skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
his point about the work ethic being a strong point rings for me. chris wanstrath is from cincinnati, ohio and pj hyett is from north dakota.

the midwest would be a great place to build startups, as long as you tailored them to the pragmatic mentality there.

for example, what i'd like to do if i get the money to become an angel investor is start something like an incubator there, but do it differently. instead of buying a small amount of equity in a team to work on their cool idea for a location-based mobile social realtime group deal game platform service API framework, i would pay people a decent salary (which is still significantly lower than a startup salary in silicon valley) to work on building niche services for particular established industries. as they worked, they would gain equity that would provide dividends. i would position this company primarily as an alternative to college - you'd get paid in both salary and equity to learn to program, instead of putting yourself tens of thousands of dollars in debt to study amortized analysis of fibonacci heaps - which is awesome but kind of impractical at the moment.

so instead of building a generalized web analytics platform and trying to compete in that large space, build a platform tailored to the construction industry, with feedback and metrics designed just for them. couple it with an ipad app for foremen and you have a product that will never be the next google, but can earn money from day one.

if you can develop a reputation for building lots of profitable companies that serve real needs (something else midwesterns are big on), you could attract a lot of funding from investors in the area (they do exist) who are more interested in serving human need than earning lots of money.
Yes, the link is there, maybe buried in all the text. Did you find the homepage too bloated? I added the open source bit in the initial statement

"MarkdownR is an open source project that provides collaborative realtime markdown editor built on top of share.js running on Windows Azure and node.js that allows..."
Would love to make it out to this, but am in another class on Mondays. Looks worthwhile though.
There's simply nothing wrong with the "redistribution of wealth"

So you want free pie? which your neighbor baked?
As we say in Minneapolis, "The weather keeps the bums out", but we're usually talking about Chicagoans ;)
Also, a shout out to mrpollo (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mrpollo) who helped me with the redesigned UI, after seeing the first post here on Hacker News. Thanks Ramon!
Quantum optics may remove the uncertainty about quantum gravity
Apple adds $12 billion in value by spending $55 billion in cash
Perhaps. But I'd much rather pass on someone who might have been exceptional than hire someone who has already proven themselves to be a bit of an asshole.
Taylormade mc irons
I think you might want to check your facts:

LLVM + Clang source code: 9.9MB + 6MB = C, C++ and Obj-C compiler and linker

GCC source = 69MB = just C compiler and linker

G++ source = 6.6MB = C++ additions to GCC

So I'm curious as to where you're getting the "hundreds or thousands of MBytes on my mac" from.
Darpa seeks to free the world from passwords
Exceptionally high yields, combined with unnaturally high prices. It happens sometimes. The people growing white beans in my area did amazingly well last year, seeing $1,000/acre in net profit, where normally you make little to no profit.

Others bank on the sale of all the assets when they retire. A farm that cost $25,000 30 years ago is now worth $1.6M. But when you are starting out, you have no idea what the future will hold. Just as many defaulted on their loans for those $25,000 farms and are no longer in the business.
>I'm not sure why people are so offended by this question.

Here's why :

>In my specific case, when interviewing in the past, things I've cared strongly about are things like test-driven development, a culture that values code quality as well as shipping products, and having a meaningful stake in the success of the company.

Platitudes like "a culture that values code quality as well as shipping products" and "meaningful stake" are useless, unless you're expecting the interviewer to say that his company values low quality code and not shipping products and that you're going to be a low paid code grunt down in the salt mines. As for testing, even if they don't use it nothing prevents them from lying - and if you think lying about it is stupid - not using testing is also stupid - so it's likely a pattern in decision making. It works the other way as well, it's really easy to fake what the interviewer wants to hear with this sort of generic questions that don't touch on the things that actually matter to the job (and I would say that the only reason to resort to these kind of questions is because you can't ask insightful technical questions, ie. talking about a previous project and the persons involvement/duties will allow you to collect actual information about the person, but you need to be able to understand what he was doing to evaluate it).

Questions and evaluations like these are things that HR people sell to management to make themselves appear useful without actually having skill to meaningfully evaluate the candidate, "corporate culture", "team player", "company values", etc. are all vague buzzwords with no quantifiable metrics behind them, but they are simple to pound on with simplistic intuition and anecdotal evidence. Even if the supposed attributes were somehow meaningful from my experience companies that focus on that sort of talk when interviewing end up with exactly the kind of people you would want to avoid - bullshiters with nothing to back their talk, that usually end up hijacking some part of the system by introducing random bullshit that only they can wade trough - to ensure job security. So even if the metrics are right the interviewers suck at measuring them. When I hear questions like these it's usually a red flag.
I just republished it to include a CC license, try downloading again please. If that fails, we need to talk to leanpub.com. Thanks!
Re: Offerings for free

I wonder if a possible market could be made from offering half of the content for free, with the assumption that if you like the first half enough, you won't mind paying for the second half, and if you didn't like it, you wouldn't have wanted to pay for it anyway.

i.e. Watch up to the first half of a movie/tv episode for free (like a big trailer), if you're still interested, pay for the whole thing?

Easily applicable to books/songs. We already have a limited kind of "try before you buy", or Amazon's "look inside". But the problem with these is that they're akin to movie trailers - selecting the best bits of the film. Making a significant portion (logically the first X%) available might allow people to make more informed choices. Then again, that might result in fewer sales...

PS. There appear to be some encoding issues, I can see "â€TM
" instead of "'" in some places in the pdf.
The problem is that PBKDF2 isn't superior to bcrypt in every regard:

* It has marginally worse library support and is built out of universally available primitives, which increases the odds that generalist devs will DIY it.

* It is actually faster than bcrypt (see Colin's paper); in other words, even without waiting for a hypothetical research result against bcrypt, PBKDF2 is already "vulnerable".

* PBKDF2 deployments virtually all use SHA2 as their PRF, and PBKDF2/SHA2 is a construction that depends entirely on the security of hash functions; hash functions are more poorly studied than block ciphers.

* Attacker tools are (mostly, but not entirely) built out of preexisting infrastructure and not by cryptographers; of the three functions, the best accelerated brute force support is available for PBKDF2/SHA2. For instance, is there a widely-available GPU implementation of bcrypt?

* The standards process that ran for PBKDF2 did not include the extensive peer review that (say) AES went through, and isn't a significant asset for PBKDF2. Meanwhile, bcrypt had broad deployment long before PBKDF2 was widely deployed, and on higher-value target systems.

You'd rather the meme be "Use bcrypt, scrypt, or PBKDF2". I'm fine with that meme! But that's not what you said. You said "please don't use bcrypt".

PBKDF2 isn't bad. It has one significant asset: you can point to a PKCS standard to convince pointy-haired product managers to accept it into systems. But given the choice between an HN cargo cult and "technology made palatable to enterprise-grade engineering managers", I'll take the cargo cult in this instance.

(Another strength of PBKDF2 that it shares with scrypt but not bcrypt: you can use it as a proper KDF for your AES keys... but note that if you need to generate your own AES keys, you're very likely in trouble for other reasons).
Obligatory link for this fact to the One True Source for oddities like these:

https://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/09/17/469941.a...
Do rich people use more roads, public education, food safety?

What is your point in making rich people pay more for these services other than they worked hard for their money and you want to take a free ride?
It's awesome!!
ime the main alternative is the box crashing, frequently without leaving behind enough information to know what went wrong. at least if the app crashes you have a pretty good idea who was incompetent.
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>What makes you think GCC 5.0 tomorrow will be better supported by your current development environment, than LLVM today?

Define 'current development environment', both at home and at work GCC is the primary development environment for me as far as compilers go, I'm not waiting for GCC 5.0, I am using GCC 4.6 today.

>comparable compatibility

Is a very fuzzy statement, having compiled lots of open source projects under many different compilers there are certainly many projects out there which fails to compile with Clang (but it's certainly making fast progress in compability). Granted most if not all of these packages were written against GCC and some of them may use GCC extensions Clang/LLVM does not yet (or in some cases won't) support or some other quirks which all compilers have in their implementations of different standards.

>Eventually, unless GCC makes a giant leap forwards in all the ways set forth in this article, LLVM is going to replace it, sooner or later. I think that's what the guy above me was about when he asked why GCC is still relevant today.

Been hearing that ever since LLVM (and later Clang) surfaced as an option, I'd say you'll have to set your hopes for 'later' (Clang's been around what? 4 or 5 years now?). Personally I can't see why anyone other than someone with an agenda would want either compiler to disappear, competition means better tools for us end users, no matter which toolchain we prefer.

As for modularization, that has been an ongoing task in GCC long before this particular mailing list discussion, and I think it will continue as it has now in small steps.
That part was clear to me immediately. All in all it was really easy to use.

What might be confusing from a UI point of view, is that the example images on the top right look like a banner you are supposed to click on to get to the main site (to me at least).

If you would have done eye-tracking on me when I was using this, I was first drawn to the face (people always look first at faces), then I went down to where it said "No images? Click on one of these.". That might be because the woman in the picture is sort of looking in this direction. After that I looked to the where the logo is "pinwords, instantly ...".
for n=2, are you counting 1 total connection between 2 computers, or EACH conection from a server to another meaning 2 total connections? Assuming each connection, is it simply n! or 3628800 for n=10, or is my math wrong?
>However, I am a little bit skeptical that a web-based OS will perform the same as a native OS...

I believe the idea is that it will be native on ALL devices, thereby eliminating the need to convert one application for multiple devices. An application written in HTML5/CSS/JavaScript for the web should function the same way on a mobile device OS that is essentially a web browser. Am I wrong?
I'm on the other side of the table (employer, not employee) and totally agree. This obsession with interview questions is complete egomaniacal bullshit. Get the person in and start working with them. Either get them on a project for even a few hours or hire them on a temporary basis.

And please don't respond by saying "some-big-company" does it by asking why manhole covers are round. The interview process in most companies is broken, especially the big ones. It seems to forget that you're hiring someone to get a job done and instead provides an inflation mechanism for already large egos by saying "We have a gate. And we're smart. Fuck you if you want to work here."
Sounds like it would work very well with Better Place's system of having a monthly subscription to such a service for swapping batteries:

http://www.betterplace.com/
Therein lies the great irony. By partaking in intellectual dishonesty, Mike Daisey has created an unnecessary sideshow that is stealing away the spotlight from the real issue.

I'm bothered, in part, by the fact that Apple is the target in all these attacks. There are some very large questions on the table here, and Apple is but one player. Arguably, they're putting the most effort in to trying to improve. Where's the outrage for Samsung? For HTC? For Dell?

How about western consumers? Even those of us who are aware of the issues, yet somehow find a way to resolve spending $499 on our latest 9.7 inches of retina exploitation? Even further, what happens to the world economy without $300/month labor by the millions?

I guess a narrative needs a villain. I just hope that everyone maintains some sense of perspective. We're not talking about the practices of one corporation here. We're talking about a major component of consumerist culture. That's the conversation, and it's being ignored at every turn.
So funny to hear "Chicago" and "the midwest" in the same sentence. Chicago is different enough from the Midwest that usually organizations serving both have both in their name to make it clear they serve and understand the differing needs and mentalities. Though Chicago and the midwest share the same geography, they do not, thank goodness; share the same mentality. I can say that as a proud Midwesterner.
I like argumentative dicks. The important thing is that the arguments are good, not that precious feelings are protected. Though I would prefer if we could refrain from being dicks about it, if at all possible.
It is hard to take this guy seriously while looking at that profile pic.

I find it kinda funny that he states that midwesterners focus on profit to the exclusion of innovation, and cites Twitter as an example of a company that couldn't have been create there. Yet Twitter is hardly what most would consider an innovative startup, and it actually gained most of its early traction in Austin, Texas, at SXSW. All this while ignoring companies like Apple, Intel, Cisco, and HP that really built what we consider the high-tech startup ecosystem of Silicon Valley that we think of today. Does he really believe that these companies weren't worried about making a profit?

I think it is kinda dumb to loop a company like Twitter, which is really not all that innovative at all with the companies that produce hardware and health care solutions. Most people pursuing startups could build the exact same web or smartphone app anywhere else. Chicago, Seattle, or Kansas City. Location is really an excuse. I know plenty of people who have moved to the Valley to pursue startups simply because "if you're serious about your startup, you have to be there." Or because they are hoping to find cofounders, or funding or some other thing they view as a prerequisite for success. The reality is that great innovators made SV, not the other way around. If people think they are going to go some place and morph into brilliant entrepreneurs because of their environment, they are misguided and probably going to be disappointed.
Blogspam. Wikipedia's page on Launchy is more useful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launchy
Your comments are being downvoted because claiming religion is the cause of slavery and all of the worlds ills is so patently silly that people see no reason to refute you in words.

You did say the "sword that is wielded" so I guess you have some realization that it's not the cause, only the effect - but then the rest of your post (and your other ones) go on to try to claim that religion is the cause.

You also don't seem to realize that the moral code you live by (i.e. the things you find OK vs not OK) just by living where you do (things like corporal punishment for adults, debt slavery, age of consent, capital punishment for economic crimes) is basically arbitrary (different countries feel differently about these things without any religious thought getting involved) and to a million mile observer is indistinguishable from a religion.

So calling out religion for giving people a template (as you call it) demonstrates a lack of understanding of both religion and your own thinking - I bet you have strong opinions on all those things I mentioned, and you don't realize your opinion is basically a religious one taught to you as a child.
Other people use '.' in dates. Or '-'. Especially the latter would end up with the same problem: Why is - and -- used as a switch character if it is used in dates (and even quite common in normal text, names)?

And given that the history of '\' as a path separator is that long, maybe you haven't seen in elsewhere _because_ it is now forever taken for the world's most popular OS?
>Given that Git is not so great on the usability front

But git is great on the usability front - if you have understood to responsibly wield its great power.

I'm certainly not an expert git user (I would describe myself as intermediate), but I think that not a small amount of the gotchas and pitfalls in git are either directly or indirectly caused by said great power. You can do a lot of very dumb things with git, but as Kernighan and Pike put it in The UNIX Programming Environment: "UNIX does not prevent users from doing stupid things, as that would also prevent them from doing clever things". The same goes for git.

Please don't misunderstand me, though. I'm all in for changes that improve usability, but only if these changes do not impact git's power in a negative way, or make it harder to draw on that power. Otherwise I will be fundamentally opposed to such changes. Dumbing things down for everyone to cater to a lower common denominator is one of the worst things you can do to software in general.
There's a pretty wide range of employees between the dude who is mocking his interviewer because he disagrees with a question, and an under-confident yes man who just goes along with everything. Arguing for the sake of improving things is different than arguing for the sake of arguing. Argumentative dicks, in my experience, do the latter more often than the former.
The tounge-in-cheek response might be the engineers that build those robots and drones.
Unless you're 37Signals and then it's Javascript and naming things.

https://37signals.com/svn/posts/3112-how-basecamp-next-got-t...
What happens if I type:

$("blah").wTooltip(new String("color"));

In my recent jquery plugin I considered doing a typeof check myself but decided against it since it was too brittle. I instead checked to see if the options was === what I expected it to be first.
unit tests

the people who heroically sacrifice their sanity to write unit tests

(
In all honesty, this is one of my biggest concerns about using robots for exploration and war. These are very human activities, and if we don't deign to use humans for them... well... why are we here?
)
Probably one of the initial barriers to porting Steam to the Mac.
Please contact me - I would love to discuss. [username] at NoSQL dot com
Gee, I'd value an employer who values definitional clarity about the work, and who is uninterested in psychological manipulation. The managers should be very very smart. Also it should be possible to build on what you know over time (somewhat like compound interest), instead of dissipating and scattering your focus on unrelated projects and duties that undermine growth. If there is concern about "silos" then there should not be a management silo that can decide to restructure departments and reassign positions without advance warning. And the statement by Joseph Stiglitz that "change has no inherent value" ought to be internalized.
It has been a long time, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Budd_Dwyer

That incident alone doesn't mean that this is happening often, because it isn't. Violence is shown on US television all the time, but it is almost always of the fictional variety.
Secondly, virtually everyone is going to answer questions like this with trying to guess what the interviewer wants to hear.

Personally I'd take the opportunity to answer that question by telling the interviewer about things that I genuinely care about, and try to gauge his reaction. If he balks and any of them it's nice to know that up front and not a few month down the road.
just a "list" with affiliates links people and no real information
The world hacks NASA in International Space Apps Challenge
This is Cloud Computing! :D
I keep hearing this argument and I'm always underwhelmed. .5% of the federal budget sounds like a huge amount of money to me. Sure, it's only a small fraction here and space can be important, but this has to be balanced against cancer research, and our social net, and taking care of the mentally ill, and police and name your favorite. According to wiki, the national science foundation will get 7 billion this year. 10 billion for NASA is real money.
Sure, but that can be done with good layout and typography, or tasteful illustrations (à-la New Yorker). Simply using bad filler stock images is a really bad way to go about this.
From the horse's mouth:
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/read/2011/08/21/if-i-...

I agree with him. Politicians are a reflection of the electorate. One can have even more of a positive impact by educating and energizing the electorate than as one lone politician.
Browsing the Platforms - Mitchell Baker, Chairperson, Mozilla Foundation [2010]
...Redditors find some way to blame Apple and "hipsters"
Quick and Dirty Python Deployments with Heroku
Hard work and willingness to put himself out there.
Clearly the author can make broad sweeping generalizations after having talked to a few people in a city of 9.8M.

The logic that 9 to 5, work, life, kids and profitability can't lead to anything "revolutionary" (whatever that may actually be) seems dubious.

Finally, assuming everyone there operates under a single "midwestern" mindset and philosophy also seems ignorant.
My top 3-5 would be something like (not necessarily in exactly this order)

1) Culture. I want to work in an environment where excellence is expected, and where employees are empowered and engaged.

2) Physical environment. No "open plan" crap for me. Show me open plan or low walled cubicles, I'm on my way out the door with a polite "thanks, but no thanks" more often than not. The only way I'd accept this would be if I'd rarely be in the office, ala a consulting gig.

3) Money. I expect to be paid fairly... I don't need or demand to be the highest paid guy around, or anything, but if you try to pay me a low-ball salary, you're telling me something very important about what your values are and how you treat employees.

4) Location. I hate long commutes. Being closer to my home is a huge win.

5) Problems. If the problems you're working on are interesting and challenging that's a big perk in my book.