skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, true insight requires a level of understanding usually obtained through a focused effort to understand all the components that make up the idea, several levels deep.

Explaining the end result -- the epiphany -- to someone else is often difficult because most will have gaps in their understanding that prevents them from seeing it they way you do and therefore they will have limited ability to verify and understand the significance of what you what you are saying.

See http://jamesthornton.com/blog/how-to-get-to-genius
Richard Feynman said you don't really understand something unless you can explain it to freshmen in a single lecture. Same concept, really.

The interesting consideration, to me, is how much we can get done with hardly any understanding at all. That's human nature. We do things, then we wonder how, and then we eventually come to understand what the hell we just did. It seems bass-ackwards, but that's the way it goes most of the time.
It's humorous how the Club Penguin blog describes what happened:

"As some of you heard, Club Penguin's domain name (clubpenguin.com) had a technical glitch this weekend. The technical glitch has been fixed, but it will take some time for the site to appear as it should around the world."

Really it was a billing glitch, but a technical glitch sounds so much more forgivable.
So now you see. The pragmatic side of me says that it is better to err on the side of the individual than the side of the ginormous government.

That's why I support getting rid of the income tax altogether.
The images on the leaked photos are clearly photoshopped so the apps look like an iPhone.

Unfortunately, I will only take that announcement seriously when I see a review of a working N9. It all smells of unfinished beta going to production.
@r00fus: You hit it on the nail. I was actually involved in creating all of the initial reports for upper management for statistical purposes (metrics). It's because management had no clue what anyone was doing because the team grew too quick too fast. I was fortunate at looking at the numbers of 30+ developers. Everybody had to enter their time. Even if you spent 10 minutes reading email, you enter it. I am not exaggerating. All the numbers were bullshit. Everybody made sure to have 7.5 hours. All the numbers were padded. The metrics didn't actually reflect the truth, just how people padded their numbers.

@devicenull: I have done that as well. You basically program using the "leap of faith" methodology. You're never 100% sure that what you wrote won't break something. You rely on others to validate your work. Assuming the "others" know what to do.
By definition, the worst of the abusers will benefit the most so why would they ever see anything wrong?
I couldn't agree more that his sports analogy is WAY off base. These athletes are all at the top of the top of the top of the top of the world in their sport. And they are getting paid millions. That model runs COMPLETELY against everything he is trying to prove.

However, to what order of magnitude you want to take the discussion can be looked at, 1,000 youth hockey players vs. 5 pros on the ice would be kinda hard to sort though....

As for his investment firm example, I think the who you know, and your firms institutional knowledge play a larger part in that game. So much so that it's not a valid analogy.
I second you. I long for a cell phone having the same keyboard as my old-glorios Nokia 9300 (also known as "brick"). Forget about blackberries, that was the best cellphone to type __ever__
FreeBSD MD5 is pretty strong— Its randomly salted and runs 1000 iterations of MD5. None of MD5's weaknesses are especially relevant in this context.

The most important thing is the how slow it is, and it's likely that if they'd taken defaults bcrypt would actually have been faster.

The saddest thing is that many of the people howling about MD5 are proposing weaker alternatives like straight SHA-512 with a static "salt" embedded in the source code.

In fact, MTGOX almost deployed such a replacement in their upgrade until they were cluesticked by people screaming to not invent you own cryptographic functions.
I think the comment does a lot to derail one of OP's foundational points: Americans work much, much more than other countries. Comment argues that, well, we work lots, but not smart.

I'd be interested to see how corporate profits parse across sectors--it's likely the finance industry is responsible for the increase in profits.
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A few come to mind (and I'm not saying I approve/disapprove of any of these):

1. Rehabilitation
2. Isolation (get them off the streets)
3. Revenge
4. Deterrence

Edit: is there a way to format a list on HN?
> I don't know if many researchers, for example, who usually know their field quite well, would be willing to volunteer their skills.

They already do, when they referee papers. Journal peer review is unpaid. This text-reviewing idea could find its way into the system as something similar. Especially since the reviewers might have a better incentive. Journal peer review helps fellow researchers. But if I'm planning on using a text, then helping to review it helps me -- and my students.
If such code even exists why would it require them to enter a password?
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Like the "God gene"?

I think your #4 may actually be rooted in evolution - there's some evolutionary advantage in family ties.
As it could so easily be seen as bashing/trolling I need to preface this question by saying that I'm asking in complete seriousness.

How does one accidentally set the failure mode of any piece of authentication code to escalate privileges instead of denying them? Even when I was first learning to code web apps I never found myself accidentally accepting any password.

It's shocking (to me, at least) because it seems like such a beginner mistake.
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They're concept renders.
The limit concept was introduced by Cauchy but lacked a rigorous definition until Weierstrass came along. In the absence of such a definition, Cauchy committed some infamous errors involving nested limits, e.g. he ascribed properties to continuous functions that actually require the stronger assumption of uniform continuity. Take into account that Cauchy's treatment of calculus was by far the most rigorous for its time, so he was hardly careless in these matters. If everything was as straightforward and obvious as you imply, neither Cauchy's nor Weierstrass's work on the foundations of calculus would have served any meaningful purpose.

The more you learn, the more you come to realize that the nature of the real numbers is deeply mysterious and not to be treated lightly. That's not to say you cannot convey many useful intuitions to students without the somewhat abstruse formal machinery.
Just emailed them the following:

Dropbox Team,

For the duration of the event described in the post on your blog on Sunday I'd like the time of login and IP address of any authenticated sessions during the window. I'd also like to understand why a post from one of your customers linked to via hacker news was the only notification I received as one of your paying customers. If you know which user accounts we logged into during the event it seems rather straight forward that you would notify those impacted. It seems clear that had a 3rd party not brought this to light you'd have felt it unnecessary to notify your customers.

I look forward to your prompt response.
Doesn't matter how much encryption you have on data if your decrypting it for the wrong people.
I'd take a look at this link: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/12/9-important-things-sell-sta...
It's actually not very flexible. I've seen field trials of this. It is an interesting concept but not very implementable.

You could do the same data transfer by having the phone display a barcode and use a barcode scanner.

They claim that outfitting an existing system with an NFC reader costs $100 to $800. Which is not true. An NFC dongle is under $20. They are looking at costs of NFC stand alone terminals (w/ LCD display, etc.) and that high cost is due to secure element and certifications those have to go through to work w/ Visa/Mastercard networks.

It is an interesting technology and has its uses but not as an NFC replacement.
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Growing up in Germany we had "Religion" as a first-class citizen in the curriculum, all the way through 13th grade. Where I grew up we were almost exactly 50% Protestant, 50% Catholic so we split up in those groups for our classes. You (your parents) could declare yourself non-religious and skip those classes but few did, even though almost nobody I knew said they believed in god. The Religion classes, which were part history, part ethics classes were actually one of my favorite subjects even though I can't remember ever in my life believing in a supreme being of any sort.
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At a guess, you could probably get a few kbits.

But you really would get better results for video. Just using some round numbers from QR codes for an example, 33 px * 33 px * 15 Hz = 16 kbit, which is much more even allowing for the metadata overhead and an error-correcting protocol.
Absolutely, they are endorsing the Chinese yuan by acknowledging it's a legitimate currency. Why do you think countries make such a big deal about who has embassies with whom?

If you accept a currency, you are implicitly saying "I agree that this thing you have given me has value."
The way I see it is that a teacher may help a pupil to understand something by identifying the pupil's misconceptions. These are unique to the pupil and the teaching process includes to-and-fro questioning aimed at identifying and blasting them away.

(Teaching a group of N pupils is hit and miss, since a teacher can't go in N different directions at once. Instead he explains something in different ways until the common misconceptions have been covered. He doesn't know what these are until he has taught many classes on the topic.)
Personally, I'm not a very technical person, so I'd probably not attend events like this. I'd definitely be interested in a general HN meetup, though.
Has anyone seen comparable numbers for Facebook Places? I used to be a Foursquare junkie, but when FB Places came out I pretty much stopped using the app...
Agreed. This would be like a major bank saying "for a 4-hour window yesterday, anyone could withdraw money from anyone's account. But don't worry, it's not a problem, because only a few people actually did."
Ha, sorry. I should have said educated people from a mostly-white country.

It's funny, immigration is a big issue here (see this, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_immigration_detentio... or this video of our last federal election debate, where two people fall over each other for 10 minutes talking about how much better they'll be at stopping The Boats: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUBrpzRPMf4) but Australians really only worry about a horde of Southeast Asians and Chinese (and lately Arabic countries too).

As a slight digression, the African-American situation in the USA is quite unique. We have a dark-skinned indigenous population, but they are more similar to Native Americans in terms of proportion, perception and public policy. 12% of Americans are African-American, vs 1.3% Native American; 2.5% of our population is indigenous.

We never really had anything like the USA's race riots of the '60s. Affirmative Action based on race never really happened here except in a quite minor way (special government grants and university positions). No Martin Luther King, but we did have Eddie Mabo, who fought and won a famous native title claim.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that, while race is certainly an issue for some Australians, we are, as a culture, much less aware of the distinction between ethnicity and country of origin. We're not worried about "Americans", we are worried about "Chinese".

As far as I know, there's nothing even on the immigration forms about skin colour, so even if the government were prejudicial in that way there'd be no way for them to know. When we discriminate, it's by country of origin. You can check out this hilarious table that categorises student visas by "immigration risk": http://www.immi.gov.au/allforms/pdf/assessment-levels.pdf - note, for example, that a Puerto Rican studying a PhD gets a level 2, while an American doing a hairdressing course gets a level 1 (highest).

I should say as well, lest I give a bad impression of Australians, that the majority of people you're likely to meet are fine. As you get further away from the city centres, you get lower incomes, less education, more babies, and more racism. I think that's probably the same anywhere though. Unfortunately, politicians need their votes as much as ours, which means some crazy immigration grandstanding sometimes.
In fact, they should add this permanently to the UI, like Gmail.
I see a kickstarter project!
Yes except the God gene hypothesis posits that we evolved to worship something (anything really), while I believe that we evolved to worship specifically other individuals (and God is just a byproduct of abstract thought combined with propensity for belief in magic powers of certain individuals).

The #2 and #4 were probably the driving factors (selected for by evolutionary pressure) for structuring the brain such that #1 and #3 also became possible as consequences. I don't literally believe in the God gene because I think that religious and mystical thinking are simply corollaries to possessing a brain structured for belief in magical power of other (attractive or otherwise powerful or desirable) individuals or even objects (idols).

I like to imagine this as nodes on a network where nodes are individuals/objects and each connection is a desired property linking the individual/object to other desired individuals/objects. Obviously, some nodes will be more connected than others. Our brains interpret (scan) this network, and past a certain threshold (with very densely connected nodes -- associated with many desired characteristics), religious/magical thinking is triggered such that our brains are led to believe that the very densely connected nodes are so powerful they are out of this world.

I thought about this long enough that I no longer find religious thinking perplexing even though I am a staunch atheist. Some people understand/understood how to trigger this religious response -- those people are/were prophets, founders of religions (Hubbard etc.) and, believe it or not, pop stars and certain state leaders... This is also why I think there is a serious danger that a strong AI may learn to exploit this bug in our brain...
Google adds voice input to homepage search
"Have we become so culturally invested in the allure of the Free Agent, the lone wolf, the techno-rebel with a cause, that we are prepared to shower millions of dollars (maybe tens of millions) on a small number of superstars rather than a well-assembled team that may not dazzle with individual brilliance, but overwhelms with collective capability?"

Who said it was about free agents? Those 5 aren't going to code alone, they're going to be working with 4 other people. And they're going to be much better at that too.
Look into something with an HSA (Health Savings Account). That lets you put pretax money into an account to pay for medical expenses, and will have a relatively high deductible (and thus a lower premium).
I appreciate that the writing style isn't for everyone, but he's not "some guy", he's one of the best writers of our time. Don't worry though, others have made your mistake: http://kottke.org/11/04/infinite-jest-blindly-judged
> Journal peer review is unpaid.

Oh okay, that's good to know.

> Journal peer review helps fellow researchers. But if I'm planning on using a text, then helping to review it helps me -- and my students.

Hmm, that's a good point, though, of course, it would depend on the researcher and how well established/organized the framework is. Perhaps it's worth looking into the history of arXiv...
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I intentionally made the submission title different than the article title to be very distinct about what has been done. The original title "Google Voice Search offers natural user input" is not specific to the content of the article.

While the original article is 6 days old, I just noticed the voice input option being live on the google homepage now.
This also means they're dropping IE8, which generally is considere to have largest market share at the moment when IE10 comes out, which is already in Beta.
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There appears to be a real market demand for a currency that is not controlled by a national government, especially one that has the features of cash-like transactions. That bitcoin is lacking as an implementation is immaterial, people want it for whatever reason.
>fault of the Mt Gox admins

Mt Gox is run in such amateurish way, it's appalling.

In real life, with many brokers you trade doesn't close in 3 days and as such you can't withdraw proceeds from the trade for 3 days (but you can use the proceeds to continue trading).

In this situation Mt Gox is effectively both exchange and the broker. Not to have rule in place to block funds from recent transactions is like people who designed it never traded real stock with real brokers.
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Applicant-submitted code samples don't correlate strongly with hiring decisions, in my experience. They're too easy to fake, and don't capture the things you want to know about interpersonal communication, thinking style, etc.

Yes, by themselves they're not much good, but if you explicitly ask for a recent piece of code that they're proud of, you can ask them questions about it: "Why did you use data structure X?", or "How does function Y work?" Much, much harder to fake.
I am not related in any way to the creators, I just found it and thought it was cool.
This is why playing within a broken system is such a pain in the ass and doesn't allow a reform of the system. If everyone followed the EFF's example no one would be trading Bitcoins. Worried about fucking tax evasion and tax laws, wtf.
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It became the biggest crime because copyright control means control of what people can see, hear and talk about. There's a lot of money to be made in censorship and controlled conversations with consumers.
I agree. My pet peeve with this article is that it isn't pointed in the right direction.

So what if someone wants to believe ghosts or aliens exist? He's certainly correct in saying that it CAN be a problem when things get too intense, but that only happens in a relatively small number of cases.

The place where the BS meter needs to be pointed is squarely at the people who have influence over our social and political policies. THAT would be an interesting book, though far more difficult to write I'm sure.
What you're missing is that the 1000 player hockey team would completely dominate the 5 hockey all-stars. 998 of them would check 4 stars into oblivion while 1 guy spent the rest of the period making hundreds of shot attempts per period until the game was won.
Bridge and Northfield? Far from UW eh.

But very close to work. Didn't know there were tech startups around that area.
Can I piggy back on this to spruik my Mac window manager here?

I posted a separate submission this morning but it hasn't seen any attention and I thought it would really appeal to HN's:

Window & tab switching with 'type to search' for OS X
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2675963
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Any plans of supporting multiple clusters at once? It seems like currently there is only one or nothing
You're assuming their internal tools have the same fields and field validation requirements as public-facing login mechanisms, while is likely not the case.
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Yes thats on my todo list.. but its less essential. At the moment my top-of-the list is getting it to copy back logging from each node. I want this to happen automatically after a certain interval so in case the node goes down you still get your logging data.
There was a time when you could volunteer to pay for anyone's domain simply by using Verisign. Even further back and anyone who could fill in a form could get a domain for free.
OK, Negative Nellie here:

Do all the popups on Stack Overflow factor into the performance measurements? My last three visits I had a "welcome back ... blah blah blah" popup as well as the orange "you've got a badge or something" popup. I love Stack Overflow, but the popups are distracting. I have a must-close-popups-OCD disorder, so if I measure performance as the time it takes from clicking my bookmark to being able to use the site, it's been in the 5-digit millisecond range.
They should. Could also do what Facebook (optionally) does: require you to send them a 4-digit code via your phone to allow access to any new unrecognized devices.
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You're considerably limited as far as customisation goes if you go for a Wordpress.com blog.

IMO if you want a hosted solution go with Tumblr, if you want a self-hosted solution go with WordPress (www.wordpress.org, not .com).

You can customise a Tumblr blog quite a lot and you have the added benefit of not needing to worry about bandwidth (should you strike it lucky and land on the first page of Digg). For greater customisation though (i.e. do basically whatever you want) you should go with WordPress (by far the most popular blogging solution on the Internet).
Out of curiosity, how big is Mt. Gox compared to the other bitcoin exchanges?
As a result of what LastPass did, they won my respect. As a result of what Dropbox did, they lost it.
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That's not a simple limit, that's the Law of Large Numbers from probability theory - a more complex beast altogether.
Link? Was this the place in the Fremont neighborhood in Seattle?
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There's still a fundamental difference between stealing bitcoins by inducing a transfer and copying music or video games or etc. The latter is clearly a lesser crime.
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I believe Chris Soghoian was the person who discovered the bug (there was an HN submission about this earlier).

http://twitter.com/#!/csoghoian
That's not to say you cannot convey many useful intuitions to students without the somewhat abstruse formal machinery.

That's more or less what I was trying to say. There are some deeply intuitive concepts for which limits are, at the very least, a very good aproximation. It may occur in some cases that the actual case and the intuition that one has about it doesn't match, but that doesn't mean that the model is arbitrary or artificial.