skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right, so the corollary seems to be:

"Unless you are bignum rich, the best investment strategy is to put your money into a market index fund (Vanguard 500) and wait..."
As an amateur bodybuilder and fitness enthusiast I'm well aware of the so-called obesity epidemic. There are plenty of ways the government can help, mostly by eliminating special interests.

1. Eliminate all farming subsidies, starting with those for corn and other unhealthy foods.

2. Eliminate special interest group influence on politics, such as the frozen food industry getting congress to declare pizza a vegetable.

3. Provide proper health science education in schools, starting at a young age. Teach kids what food is, how it works, the side effects of poor eating habits, etc. Teach them about nutrients, exercise, etc. Do it in a scientific manor without demonization / judgement, unlike most (stupid) anti-drug programs.

4. Remove all unhealthy foods from food assistance programs.

Most methods of helpful government "intervention" are eliminating government intervention.
The only privacy filters a person really needs are sobriety and discretion.
They also have the all cash option, which by itself offers a very good return if you factor in matching and tax benefits. And if you switch jobs somewhat frequently you can roll it over into a no fee IRA you manage without necessarily worrying about the state of the market when you do the rollover.
Well in this case it seems to be more of the "why". The information was easily obtained, the information was known in the country of origin. What was not admissible is for everyone to know that US govt. knows about the information.
The Arduino is just an 8bit AVR microcontroller at heart. You can program it with avrdude, and write straight C using avr-gcc.

Personally, I use Atmel's development boards and AVR Studio under VMware.
Hacking Heroku with Custom Build Packs
You are overlooking the 50%+ of people who are not mentally competent to handle a modern PC. People who haven't upgraded their Windows to SP1 because they don't want to mess with it, who dedicate 60% of their CPU time and screen real estate to malware, who think Skype keeps uninstalling because they haven't pinned it to the taskbar/dock and the icon vanished after they quit the app.
1) Your logic only makes sense if you assume that the rate of wiretaps is unchanged by the legal status of wiretapping. This seems a rather implausible situation.

If wiretapping X, Y, and Z is legal, then it's easier to hide an illegal wiretap of W. When there are more legal wiretaps, it's easier for illegal wiretaps to slip through. The cost of oversight isn't dominated by the number of illegal wiretaps. It dominated by the number of legal wiretaps, because each of those needs to be reviewed.

2) No, it's not worth trying. Surveillance agencies have been saying that forever, and they've not delivered on their promise.

Your beliefs seem to exist in some strange world where agencies are actually held accountable. So long as we don't live in that world, your ideas make no sense.

3) We will not agree on this. You simply don't value privacy. I do, and I think you're really naive about this.
If you've been paying attention, I addressed most of Stephen's points in the comments sections of his first two blog posts, and Alex's "news stories" are just a rehash of those posts. I've also made comments in one of the other Hacker news threads about the Yammer email. Finally, I know Scala has flaws and admitted to them in other places. I may be a fanboy, but I consider myself one that listens to reason, at least.

My last comment, however, has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with the human side of things. Stephen and Alex are playing dirty, and I'm calling them out for it.
Agreed. I work in the health care industry and it's amazing how gov't regulation (well intentioned as it may be) creates incredibly perverse incentives.

If you want to read up on this type of thing, just read how ASP (average sale price) reimbursement for Medicare drugs works. Doctors and drug wholesalers make money hand-over-fist because of the system.

Capitalism creates wealth by matching buyer and seller. If kids want happy meal toys (thus parents want them too) they'll get them one way or another, regulations be dammed.
How to Protect My Gmail Account from Hacking With 2-step Verification
Much of this is not true. This is in an occupy subreddit so be careful what you see in comments and what gets upvoted...

One thing that he doesn't make clear: hedge fund fees are 2% annual management fee PLUS 20% of any upside (very similar to VC's)

After fees, index funds often perform better than hedge funds:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/business/yourmoney/04stra....

Also - relevant is this long bet:
http://longbets.org/362/

“Over a ten-year period commencing on January 1, 2008, and ending on December 31, 2017, the S & P 500 will outperform a portfolio of funds of hedge funds, when performance is measured on a basis net of fees, costs and expenses.”
PREDICTOR
Warren Buffett
You can attach a keyboard and mouse and display to a tablet.
You can get paid for donating plasma.
Thanks for these additional thoughts. I totally agree with you that it would be wonderful to have discussions around papers. It is something that we want to do.

I love MathOverflow. It's really a terrific site. Also I'm a huge fan of Tim Gowers. His polymath project was awesome; I hope that's indication of what the future of scientific collaboration looks like. We are definitely going to do what we can to help push things in that direction.

Thanks again.
An application sandboxing/deployment/sales system, coupled with high-level application/platform APIs that are considerably more coherent than the gnome/kde/whole-universe-of-libraries C mess.
Kinda my point. The comparison is meaningless. I also think he's wrong, but don't know how to even begin demonstrating that.
unpersuasive. You go to the casino and sit down at the poker table, some of them are going to be pros or very skilled people who will try to manipulate you. Is the game rigged against you? As much as they can within the rules of the game.

Second, on average, HFs recently have little performance edge. They had an edge during the dot-com burst and earlier, when they were smaller. Lackluster returns and frequent blowups belie the notion they have the inside track.

A few of the hedge fund guys are legitimately brilliant, with a consistent edge.

A few are bad eggs and push the envelope, e.g. Galleon.

A few have an inside track, e.g. HFT guys who are collocated and see everything a split second before everyone else.

Most HFs have little or no sustainable edge, and just take big fees from gullible people until they blow up.

If you don't think you can play against these guys, just invest in bond and stock index funds and ETFs. You won't do much worse, and you won't be risking blowups.

There's been a lot of looting the last few years, blatant stealing of customer funds at MF Global, bailouts, insider trading by Congressmen, CEO pay, private equity extraction, would focus on those guys. Mostly hedge funds are a convenient target. If you want to target something, target specific practices that are a problem, not specific actors.

(the only real scandal is the ultralow tax rate paid by HF managers on giant earnings - thank fully-paid-for Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor)
I recommend you work for a startup first, this way you can still keep earning a paycheck but get a feel for the frantic pace, etc. I worked for one startup and then now work in a larger company and its a world of difference how they do things. This may then be a good transition to starting your own startup.
This generally depends on your personal needs.

1. Do you have another job?
2. Can you afford to work for the amount they are willing to pay you?
3. A general rule of thumb is that you always renegotiate. Once you reach salary negotiation you're pretty much going to be hired, and the worst they can do is say no.

You need to figure out if you can work for equity over cash. How viable is the company?
Somehow a person eating food can't control themselves but your desire to change their behavior is objective? Your preference for bad legislation that was transmitted to you contagiously from your environment. Perhaps you would like someone to change your environment so you take better political actions. And so on.
It's tough to legislate against every possible loophole in a law.
Touch scrolling is not enabled for mobile devices since there is native scrolling already (with two fingers in iOS below 5 and with one in iOS5). Custom scrolling can be additionally enabled.
Perhaps now this story will get the media storm it deserves.
Web Components Explained
The blog post reads like this was a new invention, so it matters from that perspective. It maybe inconsequential, however funding is not everything. If they need $1.5 mil to do this, then they need a lot more to run this business. We built everything bootstrapped. Except 2008 was a sucky year for raising money. Today is like 10X easier.
Actually no. There is a trade-off there. Compartmentalization implies duplication of work and waste but it protects against one compromised person leaking a whole lot of information.

Imagine that North Koreans promised $2m to the Korean Intel Dept. employee to reveal their secrets. If the secrets and methodology is the same and shared as he Iraq Intel methodology that one person can cripple our the whole intelligence apparatus worldwide.
Speaking as someone who isn't a programmer at all and needed (still needs, actually) to learn a language for dealing with a massive amount of data for a school project, I decided to have a stab at Python and have been working my way through his book. Overall I'd say it's pretty great. The good is that, as you mentioned, the early chapters (really the whole first half) are quick, repetitive exercises which I feel gave me a good understanding of the dirt basics of how Python works. Now I'm getting into the more tricky chapters and still really enjoying them.

I sometimes feel a bit more explanation from him on how or why certain things work would be nice, or maybe a few hints for where to start looking for answers in the extra credit would be good, but for the most part I think he's effectively covered enough of the basics needed to land me on the ground running. Between the exercises I've done so far and the basic script someone at reddit was kind enough to throw together for me I've managed to modify and make my own scripts to start processing the data for this project. Also it feels pretty awesome to write a script for an hour then actually see it work in less than a second and do what would have taken me days otherwise to do.
Hmm, does this work the other way too? Can any EU citizen claim residency in the Netherlands, then use this to get U.S. residency for a small deposit?

If not, isn't this a somewhat unequal treaty?
Good data is hard to come by. You could say the market average, but there's the obvious question of distribution: if hedge funds, "0.1%", or the Queen of England are doing far better than average, so that the distribution is skewed, then you the average is a poor statistic for what the common man can expect to get.
Direct flights to Bangkok - land of smiles orchids and amazing cuisine
Thailand is said to be the land of smiles and a trip to this land will truly put a smile on your face, especially since it involves your close encounter with nature, wildlife, warm hearted people and loads of activities to keep you busy.
I'll take that bet.

Brazos & Atom are still 45nm, and are a lot faster than 45nm ARM parts. They should be, they use a lot more power. Exynos 5250 is 32nm.

In Q2 2012 we will finally be able to compare apples to apples. Medfield vs A15. And we'll definitely see fanless CPUs from Intel next year. I don't think there's room for a fan in this: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4788/intels-medfield-gingerbre...
Attempts to calculate that for the myriad different investment strategies are exactly why we have such a large and complex financial system.
Perhaps:

SELECT ...
FROM ... WITH (INDEX(INDEX_NAME))

or

SELECT ...
FROM ...
WITH (INDEX(INDEX_NAME_1))
INNER JOIN ...
WITH (INDEX(INDEX_NAME_2))
ON ... = ...
Git is terrible at dealing with big binary files and by terrible I mean very slow, it's optimized for text files only. Linus wrote about that a while ago, you can google it.
Boat shipping
Boat Shipping: We can transport your boat or yacht from ANY point / port A to ANY point / port B - Worldwide ! Pre booking and last minute boat transport rates available !
If there are indeed "negative externalities" then there are almost always better ways to address them than limiting individual liberty. I wasn't joking when I mentioned listening to punk music and homosexuality as also having negative externalities. Almost every behavior has some negative externality, even breathing. If we are to use the excuse of control of "negative externalities" as a lever to modify individual behavior then that lever becomes almost trivial to use to create a police state where every behavior is within the realm of the government to regulate.
Yep, I'm going at it from another direction where I teach the symbols like a language, and then it makes it easier to explain how they work later. I agree that state machines are a great way to understand them, but I don't think they're practical for using them and they just complicate getting capable in it.
And why not? To me it sounds as a very good "web scale" start.
I just tried it out. Clean design, looks smart and runs fast enough. It found a bunch of my papers.

One important thing: I can't find a way to give/get formal references to the papers. This means I can't use any of the papers I find here without googling to find the text (or if I'm lucky, BibTex) of its conventional reference. This is such a glaring omission that I wonder if it was intentional. Does anyone know?

Also, scribd rendered PDFs look like hell, and the scribd frame captures scrolling events. If the frame doesn't fit in a browser window (which it doesn't by default) you have to move the pointer in and out of the frame and scroll in both places to read a page of the paper. yuk.
Possibly the best rant in support of the book "Intelligent Asset Allocation" by Bernstein.
File a FOIA request and tell us what answer you get back.
Some great hints about Windows 8
Not necessarily. If the hits are not distributed equally, you can get 500k hits in 2 hours (say lunch time in a big city in a small country).
Personally, Scala's multiple ways of solving the same problem is a major concern to me, it's language with bipolar disorder.

For example.
Iterating through a container.

1. list.foreach(anonmyous function)
2. for (i <= list)
3. while loop.

Throw in both scala.collections.immutable/mutable, and java.util collections.

Scala wants you to use functional programming styles to solve problems. Thus do everything list.foreach() way. But it's backed on top of jvm which isn't the most functional programming friendly virtual machine. All the functional programming end up being syntaxical sugar and a burden if you want any performance at all. So for performance you are forced to write things the java way, which terrible because the language is designed to lean towards solving problems functionally, so you shoot yourself in the foot either way.
Noah - appreciate the link and thoughtful advice. It does sound logical.
A console maker is going to bring their own deployment/sales system, and they're going to choose a single library stack. So no advantages there.
Apparently some folks on androidcentral picked it up a little more than a year ago. http://forums.androidcentral.com/sprint-optimus-s/45729-ever...
I think what is not OK is revealing the specific code word of the compartment not the fact that a person has a top secret clearance in general.
Ask HN: Using Technology To Improve City Governments
Lets say you were made CTO of American city with a few hundred thousand people. Pittsburgh, PA or Buffalo, NY or Madison WI for example. What questions would you ask on your first day? With some sense of realism, what would you try to do in your first year? (i.e. saying you're going to stop using all legacy systems and immediately move to open source isn't necessarily realistic, although you could start to do that) How would you use technology to make life better for the citizens of your town?
The (? ... ) syntax is for "extended patterns". In this case, it makes the rest of the regular expression case insensitive. Read through http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html#Extended-Patterns for more information on extended patterns.
ClassPager Classroom Communication
The consumers are still here, on iPads.
It baffles me how Zuckerberg can remain disdainful of our very consistent feelings toward privacy, while arrogantly suggesting that he knows better.

Facebook's popularity suggests that Zuckerberg does know better. I have yet to be convinced that the average Facebook user cares about abstract privacy at all, let alone as much as we tend to.

I can't just dismiss all the complaints and protests from Facebook users, of course, but I do have to wonder what proportion of it is simply people not liking change, rather than actual privacy concerns.
Hahaha I thought this looked familiar...

His feed just refreshed in my feed reader... And I use news.yc as a bookmarklet to save interesting stuff.

Sorry bout that.
And most probably, Microsoft as well: there has been no evidence to the contrary yet.
An existing console maker.

On the other hand, look at the Kindle Fire, and the rest of the Android ecosystem.
Most definitely up-voted! Thanks for the concern 'there' but the info I posted is entirely and intentionally public knowledge. Eric went through a great deal medically, started a foundation to help others with ALL, and even had his identity stolen while undergoing chemo up in Washington state by the person who took his blood samples every day. His case was aired on "60 minutes" or "Dateline" and resulted in one of the first federal prosecutions under HIPPA laws.

I didn't want to "pimp" the foundation here on HN (I served on the board for the first two years), but you can read more about it here:

http://www.drewfoundation.org/
Facebook privacy: You're as much to blame as Zuckerberg.
> It very much reminds me of when I was in grade 10 and we were doing simple stuff in QBasic.

That's pretty much the feel I was going for when I wrote it.
Why is this biased anonymous junk on HN frontpage?
DCI in general, and it depends on the specific SCI compartment.
I'm a freelance developer.

The amount of money that they offered will not last me more than a week.

The company is in the space of business intelligence and their customers would mostly be corporate/startup owners.

I'm not crazy over the idea, but it does sound viable but then again there's so many competitors in this field.

The only saving grace is that I find that the CEO guy with his previous experience managing a medium-sized company may be able to use his connections to get customers.

And the startup environment where I am in (Singapore) may be advantageous to him where angels and government grant givers take previous working experience before giving out cash.
I wish we could get straight answers from Apple, HTC, Nokia, Samsung and others as to whether this tracking technology is located within devices they are selling, on what carriers and what is happening with the data, what is logged, where is it logged, what it shipped from the device up to remote servers, and exactly how is that data being used?
I don't blog actively right now, although I'm tempted to start after all this. All my input can be found in the comments sections of Stephen's two EJB2 posts and in other hacker news threads.
That's awesome. It's funny because I didn't even try to write the book for kids, but happy it seems to work well for them.
The Story of Thanksgiving- Giving Thanks for What You Have
If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold. That's why I don't use Gmail. When I pay for cloud services (like MobileMe, now iCloud) I feel more confident that my personal information isn't analyzed, sold, and used to manipulate me. Apple doesn't need to sell my data to profit from me.

I value my privacy but I'm not Richard Stallman. I carry a cell phone, so there's a chance I'm being tracked. I like viewing web sites in a graphical web browser (not Chrome) -- it has JavaScript permanently turned on, I accept some cookies, and I find the geolocation service convenient. I understand I'm giving up some privacy by doing all that.
I imagine that sort of implementation issue is only relevant to the typical user if that user comes across a case where the potential inefficiency of NFA->DFA conversion (or NFA simulation) actually does happen. I'm not sure how common it is to encounter this.

I'd be more concerned about making sure there is some discussion of nonregular languages; this appears to be in the works (I'm curious to see what exactly it turns out to be).
1) Why review every single wiretap? Only wiretaps that resulted in problems need to be reviewed (e.g. some of my private info was used against me, so my lawyer would be reviewing if the wiretap was legal and would file civil suit for damages against wiretapping agency if it was illegal).

2) Are you saying that agencies without surveillance capabilities would be performing no worse than they are performing now?

3) I wish you could show me real dangers of limited privacy. But so far all your examples of surveillance abuse included government agencies doing something illegal.
Ah ha! you guys weren't arguing about whitespace in code at all. This thread is just a proxy war for the vim/emacs holy war. I should have guessed.
> to have functioning relationships governments need to know that some level of confidentiality will be kept when requested.

To have relationships that function the exact same way they do now. It's clear that things would be different. It's probably true that things would be harder for people in those roles. It's not at all clear that things would be worse for those outside of government, which is the real question of whether it is desirable.
There is no formal guidance (that I'm aware of) about revealing a secret, top secret, Q, or L clearances, nor is there formal guidance on revealing that you are SCI eligible.

Each SCI compartment and SAP has its own unique rules about what you can and cannot reveal (some SCI compartments mere existence is classified at the SCI level itself, meaning you can't say you hold that clearance to anyone who doesn't hold that clearance, for example).

Each SCI compartment also comes with it's own unique rules about when you can or cannot talk about what you learned or were cleared to access (most are probably lifetime NDAs).

That said, it's pretty shitty opsec to tell someone, or the Interwebs, that you hold a specific clearance or do a specific job.
Memory card
Memory cards are an extension card that is widely used by people to extend the memory capacity on their devices like smart phones, game console, MP3 player, digital camera and computer.
Enabling large disks and large sectors in Windows 8
حول جهازك الى آيباد مع البرنامج الرائع iPadian
I think you lost yourself in your attempt at extreme sarcasm.
Depends on the compartment...
I'm with you on (1) and (2). Problem I have with (3) and (4) is that nutritional "science" has been wrong so many times in the past, e.g. a study finds that something (say, french fries cooked in lard) is bad for you, so an entire industry changes to use what they think is better (vegetable oil) and then we discover that not only is the new thing worse (trans fats) but the original thing wasn't that bad in the first place.
Than hu: nguyen nhan va cach dieu tri
It's not clear to me that "impeding U.S. foreign policy" is a bad thing in this case.
I think it's awfully naive to claim that the environment you're raised in has no effect on your actions later in life.