skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Privilege isn’t just about money – it’s about a collection of gifts individuals receive from society, regardless of merit.

Those gifts include but aren’t restricted to freedom, time and indulgence. And to say that a person can only contribute to an open source project if they have equivalent freedom, time and indulgence from society as our very most privileged members, is to exclude a great number of people – I’d say 99% of people – who are capable and would be wonderful additions to our community.

So to address your question about privilege being entwined with ability: it is dangerous to assume a relationship between the two. I choose to question my assumptions about ability (because I know that I have biases!), because the truth is that I have no idea about other people until they actually do something. And even then, my understanding of someone else's abilities is often limited to only what I directly observe.

Keeping that in mind opens up opportunities between people. And I prefer that mindset to one that assumes a link between privilege with ability.
Fukushima fearmongers are stealing our Jetsons future
The matter of fact I endorsed only 1 team so far at platinum lvl out of 6 who emailed me
I have worked in this space as well, as a recruiter for full-time roles and now account manager for contract staffing. The biggest thing is getting to know your candidates and understanding their goals, desires, and path. There are so many recruiters who are in the game because they aren't good enough for sales or not really qualified for much else. This gives the industry a bad name. Not a lot of people go through college with the dream of being a recruiter, but many end up there for lack of other options.

Changing the recruitment game is hard because there are so many little IT shops popping up with the low barriers to entry, looking to be a middleman and grab their piece of the pie. They see a $10-15/hr margin in contract staffing and think, wow, this is easy money by just submitting a resume. Of course, these small contract staffing recruitment shops often have offshore recruiters because you pay them 1/5 of what a U.S. based entry level recruiter would make.

I am currently on the path of teaching web development to myself so I can implement my own ideas on small scale rather than relying on finding a willing technical partner. It's rewarding on it's own and gives me a little more insight into the technical world.
I'm no expert of Antivirus software, but figuring whether something is a threat by its _folder name_ ??? With all the money going into the industry? That has to be some sort of april fool's prank gone really bad.
A Year Later–The Windows Phone 7 Numbers That Matter
I hope you don't sack the guy/gal. Support can be grueling.
But if we offer a free alternative with equivalent benefits

That's the thing - you don't. Using the Coke analogy, YCombinator gives me a Coke, but asks that I share 6% of it back to them.

You want to charge me $200 for the Coke, which I can supposedly make back with endorsements, or recommendations, or 'engagement' somehow, but you're still charging $200. That it CAN be free, doesn't mean that it is.

Spelled out more obviously, ignoring travel costs and all incidentals, if I get in to MassChallenge and it doesn't get any traction, I'm out $200.

If I make it in to YCombinator and it doesn't get any traction, I'm out nothing. Also, YCombinator doesn't make any money off of me. They only get 6% IF I SUCCEED, which means that they really want to leverage their connections so that I do.

You might consider not taking equity as somehow more generous, but it's just a different strategy. I would rather you took equity on the backend than $200 on the frontend, because that assures me that you'll want to help me succeed.
9 Women Can’t Make a Baby in a Month (Lean Startup Movement)
LINQ: How To Use LINQ To Query Just About Anything
I found myself chuckling at all the odd little pictures used to denote invalid memory areas or edge conditions (16-bit Windows is a semi-truck stuck in mud, integer truncation is the top of a truck getting shorn off by an overpass). Haha!

This is definitely one of the more colourful technical documents I've read.
HP is comparable to Apple in that they have complete control of their product. Yet I haven't seen anything that makes me believe that the management of HP is comparable to Apple.

Installing webOS on all of their PC's strikes me as a really dumb idea. From what I've read they are not delivering quality PC's these days. Associating webOS with a poor product seems like a bad idea. Also I think a boot menu will confuse the heck out of a lot of people. It seems that they are desperate to show that they are doing something with the product and this is all they could do in a reasonable time frame.

They have already owned Palm for a year and if that's all they got then I'm not impressed. The creativity of HP was seemingly gutted by Hurd and will need to be rebuilt.

We can learn a lot from the troubles Microsoft is currently having updating their phone. An important key to success is turning out to be control of the devices after they are sold. Microsoft is apparently screwed because there are so many players in the process of releasing updates with each having a vote. First Microsoft develops the update but then the device manufacturer and the carrier have to agree to the release and can change the release to fit their own needs. That's not the case with Apple. They control everything. Successful product owners will need to mimic Apple and not Microsoft. They will need a management with stones in order to get that deal if it's even possible now that there are so many alternative products the carrier can provide. Android also has this issue as can be seen by the number of OS versions that a developer has to support.

Where HP has an opportunity is in their enterprise connections. I think this will be a short lived advantage. HP would have to own this market before Microsoft launches an enterprise tablet and reluctance to change gives them the advantage.

HP has a great opportunity because they bought a great product. The odds are better than even that they will blow it.
How long do you plan on being there? How much time will you spend on these tasks in the long run?

If the cost of performing these small tasks over some specified period of time outweighs the cost automating them, and they /are/ in fact easily automated, then I think the answer here is clear: AUTOMATE.

Tasks I've automated:

* Server/OS/software deployment

* Daily calculation of linear regression of email queues on my mail servers

* Webcam snapshots and automatic uploads - http://www.charleshooper.net/blog/automating-webcam-snapshot...

* Most tasks requiring data entry - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2359287

* And lots and lots of other things
160wpm? Really? You're into world record territory there: http://www.owled.com/typing.html
The scary thing is that this publicity might, somehow, be good for the security company.
Ratios for buying an Internet Business
A number of people here pointed out that the writer's original claim to be false positive proof simply because he'd used the tool for a long time was ridiculous. Unfortunately for him he's learning this the hard way.

"The findings are false-positive proof since I have used the tool that discovered it for six years now and I am yet to see it misidentify an item throughout the years."
Next entry actually deals with this exact issue :

http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002133.html
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2391289

It's even getting triggered by an empty SL folder apparently. Looks a lot like some sort of poor taste april fool's prank to me. Come on! A security warning from a folder name... _Really?_
Give me a break, if I want to go search I have any choice I want. There is nothing stopping me from using Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duck Duck Go or any other service. That's the beauty of the web, it's open.
Whilst I agree that people don't set out to become recruiters, I disagree that it's due to a lack of options.

My reasoning for making the switch was simple. My best friend was a recruiter with little to no practical IT experience and average sales patter. He showed me a series of payslips covering a 6 month period where he had earned £70k during that period because of his commission. I was young and exclusively money driven so it was a no-brainer.

As for upskilling yourself, it never hurts. I'm adding to my skills at the moment by learning Python and loving it!
good point on the page-load thing. I wonder if some small technical tweaks could substantially change our behaviour here. Something like automatically flipping back to whatever page you were waiting for, as soon as it's finished loading.
No sales numbers?
I hope the powers that be don't either (after seeing that support ID number), but it does highlight some internal things that I've been observing over the last few months which will not be posted here.
Agent-Based Model to study evolutionary dynamics
Not really. It would look extremely awkward to announce a new port standard and then announce a brand new device that does not have that port, nor comes with a dongle to convert. No ball dropped here.
Non scribe D version: http://djm.cc/library/Calculus_Made_Easy_Thompson.pdf
At least make it non-public.
Full complaint: http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2...

There may be some legitimate claims here -- plenty of mention of where the DOJ has already stopped some anti-competitive behaviour from Google -- but overall it just screams "Google is KILLING us, we can't compete, so obviously there's a monopoly here, so lets legislate instead of innovate."
This has almost no value. This basically says that a proposed vaccine has shown some signs of efficacy in animal models and has not even been tested yet in humans as to whether or not it is safe.

In the field of AIDS, vaccine development has been tragically hard.
Hopefully someone with access to the full article can answer these:

According to the abstract, they tested phones on and muted or off. A phone that is powered on (but not on a call) shouldn't be expected to use the radio much. Is it the case that the only difference was the power being on or off?

Any explanation given for why they compared powered-on vs. powered-off instead of, e.g., airplane vs. non-airplane mode?

Next, every phone I've seen with a mute feature mutes the audio FROM your phone, not TO your phone. Some phones also make a hiss even when they're supposed to be silent. Electronics can themselves hum, sometimes at a high enough frequency that only some people can hear it. Is it possible that there was an auditory difference between the two test conditions?

Cell phones that are off vs. on look different (e.g., screen) and feel different (e.g., heat generation). How was blinding maintained?

Speaking of that, how did they control for one being warmer than the other? Abstract says it was placed on the ear, so assumably the subject could feel that.

When they say that phones were placed on the left and right ears, what do they mean? Hopefully they used a random ear for the "on" phone.
I believe gcc will warn about this, unless you explicitly pass -Wno-pointer-to-int-cast, which will "suppress warnings from casts from a pointer to an integer type of a different size."
Peter Norvig’s Spelling Corrector in 21 Lines of Coffeescript
As long as you don't mix your functional code with imperative code you can stay pure.
>"Or just looking in the directory using another OS"

// What good will that do, so I see that it's C:\Windows\SL\WinSL.exe how do I tell without decompiling it that it's a keylogger? Certainly one could go further to test it but if the company that installed the drive image confirms it's a keylogger it seems reasonable to me to not check further.

If they denied it then yes it needs further corroboration but practically ...
Why I Make Dances
Where are you paying $7.75? I've been looking for an alternative to Godaddy.
A function has an effect. It can be annotated as 'impure' or 'unsafe'. Any function that is not annotated in that way is considered pure.

Pure functions that return a boolean value can be used in the typestate system (ie. typestate calls must not have side effects). 'pure' functions cannot call 'impure' functions, etc.

I'm guessing that's what the quoted sentence refers too.
Are coding katas really worth it?
True Spanking Stories, Volume II
Entrepreneurship is an Art not a Job
April fools came early this year?
That's obviously an April fool's hoax.

I mean Microsoft is bigger and richer than Google, they practically own the desktop OS and enterprise software markets, they won't accuse anyone of anti-trust because they aren't dominating search as well, would they?!
"I don’t believe [meritocracy is] our strongest value, or quality as a community. And, it’s not something that I think embodies what is awesome about Postgres.

Our strongest quality is our ability to create great code."

Let's see...
-great code -> merit
-transparency -> code improvements (best idea wins)

And frankly, the "privileged" people he's talking about contributing to Postgres make the money and lead the lives they do precisely due to their merits as programmers.

Sounds an awful lot like an organization that promotes the best ideas and gives power based on the merit of the people in it to me.
There is the BitC language: http://www.bitc-lang.org/

Sadly they dropped the Lisp syntax.
April fools joke. But nobody can see it because I have a negative score.
Minor nitpick: I think Yahoo has been using Bing search instead of its own.
[IndexedDB] Design Flaws
Apparently that’s not a number that matters.
Beal's Conjecture: A Search for Counterexamples
You should read the article. That's not what they are complaining about- in fact, they acknowledge this directly.

EDIT relevant snippet:

On PCs it is usually not difficult for people to navigate to any search engine. Google in fact makes this point virtually every time someone raises antitrust concerns about their practices. Their defense ignores the hugely important fact that there are many other important ways that search services compete. Search engines compete to index the Web as fully as possible so they can generate good search results, they compete to gain advertisers (the source of revenue in this business), and they compete to gain distribution of their search boxes through Web sites. Consumers will not benefit from clicking to alternative sites unless all search engines have a fair opportunity to compete in each of these areas.
why do you need assessment?

Are you serious? There are a small number jobs that

1. Are very desirable (lucrative, secure, etc.).

2. Require very high mathematical proficiency.

3. Have drastic consequences if performed poorly.

It's self-evident why assessment is an important function of the education system.

The question becomes: is it more important to correctly identify potential engineers and scientists and to maximize their proficiency at their careers, or more important that Joe the Plumber can balance his checkbook when he goes straight into the workforce after his high school diploma?

I doubt that we can optimize both of these cases simultaneously.
This article can be summarized as follows: use size_t and ssize_t when doing pointer arithmetic
A Quick Introduction to Racket with Pictures
Is there a record of the experiment online somewhere?
> Society demands assessment. Government demands assessment. Employers demand assessment.

My college didn't hand out GPAs and all evaluations were narrative. Only on rare occasions has the lack of numbers attached to my performance prevented me from obtaining what I wanted, and even for those cases I remain dubious about the benefits.
Too bad it only shows how fast it cools, but not how much longer it'll retain that temperature! Or is there a different video for that?
Good job Mikito :)
Contribute to serious porn research by taking an anonymous survey (work-safe)
Originally posted in TechCrunch, which was submitted here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387766

Many comments there already.

Further resubmitted here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2390766
At St. John's College in Annapolis, science is taught by reading Darwin, Maxwell, Newton, and so on. It's a mixed bag.
>It's front-line tech support we're talking about here after all.

In the report it was second line and they consulted some other authority (manual, person, we don't know; could have lied) in order to provide an answer to the question of whether the keylogger was installed by Samsung.

Why do they want him off the phone, don't they get paid according to customer contact time? The longer he's on the phone the more money the company makes.
Something like http://www.virustotal.com/ allows you to run a file through a zillion scanning engines. If almost none flag it as malware, you've either found a new sample or a false positive. You'd hope that they've at least checked such a service.
I love Lisps, and I have the same problem. You really have to learn to approach reading code in a different way. Lisp (and Haskell, say) are so information-dense that you just have to look closely at every word to understand what is going on, as opposed to C or Python where you can glance at a "paragraph" of code and get a decent sense of what it is doing , because it is basically executing a set of statements in order. Probably the closest you get to this dense unpacking issue in Python is when reading a gnarly list comprehension.

The upside is that the code actually is smaller, so you have to read less of it. But I agree that it is fatiguing to read dense code that you can't really skim.
I'm a she, and you're leaving out all the things that led to becoming a programmer. Which largely had nothing to do with merit.

The point of the article isn't to discount the work involved in becoming excellent, but to point out that the opportunity to do that work at all is a privilege.

I don't particularly care if any one person changes their thinking about this. My post was meant for my community, which is taking the issue of involvement and its relation to privilege seriously.
What are the two most beautiful words for successful startup entrepreneurs?
Good thing typical small businesses don't rely on software and documents that can only be rendered correctly by Microsoft products anymore. Cuz if that were the case, this suit would be extreme hypocrisy.

Sarcasm aside, this doesn't necessarily invalidate the premises of the argument. Even so, I don't see that current Google offerings have anywhere near the lock-in of Microsoft products.
It's open source software given for free so any slight bit of control Google tries to exercise doesn't really tip the scale to the other side, specially when alternatives exist.

Also I recommend the K-9 mail client, it's very good:
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.fsck.k9
My opinion on history is that it does not matter which set of dates you learn. But it matters that you have learned some set of dates, so that you have context for facts you encounter. Having that context gives new facts more meaning and ability to shape your world view.

Let me give a random fact to illustrate this principle. Mexican silver mining started in 1531, and by the early 1600s Mexico was the source of about 1/5 of the world's silver production. (This happens to be true. And Peru was an even richer source of silver for Spain.)

Suppose you learned a fair amount of American history, as I hope my children will growing up in the USA. This fact gives context for how late the founding of the early English colonies really was.

Suppose you learned something about English history, as I did growing up in Canada. This fact provides context for the English history of privateering, which was one of the causes of the Spanish Armada.

Suppose you learned about central European history. This fact gives context for Spain's wealth, which played an important role in their involvement in the Spanish Netherlands and the Thirty Years' War.

But if you learned no history, this fact has no connection with anything, and has no possible fate other than being forgotten.
They should think about building this into the bottom of an insulated coffee cup. Another good product would be to put the thermal material in a silicon jacket instead of stainless steel so that it could be microwave safe.
Seems reasonable to do the sums in moderate modulo sizes, then for those that pass, give them to a larger modulo system, and only then check them "properly."

Also seems resonable to reduce the work by precomputing many, many results for small modulo values.

Hmm. Can easily speed up by a factor of 10 with some work, but that's not really interesting.

Besides, I actually believe the conjecture.
High-performance computing on gamer PCs, Part 1: Hardware
Review my app: FoodFyt, FaceMash for food
DNS doesn't actually "propogate" geographically, though. It just gets cached and discarded.
Yes they can. VC++ has a setting for 64bit compatibility warnings. I would be surprised if g++ didn't.
Perl is just the the built process of the bundle. Lua is the programming language inside Nginx.

Tir looks nice too. It is more targeted at websocket type applications, although it is general purpose too. Nginx supports more traditional HTTP models, I dont know of any native websocket support for it, but you can of course use it to proxy to mongrel/node or whatever. Nginx has the maturity advantage, and you can use it as a proxy, load balancer, and so on. With the Lua support and these additional modules that taobao developed you get a full environment all in one place.
The Windows Phone Developer Tools, consisting of Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone and Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone have been downloaded over 1.5 million times.

So basically there have been about as many downloads of the developers tools as there have been phones shipped?
Hey Justin,

Sorry to see your reply only now, I don't know if you'll see this answer, but I'm happy to give you some examples of 'big' (to belgian norms) companies that are moving/have moved to the cloud with some applications. Let me know if you're still interested.
Since Rust implements a typestate system, here is a link to the classic 1986 paper by Strom and Yemini which introduces the concept of typestate: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/papers/classic/tse12-typestat...

LtU has a thread on Rust: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4009
In other news, Pot calls Kettle "black." More at 11.
No Errors.
Correct - I suspect that if you ask anyone in the UK where they went to school they'd tell you where they were before university (i.e. primary or secondary schools).
Anti-virus software is essentially useless against attackers writing their own code anyway (evading a few signatures is not that hard).

Of course, these guys are not even trying.
Bob Parsons flew all the way to Zimbabwe and trekked into the wilderness to save the village's crops and do his small part in keeping down the country's elephant population? What a stand-up guy!

Here's a more likely narrative: Bob Parsons wants to kill elephants for sport. Bob Parsons finds out where in the world he can do so legally and with some semblance of morality. Bob Parsons goes there and has a hell of a good time shooting elephants.
Show HN: Node.js console chat (ssh ttychat@chat.syskall.com)
ssh ttychat@chat.syskall.com (pass: hn)

I did this simple chat with Node.js. It basically consists of a server which listens on a UNIX socket and clients which can connect to it. I changed ttychat's login shell to the chat client (ttychat.js) so that anyone who SSHes into the server automatically joins the chat room.

Feel free to fork on Github: https://github.com/olalonde/node-ttychat
Isn't the whole "security industry" a prank gone bad?
Top 10 best apps for kids
1.Miss Spider’s Tea Party for iPad
2.The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs
3.Kids Story books:The Lorax – Dr. Seuss
......
More:
http://www.popkidsapps.com/