skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What struck me most was having multiple-choice answers on a math test... WTF?

You shouldn't be able to just guess the answers one-out-of-four. When I was in school (not in US) there never was such a thing. You simply solve the problem and write an answer, which usually is a simple number.
Ah thanks for that Alain!
>You can use SNI

and lose all your IE on XP viwers and all your non-Honeycomb/ICS android viewers? All your 3.x iOS users? All your blackberry users?

Are there any large sites using SNI to handle SSL queries? I'd love to hear about their experiences.
This is awesome. I'd love to see Wesleyan (or another college do this)
You mean that people just don’t sort their garbage at all, the company does it for them? Is it technically plausible, with decent material recovery levels? Don’t the recyclable materials lose value by putting them together with regular garbage?
NASA confirms first planet in habitable zone
Valley Girl 2.0

Sadly this is me, I hate it, but I know it is true, my mind works far faster than my mouth and when I am excited it comes out as half sentences, joined by "likes" and "you knows". I have to concentrate to focus on pulling myself back and then I worry that I am not getting my thoughts across, but at least I know I am not getting them across when, I am doing it at thought speed.

Someone said to me once "Dude you use likes like other people use ums". If there was one thing I could change about my speaking style that would be it. Funny part is I speak at conferences and when I monolog it is not an issue. Q&A is a different story all together.
> When shops like Thoughtworks are bailing on Java for Ruby

They're swapping Java for Ruby, not Java for Rails.

Ruby is, performance aside, a really nice language. It's certainly possible to build something "enterprise class" in Ruby. Especially as soon as you start treating Ruby as a meta-language and build your own DSLs in it

Rails on the other hand isn't really enterprise grade. It's constrained by Active Record, and the immaturity (and lack of popularity) of the alternatives.
How to crack SQL Server's password Hashes
Okay, you're on shared hosting. What do you do with that pretty little cert? Oh right, you now pay to upgrade to a static IP. Now you're paying for that.
Which of the sites that you use your throwaway password for have friends and messaging?

Personally, I have exactly one site from which I tolerate non-email messages from friends. That's Facebook, and it's in the same category as email, ecommerce, etc. that gets a real password.
That seems to answer a different question, not the one bermanoid asked.

To recap, bermanoid's question was a reply to manicdee's comment which claimed that underrepresentation of women in the tech industry, in and of itself, is evidence of sexism. Since men are underrepresented at all levels of the NHS, manicdee's theory would allow us to conclude that the NHS is sexist against men, without the need to look at any other evidence. Possible valid replies could be a) disagreeing with manicdee's argument about sexism in the tech industry, b) agreeing that the NHS is sexist against men, or c) pointing out some flaw in the above reasoning. I guess that you would answer c), but your comments so far don't seem to point out any specific flaw.
WEP In a nutshell
One of the cleanest monitoring tools I've encountered. Looks promising.
Payday Loan Cash Advance
It's sad that so much thought and energy went into designing something so mind-blowingly awful.

I'm with city41, I'm constantly chasing my labels now.

I don't WANT gmail to act more like a native app and less like a webpage.

If I did - I'd use a native app, not a web app.
>sentience must (by sheer odds) be out there too.

Why? Sentience just happens to be an evolutionary trait that was beneficial to us, like wings on a bird.

There millions of species animals on our planet, and only a handful of them are sentient.

We have a bit of a cognitive bias towards thinking that sentient life is something that evolution would work towards, but that isn't really how evolution works.
Gowalla Confirms Facebook Acquisition: Technology, Product Left Behind
This is exactly what i've been looking for, for the past couple of years now. At first I was using MyOnePage and About.me looked interesting, but this solution is perfect for me because it gives me the granular control that I need. Some hosting might have been nice, but i'm certainly not going to complain at all.

I was stuck of a minute thinking about where I could host my html file since both my hosting sites are running Wordpress blogs and it can be a bit of a pain getting pure html pages to work alongside Wordpress - At least in my experience.

So i just opted for my public folder on Dropbox instead. Its as good as any other location, hopefully.

Unless anyone knows of any distinct reason as to why i shouldnt do it this way?

Here's my profile link: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3417415/krmmalik/index.html
Everyme (YC S11) is hiring a versatile web engineer
We are a small team in Menlo Park, CA, re-inventing the address book on every platform, and making it more social. We've raised $1.5m from the very best investors, and our product is launching soon.

We strongly believe in choosing the right technology for the job at hand. Our web stack is a myriad of tech, currently RoR, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, and others. But we don't really care what languages you know or prefer, you can learn any language. You are a versatile, smart engineer who is capable of anything.

If that describes you, contact us at jobs@everyme.com.
LA Hacker News meetup group is pretty awesome as well!
3 Months to a New You
This is exactly what Sal, the founder of Khan Academy, believes. What strengthens this argument is that, if you miss a few logical steps you end up even more baffled when you encounter concepts that are build upon the concepts on which you neglected to learn, mostly because you were either embarrassed to ask in class or because you thought that you got it right in the first place.

This, adding the fact that it's "socially acceptable" to claim that a person might not be smart enough and give up entirely, is what makes children fail in the end and deemed to be "stupid".

Edit: If you're further interested in Salman Khan's point of view you can check his TED talk here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM95HHI4gLk
Tenther claims are not going to get you far in front of the US Supreme Court.

Congress has extensive powers over interstate commerce, and when it chooses to regulate an aspect of interstate commerce, state regulation in that area is automatically preempted except to the extent specified by Congress. This rule is clear and longstanding, and does not simply cover "various matters", but virtually all matters directly connected to commerce amongst the states.

Further, look up the dormant commerce clause, which can kick in even without Congress stepping into an area.

Then look up Granholm v. Heald. Even the 21st Amendment couldn't save one attempt that tried to regulate interstate trade of alcohol.
Wait, Google was not happy enough breaking scrolling in iOS so they decided to break it on Lion too?

I'm gonna try hard not to think they are doing it on purpose.
Man, this post was close to unreadable for me, and I gave up halfway through.

It wasn't just the anti-Fire bias, but the constant mixing-in of bold type, and just the overall styling of the post was bad. Considering the blog is about usability, that is sad.
OAuth Tutorial 2 from Layer 7 The Authorization Code Grant Type
On Magazines and the iPad
Behind RIM’s $485M Write-off
Thank god I'm self employed and decide myself when and what to exercise. I can't imagine having to dance to the pipes of these corporate clowns. 18 people being scrutinized by their bosses collectively lose 150 lbs (25 of which are accounted for by 1 person)? I can't say I'm impressed.
It's controversial because we suspect that it's your fault that you think Firefox is sluggish and crash prone.

Most likely either you've got some bad plugins installed, or you haven't tried it recently, or both. It's possible that a clean install of a modern Firefox would also be bad for you, but we doubt it.
That's your ego talking, worrying about what other people think of your choice. As you get older, what other people think starts to lose its importance.

Having had 2 brushes with suicide, and multiple times being reduced to destitution, I've since learned that life is not defined by happiness; it's defined by experience. And pain is just as valid an experience as any. In fact, I'd argue that a life without pain is a life wasted. There will be joy and there will be sorrow, but every second of every day, your life ebbs just a little. It's barely perceptible, until you discover to your shock that 10 years have somehow got behind you without you noticing.

And that's when you realize that it's far better to live a life of pain than to live a life of regret, or even worse, no life at all. A random chance ignited the spark of life on our planet. It's amazing you're even alive at all, let alone able to contemplate it. Life is allotted to you in limited quantity. Guard it jealously and live it fully, regardless of how it feels. There's no arbiter at the end, except for you, saying "I lived my life to its fullest."
David Heckerman here...

We are using a key principle that we use in fighting spam to fight HIV. In the case of spam, we have spammers changing their emails to get around the spam filters. So, we go after their Achilles heel: their need to extract money. In the case of HIV, we have HIV mutating to get around our immune system. Here, we’re again looking for the Achilles heel(s) of HIV—vulnerable spots on the virus that, if they mutate, compromise the function of the virus. One step in this approach is to catalog the spots along HIV that our immune system can target. This is where PhyloD comes in. Here are some of the articles describing our search for targets using PhyloD:

•	G. Alter, D. Heckerman, A. Schneidewind, L. Fadda, C. Kadie, J. Carlson, C. Oniangue-Ndza, M. Martin, B. Li, S. Khakoo, M. Carrington, T. Allen, M. and Altfeld M. HIV-1 adaptation to NK-cell-mediated immune pressure. Nature, 476 (7358): 96-100, August 2011.

•	A. Bansal, J. Carlson, J. Yan, O. Akinsiku, M. Schaefer, S. Sabbaj, A. Bet, D. Levy, S. Heath, J. Tang, R. Kaslow, B. Walker, T. Ndungu, P. Goulder, D. Heckerman, E. Hunter, and P. Goepfert. CD8 T cell response and evolutionary pressure to HIV-1 cryptic epitopes derived from antisense transcription. JEM, 10.1084/jem.20092060, January 2010.

•	C. Berger, J. Carlson, C. Brumme, K. Hartman, Z. Brumme, L. Henry, P. Rosato, A. Piechocka-Trocha, M. Brockman, P. Harrigan, D. Heckerman, D. Kaufmann, and Ch. Brander. Viral adaptation to immune selection pressure by HLA class I-restricted CTL responses targeting epitopes in HIV frameshift sequences. JEM, 10.1084/jem.20091808, January 2010.
How To Transport Your Christmas Tree Safely
The author provides some system solutions that I agree with, but which I doubt would be implemented any time soon on a large scale. That leaves me asking other questions:

What can I do, as a parent, if I see that my children are not being taught math at the proper pace? I could tutor my children at home to a certain extent, but that just raises all sorts of other questions:

I've got a solid math background, but no education background, so what kinds of resources are available to me to establish an effective home tutoring program?

How can I tell if the pace I am setting is too fast, too slow, or just right?

In the unlikely event that one of my children is a "math outlier," my knowledge of math, although in the 90th (95th? 99th?) percentile, would prove woefully inadequate: where would I find an (affordable) math tutor with comprehensive knowledge of math?

This last question is the only one I think I have a decent answer for: find a mathematics graduate student looking to earn some money on the side.
The Programmer’s Food Pyramid
EasySVN beta 1: Use Subversion for file sharing with automatic update and commit
Managing Distributed Agile Teams [video]
Steve Gibson calls this concept the "password haystack". The idea is that the clever hacker will do something like the following:

1) Try known common passwords: "password1", "monkey", etc.
2) Try dictionary words, maybe with leetspeek substitutions, maybe with a single digit on the end
3) Try likely guesses based on what they know about you (if anything)
4) Brute force.

Assuming your password isn't dumb enough for 1-3, you just have to put your needle in a HUGE haystack. If your password is ":$have:$fun:$cracking$:THIS1", brute forcing your password requires trying every combination of upper and lower case, numbers and special characters up to 28 characters.

At one hundred trillion guesses per second, that would take "76.43 million trillion trillion centuries".

Check this out.
https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm
COM and LPT are files, though.

Right, that's what I said.

Devices such as screens were treated as files by their device drivers as well.

I remember writing a whole hell of a lot of port-banging code to make graphics and sound work on DOS.
I brought StartSSL to my last 2 employers for internal sites, like development sites and internal apps, and it's been wonderful. We haven't found any problems with StartSSL certificates in browsers, from IE6 up through the newest browsers. We've considered using StartSSL for our public sites too, but haven't done so yet.

Do customers really care about the name brand or "warranty" of the SSL certificate? What percentage of customers are even aware of who issued your certificate, and do those customers really have concerns about StartCom?

This sounds like the argument we heard from DynDNS salespeople last year, about how our customers expect us to be using "enterprise" vendors, rather than "consumer-grade" vendors like Amazon Web Services. Even our savviest customers have never asked us who our DNS provider was.
That seems similar to what Keeneo ( http://www.keeneo.com/ ) has been doing for years. See:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee-D2-hx3so
This is why I never started with python/javascript/ruby. I live and breathe by autocompletion of proglangs/api's.
From the article: "But regular exercise doesn’t entirely make up for the shutdown of chemical processes that occurs during long periods of sitting, research has shown."
When I looked up the Latin phrase I realized probably if I had to look it up, plenty of other people would too, so I copied the first couple of lines from Wikipedia here to save people the effort.

----

Argument from authority (also known as appeal to authority or argumentum ad verecundiam) is a special type of inductive argument which often takes the form of a statistical syllogism.

Although certain classes of argument from authority do on occasion constitute strong inductive arguments, arguments from authority are commonly used in a fallacious manner.

-----

Since I'm not logically proving anything, I'll refer to an authority, Strunk and White, who say:

"Avoid foreign languages: the writer will occasionally find it convenient or necessary to borrow from other languages. Some writers, however, from sheer exuberance or desire to show off, sprinkle their work liberally with foreign expressions, with no regard for the reader's comfort. It is a bad habit. Write in English"
Arabic Voice Search in Google App on iOS and Android
I get the "You're a dumb user" feeling every time I open the options in Chrome.
Show HN: SparkDC - Command-line file sharing over ssh. Python
I have developed these peer-to-server-to-peer sharing software for our campus IIT Delhi, as our administration has blocked normal LAN sharing protocols used by DC++ and oDC.

<p>Code on github https://github.com/sravfeyn/SparkDC

<p>Further details about the software at my blog http://divinequantum.blogspot.com/2011/12/spark-automated-file-sharing-over-ssh.html
> Nonetheless, it's rather sad, because the issue is rather serious and that's a rather serious newspaper, isn't it?

It is, or so I believed. I don't read or trust any newspaper anymore; given how usually even most serious news articles get debunked in comments 5 minutes after posting to HN I don't think I'm loosing much...
ESP Signature White Electric Guitar
Price: $395.95. Save $20 off Thanksgiving Day Sale. Free Shipping Worldwide. I've always dabbled on guitar, but never took lessons.
Adam Jones
I just found this website that was from a NYTimes article

http://www.khanacademy.org/#browse

I bookmarked it because I plan on going through all of the lessons so I can refresh myself. I've only watched a few clip but they seem helpful.

Here is the NYTimes article

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/technology/khan-academy-b...
How many of those kids are being shunted into something like Duke's TIPS program in 7th grade to then face a full-on SAT? That happened to me and once I saw the math involved, I just closed the booklet and put my head down. That told me pretty early on that math was not my thing.
Would Google pull out of India because of this?
Humble brag: I was declared "gifted" in every area except mathematics throughout school; I switched schools once and retook the test leading to some kind of broad-er exposure to the process. The tests to determine mathematical giftedness were overwhelmingly masturbatory exercises in symbol manipulation and memorized algorithms. For a long, long time I thought arithmetic was math. I was told that I would not make it to AP Calculus, let alone get a math-related career. (See my profile for the exciting conclusion to this story).

Math was rote memorization and regurgitation of algorithms which I had trouble memorizing without explanations of how and why they worked. Later on I found out the answers to these questions are called "proofs," they are very fundamental to mathematics, and I am quite good at them. I did not excel at the math I was given because I was plagued with foundation questions about why any of this added up (sorry) logically and they were blockers to true understanding for me. Logic was completely missing from the curriculum. Digested mathematical trivia were handed to me like I was some kind of child. I was never given the power tools I wanted to build my own knowledge, perhaps for fear of my safety or my innocence.

People who were good at studying and taking people's word for things sailed through and to this day can't prove things rigorously. These kids don't like taking things apart.

It was only during some education electives I took that I realized that a well known problem in STEM education is the group of students who are intelligent but have rather slow, idiosyncratic, and methodical ways of assimilating new information. Imagine the quantum of solace that gave me.

I chose Computer Science at random from an admissions catalog because I liked writing programs even though I was "bad at math," and because I couldn't afford film school. 4 years of discrete math, modern geometry, multi-variable calculus, linear algebra, and algorithm classes (on top of other fun but not as fun-damental courses) later and I realize what a load of boring and disingenuous shit public school math was.

*

Why do so many gifted kids think they don't like "math?" Because "math" sucks and schools don't let kids build things anymore - materially or otherwise.

[Edit] Grammar, new insights, the sort of thorough editing I should have done the first time.
The chances that the author is not aware of what you are talking about is near 0, and what he is writing isn't an actual suggested specification it is musings about pain points in the current way that things work.

You are complaining about a single line of code that demonstrates a concept that cannot possibly be executed and there isn't any actual effort to make this line into something that can be executed. You are arguing that it is a bad idea for a reason that is completely orthogonal to the spirit of the post. So sure, implicit in that loop is the idea that iNaN would be treated subtly different than existing NaNs, but you are just responding to the text of an example that is written to be as simple and clear as possible to readers rather than the actual content of his message, which is nit picking at best.
The ups and downs of life in an Irish start up
Hahah, this is one of the truest articles I've read recently. I think everybody on here knows at least one person who speaks like the latter example in this piece, and the takeaway advice is immediately relevant and usable
So fucking what? "Its OK if they do it too" is not journalism, its sleaze. I've heard people claim Techcrunch to be a rag, now I agree.
Obligatory question: are you using the same computer/monitor to view both versions?
> "Speaking of usernames, i've run into more than one bank that requires a digit in your username. A digit. In. Your. Username."

This makes sense, as your credential set includes both username and password - enforcing increased diversity in character selection in username to include numerics increases the exponent by 10 for each character.
Windows 8: What Will Its Impact Be?
It's not anthropocentric to assume that sentience will appear elsewhere in the universe, given the sheer number of opportunities for evolution to solve similar problems in similar ways. I expect sentience to exist in other species for the same reason that birds, bats and flying squirrels have convergent adaptations.
If the description of password+number is accurate, then it's a poor solution because it means your password is sent to the bank as opposed to being hashed and the hash being sent to the bank.
25 House-Passed Jobs Bills Stuck in the Democratic-Run Senate.
If GMail decided to keep the inbox unread count visible at all times, then why didn't Google Reader keep the unread items counter visible at all times?
It's one thing to recognize a problem exists. It is much harder to accept the ways in which our unintentional actions contribute to that problem. I suggest reading this recent apology at Kotaku for an example of how this can play out: http://kotaku.com/5864134/to-whom-i-have-offended-an-open-le...

Don't get defensive. No one is accusing you of being a terrible human being for having the same reaction as hundreds of other people who also live in a society and a particular field infused with sexism. Rather, they are asking you to take a step back from that first defensive reaction and think about the dynamic at play her.

Her post described men covering for their incompetence by relying on sexism to dismiss her opinion. You took that incident personally for some reason, and used the exact same sexist strategy to dismiss and belittle her opinion. All the commenter above is doing is pointing out the irony.

She has plenty of evidence that this dynamic is real and happens repeatedly: the responses to her post prove that. The only question here is whether or not people in tech who stoop to using these sexist dismissals are willing to accept any amount of evidence that they contribute to a sexist, alienating and hostile culture.
Yahoo Battles Brain Drain
Cain & Abel v4.9.43 Released
Can we see the test?
But the money is just as wasted no matter who pays it.
Well I mean it runs kind of counter to your argument that there is not just one, but multiple sentient species on the planet.

It also didn't take very long in cosmological terms for humans to go from sentient to supercomputers, either.
Learning PhoneGap versus iOS development with Objective C
I've wanted to learn mobile app development for a long time. There is a specific project I had in mind and I was wondering what tools I should use. PhoneGap seems interesting, it'd allow me to make an iPhone app while harnessing my HTML/js skills.

Are there significant limitations to iPhone app deve in PhoneGap? Would it be more useful to learn iOS dev with objective c?
Uh... the specific examples given were comments on engaget and reddit. You think people don't talk to their friends on those sites? Yours is precisely the kind of thinking that leads people to fall for social engineering attacks. Clearly you're too smart for it to happen, right?
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