skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Eh? Both of them are just as "bad" or "good" depending on who exactly they've been tracking, and what capabilities one thinks an intelligence organization in the 21st century should have.

From reading the published slides it was actually a pretty nifty operation. They've tracked data from security vendors to learn if their tools are being detected, and more importantly getting information about operations which are being run by other organizations and nations.

For the past decade or so security vendors mostly non-US one's have detected and published research about operations that were run by the US possibly by the NSA, a smart move would be to gather information about those companies to understand what and how they discover such operations.

Also since the NSA and similar organizations have better knowledge of how such operations work in the 1st place they most likely got better chance of detecting new malware which might not be picked up or properly classified by your average security vendor/solution.

So again not really a surprise, if you are going to invest 100's of millions of dollars in developing an entire operational trade craft consisting of specialized software and it's entire supportive echo system you would monitor organizations that can blow your operation apart, and already have done so in the past.

When Kaspersky finds the latest version of some RAT used by the NSA or the Israeli NSU or by who ever they blow a huge operation, and again nothing in this is to say that Kaspersky is bad or that they support terrorism, or that they shouldn't release such information, but you can't expect the organizations on the other side of that story to not do anything about it.
Thanks for the data on the evaluation time. 9-10 hours per applicant is nontrivial, I agree. If you've worked with someone shoulder to shoulder, I can also see that being as effective. The problem I hear is that depending on the experience and number of the founding team, they can exhaust their network quickly.

Peopleware has the idea of auditions, and I thought if you were clear about what you wanted, applicants would be comparable. I'm thinking, "Walk us through a project you did that demonstrates your knowledge of code quality." Or similar, with a clear list of what you're hoping to see.
> But can you prove that human beings can solve them?
> Tessellation of the infinite plane? Please demonstrate a person that can solve this

Penrose himself would seem to be a demonstration that there is at least one person, IIRC.

Is your argument that uncomputable really just means no guaranteed success, and that just because some human can get a solution to an uncomputable problem doesn't mean that it isn't following a set of algorithms?
You're just describing behaviors that seem strange or unusual and then asserting that they are somehow not computation.

It doesn't matter what happens inside the brain. If it's governed by normal physics (no divine magic), there will be some computer program equivalent to it. We know that's true, even though we don't know how the brain works.
I think there are far too many assumptions about how the body works and the laws of physics (both of which we are far away from completely understanding) to say that the mind is equivalent to a Turing machine.
"Docker donating its container format and runtime, runC, to the OCP to serve as the cornerstone of this new effort."

This is a fantastic initiative, bringing everyone to one standard is to be applauded. Congratulations to all involved.

Wonderful also to see Docker pitching in what they started.
SimpleMDE: Visual Markdown Editor
> No one is going to put that stuff in a contract unless it's a senior management position.

Of course they won't.

In all fairness, I don't think anyone who has been around the block would be tricked by any of the items in the list, but I'm sure a lot of less experienced job hunters could be.

SO, if you are a person who weighs a decision on these gratuitous promises what is the best course of action to see if the prospective employer is lying?

Probably to ask for all that stuff spelled out in detail in the employment contract.

Sure, you may not get hired for the reasons you cited, but it'll become pretty clear that those promises were empty too, and you'll handle the next opportunity differently.
I wish DigitalOcean would have one or two instances of each type (perhaps only the most popular distros, to avoid having too many unused instances sitting around) so that creating a new VPS is instant. Of course, some of the time - when multiple people are setting up instances - you'd have to wait the normal 60 seconds. But sometimes, it would be instant. That would be great.
The wikipedia article on b-trees suggests a variety of possibilities for the etymology, "binary" not really being one of them:

After a talk at CPM 2013 (24th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, Bad Herrenalb, Germany, June 17–19, 2013), Ed McCreight answered a question on B-tree's name by Martin Farach-Colton saying: "Bayer and I were in a lunch time where we get to think a name. And we were, so, B, we were thinking… B is, you know… We were working for Boeing at the time, we couldn't use the name without talking to lawyers. So, there is a B. It has to do with balance, another B. Bayer was the senior author, who did have several years older than I am and had many more publications than I did. So there is another B. And so, at the lunch table we never did resolve whether there was one of those that made more sense than the rest. What really lives to say is: the more you think about what the B in B-trees means, the better you understand B-trees."[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=B-tree#Etymology
Ken at Popehat isn't simply angry because a prosecutor is investigating clearly hyperbolic comments on a message board. He's angry because the prosecutor needlessly (and, as it turned out, pointlessly) imposed a gag order on Reason.

The investigation itself was dumb and, I think, a bit abusive. The gag order though was clearly abusive.
Hey guys Do you think our homepage is clearly describing what we do?
www.helpingb.co.uk
I find it really hard to be excited about anything Boto-related when whoever's in charge of the main Boto project has allowed it to become an unmaintained disaster. Would much rather see them support their existing project. https://github.com/boto/boto/pulls
Or just use the mouse to open your whatever "Character Map" program comes with your OS... which works when you're missing the same letters you'd need to "sound them out", or even with no keyboard at all. (Assuming you managed to log in.)
Most organisations I've worked for were scaled N+1 for day-to-day reliability with 2N for disaster recovery. This meant that the total servers required were 2(N+1). You get even more idle servers when you consider that they were scaled for New Year's eve traffic, which is typically 10x regular peak traffic (phone system).

30% idle is easily achievable if you're doing proper disaster recovery (recovery when the entire office is gone due to earthquake, flood, fire, etc).
Or have Creative Suite installed.

Or any modern sample library (which can get to 80GB for a single piano).

Or any video editing projects and/or templates.

Just some examples of professional stuff (for graphic designers, musicians/producers and videographers) that take huge space.
4.1 merge window

part 1 http://lwn.net/Articles/640297/

part 2 http://lwn.net/Articles/641016/

part 3 http://lwn.net/Articles/642039/
Not killed off so much as delayed due to lack of ability to mass produce at a decent price point so far. It is far from scrapped. It was over hyped and optimistic to begin with. It just hit the reality that it has several decades of work to catch up on to be on the same page as current tech.
Redundancy is not the same as backup. You may not lose files due to machine failure, but a code error, some data scientist deleting the wrong folder, etc, could easily delete the files. Having a backup that isn't automatically tied to the s3 bucket can help prevent catastrophe in these cases.
Docker Unofficial Plugins Demo
Why you and I will never have a 15 hour work week
Color Grading Showreel
And a great many fine suggestions have been made. To add one more, you might take a look at CHICKEN Scheme. It's written in C, and compiles to C.

The CHICKEN website and user manual contain a wealth of info re: theory and implementation of the compiler. The development team has always been friendly and willing to answer questions.

See http://www.call-cc.org/
Yes. But at first glance, the video background distracts from the page copy. Not sure if I should read or watch. And the video is just a talking head.
The semantics of OO languages is really messy and complicated and probably has the least well understood theory of all sequential forms of computing.
> In other sub-fields (e.g. OO, logic programming and concurrency), category theory has not so far proven terribly useful.

I wouldn't say that. I don't know about OO and logic programming, but there's a good amount of categorical/homotopical structure lurking around concurrency. See for example [1], [2] or [3].

[1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.46.9...

[2] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/2108154_A_model_cate...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_algebraic_topology
Instacart shoppers can now choose to be real employees
That's something I liked about jonesforth (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AlexandreAbreu/jonesforth/...) ! but its not a lambda calculus interpreter I guess.
If LLVM is good enough for you... http://www.stephendiehl.com/llvm/ and http://dev.stephendiehl.com/fun/ (in progress)
I'm not sure if it was intentional, but I appreciate the irony of a post on internationalisation that hard-codes "first" and "last" names. Not that I have any better ideas!

(Note for any iOS devs, iOS 9 introduces a cool NSPersonNameComponentsFormatter that tries to help with this sort of thing.)
It's always the developers fault huh!
> This line of argument does achieve the goal of making it trivially true under the definitions given that the brain is a computer, but it seems to me it robs the assertion of insight

I think, rather, it reveals the fundamental lack of clarity of the contrary position.

> e.g., the brain is computer because everything is a computer, including the nearest rock, since it's also a physics-governed system.

Right. But no one is questioning the ability to build a computer that simulates the behavior of a rock; or most other physics-governed systems. The AI-is-impossible position boils down to the argument that the mind is not like all other physics governed systems, though it tends to waffle and hedge and bob and weave around that point rather than coming right out with it. Pointing to Turing equivalence and the apparent computability of natural phenomena forces the AI-is-impossible-because-the-mind-is-not-the-kind-of-thing-a-computer-can-simulate argument to come straight out and either (1) reject the universal computability of physical systems, or (2) reject the mind as a physical system.

It still, of course, leaves plenty of room for the proposition that AI is possible but really quite hard.
Not talking about GOG Galaxy at this point, but about GOG in general, steam was a steaming pile of crap the for quite a while i remember the outrage of having to install it to play HL2 and some other games like COD(2?) even when they came on a disk. I also remembering steam breaking entire game installations (which came on a freaking CD back in 2000 and change), losing my save files, changing localization of games, and heck even giving me grief when attempting to launch a game from a region other than it was purchased from.

Not to mention the thing i hate the most about steam is it getting it's nickers in a twist and refusing to go into an offline mode or launch games while in offline mode that weren't launched for X amount of time.

To this day every time i travel i keep cracks for all of my steam games that i might want to play while on a plane or in a hotel with poor internet connection, or just somewhere in the middle of nowhere like my GF's parents summer house in Iceland.

And the sad part? most of the people i know who both use steam and travel allot are still doing the same for any game which might have some weird pseudo online-DRM which cannot be launched without steam from the steamapps folder directly.

GOG in general has a much better user policy than steam, the regional price normalization alone is worth it this means that Europe and more importantly the UK which paid much more on games than the US due to currency exchange rate actually get a rebate to match the USD game price.

You also have 30 days refund for any purchase no questions asked, and ofc no DRM. And the fact that even with GOG Galaxy you can still do anything you want without a client makes this service better than steam.

How long will they be able to keep up with such generous user oriented policies i don't know, but for sure it looks better than steam atm.
Most good companies have extensive interview process to hire new employees - this is most direct comparison with getting new immigrants to the country. Comparison with having 12-30 million illegals in US is the Caltrain deciding not to eject drunk hobos living under overpass for tresspassing. Instead of getting immigrants compete on education/skills/job experience/employee referrals (aka relatives) like Canada, Australia or NZ, US allows unprofitable, illiterate and low skill immigrants into the country.
There are 3 reasons people need to buy a new computer- too slow, ran out of HD space, or too slow and ran out of HD space. It was true 10 years ago and even more true now. Backup your 32GB phone a few times and you're wondering where all the space went.

It's more like insurance. You buy as much as you can afford. That's why it's painful to by a new MacBook Pro these days. 1TB is very expensive compared to the 1TB I could afford 5 years ago.
(I am not affiliated with Dinosaur Games in any way. Just a fan of the game.)

> (Incidentally, branding aside, this article piqued my interest in the game. Is it worth a play?)

I've been playing the game on and off for a month or so (since their A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art post went viral). I think it's really nice. From what I've read they wanted to create a game with simple rules and lots of emergent complexity, and they definitely succeeded with that. Even without a story mode, it's quite engaging, and self-balancing (the difficulty level rises the more you win but goes down again if you start losing too much). There are still a few flaws, but nothing jarring, and I think the developers are aware and are still actively improving the game. I'd really like to see their ongoing Kickstarter to succeed (which would add an actual story mode and some other things), but unfortunately it's not looking promising so far. With or without the story mode, definitely worth a shot!
"Manufacturers are secretive, but analysts say a lithium-ion battery pack costs an average of roughly $500 per kilowatt-hour"

This can not be true. Tesla will sell a 10kWhr pack for $3500 retail, which is $350.

Nissan will sell me a replacement 24kWhr pack for my LEAF for $5500, or $229. Are they losing money on it? Maybe, but I doubt they are losing THAT much.
When he's right, he's right.

Hard to convince my students of it, though (they are Americans; is it different elsewhere?).
> I don't think it's a blind love, but all those things will ship in one of the next versions of Scala, too.

Well it's really lovely and encouraging to see Ceylon exercising such a strong influence on Scala. Makes me very proud.
It's not a direct dependency in the sense that algebra is a direct dependency of, say, algebraic topology.

Instead it's more like a guiding friend. A lot of PL theorists are well-versed in algebra and use it at least stylistically to do their work. If you are familiar with algebra you'll recognize it all over.

But you can definitely get by without it for a while.

The only downside is that you may go a little more slowly due to a general lack of analogies and you may have a difficult time finding resources which don't use algebraic examples.

But honestly, a lot of PL (in fact, TAPL) don't really depend upon abstract algebra much at all.
The way I did it was just recursively pass down an accumulator argument to generate De Bruijn index-like variable names, rather than keeping a global counter

Point taken though that it's a bit simpler with global state
That Navigator Comparison doc is excellent. I suggest you link to it toward the top of the Navigator and NavigatorIOS docs.

A few things I've found confusing:

- What is the best way to implement Stripe checkout in a React Native app. I'm a bit surprised nobody has done this yet so wondering if I'm missing something.

- What is the status of the ReactExtensionsManager project? Is that going to be officially supported? What is the plan for modules? Where does Cocoapods fit in?

- Will we always have to drag/drop things using XCode to use some 3rd party components. It would be great to eliminate the need for that.

- Is there a way to wrap a native component without using Objc? From the tutorial it looks like an objc header file is always required, but it's not 100% clear why. It seems like the recommendation do React Native developers would be to just stick with Objc as the IOS language to focus on (aside from RN)

- What is the timeline for releases that cover the rest of the native SDK's major APIs (like payments)?

So I think these fall into the big picture project organization bucket or maybe the FAQ bucket.
By the way, the cities are empty because they built them to be used later, and many are not empty anymore.

The Chinese government is slowly moving people from some places, to already built cities (while building other cities).

For now they can keep what they are doing, but I believe they will have to someday stop (otherwise they will build faster than the population increase), then is a matter of seeing how they will handle that stoppage.

But for now they have plenty of people to move, For example example the article here has a graph showing that in 2015 only 51% of the population is urban compare that to Brazil, Brazil is a country with a economy that relies on rural exports much more than china does, industry in Brazil is very weak, yet Brazil has 85% of the population being urban according to the World Bank, in some naive calculation, assuming China wants to match Brazil urbanization, this means they still have 462 million people to move... Projects like the one in the target aim to house 200.000 people, this mean they can do 2310 of such projects without wasting money on unused capacity.

EDIT: Running those numbers made me realize how China is mind-boggling huge and populated. China population that they intend to move, is bigger than Brazil + Russia summed population...
boinc.berkeley.edu/

The BOINC daemon can be run headless and unattended (while logged out).

You can also create your own projects/initiatives to leverage the BOINC community.
Docker, CoreOS, Google, MS, Amazon Et Al to Develop Common Container Standard
I'm curious about the reasoning behind including that annoying circle with a down indicator inside that appears shortly after the page loads and bounces at the bottom of the page until you first scroll that page.

It seems to serve no purpose other than to let you know that there is more data to be had by scrolling, but surely pretty much everyone who is going to see that page already has learned about scrolling. It's one of the first web browsing skills more people learn.
The sample manifest at https://github.com/opencontainers/runc makes it look like you just specify a big list of mounts, rather than it supporting the higher level concept of overlayed layers that both Docker and appc support.

Are layers not part of the opencontainers spec, or is the sample just missing that bit?
This is where crazy VM engineering can come into play. Something like a "Triple-passive" 3-VM server - it hosts 3 VMs, each is the passive node of a 2-node SQL Cluster. You start with 4 identical servers, running bare metal on 3 and a hypervisor on the 4th.

In normal operation, the 3 bare metal servers do all of the work. But when one goes down, the role moves to the VM, where it might run in degraded mode until the physical server is restored.
Not just that, but we still don't really know how to combine subtyping and generics very well. The soundness question when considering variance is still quite open, and it shows in the poor support for type inference in OO languages (in spite of heroic efforts made in languages like Scala).

Much of this has to do with the root: most of our PL theory was basically designed for FP, and applying them to OOP has been predictably difficult. Most PL theoreticians are more interested in FP than OOP, so progress is quite slow (though see work done by Ross Tate, Igarashi, etc...for progress).
> Machine: to find out what happens when we get to the planet earth .

Something tells me the entirety of BSG was included in the training set.
How my views towards the relationship between math and programming have changed
Kevin Mitnick Hack Fiber Optic and Steal Sensitive Data
Your idea is good but not relevant to the posted article, which is about physical server utilization.

You could probably implement your idea just for yourself with a script though.
If you read the findings, it's basically a 3 page "case study" (i.e. advert), the last page of which is a screenshot of "TSO Logic" - which claims to solve this. One reference is from 2008 and another is TSO Logic's own data.

There probably is wastage, though it would nice to see a proper, modern, scientific study on this though.
There's no lock-in what's at play here for most people. You can get a tablet/smartphone from several vendors, including Samsung, Google and Microsoft and people switch from iOs to Android and back all the time. It's not like apps are a huge investment or that it's hard to move your data across.

These people WANT to buy the iPad/iPhone, instead of something else. So a more accurate response would be "with desirability come higher prices".
Not so weird.

We have been working together for a very long time, and publicly announced in October last week that Docker was coming to Windows Server.
The one iron-clad rule of artificial intelligence: any successful attempt at implementing it makes it not artificial intelligence, just something that computers are able to do.

(Though I guess there is the second rule of over-optimistic timelines, to be fair.)
I've long been a zero-based-index-loving geek, but I'm now coming around to preferring one-based indices in programming. Hopefully in the near future I'll write a blog post detailing why.

Regarding the article itself... sorry, Dijkstra, but I think conventions C and D are more beautiful, as I prefer discrete ranges where the signs on both ends are the same. Convention C is my favorite, as it only makes mention of members of the range, not numbers that lie outside of it.
Meanwhile, how many NSA backdoors are there in US-made AV software? Note that no reverse-engineering effort targeting such companies was described in the memo.
Actually Turing's paper "On Computable Numbers" distinguishes between "automatic machines" (a-machines) and "choice machines" (c-machines), where the latter can pause to ask for input. It seems to me this accounts for your I/O. (I think this is also how you'd add a RNG to a Turing machine.) His paper pretty much only considers a-machines, so I'm curious what is written about c-machines elsewhere. It's unclear to me how much c-machines "change the story." For instance you can't escape Godel's Incompleteness Theorem by adding a finite number of axioms to fill in all the unprovable statements, because there are infinitely many of them.
JavaScript Virtual Desktop (SVG Library)