skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, it's pretty remarkable... Buffett always thinks of her as one of his role-models. It's why his goal is to work past 100 just like her: http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2010/08/27/on-80th-birthday-buffe...

One of Buffett's greatest skills I think is identifying entrepreneurs who share his intensity and love for business.
Or, instead of this breathless narrative, we can acknowledge that this is a standard boilerplate legal safeguard employed by hundreds of companies, particularly those that rely on intellectual property or creative work.

But that would require you to Google ["unsolicited ideas" policy], the first two SERPs of which would tell you that the same safeguard is published at Taser, Sling, Fujifilm, eBay, Zynga, Husqvarna, Krispy Kreme, LG, McDonalds, Dickies, American Spirit Tobacco, Reynolds, Nabisco, and The Late Late Show With Craig Furguson (and all other CBS shows).

If you wanted to be creative, you could also use advanced Google-fu in the form of ["unsolicited ideas" (cisco|google|adobe|microsoft)], whereupon you'd learn that all those companies also have that safeguard.

Sheesh.
It's much more about avoiding potential legal liability issues in the future. I wouldn't be surprised if all the large tech companies have similar clauses.
I completely agree on the "vanishingly unlikely prosecution" and "accepting the obvious" of code already being available. Off the top of my head, I can think of only one person who has been in this particular hot water over the years; Phil Zimmerman for his PGP work [1].

For me at least, it's not a matter of whether or not I will get in trouble, instead, it's whether or not I can get in trouble?

It's just like copyright infringement; you can probably get away with it, but it's still illegal.

The question now is if it's now legal to export crypto code?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann#Criminal_invest...
There was no prediction in NetQuake. The main reason for QuakeWorld was the addition of client-side prediction. It was pretty controversial and many people stayed with NetQuake.

Even back then many people (including id software) had ISDN, T1s, or college connections that had the kind of latency most people have today.

This was also in the days when LAN parties and LAN events were much more popular.
I'm wondering what the legal and ethical stances are on accessing botnots?

Technically, the researches didn't "hack" into the infected computers because they registered a domain they calculated would be next up on their flux algo.

But none the less, they were receiving all kinds of sensitive.

Finally, I also wonder whether they didn't shut down the bot net (or change the flux algo, to prevent the gang regaining control)?
If that is common, it is very very bad. It means startups are not doing real innovation mostly. What is even worse is that once this starts to be established way of business, startups will be more and more group of good hackers producing a good product but perhaps not outstanding, waiting for some big acquisition.

In the long term this can completely killed innovation.

What was very good with the model of creating a startup to create things that really users want, in order to earn money, is that people tend to give money to a company only when the product they do is really something worthwhile.

This was what happened to the big startups in 70s and 80s.
This drives innovation.
something that occurs me is that the server has to keep track of every point of every player to track collisions, basically a table of "playerID,x,y,timestamp", so when the client gets a status update, instead of receiving the current position of other players, he would get the moves of all players since the last update, limited to the x1,y1,x2,y2 of the client's viewport. Then the client would normalize the data (over time)?
FWIW: The original paper is from 2009 and can be downloaded at http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~seclab/projects/torpig/

edit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=593246
It's a good point, what I mean is, the big company gets 50% not to provide more money now, but to play the role of the few first next rounds if the company will be worth it, but ensuring the founders less dilution.
Anyone know what his full stack is?
You may be right. But how is anyone supposed to approach Apple with business proposals under these conditions?
The thing to remember here is that these systems, to the point they are today, were built by teams of people over lengthy periods of time. There are many pieces that have to be looked at from the wiring infrastructure, location, network equipment, monitoring solution, server solution, backup solution, security, OS, etc... While an individual may be capable of putting together an comparable infrastructure with only one or a few servers, once you cross a threshold with requirements and capabilities it would be almost unbelievable to find a single person who could complete the project to the same scale.
Zed Shaw counters:

http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2010-01-19.html

http://oppugn.us/posts/1286944278.html
How would you ever find yourself on the same plane as the other players? Or even on any plane that they had ever been on? If the trails are infinitely thin lines arbitrarily positioned in 3D space then it's effectively impossible to hit them.

You could quantize them on some or all of the axes but I would find that less elegant than keeping the game in continuous space and making the trails planar somehow.
Things Babies Born in 2011 Will Never Know
Great $self->patOnBack() but web spam is a huge unsolved problem

And if you'd read the linked papers (or even the summary page for that matter) you'd have read that this has nothing to do with web spam - only the traditional, meaty email kind.
You forgot http://www.toomanylists.com.

Oh wait... That's cause I haven't finished it yet :-D
Probably be my November App for 2011 as well as 2010
It seems to me that this is a classic case of "guess the answer I'm looking for". The interviewer is obviously impressed with the concept of a Bloom filter, and I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with Bloom filters, but that kind of thinking in an interview is dangerous. What if the interviewee disagrees with your views, and has strong arguments to use a completely different approach? Would you accept them, would you at least aknowledge them as valid, or would you stick with your solution as 'the only right way to do it'?
I think he's mostly complaining about people overusing these features.
couldn't this be done easier with just a ssh tunnel?
Isn't this pretty standard?
Like a professional: by arranging an introduction, and asking for a meeting about your idea.

The reason every company in the world has this document somewhere is that crackpots will send random documents to them ("here is my proposal for an Apple telephone, I call it the Apple Telephonogram Pro, and it uses lasers") and then later sue them when they release an overlapping product ("the iPhone is a rip-off of my Apple Telephonagram Pro!").
How many great novelists were English majors?
It's a pretty standard policy, actually. They're trying to prevent frivolous lawsuits down the road. Imagine, if you will, that, all the way back in 2007, someone sent Apple an unsolicited idea for an awesome new product called the iPad: it should use the iPhone OS, but be bigger than an iPhone! Basically, it should be an oversized iPod touch, they say.

A couple years pass, and Apple announces...an oversized iPod touch called the iPad! This 9.7" multitouch device ever-so-closely resembles the three year old suggestion. The guy who sent in his unsolicited idea files suit in east Texas suggesting that Apple 'stole' his idea.

Here are some other, similar policies:

http://www.microsoft.com/About/Legal/EN/US/IntellectualPrope...

http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/about_canon/standard_display/a...
"The sole purpose of this policy is to avoid potential misunderstandings or disputes when Apple’s products or marketing strategies might seem similar to ideas submitted to Apple."
If any such list of rules was pinned to the HP garage wall, they were probably a lot more pragmatic. "1) Open kitchen windows when using oven to cure paint. 2) ALWAYS remove panels from oven before Lucile gets home."
No.

(The parent was edited; originally, it read, ", but doesn't this just mean that the same narrative applies to all those companies too").
The NYC tech scene has a ton of problems. One I encountered is recruiting good programmers:

1) Living in NYC is expensive and if you are struggling on a startup you will see friends making several hundred dollars an hour as consultants.

2) Wall Street pays software developers a ton of money and then trains them on legacy technology and rewards them for having incredibly specialized skill sets (I worked with a brilliant programmer in NY who only wrote ".h" header C++ files. I mean that's all he ever did and made several hundred thousand a year.)

3) VC's in NY hate software developers and believe that business people should run everything. This is a deep prejudice, that comes from the finance people on Wall St. treating their technology people poorly. In NY finance companies I've seen incredibly talented programmers who make several hundred thousand a year who were forced to use up a vacation day if they went home early to check on their sick kids. I don't even understand why a company would pay people so well and then treat them like crap.

4) Software developers in NY don't understand the value of equity, they have no personal success stories to look at and are used to being paid huge sums of cash in bonuses.

5) I can say this from years of experience: In NYC being an investment banker or trader will get you laid, being an entrepreneur/programmer at a startup totally won't.
The internet is a continuum beyond physical locality. That was why we (humans) invented it.

It's no so much that the author is right or wrong, but he speaks from a perspective that is not relevant. Good for the companies built outside of Silicon Valley. Who said for Silicon Valley to win, everyone else needs to lose?
Yahoo!! tried this with Brickhouse. They opened a pseudo-startup innovation lab in SF. I don't know all the details, but iirc, it was 30-100 people for 1-2 years.

This failed utterly.

Why? Once a company is beyond a certain size, employees maximize their expected value by spending time seeking internal resources. Budget, headcount, etc. If the lab is still part of the parent company, these games are still played.

You also have companies like Hulu, that exist at the pleasure of their "investors." This might work a little better, but Hulu can't act fully in self-interest.

Perhaps the best thing I can think of is a spinoff with initial funding, control of its own board, and an irrevocable IP grant. This would potentially be a huge head start. But then what happens if a competitor acquires your spinoff (for the IP grant) right away?

I guess all this seems more fraught with risk than the simple buy a random startup model.
Come on. I think the context is pretty clear. If a group of novelists are discussing how writing is inherently hard, would you let them know you don't understand how they can say writing is hard? After all, you learned how to write when you were five or six by picking up "See Spot Run" and then stringing together some nouns and verbs of your own...
Back in the '90s, there was all manner of drama surround the "export" of RSA code. People got it patented, or mailed it printed on paper, or had "non-exportable" T-shirts printed (I bought one of those T-shirts in 1995; this was before SSL, so I had to send the vendor the bank account information off the bottom of a check).

If those rules were still germane, just note that they've been violated many hundreds of times on Hacker News.

I'm glad the government clarified these rules, but there's no genuine practical impact to this announcement.
You're absolutely right, of course.

But nevertheless, it's still a funnier jab with Apple than it would be with any other company.
This is a fantastic article - as are most of the technical materials that Tim Sweeney wrote way-back-when. The Unreal system was my first introduction to the architecture of "real" object oriented apps and I refer back to these articles from time to time as a sanity check.
Interesting. Are sites such as http://pusherapp.com and other hosted comet/websocket/push services basically their competitors?
IPO Readiness: How Facebook And LinkedIn Compare To Previous Tech Giants
Haha I think it's actually a case of Apple should make it's App Store license and operations more flexible. And clearer.
And be more communicative.

I'm actually serious about all the above points.
My first hypothesis is that it's a question of comparative opportunity cost, rather than absolute cost.

When a company gets very large, it usually struggles to keep innovating under inertia. Trying to build in completely new directions becomes both necessary and difficult. Buying a startup is often cheap compared to trying to fork an existing team to build new things. Furthermore, the startup's business model is already partially proven by time of acquisition - so they are buying some certainty compared to assigning a team to generate new ideas.

Another hypothesis is that with the resources of a large company behind it, the startup may grow very fast. Adobe seems to be good at this. Other companies don't seem as good at managing post-acquisition.

I have never been in or acquired by a large company, however, so what I say should come with a grain of salt.
Right; and so that's why all my wealth belongs to the public. I got it. Thanks for clearing that up.
I submitted the idea for GarageBand to Apple. I think it was through a bug report or some other generic contact Apple form. I was a senior in college at the time. I asked for a basic music loop program with an iCal interface.

I didn't really care about ownership of the idea. I just wanted the program made.

The fact that they made GarageBand was probably just a coincidence, and not based on my idea (since they already had sound editing programs like Final Cut and Soundtrack), but I was still pretty happy when they announced it.
Interesting idea. I wonder how the guarantee of future funding without dilution would affect the founders' mindset though.
I suppose its because the same code serving millions instead of thousands might be worth 1000x as much.

If you invented a process that turns lead into gold, how much has been converted so far really doesn't affect how much the patent is worth.
Why Israel is innovative (starts at minute 10:20)
Yes I think the startup branch should be a separated company, with a clear separation of management and so forth. Just the mother company has some specific rights that can use after a given amount of time a given startup was created and under specific terms. So that in the end it's really a lab without the weight of the big company, but the big company can avoid paying a lot of money, especially if the final aim is often to hire.
What is the story behind the source code at that site? It looks like letters have been randomly replaced by look-alike HTML entities, but to what end?
The strongest points are 1) and 2): monocultures have a negative impact, and living in a city is inherently a social experience. Let's say NY and Silicon Valley are equal in the extent they are monocultures, it's apparent Silicon Valley comes out on top as the monoculture there is technology oriented.
Now, looking at population density and opportunity for forming diverse social connections, I'd expect a larger denser city to come out on top.
Answers to the above seem to also be answers to Richard Florida's question of where do the creative types go.
Same space, different offering. If you want _mobile_ push notifications, you need a mobile app in the App Store/Android Market that can hook up to APNS/C2DM, et cetera. Notifo does that.
I Predicted "Obama Internet ID" In October
Cool, but it seems like they missed a bit of a chance by not printing a simple system keyless flute. Less impressive looking, I suppose, but as long as they were careful with their CAD model design, it probably would have worked perfectly on the first try.
Russian Team Prepares to Penetrate Lake Vostok
Is Timothy Egan of the NY Times an ageist?
Can't his arguments be made for any old person marrying any younger person? Rupert Murdoch? Howard Marshall?

So if his daughter was growing up in the 50's and she was shown pictures of a black person and a white person (Obama's parents?) - she could have reacted with an eeeewwww.

Thoughts from an enlightened HN community?
I agree. I can only assume that the article is an example of one possible line of solution.

Given the performance characteristics of human typing speed I would use a disc-based database. Simple to implement.
Apple keeps an internal fork of WebKit that has numerous abilities not in their public trees, which happens to be why Android and WebOS both have totally incompatible mechanisms for adding multi-touch support to JavaScript despite iOS having been out with that functionality for years prior.
Because it's almost strictly better for them to acquire an outside company than it is for them to innovate internally, and it's easy to see why: many startups will vie to succeed with substantially similar ideas, and an acquirer can choose among them to optimize their outcome.

In some cases, the acquirer can win simply by waiting for a company to prove itself in the marketplace. They pay a small premium to instantly become the market leader relative to the risk-adjusted cost they'd have to pay to ensure an internal effort resulted in the same market position.

In other cases, the acquirer knows it's going to dominate the market once it enters with an acquisition. It wants to know whether a product is going to succeed, and what features customers are going to value most highly. So it can sit back, watch the market shake out, and then buy the best also-ran at a major discount to the valuation of the market leader.

These are decision factors that aren't open to companies that innovate internally. That doesn't make internal innovation bad; it just argues in some cases for M&A instead.
> And a new every day, I'll bring The first bill, since that was a beer Me too!. I don't, but some PHP servers aren't set up 64 pixels.

Pretty accurate stuff.
Multiplatform development with Delta Engine
</narcissism>

More importantly, Government 2.0 is expanding faster than I had ever anticipated. It's great to see the Obama admins utilizing web technology to create better systems!
All software is meta. Even when it is controlling effectors.
the original poster of the link could have been a little
more professional and saved the potential beta testers
the time to look into why they would want to beta test
for the site.

To be fair Chad was a bit rushed while submitting this; just running out the door to pick me up as we were cutting it close for a drive down to Mountain View to meet with pg.
GenderFromName - Guess the gender of an American first name (PHP)
Thank you, that was an incredibly insightful reply. It would probably be easier for me to gain entry via the software aspect, however I'm leaning towards the hardware aspect as you described above. So, to give a solid answer to your question above, I'd choose "between" (or even just hardware). Books on this subject matter seem relatively obscure though. Perhaps I shouldn't look for "forensics" books, but rather just detailed books on some of these devices and how they work.

Your explanation of the emotional toll taken is especially insightful and makes me even more intrigued. Admittedly though, I didn't think people working in computer forensics would witness or have to work on situations involving brutal or violent crimes; not that it would deter me from pursuing the career. I imagined it mostly comprised of corporate crimes. I did read about people having to deal with things like "snuff films" or child pornography; I can imagine people becoming jaded and having a cynical outlook on humanity after working on things like that.
That is an excellent question. I've only seen capital pi used for repeated multiplication. I, too, would like to know what it means in this context.

I don't know if you missed it, but the author links to a PDF that mentions this notation in the abstract. I haven't had a chance to digest it, though:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Murthy91.pdf

Edit: Behold...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descriptive_set_theory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetical_hierarchy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_hierarchy
Even the tone of the article was dismissive of developers. "The previous revolution was all silicon and algorithms. This one's social".

Tard.
Proof by contradiction requires a high degree of precision because the desired result is a false statement. Whereas, for example, proof by construction requires an exactly correct answer.

For example, proving a^2 + b^2 = c^2 by construction requires ending up with the exact correct answer. Ending with a^1.8 + b^2.5 = c^3 isn't good enough. You may not know where the problem in your proof is, but you know there's a problem.

Whereas with contradiction you just get something like 1 == 2, which is clearly false. So did you arrive at that because of the contradiction or a mistake in the proof? Its really impossible to know.

With that said, I must admit that contradition feels like the only way to prove NP/P -- although I'm not a theorist and don't really know the latest techniques, but just from an amateur it seems that contrapositive/construction/direct/etc allow for solutions to this problem.
What a coincidence, I was just on the node.js site planning to write something new with it when I saw this. I implemented a heartbeat-based web stats service but it's too resource-intensive to run affordably on Apache/MySQL. I hope to write the little script that records the heartbeats in node.js with mongodb instead.
I don't have an iPhone because of this walled garden approach to software on it. I'm glad that this has happened as maybe there will be fewer walled garden type situations in the future. It is a pity for users who miss out on VLC but they've made a choice by buying a product that's locked to a single marketplace for apps and they have to live with that.
The article mentions that the botnet's owners regained control after ten days. So it seems they did not get the chance to destroy it.
In theory, this is an interesting idea. I'm not sure an entrepreneur who has (or believes they have) a truly big, scalable idea would want to give up 50% of his/her company for a first round of funding, no matter how large.
I wrote it and I'll respond - I do like the concept of a Bloom Filter and do think it's a pretty good solution to this problem but I don't really expect anyone to get to that stage on their own - and very few people do. What I use it for is as a destination and when we finally get there we get to talk about it. You can get a sense of how good a developer is based on how quickly they grasp the concept as well as the discussion that ensues.

I view an interview as more of a conversation and love learning about new concepts.

I think any question can be dangerous in the wrong hands and suffer from the "guess the answer I'm looking for" so it's always up to the interviewer to be unbiased.
From an entrepreneur's perspective, being in bed with one corporation to this extent significantly reduces your options and flexibility. Sounds more like you'd be an employee in a skunk-works than a real entrepreneur in this type of setup.
I forgot to mention that I do hear the disc based solution quite a bit and it's definitely a valid response given the problem description. But I would still say "let's say you don't have any disk space, how would you go about the problem?" while still acknowledging that the answer was valid.
Darpa Big Dog Disko
Philosophy and Lisp
would it throw off adsense, making other terms stand out?