skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Salaries and benefits make up 80 percent of the Post Office's budget. By comparison, FedEx spends 43 percent of its budget on labor, while UPS spends 63 percent, according to Businessweek. Why the disparity? As the magazine put it, "USPS has historically placed the interests of its unions first."

You can't simply compare the USPS with FedEx or UPS. Neither of the latter provide regular deliveries. How much would it cost FedEx to have a large enough workforce to visit a significant fraction of the homes in the US every single workday? For that matter, doesn't UPS and/or FedEx have an agreement where UPS does the final delivery of some of the packages, precisely because USPS has most people?

Without that comparison, that comment comes across as a gratuitous slam against unions.
Hash functions are generally not reversible, unless you were to very carefully define the input domain. Given the "similar inputs" -> "quite different outputs" ("avalanche") effect described here and the article, I wonder this:

Is it possible to describe a given hash function as a "cyclic" function, given some kind of transformation on the input to create a matrix/tensor out of the input -- are there common methods to re-order the inputs in such a way that there are discernible "axis" that exhibit cyclic behavior? I suppose such an analysis would be a way to determine cryptographic fitness of a function, but I am only speculating.
this is kinda...incoherent?
Regulatory capture is the natural side effect of regulatory control of industries. Look no further than Barney Frank asking the companies he regulated to hire his SO.
I agree with the author that meta programming may be useless in most cases. But while writing a framework (DHH writing rails or brizany writing Sinatra or hundreds of others), meta programming creates pleasant interfaces.

That said, I think all programming is meta programming; like the next abstraction is the generalization of the current abstraction; the first 1956 fortran allows to metaprogram the assembler code or the assembler code metaprograms the machine code or java the JVM byte code etc. Ruby makes meta programming in runtime, so that your Ruby code creates your interpreted-ruby-code.
Bullshit. This is ignorance talking. In practice, it's based on legislation and man power. Even if the law mandates a time frame, it can still be ignored. This is exactly what happens in Canada.
I heard rumors they are shutting down Sliverlight. So this is surprising for me too.
"genius"

- me, an average programmer n wannable programming languages enthusiast (read lusts for haskell, lamdba, monad, contracts, traits, type theory but never attempts it and upvotes any remotely related submission), after looking at the Caterwaul by example pdf and the website's html source code
I know a guy who majored in econ and attended bschool. He got into finance, and started writing code for finance. He got so into coding that he left finance, worked for various startups and big sv corps as a serious dev, and eventually got another ms in engineering. He's a very rare type though, this is a very unusual path. So overall id agree with you, though there are a few exceptions.
Jean Millet
The only thing that is causing the problem is the federal government has demanded the USPS pay vast riches into a special tax on them alone which the government is calling a "trust fund" for "future pension obligations". This is just a ransacking of the postal service's operating income by the feds. There is no trust fund, the money is not saved anywhere. It goes into the Treasury and is spent by the federal government the same year it is received. 100% of the postal service's financial problems are because of this plunder.
1. Who was talking about deaths? Sorry, but healthcare is more than just life and death. That being said, your post screams ignorance of universal healthcare.
Very poor article. This is more about how you shouldn't buy it if you want to put android on it really quickly and easily. Most of these tablets are realistically going to end up one of three ways. Given to your kids, given to your parents, or given to the drawer after they're played with. None of these issues really apply, other than the lack of warranty (which is inaccurate, there is a 90 day warranty on them). For $99, you CANNOT get a comparable device anywhere. Period. If you want to spend double the money, then you can get a kindle fire, which is a smaller device, but will be around longer.
The quote from "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" is good, but the poster doesn't really make it clear how it's related to Durban beyond the fact that Durban is an interdisciplinary conference. The poster is a bit incoherent actually, and likes to rant. Also, he's definitely no Feynman.
> It's perfectly clear to anyone who has watched Samsung
> over the years that they're the Burger King of consumer
> electronics. They let the market leader do the R&D and
> then slavishly imitate their successes.

We may not be watching the same company then : Samsung invests over 6 billion USD per year in R&D, approx. 9% of its revenue (Apple does 2.2%).

Sure, on some markets Samsung acts more as a "fast follower" than as as innovator, but to call it the "Burger King of consumer electronics" is plain ridiculous.
C++ AMP is a framework for acceleration of general purpose C++ code with heterogeneous processors. It's not the same as DirectCompute which in this case is more like the assembly language of GPU programming on Windows as Microsoft is building C++ AMP on top of it.
Incoherent enough that I glanced around for signs of being fed through Google Translate or a woodchipper.
it is not a different representation, it is a different resource. Imagune if you PUT it, it has a different meaning with different depth.
Obviously this is mere speculation.

But this is a device often used in media, when somebody would like to release some information, but would obviously loose face doing so in person.

Whenever you read/hear that "sources close to X said...", It usually means that X said it, but would not be cited on the record. It's all about plausible denial and controlling one's image.

The device can be used to prepare public for some unpopular shift of policy, to test the reaction of people to information or just to prepare ground for some change.
See CentOS; reduce sarcasm.
You seem to have jumped from the GP's statement that, "[we should] Reduce the power and programs run by the federal government, and radically simplify the tax code, and you'll dry up the opportunities for corruption." to an assumption that social services and public good projects would be cut. If social services and public good projects were cut at the federal level, that doesn't necessarily mean they would not be transitioned to the state or municipal level.

So, I'm curious where it was implied that there would be no social services and/or public good projects unless they were undertaken at the federal level.
A better way is to PUT the template as a resource that you can GET with query paraneters later and which would fill that template. Like creating a prepared query.
Both Apple and Google are massive multinationals driven by shareholders for profit and couldn't give a shit about your interests where they don't align with their own. It's time that a good portion of the community here grows up and stops identifying personally with large corporate products.
If I was Paul and read this, I would never talk to you again.
It was an Executive Order that only affected the Executive branch. But, there has been some abuses of an exception clause in the executive order. More information can be found at (the previously linked on this thread) http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/pr...
If you're looking for a cutting-edge non-cryptographic hash function, then I'd suggest using MurmurHash 3 created by Austin Appleby.

Excellent performance with great collision properties.

http://code.google.com/p/smhasher/ or more specifically http://code.google.com/p/smhasher/wiki/MurmurHash3

There exist 32, 64 and 128 bit versions.
I think "longer" referred to the length of time the question goes unanswered - not the number of characters it took to pose the question.

While you can't quantifiably measure difficulty, it's fair to say that more difficult questions will remain unanswered longer. Easy questions get pounced on. The difficult ones take time.
Read the parent again closely. He/she is talking about time.
I thin the "idea vs execution" debate often misses a key point - that in highly creative environments, the idea is the execution. In this sense, I think software development may be more like writing or painting than building a house. Every sentence a novelist writes changes the outcome... a painter may have an idea, but by the time it's done, the act of painting has transformed it. This is why I think it so important to be able to code if you want to produce software.
That's not a conspiracy theory, no matter how much you think that you want to 'win' this Internet argument with me.

You think that there was no thought put into the fact that if they put a video up on YouTube with a bunch of well-known artists in the name that they might get taken down for 'copyright violations?' It perfectly demonstrates their case, and with all of the publicity around the video itself brings the issue to a lot of the general public. Even if it wasn't a targeted effort, it seems like it turned out really well for them, IMO.
How many people realise they have been manipulated after reading material like this? It's the same feeling I had after reading 'How to make friends and influence people'.

This is why programmers don't make the big bucks.
And you're foolish for not holding that against Google. Google bought Motorola for their patents. They're playing the game which we as consumers are the losers in. If they were as moralistic as the segment of naïve geeks here seem to think they are then they'd be working to destroy the patent system.
IPhone. Single. Looking to make friends on any network.
> You'll never find a politician worth his/her salt taking cash from a company.

I guess that means there are no elected congress-critters who are worth their salt eh?

The last two non-corporate-funded ones were Feingold and Grayson who were both defeated in 2010.

Our Congress is now fully corrupt.
This service is BS. I just went there and it gave me a random torrent, "Jennifer Lopez Papi" (or something like that). I wouldn't get anything of JLo's, even if they gave it to me free.
The Deep-Sea Find That Changed Biology - 4-foot-long worm
The only reason FedEx and UPS don't deliver mails is because it's illegal to compete with the mail service.
The point is to see how technology has progressed in 14 years. Your link is irrelevant as none of the sites in question were live in 1997.
All the features that I would recommend are already in TaskWarrior. Have you seen/tried it? Maybe you should highlight some of the competitive advantages your app has over it. http://github.com/taskwarrior
It's not a laptop, but I did buy my wife and kids a small system76 desktop. Good company, decent hardware. I would personally recommend doing a fresh Ubuntu install as well. Mine froze up using their default install. On the other hand, once I did a fresh install everything worked beautifully. No hardware problems and no hunting for extra drivers(which I deplore having to do). What I like best about them is that they charge reasonable prices for upgrades.

If you don't want a pure linux laptop, I concur with many of the other poster's here and recommend a Lenovo Thinkpad.(I have one and dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu.
Update 2: http://sdwiki.org :D
You raise a point which is interesting if there was an official word from microsoft that this will be the last version. Right now this is still only speculation. Anyway, from a pragmatic view point SL5 is available today. A fresh release like this is a good reason to rejoice instead of speculating when the next release will be. Out of curiousity, what alternate are you suggesting that has the same unmatched tooling, documentation and support "today"? Specifically, if the mobile/tablet is not your target and your main audience is desktop on mac/windows and perhaps linux(note: with a small effort you can make your app work on moonlight too).

Edit: note also that with a small effort you can target the new windows 8 marketspace and release it as a metro style app as well.
He's an engineer. He probably was thinking about all the ifs and "but technically this is quite exactly like that" of each one of the statements he was making.

I often go to conferences to demo my project and I have the same habit. I try to explain the positive of my project but I know all the dirty secrets ;p
It's certainly not a controlled experiment, but at the same time, I can report apocryphal success with daily doses of 500 mg of Tyrosine, a teaspoon of flaxseed and fish oil, 200 mg of CoQ10, 240 mg of Gingko biloba, and 10 mg of vinpocetine along with several other innocuous supplements that may or may not have a role here.

The upshot: several weeks in I got hit with three gnarly race conditions in 30,000 lines of GPU code. 3 days later, the bugs were all fixed and overall performance was up several percent. I'm good at what I do, but the speed at which these bugs were vanquished floored me. These were nasty hard to isolate, seldom occurring problems and I picked them off one by one on seemingly gut instinct alone.

Which is to say I do think something's going on here, but it's hard to isolate exactly what. More data is needed but I'm reluctant to attempt to fix what is apparently not broken.

As for the raw diet. I love the raw diet. But unless you're Demi Moore, Alicia Silverstone, Woody Harrelson, or living in a cooperative situation with a bunch of fellow raw foodies, it's just way too much work. That said, upping the consumption of green leafy vegetables, and correspondingly reducing the consumption of sugar and animal products in this day and age is a no-brainer (i.e. Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead).

Amusingly, the picture of Mr. Lipkowitz on his blog site is taken at the Googleplex - a place that served some of the most healthy food I've ever eaten - to some of the fattest, out of shape and unhealthy nerds I've ever seen in 14 years in the tech industry.
I have to disagree with your assessment of cassette tape technology. Having overlapped the usage of tapes, CDs, and MP3 players for about 5 years, I can say that yes, tapes sound worse than CDs, but it takes a lot of effort to wear them out, and it was rare that a tape deck would eat your tape.
Since I don't use torrents at all (unless if software uses it for updates but I am not aware of anything I currently use that does), it might not be too interesting.

However, the next time I share WiFi with someone, this may be quite useful.
Twitter Marketing on Steroids? Twitter Auto Follow and Much More
They are probably not taking dynamic IPs in mind. But the idea is interesting.
No, DirectCompute is more like the C++ of GPU programming. The syntax style of the compute shaders are the same C++-ish that Cg and HLSL uses.

In comparison, OpenCL's compute shaders use the same C-ish that OpenCL does for GLSL.

OpenCL and DirectCompute are pretty high level considering they're running on what equates to massively parallel DSPs.

Oh, and OpenCL already runs on heterogeneous setups. There are OpenCL compilers for three different GPU archs, x86, PPC, Cell SPEs, a few DSPs, and ARM. An OpenCL program can use all of them at the same time if available.
Cheap domains
Five Awesome Hover Effects Using CSS Multiple Backgrounds
That third option is what forms the basis of Intellectual Ventures' business model [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures
They claim they can track 20% of the public torrents people download, and I suspect it's a very specific 20% corresponding to certain trackers and certain torrent clients. I wonder what they are.
Most of the questions and answers seem aimed at college seniors planning for Google-style Big O cross examination.

For experienced developers it's a bit simpler: build a portfolio, craft a cashflow-oriented elevator pitch, build a network, and plan ahead for a bit of buzzword compliance in your desired niche as needed.
You should just remove the script or make clear that it will potentially annihilate the victims host up to the point of rendering it unbootable.

"apt-get upgrade" is not a safe operation. It will install new kernels and boot-loaders and it may get terribly confused in the face of pinned packages or mixed repositories. "--assume-yes" is a really bad idea and running "apt-get upgrade" is none of your installers business in first place.
It's no longer an Apple to Apple comparison after all. :-)
On space constrained displays like laptops, I prefer the space maximizing Windows Classic theme, regardless of Windows version. I also like the thought that I'm not wasting any processing cycles on visual candy, even if it probably doesn't make much of a difference.
It would be interesting to see some sort of normalized comparison. I would guess the USPS still spends more on labor, but the raw figures are, as you say, a bit misleading. Two normalizations I'd like to see are: 1) accounting for what proportion of USPS labor costs are caused by its legal mandate to deliver mail to remote areas, which we could approximate by "any area not served by either UPS or FedEx"; and 2) breaking out by delivery mode, for example overnight-air deliveries will have a lower % of money spent on labor costs, not because the labor is cheaper, but because the non-labor costs are higher.
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> That's because DMCA takedown notices require deliberate
> effort. Are you being intentionally obtuse?

You've translated:

> A DMCA take-down notice requires a statement under
> penalty of perjury that the issuer has a good-faith
> reason to believe that they are the owner of the
> copyright in question.

Into meaning that the following two statements are equivalent:

I want to take down this video because I want to stop
MegaUpload's viral campaign because it could be damaging
to my bottom line.

and

This video has the name 'Snoop Dogg' in it so I'll send
a take-down notice because I might own the copyrights to
this, and I'm too lazy/over-worked to be bothered to
check.

You say that the above statements are equivalent because the end result is the same (a video is wrongfully and illegally taken down).

If that is true, then you have to accept that nothing that you do in your life matters because you'll only end up dead. The end result is exactly the same.
Had to watch because of that :)
I don't use BitTorrent very often (because I have incoming connections for that torrent in my router's state table for years after I do so), but there were a few things I wanted to download today so I just spun up an EC2 instance, installed Transmission, and did it from there. A 38GiB Blu-Ray image took about two hours. The next time I want to do this, I'll have a completely new IP address.

Is this a terrible idea?
Somebody did from the IP address you seem to be using.

Either you are behind a masquerading NAT, or perhaps your ISP rotates IP addresses and somebody else was using your address the other day, or just maybe your WiFi router isn't as secure as you hoped, or...

The service neatly highlights the caveats of matching people to IP addresses.
I wonder if this increased responsed time is uniform across all tags. I work on ML implementations (SML/NJ and Manticore), and I've basically given up on answering questions on SO because every time I go there every question has been answered within a few hours. Even the difficult questions, and -- especially on SML/NJ -- often by people with no relationship to the implementation team who have clearly spent serious time spleunking the depths of our source tree to answer it.

Hard to tell without some statistical data. My tags may also be odd because I suspect our user base is skewed towards a mass of novices (intro to CS students) and a small number of experts, with very few people in the middle.
There's Buddy Roemer. He's better than pretty much all other candidates including Ron Paul when it comes to campaign reform. No superpacs. 100 dollar donation limit. It's in every citizens interest(regardless of party affiliation) to make money less influential in politics.

Buddy Roemer on MSNBC's Morning Joe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oMoAMnFczY

Then there's Lawrence Lessig. He's not a politician but he's also working to limit systemic political corruption.
Good Teacher
I think teachers have a very important role to play in a students life, especially today when students spend more time at tutions and school then with parents
The irony of the misunderstanding is exacerbated by the fact that P=NP would in fact get a huge number of points.
Why Are the Rich So Interested in Public-School Reform?
Gulf Times – Qatar’s top-selling English daily newspaper - Qatar
I meant that it was the assembly language because DirectCompute is the target of the C++ AMP compiler, similar to how some people call JavaScript the assembly language of the web. It's the lowest level language that those developing in that environment can target.
What do you think of this idea for a viral Facebook app?
Just read a techcrunch article titled: "Sean Parker: "This Election, Social Media Will Determine The Outcome"
http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/09/sean-parker-social-media-election/

It got me thinking... I'd like to see a facebook app that let's you choose and share which political candidates you would vote for along with your main reason for doing so. (This can be both on the local and national level)

Only your friends would be allowed to see your choices (and only if they provide their choices as well).

There's a certain viral element to this. After you fill it out, it can post on your wall with something like:

-----------
Who I'm Voting For
"see which candidates John Doe is voting for and why"
-----------

I feel like this is an app I would be excited to download and share.

What do you guys think? Anyone know of a similar app that already does this?
Yeah, stupid Constitution for giving Congress monopoly power over the mail system. Silly also that we require universal postal service at affordable rates in exchange for that monopoly.
Well, SO does have a way of dealing with it through the use of bounties. As far as I'm aware, it requires the person asking the question to give up some rep though. Maybe there should be some internal bounty on all unanswered questions after a period of time.
Considering it's illegal to take campaign contributions from corporations, I don't think you find many serving politicians who are doing so.
This is interesting.

To me, it seem, that Apple knows its a lost battle before it even begins. So the only purpose here is to delay the open standard for as long as possible.

Why do I think this? Because they filed it at the last minute...not once, not twice, but three time!
People have been doing it with medical devices, so I don't think it's impossible. I agree it would have to be done differently, but then avionics waterfall has to be done differently than order-entry systems waterfall, so that's nothing new.
Why you can not to use statistics to dispute magic
A Comprehensive Overview of Windows 8 Metro App Development
The problem isn't with individuals doing more because they have money. It's with individuals paying others to shill for them.
The key takeaway is this: Personally, I'm too entrenched in the Obj-C/iOS ways to develop my own, personal Metro app. But based on what I've seen about Metro, I can see a lot of Enterprise ASP.Net corporate developers going home at night to tinker on their Metro apps, and who can argue against that?
Map Charts Path of MythBusters’ Wayward Cannonball