skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thoughts on the occasion of the 25th Anniversary of IBM OS/2
It would be interesting to hear a real quants take on the utility of having bitcoin as a (small) asset class in your portfolio. How much correlation does bitcoin have to any other asset class? I'd wager very, very little, making it a strong candidate for diversification. That said, it's overall volatility might offset the reduced expected volatility you'd see in your portfolio by holding some.
Pay anyone for anything – just by thinking about it.
I've concluded humor isn't allowed on HN. Seriously, why the downvotes?
I said I was genuinely curious, not that it was done wrong. There's no need to look for an argument where none exists. I've written and/or read literally hundreds of TeXed documents, all in native TeX fonts and not once thought, "gee. This would pop more in a different font." I will happily concede that your imagination is grander than mine.

I was interested, asked a question, received an answer, and have since moved on.
I thought there was about 40g of sugar per can of pop?
He means Expected Value I think. Average out all the entrepreneurs and their income today, compare that to their expected value in a year, and then compare that to the expected value of all full-time employees. Of course this is a really vague metric created by the parent post, but his/her point stands.
> But in all honesty, I would suggest that people who want a MODERN "free" OS look around for a microkernel-based, portable OS, like maybe GNU or something like that.

The most important - and ironic - line in the entire email.

Not to start a 'Linux vs. GNU/Linux' flameware, but ironically, everything that [most] people associate today with 'Linux' is as much a product of GNU as it is of Linux (if not more so). Furthermore, GNU Hurd has stalled, so in a way, Tanenbaum's reasoning was completely wrong, but his conclusion was almost completely right!
It wasn't but its the unintended consequence that should be at the top of the list to watch out for when considering how the law should deal with tracking. It seems disturbingly possible.
I disagree that the security track record of Bitcoin companies is comparable to that of banks.
It isn't about being able to beat it on the first time, it's about being able to formulate and test a theory on the first shot, and feeling like the loss is the result of a mistake that you've learned from, rather than the first shot being mostly a blind shot where you are just learning what's coming.
Hiring: A Compelling Writer Who Understands Standard Deviations
You:

--Compelling writer

--Comfortable explaining statistical concepts to a non-technical audience

--Frustrated when ideas are dreamed but never executed

--Very comfortable using technology compared to most non-technical people (Google Docs shouldn't be an anathema to you)

--Able to work at least 3 days a week out of SF office.

What you'll learn:

--How to systematically position a company as a thought-leader

--How to create successful email campaigns

--How to successfully pitch Mashable, TechCrunch, Adage, WSJ, etc

--How to create training courses that are snackable for busy customers

--How to write for SEO (Hint: it's not keyword-stuffing)

--How to write compelling PPC copy

Us: PageLever.com is the leader in analytics for Facebook marketers. We were profitable the day we launched, we're used by 4 of the 10 largest brands on Facebook, and we're growing quickly.

jeff+writer@pagelever.com
I don't know about this US lottery specifically but in most systems everything is recorded at HQ. Not just the numbers, but the place, the date and time, serial number etc

That way they can also check with CCTV.

It's an interesting topic in database design because the link to the store may fail at any time (remember lotteries started years ago on dialup) and you must not have an issued-unrecorded ticket at any point in the process
Bale would nail the crazy part but I don't think he can handle the redeeming parts (charisma, sensitivity, etc.) based on the films I've seen. Not to say he's not a great actor, one of the best, but still.
i wonder what would've happened IBM chose cpm and motorola instead of ms-dos and intel. All this compatibility stuff sucks.
What you should be doing, if you're doing numerics, is back up and find out why there's a NaN in the arguments in the first place.

Not all NaN's are created equal, in some contexts you'll want to always raise an exception whenever you see them, and in others you'll want to provide an appropriate closure or limit ... that depends on how you arrived at the Nan in the first place.

For what it's worth, you need to always know your libraries, for any one using Go to hash floats the behaviour is to return random for has( NaN ) :

// NOTE: Because NaN != NaN, a map can contain any
// number of (mostly useless) entries keyed with NaNs.
// To avoid long hash chains, we assign a random number
// as the hash value for a NaN.

void
runtime·f32hash(uintptr *h, uintptr s, void *a)
{
uintptr hash;
float32 f;

USED(s);
f = *(float32*)a;
if(f == 0)
hash = 0; // +0, -0
else if(f != f)
hash = runtime·fastrand1(); // any kind of NaN
else
hash = *(uint32*)a;
*h ^= (*h ^ hash ^ 2860486313U) * 3267000013U;
}

http://code.google.com/p/go/source/browse/src/pkg/runtime/al...
Should Java have an interpretor
Lots of people complaint that java compiling process takes such a long time and make development cycle longer than PHP.

Just thinking that Java should have an interpretor for its development to shorter people's development cycle. Maybe that will make it more appearing.
A pinterest-like website for browsing photos on instagram
Spend this afternoon developing this website. An easy way to browse photos in different topics: fashion, style, bikini, partygirls, cities like new york or san francisco, outfit, what i wear....any topic you like :D

http://in.5thvillage.com/
I have a CIS degree, but voted No in the poll b/c CIS and CS are pretty different. In fact, most universities classify the CS degree under the CS, Math, or Engineering departments, whereas CIS is usually classified under a business department.

I also regretted getting that degree for the longest time, now it doesn't bother me so much. I wish I had gotten a CS degree.
I think the piece said 'no more than 100 calores from sugar per day, less than that in a can of soda.'
The light bulb GE buried in a time capsule in 1912 still works
Compare:

http://www.alanaragonblog.com/about/

to:

http://chc.ucsf.edu/coast/faculty_lustig.htm

I'm not saying that's dispositive, but why exactly is Alan Aragon more credible than a medical doctor and UCSF clinical pediatrics professor?
A steady job is a very good idea (depending on who you ask). I just didn't want to make the assumption that he has a large enough skill set for a regular programming job.
The lottery HQ has records of all tickets for a particular lottery, which gets checked against when you claim a prize.

I'm not sure whether the has-this-ticket-won-anything machines phone home to check it against those records, or whether they just assume the ticket is authentic and leave the proper verification for when a prize is claimed.
@mashmac2 is the memory of large volumes of information, plastic?
Considering they can tell which vendor sold a winning ticket, they must have a central database logging the numbers chosen for each ticket. Also, considering the amounts of money involved, I can't imagine them doing anything less secure.
All of these invented system carry their own pros and cons, but the aversion to "junk associations" is an extremely common misconception in my opinion (one that I held for quite a while as well). Many will argue that relative to your total cognitive power the cost is virtually zero but I don't think the discussion needs to go that way, and here's why: like anything, the beginner has to force everything. You put in the effort consciously because you recognize it as a step in some process. If the technique remains a novelty, then that's where you'll stay. Your associations may get ever more clever, simpler, faster, etc. But when you start to apply it constantly in your work and in everything else that you do, soon the technique simply fades into the background until at some point it might as well have disappeared. It's like math or spelling as a child, where you have to learn step by step what is and what isn't until it clicks, and then the why no longer matters. You add two numbers because that's the way it works– you don't have to convince yourself. As your memory progresses you the junk associations will fade out and stronger associations predominate, because they're relevant and you want to remember relevant things.

Edit: this is especially relevant to the "read me a list and I'll repeat it forwards, backwards, or in any order you call out" party trick.
He does have the hair of a young Jobs.
I agree we should watch out for it, but I don't agree that it's irrelevant that it's legitimately useful today. Again: I'd be happy with a court order requirement, but not outraged if there wasn't one.

Drug dogs. Let's deal with that problem first, OK? Because we appear to have outsourced the 4th Amendment to dogs. I have a dog. My dog's jurisprudential capabilities are highly suspect.
If you were to take a poll of earthlings asking them whether they've heard of Google and whether they've heard of Wolfram Alpha, Google would resoundingly win. People would also, by and large, be familiar with their search if anything.

If you then asked those people where they would search for an answer to a mathematical problem, or if they wanted to find the meaning of some math equation, it's not hard to believe that they'd google it. Even if they ended up on Wikipedia, they would probably use Google to get there. Before Google launched this feature, people would use the search to (hopefully) end up at Wolfram Alpha. Now, they are likelier (than before) to have their needs met by Google itself.

A monopoly on search is a monopoly on access to knowledge. If Google goes into competition with another provider of access to knowledge, they have a tangible head start. That's where I'm coming from -- I concur that search doesn't overlap with everything, but I think it overlaps at least a bit with this.
What A 16th Century Guild Teaches Us About Competition (starts at 3:04)
Basically, it has to be better than iOS and Android. What does that mean for me?

- Beautiful responsive thoughtful intuitive UI design that is better than iOS
- Touch first UI. Not this Frankenstein BB OS + touch POS included in the Storm/Torch.
- The same flexibility as Android.
- Apps, apps, apps
- Kickass hardware design that is equal to or better than iPhone 4S
- Hardware specs that beat Galaxy Nexus

If I were RIM, I'd just fork Android like Amazon did.
Many actors get typecast but who would have thought Will Smith could play Ali or Jamie Foxx play Ray Charles. Comedies/romantic comedies take a lot of dramatic range to pull off and Kutcher's performances are pretty strong in that respect. I think he's perfect for the hippie phase for sure. Steve Jobs had Hollywood good looks and for that Kutcher is a perfect match too (not to mention Kutcher gets technology more than most). I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Depending on the extent of your plotting needs, Julia's grpahics/plotting capabilities will probably not be quite the same as something like gnuplot or ggplot2.

Further information:

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/wiki/Graphics

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/589

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/314
Tips on pitching your app to the media
I wear what is comfortable precisely because I care about myself. By your logic, dressing in any manner other than shorts and t-shirts would either be communicating that I don't care about myself, or would be a lie.

See how ridiculous this is?
Not always. I this year spent several hours chasing down a discrepancy between Firefox and WebKit (Safari/Chrome) and I've even seen cases where Safari and Chrome are slightly different.
Aren't you being a little disingenuous here?

The whole point of getting a warrant is to justify to a competent legal authority (judge) that the specific right (reasonable expectation of privacy) is outweighed by the states interest (upholding the law). NOBODY here is claiming that this right is absolute.

More to the point: if the cops had simply done their job and obtained the warrant, executed it properly, and stayed within the confines of that warrant, there is no case for the SCOTUS to hear.
I dropped out after finishing 99% Computer Science and Engineering degree from OSU. I had two classes left but the senioritis was getting to me and I couldn't focus. I just wanted to get out there and do things. So far it's worked out OK, I have a decent job and I applied to this latest batch of ycombinator.
http://superfamicom.org/text-to-8-bit

I built a toy: Text to 8-Bit

Create 8-bit game screenshots using your own text in Fami-liar games. About 12 hours of work, most of that is in graphics work (chop chop chop). Javascript with Canvas, not terribly fancy but very fun.
Most people don't go to HN to read jokes. That said, I've seen humor get upvoted, but it has to be pretty spectacular humor.
What do you expect to happen? What are the possibilities?
Interesting... Wonder how much they lost...
No offense, but CIS (Business Degree) can in no way be considered the same as CS (Engineering Degree).
I thought this link was a Reuter's April Fool's joke.
Can you use Photoshop filters to do this, or are there more professional programs to do so?
CrazyMike shows Wings of Fury for Android
Count on Lieberman to be on the wrong side of every crucial issue. He's the worst kind of Washington apparatchik tool.
I've never been on the App store (I had a MBP but it's been repurposed as a XBMC device), is it popular yet?

I would worry that if / when the App store is popular enough that for the majority of the market it's their first port of call, you not being on it pretty much screws you if anyone else produces software similar to yours.

And, come Mountain Lion, you'll have to convince users that it's OK to change a default system setting just to install your app. Of which there may be a perfectly servicable, comparible app on the App Store that is just a click away, no system setting pokery required.

If the App store becomes the default go to for software installation it doesn't much matter if Apple locks down the rest of the OS, you're forced to follow their store rules anyway, lest your sales figures be barren.
You've got an interesting point & concept - but if you really want to ramp things up, I've got two suggestions for you:

1. Tell folks to eat Stilton cheese a half hour before going to bed. If they've never experienced lucid dreaming, they're in for a treat.
2. Try 12-20 drops of mugwort essential oil at the base of the neck and just above the nose between the eyes, and below the nostril (men ONLY, or ladies with NO possibility of being pregnantk, as the essential oil is abortofascient, or can cause spontaneous abortions). It will cause the most incredible lucid dreaming a person has ever experienced. The oil is believed to open the third eye or a persons psychic mind. Nobody can say for sure...but what everybody knows is that it will introduce them to a level of dreaming and an awareness of their dreams that will change their lives!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/52869095@N02/6887824986/in/set-...

She's cute.
The founders also passed the Sedition Act of 1798 so YMMV, and the constitution itself has that provision about giving aid and comfort to the enemy but a public service like Twitter ought to be able to claim common carrier immunity from being charged.
A predictable casting because of the physical similarities to young Jobs and Kutcher's obvious personal interest in tech.

Has Kutcher played many serious roles successfully though? I thought he did well in Butterfly Effect, but I can't recall him in a single other serious film.
Dated April 2nd.
We're talking about the margins of warrant requirements and the expectation to privacy. Nobody's being disingenuous. The territory here simply isn't clear.

Again: the FBI lost this case because they physically tampered with someone else's effects. They did not lose because SCOTUS determined that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their public movements. Which is unsurprising, because SCOTUS has explicitly said people don't reasonably have that expectation.

So, no. Not being disingenuous. Again: under your reasoning, couldn't the drug dealer fall back on their reasonable expectation of not having someone tail them as they transited from the drug corner to the stash house? Because the police can obviously do that without a warrant.
I really loathe April 1.
Also it should be pointed out that we aren't made of fruit. We preserve meat in salts, does that mean salt is toxic to us as well?
Conan O Brien resigns as CEO from Mashable
Great cast. Kutcher will get it right, plus he resembles Jobs:

http://www.tjwalker.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Steve-Job...

http://www.binsidetv.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ashton-k...
Bitcoin is mathematically flawed. There are at least two attack vectors that someone with a million bucks or less could pull that would require manual overrides on the code, which, as nobody likes to talk about, is possible.

edit: Disclosure: I made a bunch of money getting in on bitcoin early and then selling out at around $22. It was at that point where I looked at the whole system and determined the attack vector.

Also the only way to get bitcoins securely is to buy and sell them for cash. And even then there are ways of figuring out who is who.

The next thing will be the right thing, but this isn't it. The long term picture for bitcoin, unless completely overhauled, is bleak.
Most university engineering departments were torn between creating a new discipline (Computer Engineering) versus keeping the original Electrical Engineering designation and allowing students to take elective CS courses.

It seems like such a trivial issue since most universities (I believe) now offer the distinction, but 20 years ago you would probably have been joining the 'young' Computer Engineering discipline. As an interesting data point, MIT still classifies the program as the "Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science"[1]

[1]http://www.eecs.mit.edu/
If these were humans, a standing-still ship would attract more aggression as an easy target, but bots don't seem to care about that, so it should be good option for maximizing kills/deaths. However, it takes a long time to kill anyone without active movement – hunting down near-dead ships is the best way to get best kills/minute. (and by hunting down i mean crashing into them of course, as well as point-blank fire).
Absolutely. I used a rhythm mnemonic in middle school to remember pi to 106 digits in middle school, and that was the day of the quiz (it was extra credit in... geometry for some reason). Actually the more you practice these techniques on completely ordinary and mundane things, the easier it becomes when attempting formulae, tables, and graphs. Saving your memory for "important things" will only deprive you of essentially free practice. The periodic table is actually a good place to start as long as you don't overwhelm yourself, so for example start with the names of the elements in order, then the numbers will associate, and you can keep building with recursion. OR you could begin with smaller blocks if you're more comfortable absorbing a lot of different information at once, which can sometimes work much better.
Whether you know you are being followed or not is not the issue, it's been long-established that if you are out and about in public you do not have a "reasonable expectation" of privacy because plainly anybody can see where you are and where you go and who you meet.
I'd say no, just because I could point out many people with degrees in mathematics who couldn't define the halting problem or a Turing Machine, and yet those are core concepts for any person with a meaningful degree in computer science. (Note: I did not say 'computer programming' or 'software engineering'!)

Of course, that's not to say that this would preclude someone from being employed in many of the same jobs offered to CS graduates, but it underlines the fact that the two disciplines are still very different, even if they involve related skills. If we only used the 'employable in the same jobs' benchmark, then psychology and sociology degrees might 'count' as history degrees.
Christian Bale.
Post Startup Founder Feeling Lost, Career Advice Appreciated
Hey HN,

I am hoping to get some career advice, because to be completely honest I am stumped and don't know what to do next.

My own background is I am self taught in it, have worked as a Linux sysadmin for a few years at an ISP, worked at a comp security company for a while doing protect evals, support on products, pen testing,
then I did my own start up, I bootstrapped a SaaS antispam service as a single founder/sole employee company based around open source with a custom frontend written in PHP/MySQL.
It had ~2000 companies using the system when I sold it. But I didn't have many direct clients, it was almost all through a network of resellers I built up to insulate me from having support issues from users
kill all of my time. On top of that I did freelance web dev work in PHP/MySQL.
I sold that business a few years back and went back to college to do study law.
I became a father while completing my studies and so I decided to take more time out to hang out with my son while I could afford it.

Now I have wound down the funds from my old business, I want to get back working and be a part of something.

The problem is that I'm not really good with the things that are current. Everything now is virtualization, ruby, node.
I haven't been exposed much to these things, even things like Nagios, I didn't use that in my business, I just wrote scripts which sent me an SMS based on certain criteria.
One recruiter told me that's no good, their client wants Nagios experience.
Even my PHP ability isn't the best, I write everything as functions, and job descriptions want OOP.
Any job I see is looking for people who are specialists, I'm not a specialist, in the guy who is too stubborn to give up and eventually figures the thing out.

I have also found out that HR have blocked applications I have made because of the gap in my work/employment history, I sold my business in late 2008, so I can see how late 2008 to
early 2012 would be an issue from a HR perspective.

I am thinking of doing the RHCE as a way to verify to perspective employers that I do currently have an ability to manage Linux systems, I figure some sort of third party validation would
help hiring managers get over the career break.

Should I take a junior position and work my way back up the career path? Do I just keep applying for jobs with experience and work on explaining the employment gap?
I think me being rusty is also an issue after such a break, which negates slightly against me getting jobs with experience, at least so far that seems to be the case.
Do I start learning Ruby and write something to release as open source to show I can write Ruby code?
Maybe just giving up on getting hired and trying to bootstrap a business again from scratch is the way to go?

Has anybody else found themselves in a similar position after selling a start up? If so, what did you do at this point?

Apologies if this post comes across as complaining, that really isn't my intention. I'm just a little frustrated and not sure what direction I should take.
Here is Dr. Lustig's UCSF lecture, referenced in the 60 minutes piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

NYTimes article, same subject: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sugar-t.ht...
XO-3 Prototype