skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's always a challenge to get more posts out

And you say that before you have even one content post out?!

I'm not holding my breath...
Trollope on shipping
I suspect the blog author knows this, but doesn't say it explicitly and people might be confused: This isn't an indictment of the RNG.

The test is pulling out 10 integers in the range [0,9]. That space is log2(10^10) == 33 bits big. The 64 bit seed space is far larger. So for any given sequence of ten numbers, there are almost certainly going to be many seeds that will generate it. This has nothing to do with the "quality" of the generated numbers, it's just that our intuition about what sequences look "random" lives in a much smaller search space than the RNG can actually produce.
Hmm,

At what point do the claim "they are doing their best" and the claim "clearly they don't have the resources to do anything" collide and explode into burning rubble?

I can believe that there are many noble individuals in the Doj who are doing their best. But how can one not call a resource-less investigation a tooth-less investigation if you are talking about intentions of Doj itself?
The economy is an interconnected system. If the banking system failed, then no one would be able to make over-night loans. If no one can make over-night loans, then large companies can't get the necessary funds for them to keep their regular operations running. If that doesn't concern you, consider that one of the largest companies in the country is General Electric. In simple terms, a failure of the banking system means the lights won't stay on.

Andrew Ross Sorkin talks about this in "Too Big To Fail" (http://www.amazon.com/Too-Big-Fail-Washington-FinancialSyste...). When things were really bad in 2008, and people were wondering what investment bank was going to go next, there was very real fear that eventually the biggest, most stable banks such as Goldman Sachs would go under. After Goldman, the next institution wouldn't be a bank. It would be GE.
It's a well-obscured secret, but if you write C and feed it to Arduino, it will compile and run just fine. The Arduino language is just a nice C api and the IDE just calls avr-gcc in the background.
My point is that depression is a real thing, that you need proper treatment for. All your theories are great, but it is about as valid as my butcher telling me how I should code my next project because he just got finished watching the Social Network.

I am sure you mean well, but the reality is that unless you an actual therapist, offering up advice does more harm than good.
Geolocation chat app built w/ Rails, Pushr, Cloud Foundry, & Google maps
Apple Has A Patent On Slide To Unlock
One of the phrases I've started using is, in the future you don't have to talk to anyone.

You see this already with the self-checkouts at stores. You walk in, grab what you want, check out and leave without talking to anyone. This is just the start of a torrent of low level automation. At some point there is not a lot left to do.
That might be because as a lawyer you're biased to prefer form over intent. I'm sorry if this sounds nasty, it's not supposed to be though. People are different. GNU/Stallman goes to great lengths to describe where he is coming from so the reader can understand what the motivations behind his points are.

It's not supposed to be a watertight contract between two parties with opposing agendas who are trying to outmaneuver each other at a soulless semantics game. Instead, the rider is supposed to enable people who already have friendly intentions to understand (and interpolate!) what is important to their guest.
Each product costs $10 per month.

I don't know of any plans to drop the price to $5 for 1-5 developers, sorry.
Well actually he does say that a supply of tea would be nice. I'm assuming he is not talking about his own supply.
> Their servers send an indication in the http headers: Server: Apache/2.2.21 (Amazon)

That's likely only if you use Amazon's Linux distribution (based on CentOS). My EC2 instances say "Server: Apache/2.2.17 (Ubuntu)".
If I'm Mexican, the US is a lot cheaper and easier to get to than China or India. You're right about the skilled immigrant problem though. That will hit the US hard.
Film studios and TV networks are eventually going to come to the realization that piracy is a marketing vehicle for them. Of course, they'll still need to find a way to make money off of their content, and that's an understandably tricky situation. But recent studies have shown that movie pirates are also movie studios' biggest paying customers.

The big challenge for studios right now is that there used to be two lifecycles for any given film: the exhibition lifecycle (i.e., the theatrical release window), and the ownership lifecycle (i.e., DVD or Blu-ray purchase). These days, both are being compressed, and ownership is increasingly unnecessary. Piracy may or may not be a legitimate threat to ownership, but that's sort of beside the point, because ownership -- as a fundamental concept -- won't matter in the cloud-driven, on-demand world of the very near future. But piracy can still exist as an interesting exhibition tactic. It just needs to be harnessed in the right way, and/or a compelling and equally convenient alternative needs to be created.

This is a very tough spot for studios, but legislative attempts at sticking their heads in the sand are not going to solve any problems for them -- and may, in fact, exacerbate their problems by putting innovation attempts on hold.
House takes Senate's bad Internet censorship bill, tries making it worse
The Garn–St. Germain Depository Institutions Act preceded the S&L crisis and both the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act preceded the subprime mortgage crisis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garn_-_St_Germain_Depository_In...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm-Leach-Bliley_Act

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernization...
But if they are developers why would they not want to modify their own C code (to add an embeddable JS interpreter?)
I don't think Google has any incentive to obsolete older devices.
Sometimes I wish HN had a downvote button
Awesome, thanks for sharing. I always wanted to know how apple thought of new products that they were going to build.
Well I fail at reading comprehension.. thanks.
I wouldn't necessarily argue that the federal government should not have any new powers, but rather than they should not simply assume them in contravention of the constitution. If the federal government wishes to expand its purview, it should have to get a constitutional amendment passed. Yes, that requires quite a lot of work and requires more consensus than political decisions normally require; good, that's a feature.

(Personally, I think we'd almost certainly be a lot better off if all bills required margins much greater than 50%; then, only universally accepted policies would gain acceptance.)

Hence my argument that we should not need a constitutional amendment to say that the federal government may not do something, unless the constitution currently says it may.
Impressive, thanks!
>I don't see the relevancy of the StackExchange question at all.

The parent asked "Who sells PC games anyway?" The stack exchange question is from someone who wanted to sell / give away retail boxed games with Steam activation.
You do http://pedrocr.net/text/how-much-gnu-in-gnu-linux

However since GNU software is the foundation on which most of the system is built you can argue that it has a much greater importance.

"Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs"
Hang on one second, who in the hell is "the government" in this situation?

The politicians supporting this bill, mostly republicans, work the phrase "I'm anti-government" into every single public speech they give. Those are the only supporters on the public payroll, the rest are all corporate entities and lobbyists, as well as the Chamber of Commerce, natch. Those are your pro-government marxist ideologues in this story.

I really think the phrase "the government" or even worse, capital-G "Government", should be banned from any discussion of policy, it turns everyone involved into an idiot. Government and industry both have lots of moving parts.

Lastly, I agree that our existing constitution should prevent this sort of law. I'm not optimistic about the current "small-government" supreme court agreeing with me.
GNU is, essentially, a clone of Unix except for the kernel, which is supplied by Linux. Calling your computer a GNU system is about as accurate as calling it a Unix system. Calling it a KDE computer is also technically accurate.

You could also form stacks, like KDE/GNU/Linux, or go all the way and just draw a directed graph of the major software dependencies. This isn't a serious proposal, but I would be kind of pleased if someone actually did this.
Depends on the game. Dogs are quite often used for flushing out big game (see old bear hunting approaches or boars).
Thanks, ramchip
> I can't figure out how to get inside your store. I feel a bit like I am playing badly-designed video game.

lol me too.
I'm an engineer as well. I would say that in interfaces especially, we converge toward best practices globally. Your customer is not happy to have to learn a hundred interfaces or switch interfaces when they get a new device or program. For instance, the VCR. Or Windows version bumps. Or the Ribbon. They prefer one interface to rule them all, like Logitech Harmony remotes, the browser, the command line, Emacs.

The current market provides some evidence.

http://searchengineland.com/comscore-android-nears-50-us-sma...

70% of the smartphone market is in iOS and Android, two very similar smartphone experiences. RIM's distinctive experience is at 20% and falling fast (it was at 27% in March). WP7 is an also ran at 5%. Symbian is at 2%. Palm is not in the chart.

If you believe those numbers, the contest is all but over. Every non-iOS non-Android experience is failing in the market. It may not be just because of their designs, but I think you have to believe on other grounds that UX/design is the major selling point for all smartphones. The second contender might be applications, and iOS and Android are the leaders there too, by a wide margin over the field.

I think Google decided to beat Apple at its own game. Whatever you believe about how they used Apple's patented material (or not) or how valid the patents are (or not), clearly at some point a decision was made to compete with Apple not just on features, but also in UI polish and look and feel.

And somebody probably looked at Apple and said, how can we top that? When they couldn't, they kept it as similar as possible for a variety of reasons: the patents were too broad to be enforceable, they could justify deriving the same concepts in a vacuum because they come from well known UX principles that predate the patents, the design elements were universals that all phones should have, they should lower switching costs from iOS to Android.

I agree with you that Google could have gone its own way when designing a phone experience. But I don't know that that would have been a path to success. You would only have to believe the preceding paragraph to imagine that a think-different UX could have been worse for consumers.
The bailouts have indeed occurred on a regular basis since at least, say, the mid 80's (the Continental Illinois Bailout). The rather clear problem is they have been increasing in size at an alarming rate.

This is exactly what one would expect. Each bailout increases the moral hazard involved in the banking system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

Heaven help us with the next bailout.
It's really a mixed bag as to who is to blame. On the one had the committee coming up with this should have done some research (and asked themselves "why hasn't rms done any convocations before?"). I've known organizations entertaining the idea of rms as a keynote, and it almost immediately gets shot down by anyone how has actually watched him speak.

Yeah. It seems like ordering squid at a restaurant: if you order squid or someone orders it for you, you shouldn't complain that you don't like seafood. And you can't really blame the squid.
> Natural language is a bad enough way to communicate with people

If it was bad, it wouldn't have become the way to communicate with people in every culture on the planet. Don't forget "natural language" can include body language, as well as words, grammar, idioms, stresses, pause, and intonations.

> there are several movies based on what can happen when two people have a conversation but have a context mismatch

Matching context using protocols such as small talk before a main topic of conversation is also part of natural language. Many of us who work on computers don't learn these other aspects of natural language very well, and tend to project this limited command of natural language onto computer languages.
I'm not convinced that you could run a 3.0 kernel image on a 386 without running out of RAM pretty soon, even if you cut it down to something pretty minimal. I haven't found any sources where anyone's actually installed modern Linux on one - they all seem to have used ancient distros because support actually vanished some time back (see eg. here: http://hackaday.com/2011/08/12/installing-linux-on-a-386-lap...).
Is there no prior art? Nintendo DS was released in 2004; all those PDAs prior to that, and there's no scribble to unlock? Or is the finger the novel aspect?
Hopefully this will be useful for people looking to ride-share, coordinate meet-ups or just as an easy place to keep track of things that are going on this weekend.
So are those types of models useful? The ones that need to be adjusted constantly?
He may be right that no company will get all the movies/series/etc and the market will continue to be fragmented.

But if that happens then piracy will kill the industry and nothing will be able to save them. This doesn't mean that they can survive only if there is a single company you can buy from -- I believe there is space for a number of different companies much like there is Spotify, Last.fm, iTunes store, etc each with a different model for how to provide value to customers -- but that each company must have all, or substantially all, the movies people want.

Because as long as it is easier for people to find what they want on a torrent site or on rapidshare or on usenet they will do that. The movie industry is in competition with the pirates and have no way to beat them on price so they will have to fight on the basis of convenience (which is a battle they can will, as illustrated by iTunes).

If they don't, they are doomed.

And if anybody out there is looking for a new startup, may I suggest that you make a recommendation engine like netflix has but for tv series. The channels (and especially the bundles of channels) belong to the past. But there is good value in recommending good quality tv shows to people who may be interested in them. If Netflix had focused massively on that, they would be in much stronger position against the rights holders.
Alternate interpretation: he has had overly solicitous people fret over why he's not eating breakfast, and would rather simply put the topic out of everyone's minds. He comes off as a solidly decent person in the rest of this letter; losing his composure at the mention of breakfast seems out of character.
Gitbox 1.5: native undo for git operations
That may be the case for T-Mobile but it certainly is not universal. AT&T offers nothing like that, AFAIK.
Thanks for the feedback. I think we've accounted for this with the stream and how likes/dislikes work. By taking into account how people react, we want to make what resonates more visible. Kind of like HN (but I had never touched HN when I came up with this). As for flags, the threshold for nuking a Thot with a flag varies - it is a bit of our secret sauce as to how we optimize.

For self-categorization, that is coming in version 1.2 or 1.3. We know that as more people use it, content needs to get personalized. Definitely heading down that path quickly.

Quality content and the people who make it need to shine :)
Aren't there are paid lobbyists pushing on the other side of it too? Perhaps there are not as many or they're not as well funded, but I believe they still exist.
I would readily do without buyer's remorse.
The problems with economic model or most modeling are not the methods. It's usually dealing with the quality of the features or parameters. Even in a much simpler problem, no matter how good the methods, if you don't have the right params, your model will suck. And with economic models, it's dealing with a open world system with ever changing params, the challenge is not on the methods, but how to discover quality parameters/features. And that require not just the skills of modelers but many other disciplines.
I wonder if this also applies to used cars; if you don't mind driving a bit of a clunker, you could do this affordably. A twenty year old car does not depreciate in value significantly over six months.

edit: hm, looks like it only applies to cars sold by a dealer.
Low-cost Android phone shipments to reach 339 million in 2015
Thanks!

Right now it is about 2km, but that will change as density increases.
Agreed, I started reading it thinking I'd be very frustrated afterward, but this has the right amount of detail and no requests that are too unreasonable for a venue to handle. The event sponsor may have to deal with some of the more tricky ones, but I really wouldn't mind executing this rider. Especially compared to some of the ones I've seen.
The government already insures most private pension funds.

That insurance fund would indeed have been wiped out, however, the government could have injected more money into it. This would have been the appropriate level for the bailout to take. Save the pension funds and FDIC insured savings, let all the large banks and brokerage houses go bust. The small business administration could also have provide some bridge loans for smaller companies stuck without capital.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pension_Benefit_Guaranty_Corpor...
I would like you to be right: do you have evidence that this was the reason the name was changed?

I am personally hoping that "PARASITE" has a much more negative ring that will make it easier to campaign against the bill.
Key strengthening or key stretching is used to add a work function to key generation in order to prevent brute force attacks on the key. The attack itself is probably best referred to as a brute force attack, which I poorly worded.

I did not claim that I'm an expert in cryptography, but I will tell you that my graduate course in formal cryptography has taught me enough to explain something as basic as key strengthening.

So, mukyu, perhaps you'd like to fill us all in with your detailed explanation of the number theory behind the Blowfish key schedule.
Arduino is really something special. As a kid I'd always been fascinated by electronics but didn't really know what to do with that energy. And then I grew up and just assumed that, well, that's over.

And then Arduino comes along and, with its simple little IDE, convinces me that this isn't so different from the rest of my programming.

And now I get to build stuff. With my hands. Makes me feel like a kid again.

It's amazing how much you can accomplish, as Banzi has, when you can reduce something to solving a user experience problem.
If you're an existing customer of a cell phone provider without a contract, I kind of doubt they'll refuse to sign you up to a new two-year contract because of credit quality, as long as you've been paying your bils. It doesn't make sense to drive you to jump to another carrier.
Do you the FourSquare wins here?
> There was really a shot at trying a lot of new ways to interact with mobile devices and very little made it to market in the quest to follow the other guy.

I'm glad Microsoft at least is going that way. Palm tried it as well (and as far as I'm concerned WebOS still has the nicest notification system) although they failed for other reasons.
You should use some nice examples in the front page, i can think of:

In the Movie Theater: "Mortal Kombat is a really cool movie! no plot though"

In a restaurant: "The spaguettis in this restaurant are just out of this world!"

You get the idea. And please integrate with twitter somehow (maybe a twitter client that also shows the "Thots") and also republish to twitter if the user wants to.

Edit: typo.
Actually I think that some of those details are unreasonable, but at least (as an event planner) I would rather know that up front rather than finding out midway through the planning process and it being to late to find another speaker.

Put it another way - if I had invited RMS and he sent that rider, I'd probably say "no thanks, we'll find someone else" but at least it would be at an early enough point that there would be time to find someone else.
Maiden NC, is rated at 4.78 - 4.92 kWH/m2/day for PV's

High Resolution Map of KiloWatt Hours per day across the US:
http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_pv_national_hi-res.jpg
I once wasted some of rms's time by emailing him to ask if using Google went against his principles.

He was polite enough to reply to me and say that it was ok.
Here in America that certification is done by "the market" (S&P and Moody's). They gave the CDOs AAA ratings. Of course the fact that they were paid by the same companies that were submitting the CDOs didn't effect their judgement whatsoever. Except they found the emails where they said "go easy on these guys otherwise we lose their business". Oh you mean they made the ratings up? Yea. But that's legal, since the ratings came with no guarantees. They are the "free speech" like poetry. Welcome to America. Sucker.
"That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there."

As I heard it, that was the sarcastic end to a 'conversation' in which Taibbi persisted in ignoring any information that did not fit that narrative. The DoJ has put a string of financial industry people in jail for fraud but Taibbi never, ever tells his readers about those cases. TBW was one of the largest mortgage brokers in the country and the almost entire C-suite went to jail; the chairman got 30 years. Taibbi's sole comment on this was that he was 'the exception that proves the rule.' Complete bullshit. Matt Taibbi's schtick is to endlessly repeat that the system is broken that nobody cares so he can reap pageviews from the ignorant. You absolutely cannot rely on this guy for objective reporting.

http://www.stopfraud.gov/news.html
Hurd isn't deprecated in the eyes of GNU. So far as I'm aware, they still desire a kernel under the GNU name.
There is a way to kill big media: create companies that don't act like big media, or more specifically, big media's unethical acts.

After all, they are trying to stop the spread of their own media. What about them stopping the spread of their competitors' media?
Events like this sound like they'd be great things to attend. Too bad we (my teammate and I) are without the resources to attend. Are there any HNers attending who are not from the valley? Unfortunately the only time I've been in the valley was working for a company that didn't want employees going to these types of events.
I think it shows that people will work on what people like working on, especially during their precious free time.

If you rake your memory you could probably find points in time when you were working on something you really enjoyed, even though you had other good ideas that would better benefit the community. I know I certainly have been in that situation.