skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
this is incorrect. the sum of n>1 balls each of some non-maximum weight needs not be less than another set including the max-weight one.
What did you expect to do with it, when you started building it?

Do that.
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In a vacuum, sure. But most governments would consider it something like gambling and stop it.

Ethically, as long as all the participants know the rules of the game, there's no trouble. Some people like games where there's an element of total catastrophe.
If I was HR I'd think you failed the test. (see the comment about 12 balls completed in three weightings, at least)
Hmmm.. Random un*x variant. Then the backup plan is an OS from 2001. Sounds like the plot from Woody Allen's Sleeper...
"I find having that low-level access to be more restrictive."

This look like an orwellian paradox to me, like "thinking less makes you free". Having low-level access don't mean you /need/ to use this power, it means that you /can/. Not having this power means you gave the keys to someone else. I'd rather keep most of the keys on my side, personaly.

The first time I saw an Ipod, it was at a party, in a friend of mine's hands, looked good, he had nice music, then I asked him to give me a few mp3, and it was "impossible right now". My god...

--> Never bought an Apple product myself (the Ipod I use is my wife's).
My guess is that they spent a few days trying to see if they can access accounts of anyone important from the NATO dump. The passwords were in plaintext.

They would only release the data to the public once they are done using it.
I'm pretty sure confidential informants are tailor made for covering up illegal or undisclosed investigation techniques. It's not like they haven't had a little practice trying to protect wiretaps.

Which isn't to say that I think the feebs have compromised TOR, because I think that's pretty unlikely.
Two weightings are sufficient to find heavier ball among nine.
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But if the cardinality of the sets are equal, as is the case in each step of the solution, the set containing the max-weight ball is necessarily heavier. Can you explain further?
Wow, this was your first comment.
Does that statistic include:
- Freight traffic
- State and municipal costs, including law enforcement. (Ex, New York employs over 40,000 state and municipal workers dedicated to roadways, not including contractors)
- Health impact. (Exhaust has significant health effects and associated costs. See http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/downloads/pdf/eode/comm-air-surv...)
- Direct and indirect government support of various auto-related industries.

The costs are more than just laying down blacktop.
I've seen news about child porn allegations in the UK that usually lead to nowhere in the latest years, mostly because of some credit card issues. I remember it happening with Pete Townshend (from The Who) and Robert Del Naja (from Massive Attack), plus some football player whose name I can't remember.
If you are really a key person in the acquisition, then the whole thing could fall through if you walk away. That should give you a lot of leverage. Speak with the CEO and a lawyer to make sure you are represented fairly. "Fairly" could have lots of interpretations here; what I mean is in line with the intent of your original agreement (no shady buy-back of vested options). Negotiating a retention bonus also seems fair.
Method two? Two methods? I'm so lost.
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This mirrors an idea that I had. TOR is a military project, and you know at least some of the exit nodes are controlled by the US gov't. Why not replicate TOR with a botnet? Bounce your communications around a plethora of average joes and you have yourself a more stable tor. If you spread the botnet without a CnC server and have the infected machines bounce random traffic around, it would be damned difficult to break. TOR is open source, so it shouldn't be too hard to modify it to work on a private network. The nice thing about it is that if you attract to much heat you can always ditch the network and start a new one.
Solution: Give the balls each a different variation in where/when you weight them. eg, Left pan, right pan, not weighed (LRN) for the first ball; LLN for the second ball, LLL for the third ball, and so on. The only exception to the pattern is you must make sure that no pattern mirrors another.
That's the unfortunate bit -- some innocent people are likely to get their dog shot as the FBI busts down their door with assault rifles to seize a laptop.
DanceSafe
Unconstitutional doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
> I why would I want to hack it [document]?

Well, have you never been in need of opening a .doc with a simple text editor like vim and fix some issues? Really?

> The times when hackers and users were the same people a over.

That not my point. I reacted to the false claim that prosumer (ie power users / hackers / hn readers) prefer Apple.

As a matter of fact, most geekest geeks I meet in my job are all having Nexuses. Maybe because I live in China, but it was about the same in France and in Germany.
Mountain View is directly adjacent to Silicon Valley. Like Silicon Valley it is a suburb of San Francisco.

I'm not sure how you can say developing in a county adjacent to silicon valley is the same thing as developing in a country more than 3000 miles away.

If Silicon Valley is a metaphor then the term is meaningless. New York is Silicon Valley. So is Chicago. So is Vancover, and London.

If it isn't---because of the unique legal structure, cultural consciousness, and developer concentration in and around Silicon Valley---then its unfair to say that a Luxumburg company operating under EU rules is a silicon valley company.
Skype isn't part of the tech startup scene either. They have not been since 2005 when ebay acquired them for two billion dollars - and now they have been resold twice. The erroneous Silicon Valley references just facilitates the misinterpretation of Skype as a startup to support the linkbait article title.

Frankly it would seem that analysis of the stock vesting expectations of hackers in Tallinn is more relevant to the story and the structure of the Silverlake partner agreement than the expectations of Silicon Valley programmers when it comes to attracting and retaining technical talent at Skype and among the people mentioned in the techpress, it has been difficult to find any in key technical roles.
Odd. I think it's correct... which step is incorrect?
From a legal perspective -- it's the only way to run OSX. And it will run Linux/Windows)
From the Guidelines:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Works for me.
My first thought was that the pan was balanced on its center point, so one could solve it in two. Place the balls at the twelve points of the clock, note which way the balls rolled off (e.g., along the 3:00/9:00 axis), and then put those two balls and a normal ball at 12:00, 4:00 and 8:00 to see which way the pan tips and whether the abnormal ball falls off first (heavier) or last (lighter.) However, I see from these comments and the solution on the site that it's actually a scale with two pans so this method does not work.
Okay, dumb question, which languages will you teach the concepts through? Does the list by any chance include a lisp dialect?
That's an interesting perspective. Still, in order for the anonymous source's testimony to carry any weight, there'd have to be some solid evidence. Either they'd have to show traffic logs, or they'd have to show the results of forensics done on the suspect's hdd. If you've properly distanced yourself from your activities, then there shouldn't be anything on your hard drive to implicate you.

Ultimately, it comes down to human fuckups. Bradley Manning is not in jail because he didn't take security precautions, he's in jail because he talked to someone he shouldn't have. The same will be true of any reasonably sophisticated hacking organization. They can take all the precautions in the world, but a vengeful ex can bring the whole thing crashing down.
Thanks. I like Macs exactly for the reasons you listed -- battery life is awesome, great touchpad, great boot/wake-up times, and the box is undeniably beautiful. I just found OSX's window management really clunky and unintuitive, but that's coming from a 15-year linux/windows user.

Is your MBP a 15"? How did you find one for $1300?
Links to djvu and pdf: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...
Thanks everyone for the advice.

Long story short I'm definitely in an "at will" state, my employee # is higher than 2, and while I've received a small amount of restricted stock that will vest immediately upon takeover, it won't be worth much and I believe there will be an earn-out to stretch that value over a way longer period of time. So pretty much nothing of value.

If we do this deal we're all pretty much going to be slotted into the new company with predetermined titles and salary. I've already made my case to the CEO of where I expect to land on both parts, so I'm sure he knows what I'm thinking. I have absolutely no qualms about leaving for another job, so it's his choice to make. We'll see what happens.

I just don't know if there is anything else I should be doing at this point. I could make a lot of noise and make things very uncomfortable, but in the end that will probably only hurt just me.

My thought was to press for a retention employment contract, but perhaps just a retention bonus is the way to go.
Hmm. I solved this a slightly different way. The first step was the same, (ABCD v EFGH), but all subsequent stages were different (for instance, if the scale tilts left, I'll then weight ABCEF against IJKLD). I'm sure there are multiple solutions.

The key is that given there are 24 possibilities, and 3 possible outcomes from the scale, at each stage you must choose balls in order to maximize the amount of information gained.

After the first weighing, you've reduced the possibilities to 8 (whatever the outcome). Since, on the final weighing there are only 3 possible outcomes, you need to devise a second weighing that ensures that the 8 possibilities are split into 3,3,2 - (ie. no result of the second weighing can yield an outcome where more than 3 possibilities remain).
Your client sounds like an insensitive scumbag, and you sound like a pushover.

I suggest you squeeze hard for the money owed to you and tell him you're going to keep the site.

Is he going to like you? No. Will he at least have a shred of respect for you? Yes.
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It's also not cheaper to buy brown bread and raw carrots. It's less expensive to buy the "tasty" higher-sodium canned foods. Eating healthy is not inexpensive. Add to that that raw foods in quantity go bad sooner than cheap canned items and the cost of raw and healthy give up because of the extra waste.

As for entertainment, the more wealthy enjoying turning off their brains as well. But they spend money on going to live performances at playhouses or symphonies. TV is comparatively cheap. Also with TV, you have more immediate choices (especially with something like Netflix): to watch more cerebral material or dumbed-down garbage.
I noticed a surge in traffic to EndlessForms.com and realized it was coming from this post. Thanks to Joel for mentioning our site[1]! For those of you that don't know what I am talking about, see Joel's comment on the original post where he recommends EndlessForms.com, where you can design objects with evolution and 3D print them. Thanks all for checking it out.

[1] http://endlessforms.com
He (original poster) dropped the class before attending any of the lectures.
The only thing you can really negotiate at this point is a "retention bonus." So my advice is to negotiate a bonus for 3-4 months that is as close to your annual salary as possible. I did something similar with my last company, but I didn't hold out for enough compensation. In hindsight, the deal would have folded without me, but I wasn't confident to ask for enough.

In fact, here's a note to founders: if you promise your employees a year's salary in case of acquisition, your people will stay with you. Say you offer that in conjunction with options, you are already a better employer than 99.9% of other founders.
Damn, the AT&T-release is especially juicy. It contains a lot of highly confidential information about technology and strategy that their competitors would love to get their hands on.

I'm a quite technical guy and I barely understand a thing. No wonders AT&T are having troubles with fixing their network troubles, it looks like a massive, massive beast of technology.

I found the frequency chart fascinating. It's available publicly here:
http://www.ntia.doc.gov/osmhome/allochrt.pdf
Hmm. I wonder what the impetus for adoption is. If governments aren't making it mandatory, then there has to be something in it for canon, xerox, adobe, et al to go through the trouble of adding that functionality.
"If, in
connection with the termination of a Participant’s Employment, the Ordinary Shares issued to
such Participant pursuant to the exercise of the Option or issuable to such Participant
pursuant to any portion of the Option that is then vested are to be repurchased, the Participant
shall be required to exercise his or her vested Option and any Ordinary Shares issued in
connection with such exercise shall be subject to the repurchase and other provisions in the
Management Partnership agreement."

This is actually pretty clear even to me ( and I merely have an interest in law as opposed to having legal training ) and should be manifestly obvious to a real lawyer. He should have had a lawyer read his employment contract and then should have discussed it again before he decided to leave Skype.
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consider the following example where the condition "one ball is heavier than the others" holds true but your method yields the wrong solution: {1,10} vs {6,6}

when it is further specified that all remaining balls are of equal weight then your solution cannot be optimal since comparing two thirds yields the required information about the remaining third.
Regarding Gates: A lot of people can afford to go to Harvard given financial aid. I think the more relevant point to his story is that his parents were so wealthy they could send him to an elite private _middle and high school,_ where he had access to a computer.
http://framethink.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/stock-option-g...
You're assuming they're safe because their technology stack is safe, but there are about 20 ways that law enforcement could possibly track these guys down that don't require particularly l33t skillz.

Cops work like hackers in the sense that both groups attack vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities here are clear: these guys have big mouths and they're overconfident. They'll talk to somebody someday, and when that happens, it will provide an opening for the fuzz.
I appreciate your appreciation. If you want to learn more, the wikipedia article on them [1] is pretty decent.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lulzsec
Yes; you can use their bulk dump/upload tools to help make it happen...
For all the talk about web-based streaming music services as 'discovery', it's odd to note this fixation on "labels". Is there any reason why a service like this couldn't cater to "unsigned" or "non-label" music? This would arguably help "discovery" far more than Arcade Fire fans getting together to spin another AF track.
Those are compilations of actual deals offered by the merchant, not stuff that was made up by others deciding what sort of discount a merchant might offer.
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Interesting how relative things are. 6 beers for me in one night is pretty much a bender. And I weigh 200 lbs. I often go weeks without drinking, so that's probably why.
More like "how Ruby and Clojure don't really support keyword arguments". Unless you can do something like:

>>> def foo(a,b):
... print a,b
...
>>> foo(b=1,a=2)
2 1

then you don't support keyword arguments, you just have some hack for stuffing parameters into a hash. In fact, MacRuby had to add syntax to Ruby[1] in order to be able to represent Objective C keyword arguments.

[1] http://www.macruby.org/documentation/rubycocoa-to-macruby.ht...
I used to spend a lot of time on t61 which does exactly what you're talking about. http://www.thesixtyone.com/

I stopped using it when they did the big redesign. I find the new interface nowhere near as good or useful as the old one but I guess if you started using the site today it would probably seem fine to you.
already done. http://codeschool.org/core-units/ or http://www.youtube.com/user/briantwill
I was just reading this lately; really interesting stuff. However, I wonder how much has changed in the last 25 years since this book was written? Or to put it in a different way: what to read next?
Good question. I think the menus from each chef would be relatively small, showcasing their top 2 or 3 dishes, so it would not be like the waiters need to learn 4 restaurant's worth of menus.

Also, since the purpose of the restaurant is to showcase the chefs, and the clientele is going to largely be foodies, perhaps information on preparation and such would be included on the menu.

It might be good to have the chefs come out during service and meet the customers. After all, as I said, the chefs are there to build their reputations, and the customers are likely to be foodies. If the chefs can build up good will with them, they are likely to get more buzz and more good blog write ups when they eventually go off and open their own place.
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The browser is the new Amiga :)
...the rich people, live in the "real" world, why them , the poors, live in a world from which they cannot see "outside"...lesser world

The value judgments ("real world", "lesser world") are your own invention. They do not exist in the article.

Information deprivation is a real issue for the poor in many places. For example, before mobile phones, farmers were unable to deliver their crops to the location with the highest prices.

I don't understand what you feel is condescending - Banerjee and Duflo are applying standard economics to the poor, mapping their utility functions and designing interventions with desirable policy outcomes. Economists do the same thing to CEOs, smokers/fat people, politicians, home purchasers and many others. Why is economics condescending when applied to the poor?
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Given that the LulzSec name was a clique from AnonOps rebranding itself to begin with, I would bet on the latter. Although it may be a while before we hear of them pulling such flamboyant stunts again.
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Stephen Jay Gould, expert on snails, eminently radical political scientist and master polemicist, mistaken by many for a knowledgeable evolutionary biologist because he was a very good writer.

If you want some critiques of him you can look at this explanation of his at best extremely shoddy and more likely deliberately deceptive statistical analysis here.

http://johnhawks.net/taxonomy/term/700

It's a commentary on the paper the WSJ is talking about.

Money quote

"Here is the most sympathetic reading I can give to these facts. Gould systematically selected data from Morton's tables that tended to inflate the measured volumes of Native American crania. He did so by averaging some group means instead of overall means (although Lewis and colleagues show that Morton himself had used group means for many comparisons, contrary to Gould's claims), by excluding some small-skulled groups entirely (claiming sample size as a criterion), and by omitting crania that had not been measured in the earlier, seed-based analysis. There is no logical reason for these choices other than selection bias -- Gould began with a conclusion about Morton's unconscious motivations, and worked to confirm that conclusion by selecting some data and omitting contrary data."

Paul Krugman's takedown of Gould

http://www.pkarchive.org/theory/evolute.html

"What I encountered were quite a few references to Stephen Jay Gould, hardly any to other evolutionary theorists. Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading."

If you want some more this is good too.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/kv/beware_of_stephen_j_gould/

As an aside if someone can explain to me what the hell the big deal with spandrels is I'd appreciate it. AIUI they're features that arise because they're very strongly associated with something that's selected for but have no survival value themselves. They can then be co-opted for later evolution if some minor mutations make them into something that does, in and of itself, have survival value.
This is in no way new, and is fairly easy to find for anybody looking for this sort of material, so why post it to HN? It's a good book, I used it myself for a school project, but it has been available for free for at least 5 years now.
and in a single line of bash I had nagios alerts piped into IRC. I'm amazed I never knew about ii until a few weeks ago. It's amazingly useful.
I can absolutely imagine Jobs answering a question about, for example, the App Store approval process in a similar way. He knows what he is doing, he knows how to be persuasive and how to not come of as an idiot.

Given Apple’s success (also, he’s now the CEO), however, Jobs doesn’t have to answer questions like that. It would be nice if he had to from time to time.