skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whatever is appropriate in your context. :)

What I really mean is this: use it. If you're a tauist, but tau isn't in your header file / constant library / whatever you use, today might be a good day to put it there.
Home Fitness Equipment | Is It A Waste Of Money Or Not – Click Here
This argument gets pretty complex, but the thing I like about pi is that it is fundamental. Sure 2 * pi might occur more commonly in important expressions, but 2 * pi is only special because pi is special.
It is true the techniques in the article are nothing new. However, this comment is a knee jerk reaction and largely misleading. The notion that something being crackable is a failure is incorrect. The time a protection scheme needs to hold up varies depending on the industry, but the economics of DRM to not require it to last forever. For video games it's a month or two (Starcraft 2 sold 75% of total copies told to date within the first month). Also, there are several DRM schemes deployed in production today that are acknowledged by those in the field as quite effective, namely BD+ and DirecTV's scheme. Indeed, as far as I know there hasn't been a break in DirecTV for over half a decade.

As far as malware goes, virtualization obfuscators are the current state of the art. They are a fundemental advancement in packing. Up until virtualization obfuscators, all other packers had the weakness where at some point the unprotected program would end up in memory. This weakness is easily exploitable (ala VxClass, see Recon 2010 for an easily digestible talk). Virtualization obfuscators are still beatable with manual reverse engineering (see Rolles WOOT 2009) and some effort has been made to automate the process (see Wenke Lee's group at Oakland 2009). But when a packing scheme forces you to hire reverse engineers who know what symbolic execution is, you know that you've substantially raised the bar.
Back in 1999, my brother met a plumber who had moved here from the UK and taken a 2 week class in Java to join the fun.

That's when I knew we were in a bubble.
Intro to Data Science at UC Berkeley taught by Jeff Hammerbacher
Got any details?

Predatory loan usually refers to taking advantage of someone who doesn't know what they are getting themselves into. Are you saying that Greece lacks the financial knowledge to understand what they are signing?
Sulia is Hostile to any Conceivable User Experience Goal
Disregarding all the traditional startup acumen (lean, agile, blah blah blah), in an environment where businesses are expected to be tested and discarded within months how will our 'ecosystem' tackle the bigger more meaningful problems that have a deferred payout for seeing it through? It seems to me that real innovation comes a lot more from long hard teeth grinding slogs than it does from rapid iteration. It seems like the startup environment has lately transitioned to business methods that largely aim at finding the most efficient means to get the last of the low hanging fruits.
I was following that when it was launched. But it was still easily defeated. Here's TheNextWeb article where they show a video on how easy it is to break that: http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/11/11/android-4-0-face-unl...
Why don't I see anything worthwhile happening in the startup space?
Why I'm Leaving The Empire, by Darth Vader
Is it circular reasoning to suggest pi is only special because 1/2 tau is special?

See what I did there?
I'm more of a fan of having multi-character symbols than to try and pigeonhole every concept into one symbol. Have full or partial names, just like we do in programming. We started down that path with writing things like sin x, cos t, div f, |rad|, etc. We should continue! If people really have problems distinguishing we can go the Perl route and add sigils.
> Next time try asking the Pope why he thinks that banning condoms is more important than preventing all the misery caused by the spread of HIV.

This is actually a very good question, and I don't see any false dichotomy here.
His book is not yet available. That seller is likely not legitimate.
Hi posted this earlier, but it didn't get any traction. I guess the people here might be interested.

http://www.visnos.com/demos/pi#launch
This article confirmed my feelings for the potential that will exist with Y Combinator now allowing for applicants without ideas. It at least has huge potential to allow for the coalescing of teams that otherwise would have never had the opportunity to come together. Without the right team, an idea often either simply remains an idea or has reduced potential until a team comes around it. There are only so many duties that one person can actually perform effectively in one day. Having a team compounds and multiplies the efforts to move forward at a greater rate of speed.
Simplest answer: a tech deal team - Google, for example, has one internally.

Abstracted a little, capital markets start-ups. You could add value by hybridising Silicon Valley and New York.

Go any further, e.g. to a Pinterest, and I don't know. Maybe there is a business development role? I'd guess you'd be throwing away a lot of your existing value at that point.

Call people. Most are very willing to help.
Eclipse gives you a wealth of tools to do that for Java. It's exceedingly rare for me to plain search (as in Ctrl-F) for anything in source code, I'm sure I go days without it[1].

It goes way beyond "find references" and "go to definition", too. For instance, marking a variable indicates all the usage points near the scroll bar, and ctrl-,/. moves between them. Ctrl-T opens an index of all classes. Ctrl-O has an index of the current file. Shift-Alt-Up/Down selects increasingly large expressions (across lines, as well).

I guess it all sounds trivial, but taken together I navigate within a Java project in an entirely different way than I navigate source code for other languages or unstructured files.

[1] Grep and its ilk are obviously still common tools for things like log files.
The process goes more like this:

1. Write some code

2. Test it

3. Debug your code

4. Test it

5. Debug your code

6. Test it

...

39. Debug your code

40. Test it; now it finally seems to work

If all your "test it" steps are being done manually, you're being very inefficient. A good unit test can actually make development go by faster with the added bonus of defending your code from changes down the road that might screw things up.
I do this this is accurate. Going to Austin during SXSW can be really valuable, exciting, and inspiring. Paying for a badge and doing the panel circuit isn't worth the money or time away from what's outside the CC.
Upgrading WebHooks To Be More Useful
I like it! I was thinking about adding something like that to http://tweetyourbracket.com to automatically fill out a bracket with random picks, chalk or anything else.

Not trying (completely) for a shameless plug here. I just love things that combine code and brackets.
Unnecessary curly braces in C++?
Galaxy Nexus owner here. I'm still the only person in my office (a tech company with lots of geeks) who's running ICS. It's really lonely here on Android 4.

I don't think that paying for updates is going to help matters - that's just another good argument to get an iPhone. Instead, I think Google has to start giving device manufacturers a cut of the Android app store revenue. Others here have pointed out that handset makers have no incentive to keep their customers using the latest version of Android. If they wanted to make sure that their customers were still buying Android apps, keeping them on an up-to-date version of Android would be more important.
I would imagine that busting a pimp isn't exactly high up there on the FBI's list of priorities, at least not high enough to desolder a NAND chip (possibly destroying evidence) and reverse-engineer its raw access protocol. Far simpler to just make Google give them the password.
fucking SingleHop.
I find the argument for tau very convincing. I remember having similar thoughts when I learned about radians and had a hard time understanding why they would define pi to be half of a turn, particularly since the diameter equation was d=2πr. The fact that A=πr² seemed like a counterargument, but the Tau manifesto makes a good case that having 1/2 in this equation helps show its similarity to other physics equations.

I think pi's best argument is that the area of the unit circle is pi. I actually find it very enlightening to think of the unit circle as having an area of pi but a turn of tau radians.

It makes sense to me to use both pi and tau; whichever makes a particular set of equations more clear. I certainly don't think that pi should be preferred just because it's older, or that pi's prevalence should prevent introduction of a new symbol.
Again, you have no idea what person C does for the homeless, and profiting from poverty is not a selfless act. You also have no idea whether the homeless person has skills, you are just projecting your stereotypes about the homeless.

Minimum wage laws are an anti-market baseline, just like statutory rape laws. We use them both to set a general civil upper bound on the level of exploitation.
Very interesting read. Well done, Jason and Hyperink!
Neutrinos shot through 780 feet of stone, spell out their name
Try to create a circle of influence and use it to your advantage. Make a list of friends, professors and developers that can refer your product. Then, wen timing is appropriate, create something free, relevant and sharable (like an invitation to a participate in a raffle, a free app, a free beta account, etc.) and then share this piece of content with your circle of influence. Keep working your circle for several months until you get the desired critical mass.

More Tips:

- Design for Community (by Derek Powazek) is one of the best books I've read on the subj
ect: http://www.amazon.com/Design-Community-Derek-Powazek/dp/0735...

- Try to follow and read the blogs/see the shows of key celebrity entrepreneurs that have cracked this code: Caterina Fake, Kevin Rose, Gary Vaynerchuck, Jason Calacanis, etc.

- Alternatively you can make friend with the media and (if the quality or novelty of your product warrants it) get cover by technology blogs (yes even if you only have a beta).
How to Track Traffic From Pinterest in Google Analytics
how would they make it photo proof ? I mean any guesses on the algorithm they use.. my dart in the dark would be that a photo would be absolutely still while a real person's face might twitch, shake, bat eyelids etc..
I'm no developer, so I never have to use the terminal. But now that you mention how you use it, I'll probably give it a try.
I thought about doing that before posting but decided that the HN-type crowd would probably plow through them in a couple minutes so it would largely a waste of time (since posting an actual solve-able request takes at least a minute or two each).
This is cool: An open data standard for food
I'd like to toss Amazon Linux into the ring as well.

I know we're moving our various cloud boxes from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to Amazon Linux 2011.09 whenever we have time to spare.

Access to the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository is pre-configured as well.
Don't forget the increasing Amazon Linux 2011.09 usage as well.
Why I'm leaving the Empire
I've been out of touch and out of practice for years now, so I'm curious to know the answer to this question. I was fascinated with reverse engineering back when Fravia[1] hadn't yet completely moved away from cracking to "search lore".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia
Node.js Ultra REPL
Just as fast (and that means pretty fast). Comparing to MongoDB might not make sense, if you're running it with no fsyncs (I don't know much about MongoDB, so maybe it is possible to make it fsync data).

There was a good talk about using Postgres as a key-value store at PGcon 2010, see http://www.pgcon.org/2010/schedule/events/219.en.html and http://www.scribd.com/gavinmroy/d/31669670-PostgreSQL-and-No... (especially the classic photo of DBAs running with scissors)
50% of the online ads are never seen
This is probably a tangent, but why would the FBI be involved in a prostitution case? Shouldn't that be state/local?
What's New in Apache Shiro Application Security 1.2 | Stormpath
According to that argument, if your current salary is zero, a single cent would be adequate to get you to do anything.
How Socrates Would Design [Experiences]
the implications at the end are really lame. "the phone may have received sms after the judge issued the order"

like that would be held in court for anything? let's thing analogically: would a mob king be freed if a judge authorized a safe with evidence to be opened on the 4th but it was only opened on the 7th, and new evidence was put into the safe by other agents on the 6th?
http://www.businessinsider.com/former-goldman-intern-this-is...

I hold him in very high regard - he took care of us junior guys, gave us great pieces of advice, and in general came across as one of the more personable, friendly, and genuine guys on the floor.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/former-goldman-intern-this-is...
If you're self-employed, you're not subject to the minimum wage laws.
As an undergrad at Caltech who will be taking this course next term, I find this intriguing. I'm wondering if this course will be as popular as the Stanford courses (looks like a lot less effort is being put into organization, design, etc) and how the difficulty of this will compare to the Stanford courses and an average Caltech course.
"Actively preventing"? How?
There has been too many. But Bollywood doesn't need billions of dollars worth technology to reunite families! We have (a)fate and (b)a song that the families sing and dance to in happy days(kids are young, they learn fast). Decades later, due to fate family gets placed into a 1 mile radius, and the kinship-proximity sensor gene trigger the release happiness hormones which in turn makes the family members break into song and dance.
Technology is catching up it seems ...
There's huge gap between all and few critical things. I expect many others fit in there.
I agree. This looks like they were testing some hypotheses and they didn't prove to be true. Maybe the engagement metrics just weren't there.
So what prevents people from creating new accounts and acquiring new favors ? May be you should keep a mobile number verification....
The Chinese Do A Better Segway
The Taboo Treatment: How Fecal Transplants Save Lives [Medicine]
That's all fine unless you're exploring a solution space. Then the overhead of writing tests which are thrown away _in entirety_ is outrageous. AFAIK TDD really only works if you're either a) prepared to waste a huge amount of time writing tests which will later be completely redundant or b) working to a very clear set of requirements with tools and frameworks you already know intimately. </Rant>
I don't understand why you would include testing in the invoice separate from development. It makes it seem like an activity that could be eliminated if need be.

But, are you really going to deliver code that you developed without testing it in some way? You might not be writing test code, but I'd bet you are still doing testing of some other kind.
Where did you get your probabilities from? This is a cool idea and although it's getting too late to be useful now, I think it would be nice to implement in my Twitter based bracket challenge, http://tweetyourbracket.com. Sorry for the shameless plug, I'm just trying to get the word out about it since I finished it about 8 hours ago.

And I'm with you in the horribly written source code boat. I had my idea the Sunday before the bracket came out and wrote code until last night. Gonna take another look at the code once the tournament is over, we'll see how that goes.
I think that comes from the "inverted pyramid" style of writing that journalists typically use. Most important stuff first, filler at the end.
Generally yes, you can see your peer reviews. What you can't see is your calibration score. And your calibration drives all of your compensation. There have been folks with really good reading peer reviews who have had really low calibration scores because their manager, for one reason or another, gave them that score.

I agree that many cases are different but the HR process is broken at Google, and it happens to be broken in a way unique to how Google set things up, but the effect is the same at other companies where reviews are a beauty contest.
Notably, Dave is visiting Obama. Coincidence?
"Cliff Click has left Azul to start 0xdata"
>"YC could instead "charge" half that amount, teach all the major business principles that one needs to know in a few months"

You really think you can teach all the business principles you "need to know" in a few months, huh? But I bet if I said lets take some business guys and teach them everything you need to know about coding in a few months, you'd probably think I was crazy.

Seriously, the "what it takes to successfully run a business" is so underestimated around here it makes me shudder. But, I guess that's probably why most people here aren't actually running successful businesses.
Microsoft is about to drive a wedge into the mobile market
In addition, there is the problem that links from other websites to your blog will stop working, and your Google search rankings will be affected.

I have a custom domain name for my Posterous blog, so links to the main site will not break, but links to individual posts will break if the new blogging platform doesn't follow the same link naming convention as Posterous (which most likely they don't)

Do you guys have any ideas/tricks how I can avoid issues like the above, and how to make sure that certain posts which currently rank high in Google search results keep their rank, if possible?
This year's offering has some changes from the Spring 2011 version of the course (the assignments are all different), but you can view the Spring 2011 at http://datascienc.es/spring-2011-course/
Easing Eye Strain With "Optical Aerobics" Exercises
I really understood it as a knee jerk instant reaction and tried to keep it pretty civil. I'm sure you're a good guy.
Occam's razor to the rescue. Using two distinct constants which differ only by a factor of two sounds more confusing than choosing either one and sticking to it.
Internet Download Manager 6.10 Beta Include Patch | Andra Little Notes
The problem with the world of finance is that it does not create anything in and of itself. It is a derivative of true commerce, true business, the real world.

Now that the big bonuses, expensive sell-weekends and general prestige associated with being in finance have washed away, people on Wall St are looking around realizing the emperor has no clothes. There's no money anymore, and there was never anything ultimately redeeming about their work.

The only silver lining is that hopefully now our best and brightest will be focused on solving real problems that matter.
Passphrases only marginally more secure than passwords because of poor choices
Happy birthday, my beautiful Arch! I've only been a devotee since October, 2010, and I don't know how I got along without it. While others are fighting with old. outdated bugs, I get to fight only the newest, shiniest bugs.
This definitely applies to Tech Support as well. I used to work as a Data Center engineer and would get support tickets that were just written just like the bug reports in the article: useless titles, no info on what they were doing, set to high or critical priority.

By the time everyone I supported figured it out, I had already started moving on to another company.
Testing Netflix on Android
Where are you working on reversing?
IAmA Winner of "The Most Human Human" Award at a Turing Test. AMA
AC and DC battle for data center efficiency crown
I wonder if the FBI is aware of android issue 3006 - http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3006
Nope, this is about 3 and a half months early.
At this point, nothing. If/when that proves to be a problem (probably sooner rather than later if the idea/site proves popular), then my initial plan is to verify emails, require unique emails on registration (obviously), and keep email addresses of deleted accounts on file for a short amount of time.

That would keep someone from deleting an account and immediately recreating it with the same email, so the person would instead have to use a different valid address per account, which probably is more trouble than it's worth to just participate in the site (at least doing that would be kind of fun).

Any thoughts on that? Your idea of mobile number verification is also an option, although it's a little too extreme for me to try unless things get bad.
Merged. Thanks :)
How would you compare Arch to Mint? Which one would you recommend for people wanting to get deeper into Linux?
This is why I'll never jump on the "GUIs are for stupid people" bandwagon.
They all require some kind of cooling. Fundamentally, a nuclear reactor sets up one end of a temperature differential that you can use to do work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_cycle

Water just happens to be a particularly convenient coolant.
Of course this is what is going to happen. They will make it an "option," naturally. Like picking your default search provider when you start Chrome for the first time.
Minor victim and state-lines being crossed -- that would be my guess.
You either need to get a bigger database or better search. I typed in "The Who" and got Modest Mouse. Not quite what I was looking for.
I don't know why I'm being downvoted for a simple question, but my point was that I don't see how this it's ever going to be possible to demonstrate that these things are safe. Our ancestors ate game meat, not farm meat. And now people want to grow it in a lab? I'm not saying we can't make a trade-off here, but people focus on the things they can see and ignore the unknown (in this case, the health effects of eating a new kind of processed food).
You should be using Pacmatic. The --force thing was a news feed item, and Pacmatic would have shown you the official news before you could have done damage.
Would be great to see PG do a TED Talk someday
Thank you, my unwitting "co-founder" ;-)
Not having automated test covering a piece of code does not imply that it's untested at the time it's written, but it sure as hell implies that it's not getting tested when seemingly unrelated feature X gets refactored and unknowingly breaks it.

Tests are only marginally important at the time you're writing the code they test. The real value comes months later when something else causes the test to fail, and now you a: know the code is broken, and b: have a clear specification what what that code was supposed to do.
Wow...the vitriol to Kevin here is ridiculous (or telling - depending on your perspective). HN is supposed to be a place where people are encouraged to start things - with the acknowledgement that not everything will work out and we are the testing ground for many of those new ideas.

The price for being a cutting-edge digirati is that many of the services you use, will not survive. If you can't deal with that, wait until they go mainstream and have some viable way to stay alive. Don't complain about it.

Yes, Kevin has raised money on his name - but why all the hate? Let him do his thing and you do yours.

Try launching a product and building your own, rather than criticizing other efforts. Either way, bootstrapping, getting funding, pivoting, abandoning is not easy. Doing it with such public scrutiny is even harder.

Take a chill pill and take solace in the fact that you are in the digirati that can even see these things. Your mom likely doesn't even know what Oink is. If you would rather be like her, then stop hanging out here and complaining.
Wunderkit
A good dashboard is better than testing.

Whenever I deploy new code, I make sure I pass all the unit tests, but then I watch the monitor the dashboard and incoming requests to confirm.
Maybe it was a interstate prostitution ring? Hell going between New York and New Jersey would qualify.