skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've recently found LinkedIn quite valuable as a tool for doing Customer Development. There's a wide range of people on it, not just techies and designers, many of whom (I've found) are pretty open to helping someone out who isn't trying to recruit or hard-sell them.
I haven't found a good skimming solution to this. If there's no good documentation, interface, variable naming, or other hint to what it's doing, it either has to fit a code pattern you recognize easily, or else you have to fall back to mentally tracing through what's going on. If I really need to understand it, I start segmenting the code into sections and adding comments about what it looks like each section is doing. Then you can do a few iterations in bottom-up style. For example, with branches, start out by commenting what every branch does considered in isolation. Then from those comments (now hopefully more transparent than the original code was), see if you can find what pattern a series of tests is doing in aggregate.
>Ideally, you should have some other behavioral metric in mind (say, mean comment quality, top comment quality, bottom comment quality, engagement, etc)

That's precisely what my metric is intended to measure. The community derives quality of individual comments. The article explains why measuring mean, top, or bottom comment karma is a flawed approach. By measuring what we might call an "enchanced Sharpe" [1], we encourage consistent, high-quality engagement.

I suppose I'm not really understanding what your issue is with the formula. It's certainly not trying to "define away" some social problem-- how users vote, which articles make it to the front page, etc., is an exercise left to the reader. The only thing this metric is intended to do is replace the total score shown in the top right with one that better reflects your contribution to the community.

[1] Or just the Tansey Ratio, if it's not too presumptuous.
From what I can see (I didn't work on this, so it is still a bit new to me as well), the settings revamp should resolve this conflict for you.

The default sharing state for new content remains for applications that don't implement the privacy controls, but content you post through the web site and the iPhone app will default to the privacy settings you last used and this is displayed more prominently so you know what it is before you post.

I may be missing something, but once it rolls out to you (starting soon), I think you will find that you will not need to manage a second global control about who can see your content - from then on the individual content item describes who should see it.
Part of the problem I think is that when you got tagged, it showed up in your stream. If it were federated, their server could say "hey, I tagged you in this picture", and then it wouldn't show up in your stream, or when you look for photos with your tag since arguably, you would be the one serving that information.
Do you have the cached link?
In that case you will still end up with a latency problem.
Exactly. The point of the Contacts API isn't to replace existing contacts web apps, it is to make them better by giving them access to native contacts (and potentially other contacts sources).
Only I Will Remain
I'm getting lots of "latex path not specified" errors.
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rooting for yardsale. i had similar concept/name reserved on iTunes a few years ago, but couldn't run with it at the time.

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It really depends where you're starting from. If you don't have any idea what a particular piece of code does, finding that out is your first goal. If you can, ask someone: a two-sentence summary of what a module does can save you hours of digging through things, and takes almost no time for the person you're asking.

From there, I have a couple of things I usually look at immediately.

The most obvious thing to do is to try to find entry points into the code, and figure out what happens when those calls are made by reading sequentially. This is often the best way to work, although not always.

The second thing to do that can be very helpful is to look at the external library calls that are being made. Those can give you an idea of what the code is actually affecting, which can be very helpful for getting a high-level overview.

Another entry point is state that's being kept and modified from multiple locations. (Figure out what's being stored and why by looking at the code around where the state is modified.)

One last thing you might try to do is reformat the code if it's particularly ugly. I try not to refactor unless I understand what's going on so I don't introduce bugs, but just reformatting can make a big difference sometimes if the style of the person who wrote the code is significantly different from your own.

(And truth be told, 1000 lines of code in one file isn't that bad. When you start working with multiple files, some sort of method of jumping to function/method definitions becomes extremely useful. Since I use Vim, I often use something like ctags. Knowing how to use Unix tools like find and grep is also extremely helpful.)
Ask HN: Where to start learning more about Crypto/web Security
I don't know anything, and I am not too well schooled in number theory, but do know some as well as have some friends high up in mathematics that could help me out.

I know a small bit of basic crypto terminology and some concepts etc, but would like to know more

I want to learn everything, but I have no clue where to start, what to look for; perhaps what would be referred to as unknown unknowns.

I also imagine I would need to some more about servers, databases, etc.

Basically, can someone point me too some good starting points, resources, what I should be looking to learn etc.

Much appreciated HN.

RB
There are, however, potential problems with this formula, which I think is what the thread parent was getting at.

For example, it is discouraging to log in to HN and see that your karma has fallen since your last visit. Using your formula, this would be a very regular occurrence for all but the most active users. Discouraged users are less likely to continue attempting to engage and many would eventually give up their attempts to maintain a decent karma. Then, while your measure may be "more accurate" in some sense, it would easily be less effective for goals that have more to do with engagement & participation than with notional accuracy.

Not trying to poo-poo the spirit of your post though, because as someone without much of a math background, this type of discussion is very enlightening. Just trying to clarify that inaccuracy may very well be a feature, not a bug.
We are effectively saying that each user should generate an average comment score of 1 point per day to break even. Anything you make beyond 1 point is considered an excess return for the day. We then simply take the Sharpe ratio of the average daily excess returns. The resulting metric ensures that users are incentivized to make consistent, high-quality submissions and punishes one hit wonders and those who take a spray-and-pray approach.

In my opinion, we want people to keep quiet until they have something meaningful to contribute to the conversation. The idea that making any post is a "return on investment" is nonsense.
The key phrase that makes this T&C fine is "... [that] you submit to public areas of the Website". This is a standard clause that means "don't sue us for copyright infringement when we publish the content you asked us to publish." IANAL.
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Unless you live in a country with basically no privacy laws your ISP will almost certainly not.
funny you should say skimming...because thats how i have been looking at code and i think it is my main problem...i try scanning the code over and over but get nowhere with it
I don't think I'm being excessively harsh, because he/she is blustering inaccurately about something that can be confirmed with a quick Wikipedia lookup.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
If we're going for half-open ranges, range(n) ≝ 0<i≤n would make more sense than 0≤i<n. But then again, sign(0) is still a point of disagreement today.

Dijkstra argued against this by noting that that makes adding 0 to the range impractical, but then he was considering natural numbers, not the half-open ranges we're talking about and using notation for here.

Me, I prefer integers and the a..b style, despite the off-by-one error.
With all the doom and gloom of the economy, naysaying, sky-is-falling, world-is-ending discussion (much of it warranted), it's nice to see that we're still progressing - as a global society- towards freedom and transparency.

Bonus points for this progression being driven by technology.
loganlinn,

I can't know the exact details of this situation, but in a normal PayPal reversal scenario, you can call Support, pay for the reversal with a different payment method (as you suggested would be done), and the service would be returned to your account.
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LOL. Welcome to the Internet. Guess you've never heard of Swiss Miss before.
If truth is uncomfortable, it's just grinding against some lies you're more comfortable with.

But there's no "wow" about it. If America has the pedigree amongst whites, asians, africans, and hispanics, it was simply due to the horrible trials associated with distant migration. Simple Darwinian stuff really.
Why are people comfortable with paying for tiered connection speeds, but not comfortable with a monthly data cap (that can be removed by paying more for a business connection)?
and now we get to see how the people's liberation army responds to an 'internet scandal' in the west.. my guess? ignore it completely ';-)
You can't see whatever content it is that you are trying to access until you enter the code. The examples on their web site make it pretty clear: http://doublerecall.com/
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So in other words, roll your own GUID implementation? Instead of using the built-in, highly-tested stuff?
Facilities and materials aren't cheap. Admin is about 10% of my school system's budget and that counts total admin, not just the principals and the like (there are tons of low paid employees in administration).
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The nice thing about GUIDs is that any node in a distributed system can make one at any time and you know that a collision is impossible or almost impossible.

On the other hand, they take up a lot of space, in particular, they fill RAM. They make the most used indexes in your system large and slow.

Practically, the need for GUIDs can be eliminated by establishing a server that works like the "take a ticket" machine at the supermarket. Any node that makes a new object makes an API call and gets a new id.
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Karma is there to let you know if others find value in your comments or if you're being an asshole, it's not really meant as a longterm way of ranking users.
What I would like to know is how much of that speed is due to being 'on-net'. I know that speed is what the connection is capable, but if the server is onnet, then it is nowhere near realistic.

Speedtest tells me I get 75mbps up/80mbps down and a ping of 5ms, but that's with the server it automatically gives me... This is using my uni's on-campus internet, which is connected to AARNET, a massive network. How much of that speed is due to me never actually 'entering' the 'internet'?

Is there some sort of way to test all of them automatically and get the average?

Edit: My speed test results over 15 test and multiple servers http://cl.ly/9aNO
Bowed out of the checkin-war? How about just WON the check-in war by making it an integral feature and de-productizing it out from under 4square et al's feet?
There's local cache(s) too to help with latency. Basically, you have to keep your GPU memory full, cache on RAM, cache on SSD, cache on HDD and continue all the way down to the cloud servers. Check out this demo for example, which streams data from disk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HScYuRhgEJw
Creating habits
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That's an interesting insight.

I'm not sure that's true. Lots of people play games where their rankings shift down if they don't constantly play. In a lot of cases, this actually increases engagement. I think we would need to see some evidence here, but the null hypothesis should be that user engagement does not change.

If one wanted to assume that it does negatively effect engagement, however, then maybe an extended approach then is to show the ranking of the user's ratio score? This is less of a judgement of their score and more of a pleasant reminder that they are not contributing as much as others. Alternatively, you could also set the risk-free-rate to 0 for both the comment and day, then only update the scores periodically.

I suppose one could argue that it's not a competition and you shouldn't be vying for a higher score, but then why show us our karma at all? Similarly, if one believes that consistent contribution is not important to the community, then it's a philosophical difference and we'll have to agree to disagree there.
The Other
Because ISPs are keeping prices the same when introducing caps, effectively providing less service for the same money.
Those companies are meant to be off the record.
I think I am probably a little above average when it comes to reading, understanding, and fixing other people's code. Here are a few things that helped me train myself:

1) I read a lot of open source code, the more you read the more aspects you learn about the way other people code.
2) I fix a lot of bugs. At first I fixed bugs in an large open source project. Thats all I did in the project, just kept fixing bugs. Then when I got my first real job outside of school (MSFT) I fixed tons of bugs. I poached bugs off other people (this has a side bonus of your team quickly growing respect for you).

Now, those are things that will help grow your skills but probably won't help you at this moment.

Here are some tips for the way I approach the problem:

1) Use a debugger. Right from the start, use a debugger and look at the variables that are coming and going. Look at their values. Do this over and over again.

2) Rewrite the code. Even if you don't use the code and you end up reverting it all (which I do more often then using my re-written code). Start with the smallest methods and work your way up. You will begin to run into issues that the original author also probably ran into. Often times, these issues force the code into a certain form which would be non obvious just reading it.
Ask him. He'll probably know about it. It's the biggest news in Slovenia atm.
The publication of the API allowed for clean room engineering of BIOS clones, but the publication of the IBM BIOS source was a defensive move to taint the pool of engineers that would be trying to write clones.
that is unfortunately double-edged proposition as severing the Internet connection would also mean that US couldn't spy on China as well. The goal of Internet war isn't to avoid it, the goal is to win.
Yeah, it's essentially the mean karma (subtracting 1 from each karma) divided by the standard deviation. Looks like you've re-invented the signal to noise ratio formula, or the reciprocal of the coefficient of variation formula (standard deviation divided by the mean), although they recommend not making the mean be zero.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio#Alternati...

It's probably going to have problems. Wouldn't it punish someone who had mostly good comments and posts, and occasionally gets one with a huge amount of karma, versus someone who never got one with big values of karma.
I think we have a lot of clues (based on neuroscience), lay people just have trouble understanding them because they don't fit their preconceptions.

Basically: you are (mostly) your brain. If there are suddenly two copies of your brain (whether meat or silicon), there will be two "you"s which will diverge upon receiving different sensory inputs. Both will be "continuous" with past "you" in that they will share memories formed prior to divergence. However without some kind of telepathic link, they will not be continuous with each other (apart from normal communication).

The question of "which one is real" is like asking which deep copy of a variable is "real".

However, destroying one's physical copy in favor of having only a virtual copy living at the mercy of some Matrix would be an ... interesting life choice.
I don't think this is the case at all. The problem people have with monthly caps is that they're frequently done with plans that advertised "UNLIMITED X!". There are also people who don't mind paying per GB. The problem most people have is when ISPs react according to content, such as capping your torrenting but leaving youtube untouched, or capping Netflix but not Facebook, etc.
Makes you wonder how they will deal with shifting tectonic plates?
The teachers I know (and remain in regular contact with) are mostly high school teachers and a couple of middle school teachers. I believe the Americorps teachers I know are both HS teachers, both are in Mississippi.

As to the other, more experienced teachers, they teach in various parts of Georgia. Rural districts in both north and middle GA, as well as the Atlanta area (in a variety of school types: a few in financially well off districts; others in financially poorer districts).

Subjects taught:

- Math by most of the Atlanta area teachers

- The rural teachers are a combination of foreign languages and english and a couple math/science teachers
Is this an acquition. From the crunchbase description, it appears that this can be used to suggest friends on Google+. Thoughts ?
Not to mention the fact that Canada is sitting on what is considered to be the largest oil reserve in the world.

This is also a very smart long-term strategic move to run a pipeline from Canada to Eurasia and Africa.
I guess these days FTTH is all Gigabit, but I remember a few years back when some companies were talking about 100 Mbps FTTH; that's nearly pointless now that cable can deliver that speed.
I can't reproduce any of these bugs using Firefox.
Man In The Middle
Can you address that by just discarding outliers?
The forbidden truth is about poor people ("rural"=white and poor, "urban" = black and poor.)
[2007]

The first hard part is building the tunnel.

The second hard part, as alluded to in the article, is that there is essentially no infrastructure (highways, railroads) within 2000 miles of the Russian terminus, and the Alaskan side is not exactly a thriving metropolis either.
I learned to make computer games by making below average computer games. What's wrong with someone learning to make programming langauges by making below average programming langauges?
Would be useful to know if there was a corresponding traffic spike or if the response time spiked on typical usage.
I'd imagine California and Japan have given a decent amount of experience with that.
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http://www.speedtest.net/result/1447236364.png

5 ms? Apparently I have the fastest internet in Australia
And the only way to know if it works for you is to test it.
Couldn't you solve that by increasing the "break even" score to whatever we think an "average" post should get? Spray a bunch of unvoted responses (technically, those are worth zero points of karma, I believe) and the average post is worth two, you will kill your ratio pretty quickly.
>Looks like you've re-invented the signal to noise ratio formula

Well, I didn't, Sharpe did. :)

However, the important distinction is the notion of a risk-free rate of return. In this case, it's (loosely) the 1 upvote you automatically get for every comment; in finance, it's usually the return you get on US Treasuries (around 1%, thought right now it's effectively 0%).

>Wouldn't it punish someone who had mostly good comments and posts, and occasionally gets one with a huge amount of karma, versus someone who never got one with big values of karma.

Assuming all else is equal (meaning it's N comments of karma K vs. N+1 comments where the first N are of karma K and the N+1th comment is something huge relative to K)? No. This makes sense if you think about how the standard deviation is derived, also note that I am capping the minimum standard deviation at 1 so consistently hitting the same karma does not give you an infinite score.

However, if both individuals have the same mean karma but one got it from consistently scoring around that mean, and another got it from having one huge upvoted comment and several smaller ones, then yes. But isn't that what we want?
This is a good example of why programming puzzles do a poor job of testing an applicant's problem solving ability.

These programming puzzles are like the old fashion puzzles http://www.lehmans.com/store/Toys___Iron_Puzzles.

* If you know the "trick", they are trivial and don't test your skill at all.

* If you don't know the "trick", they are extremely frustrating and don't test your skill at all.

* Once you know the "trick", you will look like a "genius" every time.

* The "tricks" are widely available on the internet.

Besides the "trick" issue, the "integer not in four billion" suffers from having "domain knowledge bias", which is pretty common with programming puzzle problems. This is one of the reasons programmers only hire programmers like themselves - they cannot see outside their bias box.

For someone with a bit-twiddling C/assembly background, the obvious assumption behind the puzzle is that "four billion" and "integer not among" and 1GByte implies you are given the unsigned integers 0..2^32-1 with one of them missing and you are to make a bit-map of the integers.

For someone without a bit-twiddling C background, they quite likely will both produce a perfectly valid answer and will fail the interview. For instance, finding the highest value n and returning n+1 is both correct and better than the implicitly "correct" answer in that it will take much less memory than the implicit algorithm and run much faster.

In fact, if you are allowed to take advantage of the puzzle author's bias box, the answer 2^32 will be correct every time and will be impossibly fast compared to the "correct" answer or even the n+1 answer. In fact, the n+1 answer will always be 2^32, given the bias box - the puzzle author cannot conceive of an integer larger than 2^32-1.
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This is also a very smart long-term strategic move to run a pipeline from Canada to Eurasia and Africa

This is what I don't get. Isn't there plenty of oil in Eurasia? And plenty of demand for oil in the Americas? Do the Russians really expect that in the future the flow of oil will go in that direction?
You're taking dubious tips collected from forums across the internet, and posting them as if they were authoritatively good. They're not.
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Does anyone have a good handle on freight costs?

If I wanted to send a container of stuff from (say) China to the US, would it be cheaper to send it in a ship, or go round the long way through a Bering Strait tunnel (assuming such a thing actually already existed)?
Earthquake resistance, yes. But building a tunnel right across the middle of a spreading mid-oceanic ridge? Nobody has ever done that before and it seems problematic.
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