skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to work in a company where the drone approach did work out well. We wrote screen scrapers for insurance websites that ran in a framework that would kill them if they went off the rails, handled serious errors, and was the major interface between our component and the front end products the company actually sold. The scrapers weren't terribly technically challenging, and at the time I left, I could crank one out in roughly 3 days which was a pretty good pace.

When I left, I mentioned in the exit interview that, for my salary and benefits, the company could hire 4 interns and put them to work. Even if they were twice as slow as I was, which was unlikely given all the work that went into the framework, the company would have a net productivity win, not to mention the benefits that come with having interns around to recruit from. Last I heard, they took me up on that suggestion and picked up 10 interns who are all writing and maintaining scrapers and freeing up full-timers to work on less routine work.

It can work, but you need a steady supply of relatively routine work that's set up in such a way that nobody can break the system with a simple bug or logic error.
I love it :). It is fun watching this campaign move so fast.
Does anybody really think this is going to have an influence on Lamar Smith? Maybe I'm just jaded, but I don't see this as changing anything aside from giving money to a billboard company, and emptying the pockets of donors.
Good point, and neat link.

So let's go with "easily-invalidated hypothesis even at the time."
OAuth Application Enhancements for GitHub
Strange that they'd put together a whole page about this without ever mentioning who this person is or what he's doing that messes with the internet.

There seems to be a tendency among people who are really involved with politics to assume that everybody else is also really involved with politics, and therefore don't need any explanation about why we should be so angry about whatever it is we're supposed to be angry about.

But we're not. So if you want us to get behind your cause, you're going to need to tell us what it is. Possibly on your giant billboard itself.
My experience shows that tests is not very useful in protecting from "hard" mistaken (like unusual combination of inputs, missing condition branch coverage, etc) because even with 100% code coverage you don't actually cover 100% of input/state combinations. And things you didn't think in development are usually things you didn't think in tests too. Tests are, however, always been amazingly helpful for me in:

1. Protecting me from stupid mistakes like using wrong variable in parameters, etc. (yes, it is embarrassing to have something like this, but I better be embarrassed by test and fix it before anybody seen it than be embarrassed by somebody else hitting it when using my code).

2. Ensuring refactoring and adding new things didn't break anything.

3. After "hard" bug has been found, ensuring it never reoccurs again.

As for dealing with authentication, etc. - that's what unit tests are for, testing stuff that is under these layers directly. And I don't see it matters what you are using for tests - almost any framework would do fine, it's having tests that matters, not how you run them.

I think you can unit-test javascript too, though I never had to deal with it myself so I don't know how.
Not even the network carrier should be able to tell the duration of a web page visit. Only the browser (or tracking javascript) could record this, but that's still dubious. I've had some browser tabs open on my phone for months... but that doesn't mean I've been constantly looking at them for months. I doubt Android keeps a big database of every page you visit and how long it takes you to close the page or navigate away. I guess Google Analytics might have some of that data, but only for sites that use GA.
He was the sponsor of SOPA.
Kickstarter's got a pretty solid grasp on the reddit crowd at the moment, though.
I think they assumed that most people who'd be donating to the cause already were aware about SOPA, and Lamar Smith (the representative who sponsored SOPA.)

Maybe a faulty assumption!
We run tests at Absio (the place I work). Everything is supposed to have full unit test coverage, but with ship-it mode that has slipped a little lately.

When you commit to a personal clone of mainline and push it up to the server Jenkins picks it up, builds it, and runs the tests, and if there are any failures notifies you over Jabber and or email to let you know it is broken and for you to go look at it.

We also integrate Jenkins with JIRA, so as soon as Jenkins builds something, pass/fail if there is a JIRA ID in the commit message a comment is automatically added there as well, which if people are watching the bugs they will get notified about.

This effectively allows people to see how they are coming along in terms of their progress and lets them see when stuff is broken almost instantly. Automated builds are nice because we can distribute the builds across a variety of different environments at the same time to see that if maybe something worked on Mac OS X that it doesn't build on Linux, well that needs to be fixed.

It definitely has made me code more defensively, nobody wants to have your Jenkins build show up as red on the status board, and nobody wants the extra scrutiny on code review when asking to merge something back into mainline. So far it has worked fairly well with most developers doing testing.
> So if convicted of a crime they can require you to not use basic personal and identity safety measures.

Not really a new concept, it's fairly similar to banning a paedophile from going near schools, banning someone on parole from leaving the country (or state), or enforcing a curfew, etc. Similar in that it's restricting what would normally be anybody's right.
The "trending links" nature of Digg also resembled Delicious Popular, Rose has mentioned it as an inspiration.
> Corporations do far worse things to people and to society than sue other corporations for IP infringement.

This isn't just unethical in a general sense. If it were, then yes, corporations do much worse.

The bigger issue is that Yahoo's move here threatens the entire software industry and specifically the internet. Yes, we already have massive patent battles in the mobile space. But they are fought over the selling of smartphones and tablets - hardware. Many of the relevant patents are software ones, so the distinction is not absolute, but at least they still happen in a clearly hardware-orientated space. The players all sell hardware and are already familiar with the patent game from hardware patents. It's bad there, don't get me wrong, but it is - for now - a controlled bad.

Whereas Yahoo's move here does not involve hardware. It doesn't even involve shipping any product at all or even selling one. It's a lawsuit over a website that is free for people to use - one of the most important forms of online business.

Imagine if patent warfare broke out on in the web space. It would be a massacre for big companies and startups alike. Everyone violates patents all the time, its impossible to avoid doing so. If such lawsuits are brought, they would devastate silicon valley. Yahoo's lawsuit here looks, worryingly, like it might be the first attack in such a war.

That's why people are so shocked and react so strongly - and rightly so. Pressuring companies that use software patents, and pressuring their employees to try to effect change internally or consider jumping ship, is something that makes sense for the software industry to do. To do otherwise would be suicidal. Only Intellectual Ventures and other patent holders win if patent warfare becomes commonplace on the internet.
There is a lot of gray with this story. One IC vs many middle managers and a VP will never turn out well for the IC, especially at Microsoft. I don't know what I could have done. To whom would I have sounded the alarm?

What I did: "I told my manager," "realized it's a systemic problem," "I was a friend to someone who needed one," "I helped her leave and get her next job," and "I quit."

I made lemonade and enjoyed time in Europe. But I don't think there was a choice to fight.
Stanford's Jeff Pfeffer, author of Power, interview
I used to work for Lehamn too, M&A. Now working on my own startup. I also found that the focus was on our incentives, and this is where the tech industry is different in that it sets the incentives aligned with the users.

Wall Street could do the same by changing its incentives, and grow massively together with their clients. Once they understand that clients all the way to the end ("crowd") investor can also be happy users.

One thing that bothered me about this article though, is that it just seemed like he had a personal reason to make his superiors look bad. After all, he built his entire career in Goldman, so why burn your bridges? Unless they are already burned and you are leaving with a blast anyway, and maybe you are trying to get back at someone.
Researchers send message using neutrinos
I have a question perhaps someone knows the answer to: is Udacity concentrating on short, relatively easy classes for mass appeal and Coursera concentrating on more difficult and rigorous classes?

I am currently taking two Coursera classes (one is on probabilistic graphical models and the other on NLP) and so far at least, I am impressed by the depth of material covered and general quality. I will probably need to spend 10 to 15 hours a week on each class.

There are some subjects that I am interested in that I would like just a lighter weight overview, get a lay of the land - I think that this is what Udacity is for.
I sincerely don't think Yammer would be able to absorb any significant part of Yahoo's workforce. That said, imagining Yahoos all over took his advice, the company would become a hollow shell with patents.

Does he even realize what kind of damage an NPE the size of Yahoo could make? I assume he knows his threats have no effect on the lawyers Yahoo pays to pursue such actions.

note: instead of a downvote, I'd appreciate constructive feedback or a discussion. You may like Yammer a lot, or even work for them, but I'm more interested on what did you find worthy of a downvote in my post.
What would Molydeux? An international petermolydeux based game jam
I was referring to the well-known quote attributed to Occam that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity".
I propose, he give employment to everyone who leaves yahoo in next 60 days, then we can talk
Yeah, it takes up more space than my browser chrome does. I removed it with the inspector.
Ok, this was pretty cool. Granted its expensive to set up but imagine two stations on opposite sides of the planet sending a constant stream of neutrinos to the other. On that 'carrier' you modulate data.

Now compare that to running a transworld cable half way around the world. Not only do you get a latency improvement of 33% (going 8K miles instead of 12K) you don't have to worry about ship anchors or anything else screwing up your link.
> "for anything longer... misspellings makes a big difference."

The question to ask is, how big a difference? Put another way, how many bits of entropy do your misspellings generate?

In your above example, where each word has 2 common misspellings, each misspelling gets you ~1.5 bits of entropy. For comparison, adding another randomly selected OED word gets you just over 17 bits of entropy. If we're talking about making meaningfully stronger passwords, making a grammatically correct phrase and then adding misspellings (what the article calls "seemingly random modifications") is a less effective strategy than simply using a series of actually-random words from the OED.

It's better to add entropy 17 bits at a time (whole words) than trying to add entropy piecemeal, 2 bits here and 3 bits there (misspellings, punctuation).
President Obama invites Apple design chief Jonathan Ive to state dinner
If they have it running on Android there is simply no excuse not to have it running on Linux.
we actually want to provide a pretty substantial dashboard to admins so they can see (and like us, get obsessed with) things like referral traffic, the referrals with the most value/contributed, the velocity of contributions you've mentioned, etc... But we never thought of providing those kinds of metrics to general visitors actually. That's good feedback rdl, thanks.

(most uses of the site are for a "kickstarter for groups of friends" where instead of a $30,000 documentary, it's a $1,300 party-bus where like an evite, you share the link/campaign with your group instead of strangers just coming across it through a "browse" page)
Fellow Mechi here. Yes, they can do that tau revolution without us.
In the dynamic equations, tau is also used for the "generalized forces" (a vector/array which contains all the forces and torques that act on the generalized coordinates). At the same time, they are usually full of trigonometric functions (with 2*pi).

I can only recall one time in my academic career where someone used pi for something else than a time constant or circle constant. It made me feel so uneasy ...
Dr. Norvig is no doubt a genius in computer science, and Udacity is certainly looking promising considering that it's able to hire such influential people... but that said, it doesn't look like he has any actual teaching experience, and educating is made up of a different skill set than computer science. Every teacher has to start off having never taught before, but nevertheless, this makes me a little hesitant—are my concerns legitimate or not?
Thanks for your reply. I guess I tend to shy away from things like tuts4u and crackmes.de because it seems questionable legally, although I haven't looked into it much. I mostly "reverse" my own code in gdb just to understand whats going on in the assembly. These types of things are hard to show in a resume, so I'm not really sure how to make myself an attractive job candidate to some of these antivirus companies.
<i>I have one corporate client that deletes all emails every 6 weeks (for legal reasons).</i>

Isn't this kinda weird? How exactly is he operating his business, such that needs to leave absolutely no paper trail?
I'm interested in this material. After talking with a UT professor I get the impression that a big challenge for students is forming a good model in their heads of just what computation is.

I plan on teaching a local Skillshare class in this soon and currently I'm keen on using Dr Racket and stressing the importance of referential transparency; however I get the feeling that people are going to want to use Python.
I would rather have an iPhone Max , with a bigger screen. They should just make iPhones in three different sizes, like shoes (otherwise identical).
Yes, Mr. Smith, Goldman Sachs Is All About Making Money
Physically unlocking the phone breaks the rules regarding forensic data retrieval as well, since the state of the phone has now been altered, how is the court to know that the FBI didn't plant the details.

This is why backup images are made first, which is not possible with phones when they are locked... the backup images are operated on when doing digital forensics, so that the result can be reproducible by a third party.
Different, but this guy has made physical bitcoin coins. It seems like a clunky expensive way to use bitcoins.

I'm not sure if they're legal in the US.

(https://www.casascius.com/)
Hopefully everyone in Lamar Smith's district knows who Lamar Smith is and what he stands for. SOPA triggered a mainstream debate and you don't need to be 'really involved in politics' to know that.

This sentiment that people with political agendas need to inform their potential constituents is what has created our current political problems in America. When people don't pay attention, anyone who can attract eyeballs and make a reasonable sounding argument gets to do as they please. If we were paying attention, we wouldn't let these people wreak havoc in our society.

edit: What does it mean to live in a democracy where nobody knows whats going on? I know we're all familiar with and jaded to the current state of affairs, but I'm asking that we spend more time thinking about that state of affairs and what we expect of ourselves and our politicians.
I don't want to speak for Alexis, but I think he just thought he'd send it out to friends and people he's gotten through the SOPA ordeal to see if it had a chance of getting funded - wasn't really a "let's rally the internet" kind of thing (I literally think he set the whole thing up in about 10 minutes).
玻璃温度计
WebGL + HTML5 Audio = Web Strobe Tuner
> this[1] made me laugh with joy.

Whereas it went completely over my head...
Enrolled! Is it possible to "audit" the course and just watch the 50 minutes of promised video or will I have to complete homework assignments and such in order to proceed through the lectures?
Our Collectors (Jon Masamitsu's Weblog)
How Much Does Yahoo Need Facebook? (Infographic)
You're not an engineer, or you're not talented? :)
the technical expertise of these guys is way behind what the public expects of them.

And thank God, or we would be even more deeply fucked.
I have to agree, I love Norvig's writing, but I was really underwhelmed with his teaching ability in ai-class. I though Thrun was a much more enthusiastic and elucidating teacher. It's also possible that Norvig and Thrun placed different priority on the course. PAIP is one of my favorite programming books, so I'm really surprised that someone that would write a text so well would have such a hard time getting that same energy to come across teaching.
It's okay - they still have one strike left :)

I list a patent on my CV.
This misrepresents his complaint. Presumably willfully so, since the writer seems to understand the investment banking business. Smith wasn't complaining about the fact that Goldman is focused so much on making money, but the way they do it. And that has changed. Goldman may not have been super benevolent when Smith went to work for them 10 years ago, but it is even less so now.
You can audit
I've been using Arch for about five years, and I can tell you that things break more frequently than with any other distro I've used for a suffiently long amount of time. Things break more frequently when you're tinkering with things, but sometimes even on routine updates. If you want something more stable, use Debian Testing or Slackware. That being said, Arch is great. Try it!
Thats useful, it's got some things I didn't run into yet.
Kurzweil: We'll someday accept computers as human
I agree that understanding the theory is very important.

The figure is very interesting. Would you care to explain it? I think I know what these are in theory, but perhaps I haven't internalized them enough to understand the visual representation.
Meat Is the New Tobacco
The idea though, is that we can allow every user to create any product of any type without giving them access to make new tables. I doubt amazon has a books table, a toilet-paper table, etc. ... This is just another tool in your Postgres toolbelt, use it when appropriate.
The Underwhelmed Audience
You can surround your text in asterisks to achieve italicization.

http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
This is really funny. He is asking people to leave without promising them a job. What's the downside of leaving - Risking visa, income etc. What's the downside of not leaving - Cannot be hired at Yammer at some future point :) Who cares in this hot job market.

Publicity stunts like this only fit Hollywood. Seems like we have a new culture in Silicon Valley.
Will Udacity courses be accredited? Will their accreditation be taken seriously? If not them, then some new startup in this space will be. They will spike the money-hose directed at HarvardYaleOxfordCambridge.
I think the sample size is too small to tell (there are more higher level courses from Coursera, different topics, professors), but from what I've seen of the NLP and Machine Learning Coursera courses versus Probabilistic Robotics, I think that Udacity has the better teaching model: short videos immediately followed by a quiz question, rather than Coursera's more traditional PowerPoint approach with maybe 1 question / 6 minutes or so. Thus hours/week is probably a poor metric (FWIW, I feel like I have spent alot of time on the programming assignments in CS373).
Who really cares what yammer does or says? I wasn't all that impressed with the app when using it. Are they a company anyone actually actively seeks out for employment as anything other than "I can't find anything I like, might as well"?... Fail
He co-taught Intro to AI at Stanford last fall. I sat in on a few of his sessions. He was fine. Maybe not a Richard Feynman level lecturer, but few are.

He's also a superb technical writer, if you've read any of his books [1] or website blurbs [2].

I don't think the quality of his teaching ability will be an issue for anyone.

Edit: Obviously some disagree. My own personal opinion is to overlook and ignore presentation style, but others may need that to stay engaged. YMMV. Learning from Peter Norvig is quite enough in my case.

1. http://norvig.com/

2. http://norvig.com/sudoku.html; http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html;
I know all about the Lamar Smith debacle, and even to me, this billboard would be ridiculously vague.

This is more of a gloating-esque billboard, not an effective one. I completely support the idea, but I think this as poor of "an implementation" as possible.
GVPE creates a virtual ethernet network with multiple nodes
I have a very little bit of insight into how DirecTV's modern cards are implemented, and the fundamental technique does not rely on hardware --- in other words, if you had already been outfitted with a lab that could decap and image chips well enough to generate simulators, the fundamental technique involved would still be expensive to unwind.

BD+ has produced multiple titles which, during their new release window, had no high-quality HD rips torrented. But that's besides the point: if antidebugging and antireversing is such a lost cause, it stands to reason that BD+ should be completely broken by now. But, of course, it is not.
This is an argument for large-scale backups. If you're already maintaining around 100 TB of assorted backup data, the extra effort of preserving another megabyte of data is negligible, even if you don't consciously care about that particular megabyte.

My thesis is in Dropbox, and I emailed it to my GMail address. Both companies seem likely to faithfully back up my thesis for the indefinite future, because it would literally be more effort for them not to back it up. I also have it on a USB drive somewhere, but I forgot where I put it. Incidentally, I also made a printed copy, but I have no idea where it is.
Hey I have a small comment. I'm in Canada currently but I have a US credit card, yet I didn't see anyway to get past the non-US user page.

Also I was a little put off by registration page since it at first seems like you need facebook and the non-facebook options is in little print. When you click that link it and the name and email box appear would in my view be a better registration box to put first.
BD+ is a software issue. The incremental breaks in BD+ are delivered in the form of updates to Slysoft AnyDVD.
"Hopefully everyone in Lamar Smith's district knows who Lamar Smith is and what he stands for."

That's some misplaced hope.
Make your beta versions free to the initial clients / testers.
At first I thought, "Yeah, but who the hell would want to write web apps in C???" Then I thought, "Oh yeah, people who want high-scalability at the cost of readability."

And then I realized, "Oh my god, it's Node.js all over again!"

But seriously, looks cool.