skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His bolded quote is script interpreters are bad, from a performance, debugging, development standpoint.
Yep, a little disappointed, I was expecting them to be fielding cool things to be built related to their product or restaurants and tech in general.
Heard Somewhere Inside the Beltway: BART vs. Free Speech (a short "radio" play)
One Aleph One Circle?
Well, seeing as they have as much cash as the country, it only makes sense that they have their own Penta^H^H^H^H^HCirclegon.
On the one hand, the evidence provided to back this claim is pretty lame:

1. Microsoft vendor says so.
2. Windows blogger says so.
3. Person *hired* by Microsoft says so.

That said, if Adobe can no longer say "hey, at least we're not as bad as the people who make the operating system", we may finally see some effort by them. More public shaming the better.
Fair enough. But Preston Gralla is certainly not like a walking MS PR firm. Compare and constrast Preston's stories with someone like John Gruber for Apple. Gruber has written maybe 100 blurbs about Apple in the past year and maybe one that was critical. Daniel Dilger is basically the same -- except maybe he hasn't yet written the critical Apple article yet.

Preston OTOH regularly writes critical MS articles, more often than he writes those that defend MS.

The author who refered to Preston as the equivalent of an MS PR firm doesn't know his history well.
So as a test I donated $10 to the card:

http://i.imgur.com/2p3gK.png

And the balance still shows as empty. It's probably a scam. (Or someone has already found a way to siphon the money off immediately.) I don't care personally, its just $10 for me, but I thought you all might like to know the results I got.

Edit: Never mind, it just took about 10 minutes for the main page to update. Here's to the good people and coffee drinkers of the world. ;)
Certainly everyone got a numerical score at the end... but what letter grade should, say, a 77 be? There were no departmental standards, I don't have any particular personal standards, and I hadn't tried to match the difficulty of the exams to what was done previously.

I could do something like 90-100 = A, 80-89 = B, etc., but that is no less arbitrary than any other system, and in my experience it is customary (as well as, IMHO, a good idea) to write harder exams and then make the cutoffs more generous.
So 'karma' is just the level of influence you have? So you could say that 'karma' is the klout for HN? Or is there more to it?
Audiophiles can't tell the difference between a $200 receiver and a $12,000 one
Here is one good overview:

http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~mohri/pub/bandit.pdf

"[...] ε-greedy is probably the simplest and the most widely used strategy to solve the bandit problem and was first described by Watkins [24]. The ε-greedy strategy consists of choosing a random lever with ε-frequency, and otherwise choosing the lever with the highest estimated mean, the estimation being based on the rewards observed thus far. ε must be in the open interval (0, 1) and its choice is left to the user. Methods that imply a binary distinction between exploitation (the greedy choice) and exploration (uniform probability over a set of levers) are known as semi-uniform methods."
Define insecure/secure.

I know that if a popup tells me I can get free cat screensavers at 'randomwebsitewitharandomname.com', it's most likely fake and might have a virus attached. I don't download it and my system is 'secure'. However, if I don't know it's fake (i.e., I'm not experienced with computers at all,) I might download it. Now my system is insecure. Whoopee.

You could say that a system is only secure if it can catch things like that before it's too late. The problem there is that Windows, like other OSes, does not come with any anti-virus program built into the system itself (I'm excluding security measures built into Windows as this doesn't fully protect it.) Windows is only secure from viruses when an antivirus program is used.

Of course, that doesn't make other systems safe. Just because Mac and GNU/Linux viruses are rare doesn't mean it's secure. This mentality is 'security by unpopularity'. The real argument is in how these systems would protect themselves from viruses that actually ran on them if those viruses were as prevalent as Windows viruses and the systems were used as much as Windows. On that, we can only speculate.

My point is that I'm only secure if I know what I'm doing; software is not built to replace common sense
It's time for the percolator http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMEDZnM_TZE
Should Your Employees Take Naps?
Most of the time with sensational stories you only get the 'shock' side of the story. Like forgetting last years case Ted Williams (radio voice guy) was a drunk and drug abuser.

Or untold police brutality stories which neglect the office point of view. Not that I condone police beating the crap out of people, but I understand every one has a breaking limit, and often after watching those videos I think I wouldn't have lasted half as long as the cops did. But a cop having to face 3 abusive people in an uphill struggle to do his job... until he pulls out a baton and pacifies one or two ... is no where near a great story as a abusing his power.

Lots of homeless people have mental defects that can be hard to see at first. I wouldn't mind betting there maybe something else as well. Even something as simple as depression.

I suspect he has these going against him. Age , weight, race, long term unemployed, homeless, new city, industry knowledge which he probably hasn't kept unto date on, and drive... lets face it younger people have more drive to be prove themselves than older people.

Pretty hard to top of the pile when lots of other applicants wouldn't have that.

I'd say the best thing for him would be teaching, seems he has a warmth about him, proven kindness (with parents), seems intelligent enough, and as long as theres no mental defects. One year in a local community college and he'd be set. No doubt there will be an online effort to help this man out. And I'd chuck him a dollar to be a teacher.
* Well. He's 55 yrs old *

He's 55 years old now. He was 33 in 1990, when he stopped working (according to him). The idea that an electrical engineer and physicist with tons of programming experience to boot, and with references from Lockheed as a Senior Research Engineer, could not get a job from 1990 to 2007, is just not plausible, even if he took a lot of time off to care for his parents. The story is not reasonable, and there are parts of it we're not hearing and parts that have been distorted (I doubt he really got to Dartmouth at age 16).

People pass this along as two things: a) a sad personal story, and b) a commentary on the sad state of the country. The fact is that it fails as both. As a personal story, it is implausible and clearly incomplete. I feel like I am being pulled around by the nose. I feel like I am hearing only one source, and that source is less than totally truthful. The real story is probably still sad, but it's probably different and less pithy. Right now, I just feel like I am being manipulated.

And it clearly has nothing to do with the state of America in 2011, since this man's problems existed decades before, and in an excellent economy.
I think it is incredible to see all the edits going on all around the world, and to see how Google is leveraging its huge reach to get its users to name roads and fill in businesses all over the world, even in remote areas.
Macmillan didn't withdraw their books from Amazon. It was Amazon that dropped Macmillan.

Edit, for the [citation needed] crowd:

"We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles." -- http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle/Tx2MEGQWTNGIMHV/1?_encodi...
Premature optimization is a skill. That is, you know how to write good code and never waste your time on neither premature nor postmature optimization.
I'm seeing $120 it's prob not real time. It says on his page that he gets the data somewhere else and then updates it.
I used it earlier, and it worked like a charm. The page now displays $120 donated.
Test post
this is a test post <a href="http://www.google.com">with a link to google</a>
It's a shame that people contribute data to Google Maps when something like Open Street Maps exists.

If I'm going to spend the time it takes to map something, I'd much rather it go into an open source project rather than just improving the product of a for-profit company.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/
Are you using software like Nginx or haproxy, or a hardware load balancer? If you're using software, then I recommend using something like Heartbeat to share an IP address between the two. It basically does the same thing that mahadri suggested, but it's automatic. Here's how it works.

Let's say you have two servers, primary and secondary -- primary is the one that's currently acting as your load balancer. When both servers are running Heartbeat, they exchange UDP pings every second. If the primary server stops responding, then the Heartbeat process on the backup server will automatically take over the shared IP. When the primary box returns, it won't cause any problems or steal back the IP address, until you explicitly instruct it to do so. (If you really wanted it to steal back the IP automatically, I'm sure you could configure it that way.) You can also initiate a failover with a single command, which is useful when you need to do maintenance on the primary box. Running "/usr/share/heartbeat/hb_takeover all" is a lot simpler than having to manually reassign the IP address.

My company's infrastructure is very dependent on heartbeat -- we use it to support our load balancers and all our back-end services. You need to be careful or it will do "surprising" things when you're rebooting or changing the network config, but on the whole it makes it cheaper and easier to provide highly-available services.

Of course, if you're using a hardware load balancer, it should have a similar failover protocol built-in. I'd recommend just using its built-in features, that's what you're paying the big bucks for.
You shouldn't walk around without your redundancies
Oh look, it's a cheap marketing trick. Ad. Blocked.
This is a weird little thread right here.
I would say it is probably because Google makes it very easy to edit maps and it offers navigation. Open Street Map doesn't allow you to enter two addresses and find a route between them. (At least not as far as I can tell.) Therefore if you are living in an area where you want that ability and your local area is not yet mapped, you will map it in Google, not in Open Street Map.

Additionally if you are a business owner you are going to add your business to the map that has more users and searchers. There is little if any benefit to having your business mapped in Open Street Map, whereas having it on the Google Map could potentially bring some customers to you.
I made a feature-length documentary about four homeless people including one with a master's degree in psychology.

http://graceofgodmovie.com/

In his case there definitely turned out to be more to the story.
Home folders and UAC have very little to do with the real-world security of Windows vs. other operating systems. The reality is, even today, if you get arbitrary code execution on any operating system you are probably boned.
I'm unwilling to trust IP access control for anything in 2011.

If I could do SSH port forwarding, that'd probably be my first choice. I have a AES-128-CTR+HMAC-SHA256 encrypted sleeve for the Redis protocol with an attendant Redis::Connection driver, but this is exactly the kind of thing I'm always telling people not to do.
A little bit off topic, how did this individual create the presentation in HTML5?
It is not a reasonable security decision to make any part of your backend depend on Redis authentication.
From what I read, they said ground fault confused their PLCs (synchro gear for paralleling multiple generators). This shouldn't affect the generator (engine, generator) outputting power.

Electronics are much more sensitive to ground faults, etc. than mechanical and electrical devices.

A big manual transfer switch (as backup), which is presumably what they ended up using, is fairly bulletproof.
From Wikipedia, in case this term was as unfamiliar to others as it was to me:

"In statistics, particularly in the design of sequential experiments, a multi-armed bandit takes its name from a traditional slot machine (one-armed bandit). Multiple levers are considered in the motivating applications in statistics. When pulled, each lever provides a reward drawn from a distribution associated with that specific lever. The objective of the gambler is to maximize the sum of rewards earned through a sequence of lever pulls.

In practice, multi-armed bandits have been used to model the problem of managing research projects in a large organization, like a science foundation or a pharmaceutical company. Given its fixed budget, the problem is to allocate resources among the competing projects, whose properties are only partially known now but may be better understood as time passes.

In the early versions of the multi-armed bandit problem, the gambler has no initial knowledge about the levers. The crucial tradeoff the gambler faces at each trial is between "exploitation" of the lever that has the highest expected payoff and "exploration" to get more information about the expected payoffs of the other levers."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
* I'm only secure if I know what I'm doing; software is not built to replace common sense*

That's an excellent and succinct statement of security; can I use that line?
Technically, it's a donut.
Making apps that don't suck [video]
I can confirm this works, just grabbed a coffee. I'll donate $10 when I get back home.

Edit: donated using my iPhone. Neat project, great hack.
I can confirm this works. Just bought a latte!
I get to deal with the separate issue fairly often. After a few passes, 90% of the time is being spent in 90 functions taking no more than 2% each. At that point, I have to start ripping out layers of std::map<std::string, boost::shared_ptr<boost::any> >. That's even less fun than it sounds...
I searched before posting[1] and didn't see anything relevant, so I posted the story.

In retrospect I should have posted the original link from the chrome blog. I see someone has already dug the original out and posted it[2].

Anyway, the four day old story never made it onto HN to begin with, so that's not a valid complaint.

[1] http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=chrome+c%2B...
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2881946
To me, this seems like a Big Huge Deal, but perhaps there aren't that many use cases for it. Is anyone excited to build something that runs at almost-native speed on a browser?
It's not ip access control - it's hypervisor control.
One of the reasons I could never do manual labor for the rest of my life (after working on farms and road crews) was the sheer intellectual loneliness of it. No matter how strong I was, or how fast I worked (I'm still pretty good with a pick-axe), I was still the loser who didn't go out and blow money at the bar. Worse yet, the area was like 70% male and I couldn't get a date as a laborer to save my life.

The fact is, computers and large-scale engineering projects are really fucking interesting and siphoning off talent from other areas. The dreaded brain drain. Meanwhile, our grid is crumbling and we're playing it conservatively--minor fixes, if anything. If there was some serious thought and excitement put back into it, to not just modernize, but futurize our utilities--we'd see a lot more people start to join.

NIMBY is a problem: no micro-wind farms, no upgraded rail projects, no weird bio-tech projects, nothing new or innovative. If anyone's intellectually curious, why the hell would they want to join something as boring as a public works project?
Yes, exactly. The natural words for things are already used as extensions, and they want to avoid clashes.
I'm kindof confused: do you want us to write actual code? Just give an explanation of how to do this?

If the former: what language, what assumptions can we make about the environment?
Qt's meta-object mechanism is definitely convenient, but that's not C++ anymore.
Somewhat related... relationship between psychedelics and developments in math and computers: http://www.maps.org/news-letters/v18n1/v18n1-MAPS_8-10.pdf
Sometimes I feel like there is a little jealousy among the startup community which translates into I like this, but the valuation is absurd.

Dropbox could be worth that much, I believe. Some say their business is not defensible because anyone else can build a similar product for free. Well until someone has, nobody has.
The Pentagon's new China war plan
Clippy is plopping intrusive tutorials on top of a complex interface. It's not a serious attempt at execution, it's bureaucratic incompetence.

What I'm talking about is more akin to Google and Wolfram, when they give you an answer to a math problem. When you ask "how much water is in the oceans" it would try to figure out if you meant volume, show you related formulas, etc. Similarly for a photo editor you'd say "make the head bigger" and it would list the features one would need, like the selection and resize tools.

So if you only know what the result should be, use keywords to find features, then click to see if they're the right features. It's perfectly doable, just hasn't been attempted.
Apple Patent: Mini-Projectors Could Soon Come to iPads, iPhones
Moving your blog from Weebly to Tumblr
I wrote an app that will take your Weebly blog RSS feed, and import all the posts to Tumblr. Let me know if you have any feedback!
Definitely can relate to this situation (of your ex). It definitely can be a case of difficulty "judg[ing] how/when to jump in", I certainly am below-average on that measure.

However, a separate but related trait is that I often find myself internally running through several iterations of what I want to say, only to realize that by the time I've winnowed it down to the relevant info and am ready to speak, the conversation has moved on.
The idea of Open Street Maps is not to make tools for map viewing or journey planning, it's to collect user contributed mapping data for the world. That data can then be used by any project that wants to use it.

This tool (using OSM data) allows you to view routes http://www.openrouteservice.org/

I agree though, there is a bit of a lack of good quality tools using OSM data, it's a shame.
Auto Transport Roanoke Island, Virginia
"Video games of any type are not good for kids. Not because of violence, sex and other things. It is because they don't go out to socialize. My theory is that instead of limiting "what to watch / play", parents should more focus on limiting "how much to watch / play"."

I have to disagree here. Many video games are very social and a great way to bring people together. I remember when I was little N64 sleepover parties were all the rage and something to look forward to. Video games are great for kids but parents have to be there and assessing things as they go--it's not a cut and dry thing, there's a ton of different video games and every kids different. At the end of the day it's about ensuring these are good kids that will become good adults.
for q1 - submit an answer and explain how you got there (with whatever code you wrote, if any)

for q2 - just the answers are sufficient

for q3 - submit an explanation of how you'd tackle the problem, or code
So use a static language with type inference instead.

Most people don't know about these things because of the poor / non-existent education in computer science and lack of any recognized qualifications, but that's no excuse. One day this branch of engineering will need to grow up.
There is a bit of an obsession with telling the whole story in this thread and it's exactly what I'd expect out of HN readers (we're always skeptical, or maybe that's just me). The reality is that it's impossible to tell the whole story in 7 minutes 25 seconds.

I'm guessing the question really is: is what we're listening to and reading an honest portrayal of events. That's anybody's guess.

It's not the whole story, for sure. It's a story with details and facts chosen based on the biases of the folks covering it (I believe the business of news, particularly news magazines, is closer aligned with the entertainment industry ... having a story go viral increases pageviews, advertising dollars and subscriptions [I'm not implying malice, here, just trying to analyze perspectives]).
Hyperpolyglot: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby
You are starting with an axiom that I'm talking nonsense and then bending everything I write in that direction instead of reading what I write. E.g.,

"I regret to say that that's not as easy as it sounds. There are issues of tractability, and more importantly, there's this not-quite-cottage industry of software development, which needs good-enough languages to use _today_."

I didn't say it was "easy", and clearly my point is progress and not current software development. Sure, for my project, I'm typing in code in Visual Basic .NET. For writing code today, all things considered for my context, that is about the best option.

But what I'm typing in is hardly different from what anyone might have typed in all the way back to Algol.

Here's the point: People type in all that code, and then what? Can some software go over it, report properties, do some transformations with known, useful properties? Not very much. Such things won't be better for Visual Basic than they were for Algol or anything between.

So, they type in the code, and then all they have is just that code. They can desk check it, test it, try it, revise it, etc., but it's all still digging the Panama Canal with a teaspoon one canal at a time. That is, there's no real automation and no significant exploitation of mathematical properties that could lead to automation.

Or, return to most of the rest of engineering where we have specifications of resistors, capacitors, inductors, transistors, fans, copper wire, steel sheets, aluminum bars, etc. with ohms, farads, density, tensile strength, electrical conductivity, etc. Okay, now compare with some DLL or its source code: What engineering properties do we have. Essentially none. It's like building with iron before we knew about tensile strength.

Sure, with some such research progress, eventually programmers would benefit. Obviously the intention is real progress in software productivity. We're not going to get such productivity by more of the same that got us C, C++, Java, Python, Visual Basic .NET, C#, etc.

Also for another of your points, I'm not talking about anything like branch prediction or deep pipelining. That's basically what to do with with the hardware to execute an existing instruction set.

Also the point is not math or not. The point is progress. Math will be necessary but not sufficient. That is, just stuffing in some math won't yield more than the old trick of putting two extra, unused transistors in a radio to claim nine transistors instead of seven.

Your point that there's a lot of good CS to do without 'mathematizing' the field is not promising for research or significant progress.
Show HN: Two-handed HN keyboard navigation
Justifying billions is of course a stretch, but having a really, really smooth UI definitely does make a difference. Its easy to underestimate these things in favor of technological advantages, which dropbox doesn't really have compared to every other personal file hosting site. But normal people really don't know/care about that, for them all that matters is an easy UI that just works. And dropbox does just that, IMO better than any others
Haha, sure!
Being an engineer is a creative job, despite some people trying to bogart the term.

Read the book The Eudaemonic Pie for tales of dope-smoking uber-geeks.

Also Fire in the Valley might be a source, though I've not yet read it.
And HP, Warnock and Geschke (adobe), Morita and Ibuka (sony).

But there's also Wilson (xerox) and of course Edison.