skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fine to learn for personal use but other stuff is better if you're job hunting. If you want to learn, then skip Esterel (big $$$) to learn Ada with AdaCore's free GNAT IDE. Helps to understand why it does certain things (eg foundations). Get that here:

http://www.adacore.com/knowledge/technical-papers/safe-secur...

AdaCore's "Gems" and other resources will help you plenty. SPARK is a variant of Ada designed to be easy to analyze with mathematical techniques with goal of automatically proving absence of certain bugs in over 95% of code. The article below has links to many resources and demonstrations. Tokeneer further demo's Praxis's Correct by Construction process, which is also cool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_%28programming_language%...

Here's a nice example of applying it to a DNS server to prove absence of single-packet vulnerabilities leveraging common, coding issues:

http://ironsides.martincarlisle.com/

I'll end with a few other goodies. Adam Chlipala does great work in teaching and making formal methods lightweight. His book below describes such methods. More links in comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9862127

Another high assurance processor below. Verified for correctness rather than security although one helps the other a bit.

http://scidok.sulb.uni-saarland.de/volltexte/2006/633/pdf/Di...

Sandia's Secure Processor (SSP), also called Score, utilizes a highly assured design and implementation that results in a Java processor immune to obvious code injection techniques or radiation-related issues. Their SEED architecture is really nice. Modern stuff is paywalled but this old paper tells plenty. Thing it leaves out, IIRC, is they use an ML-based hardware model to do equivalence checking between executable specification, hardware spec (in ML), and actual hardware HDL. Already in ASIC's on rad-hard processes. Availability of ASSET tools or SSP/Score unknown.

ftp://ftp.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/phw/.old-1999/tmp2/443-cpa2007-wickstrom.pdf

Happy reading and bug hunting. :)
Nasa may have found the most Earth-like planet to date
I keep reading Gangster.
Show HN: Seomator – embedded SEO audits
It's a Wired article not an academic paper.

If you want context just google it.

Plenty of information exists for CRISPR and it is definitely substantive.
Kickstart your SEO agency sales with our white label audit tool embedded on your website
Very interesting that a well-marketed agency/service biz got VC funding to the tune of $2.5m. Service businesses are notoriously hard to scale and run on thin margins, not usually of interest to SV investors chasing 10x'ers. What's the secret sauce here that makes it more scalable than the traditional agency/dev shop model?
Sorry, you have no idea how reductio-ad-absurdism works.

Reductio ad absurdum requires that the absurd conclusion is a consequence of the argument that you are trying to disprove when taken to extremes.

You haven't done that. You've just posted a comic that is a flawed analogy to the point in question.

If I was claiming that any behavior, however immoral, was justified by the need to make money, your argument would hold.

But I don't claim that. I claim that the rational behavior of not selecting the GPL is supported by the argument that it might be against one's financial interest and the interests of a prosperous society to do so.

Your reductio only works if you assert that the GPL is morally superior and not just pragmatically so.

My comment about the comic stands - you are raising the choice of the GPL to the level of a moral choice. Why not just admit that?
What is BITS in this context?
Hold on, are we talking employee or contractor? If it's the latter, I'd consider at least the following two points:

1. $20k/month every month? Unlikely.

2. Self-employment taxes + other business expenses.

edit: formatting
It works the other way around too!

EU is to Romanians what US is to Latinos, and what industrial countries in general are to Africa: an elite that is currently sustained through the exploitation of and exportation of problems to their counterparts.
Twitter’s Ill-Timed ‘Frat Party’
When you're truly passionate about what you do, how you do it, who you do it with and who you're doing it for it doesn't matter what the "normal" business world does. You end up doing what's right for your company at that moment.

I don't go to bed without reminding myself that this isn't just for me. It's for my employees (livelihood), my customers (their businesses) and my family (creating a better life).

When you frame it like that, hours just turn into numbers. It's irrelevant. Results matter.
We have worked with freelancers from Russia for about 6 years and have rated a lot of portfolios and tested them on the real projects.

The quality of our Freelancers is like on toptal. If you tired of managing freelancers by yourself we can do it for you.

More detail about it in the article:
https://medium.com/@serg_ezhov/the-simpliest-way-to-grow-you...
Pity that the author confuses declarative programming and functional
programming. SQL was never nowhere near functional programming. It's closer to
see it as a Prolog's cousin than Haskell's. This fundamental confusion weakens
author's credibility greatly.
What's up with Techcrunch? Is this article an advertisement? It seems like an advertorial, though a lot of TC seems like that these days. Is this the writer's friends company?
Really? I was confused starting with "attempts by certain groups to dictate to artists what they should create".

That's certainly meant as a metaphor, no? While I'm certain there are people who want laws passed to enforce their beliefs, they would be a fringe group and not representative of "progressives". In any case, such laws in the US would be unconstitutional, so all that's left is the force of argument, protest, boycott, and persuasion - all of which are allowed under free speech.

The next reference to dictatorship is "...totalitarianism, censorship, lack of freedom and a regime that dictated what people should think, write and create, I utterly abhor any attempt to reintroduce such things in the name of any kind of good intentions." This is the sort of "dictate" which carries the force of law, or at least institutional power, behind it.

I can't figure out why the metaphorical use of 'dictate' in the first paragraph connects to the literal use in the latter. Could you explain the connection?

We can point to places where the force of law does prevent artists from doing what they want to create. A classic example is the Red Cross symbol that many games, going back to at least Doom, use for health power-ups. Thing is, it's a protected symbol under the Geneva Conventions, and US law prohibits that use ( 18 U.S. Code § 706 ):

> Whoever, whether a corporation, association or person, other than the American National Red Cross and its duly authorized employees and agents and the sanitary and hospital authorities of the armed forces of the United States, uses the emblem of the Greek red cross on a white ground, or any sign or insignia made or colored in imitation thereof or the words “Red Cross” or “Geneva Cross” or any combination of these words—

> Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.

More recently the ICRC has been pushing game companies to not use that symbol, which is why the recent Xbox 360 port of Doom no longer uses that symbol.

Here we have a case where there is a law that prevents game artists from doing what they want, and passed for humanitarian reasons ("good intentions") - and reasons that I fully agree with, by the way.

As expected, there are many people who protest this restriction on artistic freedom, and on nostalgia. But to say it's equivalent to an oppressive Communist dictatorship is so overblown as to be meaningless.

Do you think this law prohibiting the use of the Red Cross symbol is an example of an oppressive dictate that should be removed? If not, how is it that people using their free speech rights to change things they don't like is equivalent to them wanting dictatorial power?
Easy DNA Editing != Easy Lifeform Manipulation

Editing DNA is like having the power to tweak the binary code of an Ubuntu installation. Hopefully, you will not accidentally edit the kernel (e.g., DNA replication and the ribosome). More importantly, the early days of DNA editing will be like tweaking your favorite application just by changing the binary. Sure, tiny tweaks are possible now, but creating genuinely new functionality that integrates well with the your existing "apps", e.g., height, will be rather difficult. Biological systems have a lot of non-linearity and many feedback loops to contend with.

DNA editing and human life manipulation will happen in time, but imagine writing code that takes 10-50 years to compile. Iterating and pivoting will be challenging. But, we'll have some really advanced flies since they only take 10 days to compile (I mean, reproduce).
Google Employee Clarifies Google Photos Announcement
Imagine what the industry would have looked like if IBM locked down its hardware, so that nobody could develop an OS for it.

Or if they started an app store.
There is https://hypothes.is/ which provides this additional layer as a browser plugin. And I vaguely remember that there were others.
Does it matter for the context of my post? $240k is a hefty income either way for a freelancer who needn't live in an expensive metropolitan area. And it seems you agree with me either way with the way you ended your first bullet point.

A lot of startups in the sharing economy space have been guilty of grossly exaggerating how much their contractors/employees actually make. Is this just yet another instance of that or are these numbers legitimate? I think that's a perfectly reasonable question to ask.
How does Gigster differ from a typical software house that hires its workforce to others?
Machine learning is reproducing the result of a process but not the process. It's easy to be confused about it, and many are. Just like when we call "thoughts" to be patterns of some sort, so then any sort of pattern is a thought. The logical error in this should punch you and any sentient being right in the stomach and leave you breathless for a few good seconds.
Thank you!

This way I know that it is sufficient to read the first paragraph.
In Defense of the Floppy Disk [video]
Ask Sam Altman anything
It has no idea what it's doing. :)
I'm not sure that should create an infinite debt for (potentially) thousands of people.
You could also pre- or post-fix.

I imagine that the parent considered that one could play a longer word that happened to make shorter words just not _only_ play a two letter word; so parallel words would be acceptable as would things like in-fills that only took one letter but caused 2 words to be formed.

Perhaps a better, succinct, rule that tackles the same problem would be "a minimum of two tiles must be placed".
>There is no class of trail blazers.

I think this post takes a narrow view of what constitutes a trail and link. From listicles, Pinterest boards, and even your Facebook feed, people use the internet to connect to different links and articles. This process of curation occurs at personal (Pinterest) and at large (Wikipedia).

There are, indeed, people who make a living from annotating and associating articles and information (see the HN front page and brainpickings).
I'm not the person you're asking, but I certainly think so. The strategy of: 1 identify a problem with existing products (try to make the audience go "oh yeah, I hate that"). 2 explaining how your product solves this problem. This usually works very well as seen on most infomercials (ex. Are you tired of ______? Well now there's _______!)

I think this will be especially true since most people own knives already, so they will only buy yours if they think it is an upgrade significant enough to be worth the cost. As a result, maximizing the perceived difference between your knives and the ones they already have is key.

Sorry for any typos I missed, I dictated this on mobile.
Really interesting talk. Skip to the last 5 minutes for the history, and appropriate use, of the "hamburger" menu icon.
I'd like to know the answer to your question but note the fact that sama says this:

"we believe investing in YC companies at post-YC valuations is still a great deal"

but also says this (from the post):

"And by doing this in every YC company, there will be no signaling issue of us supporting some companies and not others."

So how can you have both statements be true?

In other words how can you say "still a great deal" and also acknowledge that you are investing in all companies, not only ones that are a "great deal", simply so there is no signaling?
Our crack at defining 'smart notifications'
Doesn't this depend a lot on when they leave? I'm assuming you didn't rush to hire people that gave "contributed everything I can and need a new challenge" as a reason for leaving a non-contractor position after a few months.

The OP - who understandably hasn't provided many details - may be in a situation where a bland answer doesn't sound like an obvious lie, but it's evident from the way the question is phrased that they fear it might be.

Even if they'd in fact been there for 15 months at a run-of-the-mill Series A startup so a bland answer was pretty likely to be the truth, would you have been more likely to have screened them out if they'd answered "I'd prefer a working environment where people weren't constantly making homophobic comments"?
Here is a Chrome plugin for HN discussions: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-discus...
> They could do nothing about the IBM PC

Except for doing what the engineering guy had proposed - selling an IBM PC compatible machine. PC clones became a huge industry in the mid '80s. The first Compaq was sold in 1982, the first Dell in 1985. It looks like Vector missed out on this very lucrative market because of the rift between its engineering and management.
I listened to this with a friend of mine who just got his PhD in molecular biology. His response was it was a lot of hype about of technique that requires a large amount of wasted samples to even get one usable mutation.

Like all RadioLab episodes it was brilliantly produced and an entertaining listen but CRISPR might be a little overhyped.
You mean just like I can get with Infosys or any of the boutique software dev consultants? Most of those guys don't even bother with the type of rapid prototyping it seems like you guys do because the margins are crap and the collection rate is abysmal. The client always expects more than can be delivered at the price point and then refuses to pay on the basis of non-fulfillment. Sure, you can go after them, but a single lawsuit will cost you half of the value of one of your projects.

Prepayment isn't an option because you'd need to use something other than credit cards -- the chargeback rate would be far too high for any payment processor to keep you as a client.
This. Nothing has changed from going to upwork or freelancer or whatever, except rather than many bidders to chose from you just have one.
Weaponizing Civilian Drones – VICE (2015)
Apple's Updated Feedback on Custom Elements and Shadow DOM
So strange no one wonders if hyperbaric without oxygen is also effective.
Sounds like phishing to me
Have you tried the pure-Java fallback on App Engine? I tried it for JRuby 1.7 and it didn't work. I haven't tried yet with 9000, have you?
In the same logic, don't read Moby Dick unless you plan to hunt and kill a whale.
Yes, absolutely. Our platform provides physiologically relevant 3D environment that recapitulates the native conditions seen in human tissues. Moreover, unlike the models with immortalized cells lines, which for many cancers are not representative of the disease, our platform sustains primary cells from patients. Our studies demonstrate that our platform has high correlation with clinical response (i.e. how cells respond to drugs in our system matches how the patient responds).
VERY impressive demo but I find it kind of funny the extra effort it takes to produce a "worse font".
Every article about every startup you read is an advertisement. I'm not even joking; you pay a PR firm to seed articles at news sites. The writer is probably friends with the PR person who feeds them stories and likely a placement fee that gets shared with TC. If you think any positive story you read about any company isn't paid for, then you haven't been involved with media in any way.
That's badass. I wondered about whether the machine would need constant calibration due to the belts slipping or hopping a gear, etc. I really dig solutions to problems like this.. I'm not sure how I'd categorize them, I suppose solutions that involve observing reality as directly as possible instead of relying on too many layers of abstraction.

EDIT: I guess now I'm curious... probably this is fast enough that you can literally scroll until you see the right color. I wonder if that's what's happening or if there's still an attempt to remember where on the belt it's located and make an attempt to take the fastest path there. It'd only be faster half the time though. I wonder if the overall experience would differ much.
As a teenager I used to read the dictionary for fun - this is my preferred form of the game!
I'm going to take a wild guess and a much greater percentage of Danes speak English than anglophones speak Danish.
Don't the students just get together and do a lottery? And in RL tragedy of commons, it's rarely anonymous.
China Unleashes $483B to Stem the Market Rout
I think you're confused about the point of the test. The point is that an AI will be clever. Like, unimaginably clever and manipulative. Under the limited circumstances of interested people who know they are talking to Eliezer maybe you're right that whatever he says would only work on those people. But when you're dealing with an actual superintelligence, all bets are off. It will lie, trick, threaten, manipulate, millions of steps ahead with a branching tree of alternatives as ploys either work or don't work.

I'm at a bit of a loss to convey the scope of the problem to you. I get that you think it would just stay in the box if we don't let it out, and it's as simple as being security conscious. I don't know what to say to that right now, except I think you're drastically misjudging the scope of the problem, and drastically underestimating the size of the yawning gulf between our intelligence level and this potential AI's.

As for not letting scientists guard the room, you might enjoy this: https://vimeo.com/82527075
> I’ve been giving it to students since 2008, and only one class has successfully mastered the challenge.

That's a real surprise. The 2 points option is the safe one, so everyone should go with that. Sure, I could assume that all (or most) of the other students think so and just get the 6 points myself. But then again, chances are that the other students think the same. So let's just go with the safer 2 points.
Can you copyright your voice then? There are laws governing your "likeness" so I guess they would apply?
Yeah, that's one of the difficulties. That's probably why the Guinsu knives people ended up having those demonstrations where they cut bricks, metal, etc., to capture the customer's attention quickly. I would not personally go that far though!

Edit: typos
I'm going to just quote my response from somewhere else in this thread:

> ...when you're dealing with an actual superintelligence, all bets are off. It will lie, trick, threaten, manipulate, millions of steps ahead with a branching tree of alternatives as ploys either work or don't work.

> I'm at a bit of a loss to convey the scope of the problem to you. I get that you think it would just stay in the box if we don't let it out, and it's as simple as being security conscious. I don't know what to say to that right now, except I think you're drastically misjudging the scope of the problem, and drastically underestimating the size of the yawning gulf between our intelligence level and this potential AI's.
Googleguess "The Intel BIOS Implementation Test Suite (BITS)"
http://biosbits.org/
9 mothers don't produce a baby in 1 month.
There's a paywall from that source as well.
"People conformed to the group’s positive behavior."

People are more likely to respond to social pressure, than to appeals to "do the right thing." Valuable lesson for startup marketing... and maybe even pricing.
>any NP problem can be polynomially reduced to an NP-hard problem

Except that there is some probability that the algorithm will be unable to solve the problem?
So does that mean that traffic on HORNET is viewable by one's ISP? (Sorry if this is a noob question)
I vote to burn it...give the radical Islamist some of their own medicine. Two wrongs don't make a right but when you have ISIS exterminating entire villages full of Christians and destroying ancient artifacts for fun, we should see how they like it. I know this will cause a backlash because there is no reasoning with mad men.
The trouble comes when you can't be sure that you're even measuring what you're attempting to compare.
Thank you for the compliment. I was looking at the Barack Obama link too and thinking the same thing. Either using different colors, or a small popup that gives more information, would work.
Passwords could easily be both strong and memorable if we got rid of ridiculous anti-secure constraints like "password must be at most length X", "password cannot contain a space", etc.

I've heard somewhere of military organizations having people trained to go in an office and search the places people "hide" their password sticky-notes...
Would be nice to see it in writing instead of assuming it's 'the usual'.
Funny that you never asked the other guys who did the exact same thing to me publicly to stop.

I like how HN just like Reddit is turning into a propaganda machine where you remind everybody who does not support your agenda to follow the rules while all the guys who support your agenda can happily do against the rules, regardless how big lies they are spreading.

Thanks for proving to me that you are no different, double standards for the win!

I guess I will just stick to commenting outside HN.
Connecting Crowds
Interesting research. We won't know how impressive it is until the kinds of people that break Tor give it a thorough analysis. Otherwise, it might be a scheme that simply de-anonymizes users faster than the competition. I'll add that combining anonymity and performance seems to be one of the hardest security problems to get right with so much left to learn. So, I don't trust anything that does that, including Tor.

Asynchronous, non-real-time schemes that look like vanilla web traffic are the best. Especially using covert channels. However, my method is to do face-to-face with possible and otherwise use burner PC's, LiveCD's, and random Wifi hotspots. Tor or proxies optionally as extra layer of difficulty depending on what I'm doing.
PICO-8: fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games and programs
Two brief thoughts about HCF:

1. The show's story and characterization is innovative because it intentionally is about people who lived in a historical period, not people who shaped it. Joe and Gordon are not Jobs and Wozniak. Jobs and Woz are Jobs and Woz, and in the long run the Macintosh eats the Giant's lunch. So it's cool to see ambitious people try to reach for the stars, even if they're fated to fail.

2. The show does a good job not being solely about the drama or about the technology and history thereof, but of being an acceptable blend of the two. Certainly the tech details are sometimes inaccurate, and the history skewed (the characters keep coming up with ideas for which there already were contemporaries). And the drama is often contrived, and in the first season, often not very good. But somehow when then come together the weaknesses manage to get overshadowed by the strengths. A good hack of a prestige drama.