skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's besides the point that there are alternatives. Locked down hardware should be universally frowned upon, no matter who is trying to control it - whether that's Microsoft, Apple, or anyone else. It's downright sickening to see this being accepted at all. There are no - I repeat, NO - valid reasons to lock down hardware. It's anti-competitive, it's malicious and most of all it's an affront to Freedom. I also find it quite sad that people (with RMS among them) predicted this years, if not decades ago, and people called them paranoid.

We need to fight this. Do not buy locked down hardware. Boycott businesses and corporations pushing this. Tell the hardware suppliers that you will not take this. Use free operating systems and hardware whenever and where-ever at all possible. Pursue other people to do the same.

Finally, disregard laws which forbid you to circumvent, render ineffective or deactivate these kinds of restrictions. Spread ways to do this if you can, anonymously. Once information is out there, it cannot be subdued again.
Yes I have.

Each client connection is entirely independent of the other client connections. That's trivial to parallelize (thread pool, Erlang, whatever).

I also have one where the clients are almost entirely independent; that one connects to a database which handles the "almost" part.
Interesting. I wonder what stopped them mandating this on x86? (Intel cough)
Lamar Smith is a grade-A Republican shitheel who just worries about who or what has contributed to his campaign slush fund. It would appear that freedom of speech, to him, is something that should be paid for by the highest bidder. The level of ignorance this man has shown by authoring this bill and the amount of selling out he's done to corporate interests, rather than the people he ostensibly represents, is staggering.

Unfortunately, the Texas Legislature has gerrymandered the state so badly that he's dug in like tick and will be difficult to remove.
Ask HN: What counter-offer should I make for the position of CTO at a startup?
Dear HN,

One of my friends offered me the position of the CTO at his small self-funded startup company in the real estate market. The offer revolves around the idea of building the company's website, which would handle listings, financial transactions, apartment bookings, etc. It's of decent complexity (we have to yet figure out all the functional requirements).
I cannot commit full time and I am also in a different timezone, so I would be working part-time, remotely.
The offer includes small cash upfront and 10% of site revenue.
Do you think this is reasonable? What do you think my counter-offer for the position of the CTO should be?
Alternatively, do you think it's best for me if I suggest a contractor/consultant relationship instead? What other options do I have?

Thank you in advance!
The problem sets are bigger only because our tools allow them to be.
With regard to being a viable business not sure, but on a personal note, I really like it. Very impressed by the speed. I don't mind that it's not 100% correct. It's a great tool to get your creative juices flowing when looking for an available domain.
Obviously one side isn't necessarily in it for profit, they could simply be defending the other side's actions. But the instigator is usually in it for profit.
So, just a gripe about your startup plug at the end of the article.

Look, I don't care whether your product cures cancer, dispenses oral sexual favors, and mints pure gold dubloons-- I will not give you my email address without a damned good reason.

Every single goddamn link on your page brings me to a "Enter your email here" prompt, except for the company tab, which brings me instead to a pile of vapid marketing bullshit.

Flotype Inc. is a venture-backed company building a suite of enterprise technology for real-time messaging. Flotype takes a unique approach by building developer-friendly technologies focused on ease-of-use and simplicity, while still exceeding enterprise-grade performance expectations.

Flotype licenses enterprise-grade middleware, Bridge, to customers ranging from social web and software enterprises to financial and fleet management groups.

What does that even mean? You using carrier pidgins? Dwarves? Cyborgs? UDP? ZeroMQ? Smoke signals?

You don't even tell me how my email is going to be used.

Fix your shit.
Salt. Seriously. A big, long, gnarly-looking salt. Preferably a unique salt per user. Really, even just that is sufficient, even if stored right next to the hash. It means doing a bruteforce/dictionary attack one user at a time rather than one bruteforce/dictionary attack of all the users at once (static salt) or just googling the hash (unsalted hash).

Also, are these passwords encrypted or hashed? Those two are miles away from each other and you guys are using both words nearly interchangeably. If encrypted, where is the key? Was it compromised?
There are a ton of craptablets based on Rockchip SoCs. Even so, a craptablet running "real Linux" would probably cost more than the equivalent Android version.
Windows 7, actually. It isn't signed.
Is it pronounced pander-daily?
Just pointing out... Nobel prizes aren't given for cutting edge work, they're given many years later. People have been doing transfection of genes for decades.

The Nobel prize you're referring to was probably the one for GFP. Interestingly, a huge challenge in using GFP now is patent issues and thus money issues, rather than technical issues.
one of those teams picked a bad name, given the obvious and inevitable confusion it would cause.
Stop Letting People Step All Over You
Public Speaking Lessons from MLK
"The obstacle we shall have to overcome, if we are to successfully program manycore systems, is our cherished assumption that we write programs that always get the exactly right answers."

Most of the time, this is not a trade off worth making. I can't think of a researcher that would willingly trade replicability for speed. I can't think of a mathematician who would base a proof on the idea that a number is probably prime. I can't think of a bank customer who would be fine with the idea that the balance displayed on the ATM is pretty close to where it should be. I can't think of an airline passenger who would be totally fine with the flight computer usually being pretty good.

It would be a fine trade off for games, however. And I'm sure there is room for some fudging in complex simulations that have plenty of randomness already.

But given the choice between an answer that is correct, and an answer that is probably correct, I will take the correct answer. Even if I have to wait a little.
old dinosaurs of economy - the old oligarchs tried to crash the internet by SOPA to maintain their crip in society ,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct9xzXUQLuY
Jay Rockefeller: Internet should have never existed

but the new generation does not allow to push themselves aside ...
I don't think any one of the startups which you mention currently looking for interns.
This is about maintaining invariants, and I interpret the "any random input" from the parent question as "input that breaks the preconditions the function expects of its inputs."

With str* functions the assumptions are that the string is null-terminated and stored within a memory block of large enough size.

When providing string+length, "any random input" means that, e.g., length may be arbitrary; maybe it became garbage as a consequence of series of unfortunate integer overflows (when did you last check for those when checking that len1+len2 < buffer_size ?).

So, how DO you write a string-handling function that can safely handle ANY random input?
I have not encountered any need for throwing away results, speculative computation as you describe it. An example of programming non-deterministically is the swarm model (ants). You can for example write the text editor of a word processor this way, as described in http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf

Our SiliconSqueak processor is in an FPGA stage right now, we will make the first ASIC version this year. At this time I have no hard numbers on the watt/performance and price/performance of the ASIC. The energy use of the FPGA per result is an order of magnitude below that of an Intel x86 core and we expect the ASIC to be much better.

Regardless of the efficiency of the code, I see no need to re-introduce determinism down the line.
"Long story short, nearly all rules of war exist because they are beneficial to abilities of the parties to conduct war. The rules do no exist to make killing fair."

That actually makes perfect sense. Although I find it rather disturbing.
Sell advertising. The registrars will bid each other up to get first crack at the registration business. Other providers (hosting, developers, designers) will also be interested in your traffic.

GoDaddy et al might replicate your functionality. But they won't replicate a look at the competition for the business.

Better yet, be a brokerage portal. Get registrars to bid directly for the work. You also provided curated search on "best registrar" questions -- fastest, reliablest, fewest / most stolen domain problems.

If you can work out some means of obtaining good names held by squatters, that's better still -- and a real value add that would be harder to replicate. (I actually have some idea along this line.)

Why try to run a registration business when you're already good at generating traffic?
What's to protest? SOPA is pretty benign now.

This just in: The DNS will not be affected. Lamar Smith took it out.

And even before, two weeks ago, I posted that only foreign websites which would be prosecuted under US law would possibly be affected by this. So maybe bit.ly and the other URL shorteners would be affected, but that's not a big deal.

Before you throw a knee-jerk downvote on this, ask yourself ... are you aware of what the SOPA legislation says NOW? Or is this just inertia from the beginning from SOPA, and you are just against any form of going after foreign sites which host illegal downloads?

On a related note, I want to ask ... in the Russian community it's well known that VKontakte has all the songs and you can just listen to them. Does this mean that VK is on the hist list of SOPA? I don't think they care about US advertisers though. What do you guys think?
Steve Blank Discusses The Ideal Venture Capitalist (video)
i'm picturing the blackmail note:

"dear bestnameever, i know about those high heels you bought, and i happen to know you don't have a girlfriend. $1000 in unmarked bills or we tell your father you're a cross-dresser."

Or the incredibly geeky wife who suspects her husband is showering the hot secretary with shoes and handbags, and confirms it by poring over the breached data.
Great ideas. In the last few hours I:

- Added sorting options (alphabetical, length)
- Added filtering options (starts with, ends with)
- Added a Moniker registration link

Will eventually add more search results; want to make sure this holds up first.
I've been on the mailing list for "savetheinternet.com" (run by "freepress.net") for a while now--they pre-date SOPA/PIPA.

Confusingly enough, they're sending out messages now reading "end the SOPA blackout!" that actually refer to the lack of media coverage of SOPA.
There is also simply more information in the world now to index, because the internet has been around for longer.
I'm sure there must be a way to persuade companies to take you as an intern.

Do you have any suggestions on startups you think are doing some really interesting stuff in the San Fran area?
With hstore and psycopg, you'd gain a lot of flexibility that's very similar to another NoSql store. Psycopg does the mapping to/from python dicts.

It's not without a learning curve, but I found it helpful when I hit shortcomings in Mongo's design.
Thanks, appreciate it. And I'm working on the accuracy issue.
If SOPA isn't dead, shutting down Wikipedia for a day will kill it because of the degree to which it will raise awareness of the issue among people who don't pay much attention to politics...Wednesday is a school day after all.
Though they are making that complaint about the PS3, because you used to be able to
Good luck to Searchify. I love/d IndexTank. And Jorge thanks for all the assistance you always gave us in IRC and on live chat. :)
With a little imagination, you can come up with countless ideas on how to use a thousand cores for each of the applications you listed. I've listed a few, which are likely a bunch of crap, but I'm just one person. There are millions and millions of other minds coming up with ideas better than these every day.

And who are you to say that today's parallel algorithms for solving things like these are optimal? To me, it certainly seems worthwhile to consider possible alternate parallelization models.

> My email client is pretty much I/O-bound.
> My word processor is perfectly well able to keep up with my typing speed.

Better speech to text? Better prediction (so you have to type less)? Better compression for attachments? Better grammar checking?

> My web browser is largely I/O-bound, except on pages that do stupid things with JavaScript.

It's clear that web sites are slowly transitioning into a role that is similar to desktop apps, so there will be a million applications that can use hefty computational power.

> Compiling things can take a while, but that's already easily parallelized by file.

Better optimizations? Things like evolutionary algorithms for assembly generation come to mind, which could use any conceivable number of cores. Better static analysis?

> I'm told image/video processing can be slow, but there are already existing algorithms that work on huge numbers of cores (or on GPUs).

GPUs are typically not as good as CPUs for integer math, in particular they're not deeply pipelined, etc. This could conceivably become much faster.

> Recalcing very large spreadsheets can be slow, but that should be rather trivial to parallelize (along the same lines as image processing).

There are a ton of things that could happen here with massive computational power. Spreadsheets that use machine learning techniques to predict things? More powerful models?

>* So isn't the article pretty much garbage?*

Come on, people have been coming up with novel uses for our ever-increasing computational power for well over a hundred years now (from mechanical computers to octo-core desktop machines). Why would they suddenly stop now?
Ah, I understand now. You mean you want companies to just replicate Zappos outside the US. Any chance that there could be a "Zappos API" where we could while label Zappos, and pick-up the goods at the Zappos warehouse for foreign shipment?
When I was in 5th grade the Nintendo 64 came out and a friend of mine commented that this was going to be the last major video game console release of all time. After all, the graphics were so mind bogglingly good that no one would ever have any desire to create a better system. The N64 perfectly fulfilled everyone's game requirements.

Your argument is similar. Everything you have on your machine right now works fine as it is. What you aren't taking into account is that the list of things on your machine is defined by the machine's limitations. A new style of computation will open doors and allow things onto your machine that are currently not possible because of limitations in your processor.
I'm sorry you're being downvoted.

I tried their site on my phone, and got a nice "jQ.Mobi requires a webkit browser" popup, with a site that didn't react to any input.

And yes, I use Opera on Android.
None of that would be particularly difficult. And nothing here is stopping that from happening, or replacing it. It's just another, fairly simple way, to organize and share code.
Personally I think that the OPEN act might be a better idea than SOPA.

Why not give the infringing websites a chance to enter US courts and have due process, or face the consequences in, say, a week? This would make it more costly to prosecute them, but also give them a chance to explain themselves. The courts could possibly give another resolution than just ordering the intermediaries to doing business with them. The threat would be the threat of SOPA (which wouldn't include DNS), but it would be only AFTER the foreign corporation has refused to comply with the decision of the US court for a month.

And yes, this would mean that all its subsidiaries and websites would be affected at once. It takes time to build a big broadcasting system, so it wouldn't be whack-a-mole, either.
I thought my 10y.o. daughter might want to learn programming. So I pointed her to codecademy and said if she got stuck, to call me over.

She was excited to try, but ran into the exact same problems this article surfaced. She was being a real trouper about it, but it was plain that her patience and temper were running short. That said, once we got past the first steps and I taught her how the website was supposed to work, she breezed through the next handful of exercises before calling it a night.

All that said, I was definitely left with the impression that codecademy was not well designed for complete beginners. Yet.

For now I had a brief look at Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/) and I'm tempted to turn her loose on that. It seems to have a nicer effort/reward slope, and will help her understand enough of the core ideas behind programming that I could then turn her loose on other languages.
DIY NES Gamepad to iPad Adapter
In most applications, using a IEEE float is fine. It's a trade-off where a loss in accuracy is acceptable. Lots of digital things (images for instance) are discrete approximations of continuous phenomenon. The question is the degree of inaccuracy that is tolerated and the sorts of things you have to do to prevent it from propagating (which should be familiar to anyone who has to do math and work with finite precision floating point numbers).
If only there was some kind of blog or journal that described the choices made, so we wouldn't all have to wildly speculate.

Oh, wait.
By this definition an "item" is "one emotional connection to an object", not merely an object itself.

This would be a pretty odd definition of an "item". Going with this definition though, I (and suspect quite a few others) don't have more than 1-2 "items", or even any at all. I can't think of a single (physical) object I have emotional connection to, as long as I am reimbursed so that I can replace it it's business as usual.
Migrating SimpleGeo Customers to Parse: Idea to Production in One Day
I'm not sure what color scheme you'd like to go with, but as a colorblind user, the green and yellow colors that you're currently using are very similar to me.

Perhaps you could do a colorblind mode that uses red, blue, and yellow (out of simplicity's sake) to indicate availability? It'd make your service way more useful for me :)
Due to round off error correct programs are not a subset of replicable programs. Scientists do trade replicability for speed.
There's a philosophical distinction between suicide and murder and martyrdom. Just like there is between being thrust into a furnace and setting yourself on fire.

I actually don't know what it's going to be like to work on Wednesday without Wikipedia. But I think it's in all our interests to find out and put a face on these bills.
Pretty neat. I think this is the important bit though:
"Basically, his patch just parses the text to make sure it was valid JSON, and stores it as text."

So, if you already have an environment where you are certain you are inserting valid JSON, it's not much different than just using the text type today.
That's what sucks. Everyone you pick from (except Ron Paul probably) doesn't really represent you. I think Obama had really good intentions, but then he ran up against reality aka Congress.
And yet our brains works that way, and we trust them.

If I understand correctly - no single neuron is neccesary for your brain to work ok. Brain does not depend on any single link working correctly. Somehow it works reliable enough.

It's possible to make reliable systems from unreliable parts.
Looking for LAMP(Perl)/Web development/sysadmin work. I'm based in Nottingham England. More info about what I can do and have done here: https://grepular.com/me/
> So why doesn't the Linux community just man-up, and start backing Linux-oriented hardware manufacturers?

We do. The problem is this increases their sales by 1% in notebooks and desktops. There just isn't that many people who want to run Linux on their computers.

Microsoft will cleverly induce hardware makers to build those single-purpose locked down tablets to force some market share for a solution they know can't compete on a level playfield. And they'll do so by threatening to increase the exto^H^H^H^Hlicensing fees on patents Android "violates". Watch for those increases after they acquire what's left of Nokia.
The money they are given probably helps buy food, since not even the magical Buddhist monks can survive without at least a little rice.
Shoestrap: light Bootstrap for customizable websites.
Ever since I heard about SOPA I hoped that Wikipedia would have done it sometime soon.

It worked for Italy as far as I know.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/10/italia...
"only foreign websites which would be prosecuted under US law would possibly be affected by this"

"not a big deal."

Says you. That is a pretty big fucking deal.

EDIT: I've read your submission. Your argument seems to be "ICE already does this, so we might as well let SOPA legitimize it". I hope you can see why most sensible people would find this logic dissatisfying.
Access. Probably worth a lot more than their original investment.

EDIT: I forgot to wish her good luck. Good luck!
Right, you used to be able to. Some people bought their PS3's over the competition because it could run Linux.

Then comes a firmware update and that feature is gone. Sorry about that.
Sounds like a fascinating project!

I find it curious - and slightly scary - that as the world is stampeding towards increasingly-parallelized computing models, most of us in ASIC design are becoming increasingly thwarted by the limitations of functional simulation - which, by and large - is pretty much single-threaded. I mean, we're supposed to be designing to keep up with Moore, and our simulator performance has pretty much flat-lined. And even more alarming, I've heard very few ASIC people even talk about it.

I'm curious of your take on that.
Forgive us for not trusting hearsay.

(If you have a link to an actual updated text of SOPA I will retract that statement. Additionally, as is said elsewhere on this page, there's still PIPA. Despite the title at the top Wiki is protesting both.)
Singapore is obviously not the usual sort of competitive democracy with vibrant (and even celebrated) dissent like the major Western democracies.

But it's also far from a 'police state', the very loaded term you introduced. It's interesting precisely because it seems to illustrate that there's not a stark binary choice between 'democracy' and 'despotism', but rather a more multidimensional choice space, and on many scales their choices are doing very well.

It's also the case that even in impeccable liberal democracies, cities/regions/jurisdictions larger than Singapore's 4-million population can remain overwhelmingly loyal to a single party for decades, for its local officials and representatives to national legislature.

For example, Chicago has had Democratic Party mayors for almost twice as long as Singapore has existed as a country. Some unfair play by the incumbent machine is an understood factor, but it's also the case that the major alternative statewide, the Republican Party, isn't very attractive to city residents. What competition does occur happens under one party label.

Against its region, then, the noncompetitiveness of Singapore internal politics may be just as much or more an outgrowth of that same sort of local identity/satisfaction against distinct alternatives, as it is from the unfair play.