skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also took it before the chat bot... :(

If you are thinking about a masters in CS, you must check out the OMSCS program. The cost to value ratio is completely off the charts!

"total program cost of about $6,600 over five terms"
I think part of the confusion is because you call it CTF. I think Team Fortress when I hear CTF. I'd call it:

Stockfighter is a programming challenge where you try to beat a virtual stock market by writing code. If you can solve all levels, we might even have a real job for you.
You really think "Let’s Talk About Amazon Reviews" is a better summary than "Amazon Reviews Are Gamed by Compensated Reviews by Professional Review Companies"? At least in the latter, 4/6 of the words in it are not meaningless fluff.
That is the operating principle of a bolometer.
It's not quite that simple because the overall impact of an individual compound relies on both its atmospheric residence time and infrared absorption. This article[1] covers the basics.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential
That is a much better title than the one on the article.

"Lets Talk About Amazon Reviews" is linkbait IMHO, it fails to cover the topic of the article in the title, only the subject.
Check my comment where I have given more details.
Not necessarily true, you can do it with just a display (and two buttons) like the Trezor does[1]. You can probably even omit the buttons using this model:

1. Send message to sign over the wire

2. Display message to sign on the device's screen

3. Send a message to continue or reject over the wire

4. Device displays scrambled pinpad

5. User enters PIN on the compromised computer, using a blinded pinpad (like the Trezor)

6. The blinded PIN is sent over the wire to the device

7. The device verifies the PIN, and if correct, signs the message displayed in step 2

8. The signed message is sent over the wire to the compromised device

[1] https://doc.satoshilabs.com/trezor-user/enteringyourpin.html
Certainly not. I'll keep using the $5 counterpart and intercepting the packets in an inglorious-but-it-works way.
I no longer trust Amazons reviews. They're so obviously loaded with fake reviews. I try to be smart about it and sort by most recent. I've been burned on a few products recently as well.

I met a shady guy recently, who has personally paid for tons of take reviews on kindle books. After hearing how easy it is from him, I really lost trust.
The government’s 18F is attracting former journalists
I write reviews all the time, and to be honest, Amazon makes it pretty easy. Basically if it shipped on time or earlier and was exactly what I expected, I will write a review and say exactly that.
>Not surprising at all, given the rise and fall of Java as a first class citizen on OSX

And not only on OSX -- generally the rise and fall of Java. In late nineties "Java Applets" (+ the web plugin) were supposed to go big. Never happened. Then there was always the promise of Java on the consumer desktop. Never happened either [1]. Java on the enterprise desktop also didn't fare that well. As for startups and smaller companies, the mostly go with Ruby/RoR, Python, Node, Go, PHP, etc.

Nowadays it's just mainly Java on the enterprise server.

[1] Yeah, I know you can name 5 somewhat successful desktop Java apps. I doubt you can name 50 though, and that's the whole point.
Had no idea it was that old, that completely makes sense for 2005.
Finding the common features in top block buster movies
So, I'm guessing right now Jill performs about as well as a human TA who is pretty new on the job.

Nothing wrong with that, of course.
Take your candidate to a computer, ask the programmer what he/she is working on. Have the candidate sit down and continue the work for ten minutes. If it works, hire him/her.
In Maritime Logbooks, a Trove of 'Extraordinary' Imagery
It's about the backend, not the UI/frontend.
There have been times where files have been too big even for Sublime Text to load on my Macbook without slowing it down. In those cases I've used Vim with the LargeFile plugin.
No matter how well organized the page is, you still have to do some sifting through the material. The bot is a way to outsource that effort to silicon.
Unfortunately the resolution of your image will decrease with an increasing wavelength so you might end up with a pretty fuzzy radio-picture.
Hegel Music
I'm curious how scpiy and numpy manage it. I'm pretty sure that they have solved some of this before.
He basically did this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsrU2dMBVUQ
No, you misunderstood. Co-working spaces are anywhere from $25-$100/day. Monthly is over $500. (At least in Toronto, I'm sure SF is worse...)
Great project and team!
I totally do not understand the reason for starfighters existing.
Who is it aimed at? Mediocre engineers? Those targeting hedge funds?

First of all, as a boss, I would never hire someone from starfighters without an additional interview. Too many ways for one(s) to game the system. The current interview process
may have faults, but it works out OK for the vast majority of the field. Are Ptacek & co trying to fix a problem that's simply not there?

As a software engineer, why would I even consider wasting my time with starfighters.io when I can simply go do as many traditional interviews as I want, with the top 10 companies in my field (that are also not using starfighters.io), get multiple job offers that I can use for leverage/negotiation, without having middlemen parasitize off of me. And this is exactly what starfighters.io is, a middleman. Historically, middlemen have been tolerated (yet always seen as parasites) whenever they ABSOLUTELY HAD to be there.

Ptacek's background is in computer security (Matasano). Rumor has it that whatever success they had came from consulting (penetration testing).
The single product that they released that I am aware of, a firewall rule manager, didn't seem to go anywhere. One has to wonder what he's doing with starfighters.io.
The benefits described would seem to come from any electronic trading systems; high-frequency wouldn't seem to be neccessary. Also, it assumes the benefits of high-frequency trading are shared with hordinary individuals, which I doubt.

IMHO, it reads like a propaganda piece: A bold, novel, counter-intuitive assertion that freezes the other party and puts them on the defensive, because they never had to think through this kind of crazy idea before. You can throw these ideas out there by the dozen and tie up your opponent, because it takes much longer to refute it than to say it.
"So we need to have next generation of people starting from scratch, questioning everything, otherwise we would be stuck with the old ways of doing things."

This is a very important concept - and one I would like to help illustrate with a thought experiment:

Think of the most liberal, progressive thinker[1] you can from the 19th century. I don't know ... Karl Marx ? Tolstoy ? Lincoln ? Whomever ...

Now, hold that thought ... and think of the most reactionary, "conservative", bigoted, old-fashioned public figure you can ... Mike Huckabee, perhaps ?

I will now suggest that Mike Huckabee, in almost every imaginable measure, is more progressive and liberal than (whomever you chose in step one). Mike Huckabees wife has worn pants. Mike Huckabee has spoken to a divorced woman in public. Mike Huckabee has probably used birth control.[2]

See how fast that happened ? In less than 200 years, the political window has shifted far enough that the most reactionary, right wing member in 2016 is more liberal and more progressive than the most liberal and progressive figures from the prior period.

How will that work if people from 200 (or 300 or 400) years ago are not only still around, but presumably well funded with vast stores of capital ?

[1] let's limit it to very well known, universally recognized figures...

[2] Ok, I'm not sure about that one, but you get the point ...
> For instance, couldn't EME be used to make a system to protect the privacy of people sharing personal videos

Not really. If you want to use the Clear Key key system for privacy, you need to deliver the key over https. (Plain http plus Web Crypto doesn't work against an active adversary.)

To get the key over https, the hosting page needs to be https. Then, due to cross-scheme CORS being prohibited, you also have to fetch the media (MSE segments) over https.

Since https already provides privacy, Clear Key EME doesn't add privacy value beyond protecting against untrusted CDN staff. But if you deliver some JPEGs over the same CDN, you have to trust the CDN staff anyway.

Don't try to post hoc rationalize DRM-motivated constructs as privacy measures.
I would say 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I will go as far as to say that if I had to read one book throughout my life this would be it. Love it.
I actually know people whose job it is to write these things, and to create and maintain sock puppet personas on forums for the purpose of subtly promoting clients' products and disparaging those of competitors.

Then there are the professional reviews, which are all conflicted because most reviewers either get to keep the gear or the gear maker is a sponsor of the site/publication and the reviewer knows it. I say this as a person who's still involved in publishing reviews (of outdoor gear, mostly), and who most of the time gets to keep whatever some company sends me.

However rotten you think the adtech industry is, the state of product reviews online -- user generated, casual forum reviews, professional reviews, etc. -- is worse.

I have a standard rant about the current state of the web that I give all my family and friends, and it always ends with: "if you didn't pay to read it, you probably read an advertisement."
At least in the US there is transparency. Good luck with that in China.
I have to log daily worked hours (eg 8am-6pm). Many people just copy and paste an entire week or month at a time and don't log every single hour, but I prefer to be more exact so that I have some documentation of overtime etc to keep an eye on or refer to.
Of course. It's called my pocket. Did it ages ago.
This was my first encounter with ITAR – the “how dare you
want interesting stuff?” restrictions. Before then I
never realized just how USA, uh…, loves the whole world.

ITAR is a US regulation, and the USA doesn't have jurisdiction on a sale from a Japanese vendor to a Russian customer. You're thinking of MTCR, "an informal and voluntary partnership" between 34 countries. Both Russia and Japan are members: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_Technology_Control_Reg...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Greenland :

> According to a report published in the Science Daily in 2009, the suicide rate in Greenland increases during the summer. Researchers have blamed insomnia caused by incessant daylight.[10]
That is great news indeed! Been waiting forever to try it out on my arm64. Thanks!
> What makes progressive social policies (ignoring loaded issues like reproductive options and gun control) so distasteful to some of those who would most benefit?

I'm not going to claim to answer for anybody but myself -- in large part because (a) I'm an urbanite too and (b) my politics can be least inaccurately described as "anarchist" -- but to me, this question really comes down to one point: respect/maturity.

Much of the modern progressive social policy package sounds to me like somebody saying "Tsk tsk, daddy's little princess deserves better! You sit back, I'll deal with this!" (Wages too low? Have a horrid health insurance plan that doesn't cover what you need? Housing in short supply? Don't fret, Just vote Progressive! We can legislate your woes away!)

That attitude is OK if "princess" is only 8 years old -- but only because a child is not mature enough to make many decisions, nor expected to be capable of executing on them. Should the target of this attitude be 18, it becomes mildly condescending since "princess" is on the verge of being a legal adult. However, should this be directed toward someone who is 28 or 38 [as all universal government policy inevitably must], the concern arises that whomever carries this attitude will never be treating "princess" like a capable, autonomous adult peer.

You may find concern and compassion in the progressive social agenda, but all I will ever perceive is condescension and thinly-disguised contempt.
With N=69 across all scientific disciplines, this isn't really a helpful survey. But it is an interesting list of questions.

It brings up one of my pet peeves. There's no good site for asking for what (usually enterprise) software I should look at. Whenever I ask on stackoverflow they yell at me :)

What I want is legitimate, in depth review of enterprise software and a good forum to ask about how customers use it. With the explosion of SaaS services, what I want is to be able to go somewhere and have this conversation:

me: "what's a good software for organizing 400+ software products my company sells?"

reply: do you mean a Product Information Management database?

me: "yea, (who knew, there's a technical name for that niche). Any good ones?"

reply: do you need an online catalog, or are you using it just internally?

me: "just internally"

reply: try _____ if you need ____, or ___ if you need ___.
I am confused. A few months back everyone was talking about WebAssembly. Now Rust on the Web. Do they conflict each other?
From my perspective though, the best Social Engineering undertakings are targeted in ways that are like one-time-use-zero-day exploits. Or, in other words, the merit of SE is breaking in once, not leaving an open door behind as a repeat attack vector (that's the goal once through the barrier).
Sorry for imprecision -- I meant "players in the recruiting industry", not Starfighter players.

It is probably the case that at least one person who can't FizzBuzz has signed up for Stockfighter, but it's highly unlikely that I end up talking to them regarding career options, and even if I did I'd phrase things more like "OK, so you've got a fun couple of years ahead of you; let me recommend some resources for learning more about programming" rather than being contemptuous of that. Our industry does way too much of that; no need to add to it. Plus, we intend to be in business in 3 years, and even starting from "can't Fizzbuzz" if you're dedicated you could be a really interesting person to try placing in 3 years, so I'll happily spend a few minutes buying a call option.

(I guess that's closer in actual practice to a put option, as I'd be selling the candidate's availability rather than buying it, but you get what I mean by the joke.)
The neoreactionaries flip it the other way; they would shove this thought experiment in the faces of "conservatives" and say, "Haven't you, by any reasonable measure, failed utterly and completely in achieving any of your political goals? Do you have any reason to believe this will change in the future?"
I think he can probably get his points across in half or 1/3rd of the length that he writes. His format of communication may be better suited to podcasting and talking than written. But ultimately, even with his drawn out writing, I derive good value from it by just skimming and speeding through it.
Newrelic: This Week in Modern Software: Banks Embrace the Public Cloud
I'm confused as well. The description on their home page that you cite doesn't match the description they provide on the linked :

> Starfighter, if you're new here, is a company which makes fun engineering challenges that you can play online for free.

I can see how the two things would be related, but it's still confusing brand messaging.
It's palpable if you're in the harder regions, and it's palpable if you're attuned to the local politics. The homophobia is a lot more direct and obvious, but in practice you don't see it much, because you don't see many people making targets of themselves.

A lot of what is true about Estonia though, is true about the whole region to an extent. I don't want to seem like I'm calling Estonia out in particular.
As I mentioned in another comment, the incentives here draw from the protections that derive from several levels of prohibition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11650108
> it would be much nicer to see the nuclear ... climbing at a faster rate.

Good luck convincing a nation of fear mongering people that nuclear energy is safe. The whole argument of not in my backyard comes to mind.

Solar panel prices are dropping fast enough that I may actually consider putting one on my house and keeping my house at a nice 70 degrees all year round.
What about compared to opencv's image handling functions? I've seen Opencv run about 4x faster than pillow for certain operations.
>Is there something about writing that makes it fundamentally less valuable?

For one, the logistics involved are infinitely simpler than for the video, which needs a team of at least 3 and usually 5 to 10 people, plus expensive equipment, props, a script, voice over talent and more.

Second, way more people can write decently than produce a decent startup video. Supply vs demand, etc.

Third, nobody much cares for a piece of writing. A two-minute startup demo video can catch millions of eyeballs. A writing will mostly go unnoticed.

Seriously, I've written for some media outlets and did some technical copy for a few companies. If you think you can get anything like $5K per piece, you're in for a very big surprise.

>E.g. look at that guy who was shorting Lumber Liquidators due to the toxic materials issue. That ended up blowing up anyway, but would you claim that if he had paid someone a couple hundred grand to create really compelling content around that issue (think Groklaw) that he would have been unlikely to see a good return?

He'd pay people "a couple hundred grand to create really compelling content"? Are you in ANY job market currently?

That's of the scale of the whole advance for a very popular book author (think NYT Best Seller list level, and not even all of them) -- not copy writers kind of money by any means.
I'm not bothered by "hello world" performance myself, and I my recent issues with Julia have been caused by rapid development meaning that when I had to put it down for a few months lots of things I had done (because I'm mortal) stopped working. I wrote this off to "it's 0.x, getoverit". I've never tried complex text formatting in Julia either! My concerns are more focused on the type system (this I love) and performance for massive computation (I've still not managed to persuade my Hadoop admin to put julia images across our cluster, but I suppose I might win the argument one day!)
Rust would compile to WebAssembly. As would other languages. LLVM will support a target that will enable this in the future.
Do you know what kind of classification method it is using at the moment?
I didn't find a lot of substance in this article, the message was basically "Alibaba's accounting practice is opaque, so we don't know where the money is." the reminder that in Arabian nights Alibaba was a thief seems to tie up the narrative nicely. Not that I'm buying it.

That said, it is tremendously important to Yahoo! that they understand the real value of Alibaba. No doubt it would be tremendously useful to have transparency on where all the money is coming from and where it is going, presumably these people use a recognized accounting firm to provide audited results for people who want to know?
"I was hoping that we would have found an organism that existed before mitochondria were subsumed into cells. That would be cool"

Wait - isn't that what archaea is ?
"Even 500 would be pretty nice."
I figured it would be about the child sex trafficking done by the rich and powerful, no it's just about tax evasion.
I usually go for "result", but that was also on OP's list. I wish it was a convention to use "r" for retval variables.
I have often wondered about this coming of age of Manipal university. In my times it was primarily a place for those students who could not find admission anywhere else in India through merit, as measured by board examinations of course, but had parents who could buy a seat for the kid with a fantastic sum of money.
> In the early 90s, the next big thing was WebTV, VR, or PDAs. Instead, we got the WWW.

That's kind of confused: WebTV was a predicted next big thing after the WWW (it was, in fact, seen as a progression of the WWW).

Of course, mobile (PDAs, basically) was big in the next wave you cite, and VR is, if not quite big, just hitting the consumer market in a noticeable way now. And WebTV is basically the original SmartTV STBs, which are now an integrated part of most consumer TVs. So, another one that went big, if somewhat later.

> In 2008, the next big thing was casual games, (micro)blogs, and embeddable widgets. Instead we got mobile and the sharing economy.

Microblogging was predicted earlier, and became big (as a key part of 2nd wave social networking -- FB/Twitter, which displaced MySpace, etc.). In fact, its so central to them that its just been absorbed into the concept of what social networking is rather than being called out as a separate, distinct thing anymore.

Ditto with casual games, which then moved from social networking platforms largely to mobile, and while some of the original developers went through a bust after their initial boom, that seems to because the market got more competition, not because it stopped being big. So, of these, the only one that wasn't true either before or shortly after 2008 is "embeddable widgets".

> Now, the next big thing is wearables, IoT, or AI. And who knows what we're going to get?

Well, judging from the success of the other things you point to, probably all three of those (or at worst 2 of 3), but only one of them will hit it big in this wave, and the others will be one-two waves later.
One thing I've found useful is following specific reviewers. For example, Peter Norvig reviews many, many programming and CS texts.

He has both glowing reviews such as this one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R30AQNQK2I1O7P?ref_=glimp_1r...

And scathing ones such as this one: http://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R2C7L5KHUVHOR2?ref_=glimp_1r...

By following several reviewers I respect in each domain I care about, it's not hard to find quality texts (or products) that I'd never have found by typing words into Amazon's search box and looking at average review scores.
Is there any way to make sure it only looks on (English) Amazon sites? I tried it, but it demands to look at all sites according to the description - which may not be the actual case, though.
Overall there seems to be an epidemics of "fakeness" in Internet ratings - even looking on IMDb for movie ratings I see e.g. a movie 7.7/10 but first few pages are unanimously 1-4/10 by what seem like genuine reviewers complaining about being deceived by IMDb to watch the movie...
I think you left out de-industrialisation as one of the major causes.
> I would never hire someone from starfighters without an additional interview

This is the crux of my issue with the product as well. I'm entirely uncertain what a Starfighter candidate gets me as a hiring manager. I'm not going to blindly hire someone because they passed a few levels in an online programming game. The fact that the candidate is technically competent accounts for only 10% of what I test a candidate for in an interview.
Absolutely. Rust does have some advantages here, in my understanding, since it has no GC. I haven't been following the latest wasm stuff, but GC integration is coming later, right?
Tiny $1 STEM-oriented open source hacker board hits Indiegogo
I enjoyed this metaphor even though it's a bit misleading.

Suspension of apoptosis is necessary, but not sufficient, for cancer. We have plenty of non-cancerous cells that rarely or never undergo apoptosis such as neurons or stem.

The implication that immortality = cancer does not follow.
I've been told that the LLVM branch I linked to is 'the most wrong branch you possibly could have linked to'.

This is the right one: https://github.com/rust-lang/llvm/tree/rust-llvm-2016-03-13

Patches are mostly backported from upstream or optimizations.
your source code is checked on the last level
Not their [the hitmens'] cars. "A" car.