comprehensive coverage of Magic.
No. 0/0 cannot be logically given a real value. Make your NaNs signalling if it's a problem. Raise an exception like Python does by default, or warn like modern numpy does. But don't make 0/0 complete and absolute contradictory nonsense like a real value.
Presumably a number of people at Google had access to the orders, if only to implement the government's surveillance.

What's always baffling to me is how seldom stuff like this is leaked -- all it takes is one person with the right access, conscience and the technical skills to work out how to siphon off their own unofficial copy, then put that unofficial copy anonymously on the internet when the appeals to do it legally have been exhausted.
No Time to Be Nice at Work
Pole vaulting used to kill about 1 person per year in the US, but after rule changes in 2003 it went down to about 1 every five years -http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22582223
Wasn't the original Bourne shell also written with (more basic) C preprocessor macros to imitate original ALGOL-style constructs?
While those with NCS worry more about it, head injuries from falling are a concern of everyone. At almost every cross-country or track meet I've been to, at least one runner has collapsed from exhaustion or lack of oxygen to the brain. Some are more prone to it than others, but it's a risk that participants are aware of and accept. Races rarely happen on asphalt or cement, so falls (by themselves) aren't as dangerous as you might think. It also helps that, even while losing consciousness, runners tend to stick their arms out and cushion their fall.

For most distance runners, their biggest worry is getting trampled. Racing shoes have metal spikes on the bottom.[1] Like fainting, some are more prone to getting trampled than others (typically smaller runners). I've fallen at the start of a race and had my ribs cracked and skin perforated. It's certainly not fun, but it's a risk everyone accepts.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_spikes
Can everyone please share their thoughts on how significant of a breakthrough this is, how do you see this being applied in the world of AI, and what are some use cases in the consumer realm?
There's a pretty big difference between "it was too long and I didn't read it so I just clicked Agree at the bottom" and "I had no idea the thing was even there because Microsoft's software hid it from me."

If there was no reasonable way for you to even know the terms were there at all, I don't think any court is going to consider them to be binding. That's why these places show them to you when you try to use their network, instead of just hiding them in the freezer.
Remind me: Are modern hypervisors meant to securely contain guests? Because they advertise their presence pretty loudly, and there's nothing which motivates a jail-break like reminding the inmate they're in a cell.
This makes Julian Assange's rant about Google and Eric Schmidt all the more concerning. The two should be working together instead of against each other. It's clear where Google's morals lie. It's just hard to tell at times as they are bound by the rule of law (and business).
Fairly mundane. You could do most of it in C89 with cpp.
It's not impossible:

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/517336/physicists-detec...

Lasers have been used for 50+ years in the intelligence community to eavesdrop on voice conversations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone
Software-designed molecular machines (Lisp, C++, LLVM)
scala too http://blog.fogus.me/2009/03/26/baysick-a-scala-dsl-implemen...
Help, I’m Trapped in Facebook’s Absurd Pseudonym Purgatory
gi/go
No one wants to go through what Chelsea Manning went through. Psychological torture and completely ruining someone's life is a powerful deterrent.
yeah, just like Exodus is about going for a long walk
Thank you. This sort of thing (coming from a PHP/Python) background is what I am looking for.

Would love to see one day examples of doing something in PHP/Python and then how to do it in Golang.

Ultimately, I see myself dropping PHP in favour of Golang for my front-end stuff and continuing with HHVM/PHP for my backend development.

My daemons on servers are currently running in Python and do see them ported over to Golang in the future.

So +1 from me.
I don't think it would be too difficult, design-wise.

Have every Win10 installation generate a public/private key pair. Share the public key with MS.

When you share a password with all your contacts, MS can send all of their public keys to you, where you then encrypt the password with them and send the results back to MS. MS can then send the encrypted passwords to the contacts, who can then retrieve the password with their private key.

Something tells me they probably didn't do it this way, but it doesn't sound like a particularly hard goal to achieve if one thought it was important.
Micheal Jackson Inspired Dancer
> The only real argument is that discrete categories do not exist.

And yet they're 'discrete' enough that certain drugs are more effective on specific 'races' (or groups of people who share certain genetic traits if you prefer) than others.

I'm all for equality. I'm all for being judged and identified by your individual traits irrespective of the groups you're a product of. But this race/gender doesn't matter (or even exist) stuff has gotten to the point that it's as bad as the old christian movements when it comes to blocking scientific progress.

> Humans are not dogs, our populations are not strictly controlled for the purposes of winning dog shows. Attempts to do so are racist, in that they are (scientifically misguided) attempts to create or purify a race. Such as when your parents don't want you to marry someone who doesn't look the same.

I consider politics quite the dog show, and people have been self-selecting their mates on the basis of looks, culture, and politics for as long as they've been on this Earth. Seeing if this has resulted in genetic differences is a question of science, but deciding whether this activity is ethical is a question of value.

That's really the heart of the matter. As long as people believe scientific conclusions reflect personal values, we'll never be able to address any of these issues effectively.
> As I recall it, an early CL employee got equity as a gift, and then sold it off in a way I thought disappointing

To be fair, it's not like CL the company went out of their way to provide liquidity for that equity.
we all gonna make it brah
Just to remind you of what the context of this discussion is:

You commented on an article that says, paraphrased: "Stop merging criss and cross y'all, it's dumb and counterproductive; rebase everything instead, it'll help you in the long run."

In that context, you asked "well merge commits are easily to revert, if i can't merge, how to i revert a feature branch?"

I answered to that, in the context given by the article on which you were commenting. That context is: "Rebasing all your things is mandatory."

As i said in my previous post, if you're not willing to even mentally adopt that context, then nothing i can say would be helpful.

Are you interested in doing that?

--

> we're not obsessive over having a "clean history", and are instead more than happy with a realistic one.

I deeply resent the implication. This kind of stance is what led me to my initial post you took offense to. What you perceive as obsession is experience and knowledge by people who have experienced both sides of the coin, along with their benefits and pains, and made a rational decision on which is more favourable in the long term.

You won't find me accusing you of obsession with fixed history just because you haven't had the (mis)fortune to make the full range of experiences on this.

> Instead of the commits simply disappearing for a time.

Nothing disappears, that is specifically why i mentioned tags. If one abandons a branch and the history is valuable to keep around, you stick a tag on the end of that branch, give it a description pointing at the ticket, then put a similar tag on the end of the remade branch, and off you go.

> not to get in the way.

How is git getting in the way of teamwork in your opinion?

> It's not a fuck-up.

Bugs are fuck-ups. There are no two ways around that. Especially when they're bad enough that a feature branch would be removed wholesale, and not simply disabled with a flag.
Maybe instead they could have router makers add a flag to opt in to this insanity. Then if people really thought it was important for their networks, they could ensure they have compatible hardware, and turn it on.
[nitpick: I don't think I would lump VOIP into that bunch because SIP is a pretty open standard that can work quite with some cheap hardware like an Obihai, and then a large wholesale VOIP provider like flowroute ($2/year for a DID and ~5 cents/min connectivity).]

I think there are projects/people working on the things you are concerned about, but it will take time. I believe people are going to have to have some machine on their wired, home connection that is always-on doing background stuff that a SAAS server would be doing. The software business is closer to native applications in that case.
Note that this has been a public feature since windows phone 8 was released, two and a half years ago.
AutoCAD brought Lisp mainstream for mechanical engineers, architects, and so many other 'rocket scientists' that I believe Emacs pales in comparison.
I was programming AutoLisp (automatic correction of trace and drill patterns for PCBs) on the machine which wasn't even able to build a decent Emacs in reasonable amount of time (PC AT/286 12Mhz with 2MB memory :-)). I was able to build myself an Emacs only after I got upgraded to 386SX 16Mhz with the whopping 4MB of RAM.
Yes, that's far less complicated for the layman to understand.
I've developed an app that lets you log on to your friends' Windows machines without having to know the password! Don't worry, it's just Facebook friends.

Someone has to realize how dangerous this is. How would ANY corporation EVER allow a single Windows 10 machine to connect to their wifi, let alone contractors, or...

Do they not realize how paranoid network admins are to begin with? Windows XP forever, I guess.
I have that problem, and I don't exercise at all. Happens probably once or twice a week. Almost always from going from sitting to walking too quickly.

Usually, as long as I grab onto something and stay still, it passes after about 20-30 seconds of my vision blacking out and my thoughts getting all jumbled and incomprehensible.

I've only fully blacked out from it once, coming to and realizing I was twitching on the floor.

I've been led to believe that it's a fairly common condition, though.
> We'll have direct democracy on this stuff yet! Look at the Swiss.

Sorry, I'm not sufficiently up to date on this stuff to know at what about the Swiss to look. Could you elaborate?
You need mutual spying, but if you have that, then the week country will know that it is 100% vulnerable to first strike, and surrender before it comes to that.
100% snarky, and has no place in the comment section here on Hacker News. I expected better.
Research Shows How a Messy Desk and Creative Work Go Hand in Hand
The dispensaries can't open bank accounts and are forced to maintain multi-million dollar cash stockpiles. They are so afraid of being robbed, they hire ex-military to travel around town with them armed with semi-automatic rifles [1]. Isn't this asking for more violent crime?

Well, if Marijuana was legal at the federal level too, then maybe the dispensaries could do business like everybody else. I don't see that as a valid argument to stop decriminalization.

I didn't say drug use wasn't a problem, just that it should be treated like a public health issue, instead of a criminal justice one.
> WebAssembly

Huh? That's not a Google-exclusive thing.
Lisps do a fantastic job following the principle of least astonishment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen... ). I work with Clojure professionally and I find there's a huge advantage to Lisp syntax compared to other languages that I've used. The syntax is very minimal and consistent while also extremely expressive.

Practically all other languages tend provide expressiveness by having tons of syntax sugar. This introduces a lot of special cases, quirks, and rules that you have to keep in your head to work with the language. It's constant mental overhead that distracts me from the problem I'm working on.

A language like Clojure just gets out of your way and lets you focus on your work without having to worry about its quirks all the time. The code tends to work as expected and does what it looks like it's doing on the first try.

The other big advantage is that s-expressions make it much easier to write structural editors like paredit. With Clojure I'm always thinking in terms of manipulating expressions as opposed to lines of code. I think of taking this block of logic and putting it in there and so on.

Finally, the syntax provides additional visual information about the flow of the program. You can tell what parts of code are interacting with one another simply by looking at the nesting. This makes the code much more easily scannable than other languages.
The Wikipedia page on Cyc [1] matches my memory of how it was presented at the time. It was being done at MCC with the expectation that it would be a commercial product at some point, I don't remember being shocked that there wasn't much being published about it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
I was thinking along similar lines. Does anybody know more about the penalties for violating a gag order, like this?

Is there some trick that could be built-into sensitive services like email, maybe some kind of per-account warrant canary?
That's an idea from 1970-1980s AI, called the "primal sketch" model. The concept was to take an image and try to turn it into a line drawing, then extract the topology and geometry.[1] Further processing might yield a 3D model.

This sort of works on simple situations without too much edge noise. It's been used for industrial robot vision, where what matters are the outside edges of the part. It's not too useful when there's clutter, occlusion, or noisy textures.

More recent thinking is to find surfaces, rather than edges. This works well if you have a 3D imager, such as a Kinect. You can get a 3D model of the scene. Occlusion remains a problem, but texture noise doesn't hurt.

[1] http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/CVonline/LOCAL_COPIES/GOME...
Please clarify. Is it your position that the general public would be better informed of the actual state of the world if someone created a non-functional prototype of something you imagine to exist? Or is your intent not to inform them of the actual state of the world, but to convince them of your beliefs about it?
What if the light cones of A and B don't intersect at all? There are certainly places in the universe so far apart that light not only can't now, but could never, have travelled from one to the other; that is part of why the near-isotropy of background radiation is something that needs to be explained, I thought.
> Under new guidelines proposed by MarkMonitor and others who represent the same industries that backed SOPA

Uhm...what? When Wikimedia moved all their domains off of GoDaddy to protest GoDaddy's support of SOPA, they moved them to MarkMonitor. A quick WHOIS check shows that MarkMonitor is still the registrar wikipedia.org (I didn't check any other Wikimedia domains). Other SOPA opponents such as Google and Facebook use or have used MarkMonitor services.

Fight for the Future occasionally sensationalizes things to try to get more signups, and tossing in gratuitous references to SOPA is one way to do that. I'm tempted to flag this, but it does link to the actual proposed rules so I'll refrain.
Heres why HBO's 'Ballers' can legally use NFL logos without the league’s consent
OP here, and thank you kind sirs and ladies for you feedback.

I'd just like to answer the recurring objection: yes, our visual experience contains a lot of frames and that seemingly refutes my MNIST example; however, you do forget about the other part of a supervised dataset, namely labels. Do we have a label provided to each thing we see in our life? Obviously not. How much time do you need to familiarize yourself with a new entity, like an unknown glyph or symbol? Can't provide a concrete example, but I guess a single math class was enough for all of you to recognize all the digits the next day. You can test it right now by looking into some unknown alphabet and then looking into it again upside down - you'll recognize it perfectly, except for mental rotation issues (which occuur even for well-known letters and symbols).
site != sight
And that ain't even an auto-correct typo.
Police in Brazil wear army uniforms, paint skulls on their vehicles, and kill about 6 people a day (mostly poor and black). This has a lot to do with the fact that it was created to defend the state, not the people. So there's a lot to do.
"For a long time, only men were allowed to have SSNs..."

This is incorrect; for a long time, jobs that were more likely to be held by women or minorities (domestic servants and agricultural workers) were excluded from the Social Security program, so those workers often didn't pay into or receive benefits from the system, and therefore never applied for a number. But there was no formal gender or racial discrimination. My sweatshop-working female relatives certainly had SSNs.

Incidentally, requesting a deceased person's SS-5 (the original handwritten form that applied for a SSN) is a fantastic genealogical tool, because it lists the applicant's parents' names, including mother's maiden name, among other things. They're available from the Social Security Administration under FOIA; you can order copies through their website.

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Social_Security_in_...

https://secure.ssa.gov/apps9/eFOIA-FEWeb/internet/main.jsp
Nice summary.

Contributing to existing project is one more way to learn Golang. Perfect if you have some exotic needs which are not covered in existing golang libraries.
Yes. It was the inspiration for the IOCCC (International Obfuscated C Code Competition).

http://www.ioccc.org/faq.html

But the macros were the least of its problems: It allocated memory by trapping SIGSEGV (SIGnal for SEGmentiation Violation; that is, the signal the OS sends a program when it's tried to access memory beyond the region it owns); the function which caught SIGSEGV allocated more RAM. This made it difficult to port sh to the Motorola 68000-based computers which were the first generation of Unix workstations.

http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/bourne/segv.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8843951
Nasdaq Launches Enterprise-Wide Blockchain Technology Initiative
Google's an easy target, and their competition has hyped concerns about privacy and surveillance.

But this story just confirms years of reports that Google really does behave more honorably than many multinational corporations.

Google pushed back forcefully and repeatedly against these court orders. I don't know how they've managed to build this culture, but it shows it can be done.
If you #define END as "return(0);}" and put "int main(){" at the bottom of basic.hpp, you can have a complete BASIC program with #include "basic.hpp" at the top as the only indication that it's C++.

#include "basic.hpp"
_10: LET X = 1;
// ...
_150: END

I think multiple data types could also be added in a way that mostly fits with BASIC syntax. GW-BASIC uses sigil suffixes on variable names to denote their type:[1]

$ String variable
% Integer variable
! Single-precision variable (default)
# Double-precision variable

Something like this might be possible with unions (e.g. _10: LET X.D = 3.14; _20: LET N.I = 42;), or you can tolerate a few different LET macros (LETS, LETI, LETD).

[1] http://www.antonis.de/qbebooks/gwbasman/chapter%206.html
> [] and . have always acted directly on object properties.

That was the bad idea, but as you suggest it really can't be fixed now.
Was the Nokia 3210 the greatest phone of all time?
I would expect absolutely no change at all. If you're able to ignore science, then why believe that a robot is actually on Mars anyway. Why believe that the magic box that you connect to the computer exists at all. If you're going to ignore science, then why would you try to rationalize at all. It's not like we put the smart kids in computers, engineering, physics, maths, chemistry, and physics; but then put the 'special' kids in paleontology. To believe a book over hard science because you were told to demonstrates a lack of critical thinking and a propensity to self delusion. I would expect a headline in a Christian blog to be "Scientists fake Mars life" or some other such nonsense.
There is "sketching". The idea is to write a partial program and use wildcards for the parts you are not sure of. For example, you can replace values on loops by a "%". The tool try to find the best program for a given input.

https://bitbucket.org/gatoatigrado/sketch-frontend/wiki/Tuto...

Superoptimisation is also related to program synthesis. It's a fascinating subject.

Peter Norvig did a talk about what we can expect with that.
> Suck it up and use the tool that everyone else is using -- Word.

A great recipe for making sure nothing ever improves!
> Would love to see one day examples of doing something in PHP/Python and then how to do it in Golang.

Do you got some specific examples you want to see?
For some usecases i don`t know if this would make sense to port in 1 by 1 from PHP to Golang (because of lack of features on both sides).
But maybe you can name some pieces of code / examples.
semver teaching you its value by contradicting itself ?
From the article: But insensitivity or disrespect often sabotages support in crucial situations. Employees may fail to share important information and withhold efforts or resources. Sooner or later, uncivil people sabotage their success — or at least their potential. Payback may come immediately or when they least expect it, and it may be intentional or unconscious.

It's a bit weird how the article paints this as a failure of the uncivil person - this is pretty clearly a failure of the sabotager. Some people are willing to harm random third parties (shareholders) in acts of petty revenge against those they dislike (for possibly valid reasons). Quite a bit of victim blaming going on there.

I agree that the person with power should - as a pragmatic move - attempt to behave in a manner that accounts for the bad acts of others. In much the same way, people should avoid putting themselves into situations where there is a high risk of crime. But the ultimate responsibility for an individual's actions lies on the individual, not the person who was "asking for it."
To be fair that is one of the few things on a bike that isn't a triangle.
The title of the article makes a claim that we don't know is actually true, as evidenced by the article explaining how we might test this in the future.

It's entirely possible that gravity doesn't reveal information about quantum state, and instead is derived from the superposition of states.
This is why I'm not a fan of public cloud virtualization for high security systems (PCI-DSS/HIPPA/etc).

In addition to the escapes, you need to contend with side channel timing observation and resource contention.
Reminds me of distraction free editor mode that popped a few years ago. I personally find the screenshot appealing and appeasing. But having Emacs is somehow cheating.
Tell ICANN: “Respect our privacy. Don't expose WHOIS data.”
I want to throw the little go book into the ring as another great resource:

http://openmymind.net/The-Little-Go-Book/

Short and also freely available.
Works without the ending slash, nothing to do with incognito mode.