skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think everyone should let a few crackpots in

a) It's entertaining - it's good exercise to figure out what mistakes the crackpots are making
b) Some of the crackpots might turn out to be right
Using Twitter to Build a Password Cracking List - 1978 passwords out of 4400
What is the reasoning behind the fact that, say, (INT_MAX + 1) != INT_MIN?
4mnow - can't think of a better system!
Two's complement is not required; there might be systems that use saturating signed arithmetic for example.
Trying to kind of figure out the features of this sort of thing.

1. Talks quickly.
2. Fairly good mastery of appropriate buzz words.
3. Very much focused on the narrative "and then this was discovered and then this" rather actual analysis of any given topic.
4. Never particularly makes any claims other than the broadest generalities.

Has the guy ever read mainstream scientific analysis?

It's kind of like timecube, where the guy just repeats over and over amazing claims without really saying anything else. It's a very weird phenomena, but kind of makes me wonder what the exact difference between this and "real" science is. It's not really the truth/falsity of the claims being made, since the claims are so general or otherwise incoherent I'm not sure they have a truth/falsity.
Here here to this. For some reason when I'm taking a shower, I usually come up with solutions to problems that I've never been able to do elsewhere. Probably because when I'm not in the shower, I'm "keeping busy" and that restricts my creative abilities.
I don't see much evidence of what the title says in the article. It just is based on anecdotal evidence. This is on par with a blog post by some random person. I'm surprised SFGate would publish this.
That would be true for unsigned data types. The C Standard specifies as 'undefined behavior' overflow for signed types. The C compiler can do whatever it wants...
Have an idea of what they are using the data for perhaps you can provide this service?
But would you say that time in the shower is "wasted" if your mind is actively on and turning over a problem?
Good catch. I updated the post so that it tests for a > b + epsilon instead of a == b.
I can imagine a number of situations where the implementation is significantly more complex. While ideally A/B tests should be looking at relatively small changes, where each change is independent, many times people are making profoundly larger changes.

If you are testing the conversion rate in shopping carts, and the changes involves drastic redesigns of the flow through the shopping cart process, that could be a serious technological difference and requires substantial time to implement.

Not every test is as easy as changing the copy on an email.
The D-K results don't actually say that incompetents think they're awesome. It says that, as a group, they tend to estimate themselves as slightly above average. So do the most competent. What this means is that percentile-based self-assessment has no signal, not that unskilled people are preternaturally inclined to think of themselves as excellent.
No, not you being male. Other engineers being male ("role models in popular culture" not just day-to-day life).
Anything in Seattle that's not Amazon?
From the article, she mentions that she goes for an early-morning walk and watches the sun rise over Oakland. That seems to fit your definition of "wasting time."

Her definition of wasting time seemed to refer instead to realizing what's important to you and what's not, then spending less time on that unimportant stuff. Her "getting up and checking email/Twitter/Facebook" was an example of unimportant stuff. But she gave plenty of examples of taking creative time instead of just staying busy.

"Don't waste time" is not the same as "don't take creative time".
I was trying to highlight that in some cases the user won't notice any benefits associated with page file when they have a large amount of RAM, so it is not really a negative to have it disabled. Personally I have encountered times when Windows, having paged processes, knocks them out of memory when I have plenty free (I know the memory is used for file caches, but I would prefer it to kick this stuff out first). As for mentioning linux, I was using it as an example (albeit only slightly applicable).
The Director of Engineering at Facebook is not just some random person.
That is true but it's not the reason... INT_MAX + 1 must be 0 for unsigned int because the C standard defines wrap-around behavior for unsigned data types. Saturated data types are only defined in Embedded C. E.g.: Sat Fract
It is great before sunrise or just after sunset. Stillness of mind is the key to creativity. Stillness is achieved through long meditative practices
I wasted a moment clicking on the link only to get a server error page...I guess there are a lot of people wasting moments checking out why they should not be wasting moments.
Symbols of Power: Error Correcting Coded Adinkras & the Nature of Reality
There it is, I have been trying to remember that title for a while.

Not available for the Kindle!?
everything you need under one roof
Some reasons (the first one being the most important one):

1. To give compilers some leeway when optimizing stuff (for examples, see http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-...)

2. To make C usable for those worried about erroneous overflows in their code.

3. To make it easier to write C compilers for CPUs that trap on integer overflow.

4. To allow for performant C compilers on CPUs that use one's complement arithmetic.
I'm exactly the same - this thing with WiFi in would've been much more successful. Even just an ethernet thing as standard would have helped.

I look forward to a v2, but haven't seen/heard of any developments.
Blogging with a simpler interface...isn't that Tumblr? Is it late for Wordpress to think about going in this direction? (I read the article but didn't watch the 20-minute video.)
I use 4mnow in my apps. Coolest backend around and its on my server. nobody to pay
Personally, it took me a long time to realize that time was not wasted. Mostly because it doesn't feel directly productive.

Also, having your mind actively on and turning over a problem defeats the purpose of letting your mind wander freely in search of serendipitous solutions. Having it actively "on" is the same as keeping busy.
No, it's nothing to do with professionalism, it's a matter of having to pass on work that must continue when your not there. Maybe you only work Mon & Tue and someone else needs to work on the same task all week, you have to pass it to them tues eve and pick it up mon morning again, both of which take time.

Now the obvious answer is to the structure the work so that isn't required; but not all companies are willing or able to do that.

I've had to leave tasks with people knowing they would be by themselves for several days, and hoping they'd have done it right when I got back. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't. I was half in charge of someone else while part-time - not the best situation. A badly organised company.

I'm sympathetic to your plight, as said elsewhere I used to do part time (now I'm proper freelance) but in badly organised teams this can be a problem.
The world’s largest Boeing airplane takes flight
I used to own an Asus EEE PC 901, and while it is still one of my favorite gadgets of all time, I have to admit that small keyboards are absolutely terrible for taking notes.

The keyboard on this device looks to be about half the size of the EEE PC 901, so I don't think it would be very effective without a full size keyboard connected to it.
At the college level, some universities have instituted a policy of having a 50% ratio of women to men entering computer science, but high attrition brings the number down between 10 and 20% for graduates.

And this is why "quotas" are complete and total crap. If a school has 1000 openings for their CS program and the policy says the 500 should be women and then half of them drop out that is 250 spots that could have gone to someone else. Quotas do not allow for the most qualified/capable people to get the spots. It is a shame that these policies keep going on. I understand they were designed to combat discrimination but they just traded one bias for another.
Eating
How to improve the way we eat
Because Apple's installer framework has the option to open a document after installation is complete: We have it open the start.html page. Alas, Apple's framework always opens web pages with Safari, no matter what the user has set as their default browser. I don't know why, since it is just the standard "open" action - suspect it has to do with the Installer running as root. If anyone knows a work around, I'm all ears!
Statistics vs. A Child's Argument (Humor)
This works great in my experience as well. I work remote (full time) for my company, but several employees are on the West coast while several are on the East cost (myself included).

We find it works great. I can take my time in the morning, having some coffee and reading Hacker News. Then I get started, make some progress and by time I run into needing to collaborate, my colleagues on the West coast show up for work. At the end of the day, I sign off informing them what I've finished and still need to do, and they can keep working without having to to talk to me.
The Haskell Platform 2012.2 is live
So this is incorrectly titled. This should be a "A Quiz About Integers in C on common x86 and x64 ABI."

Unfortunately this does not educate people to that kind of issues, which is very unfortunate.
Even better is to generate real words. I took a "1000 most common english words" list and reduced it manually to 256 that don't rhyme with other common words and now use that to generate pass-phrases. It's my best solution for English since phonetic spelling isn't a feature of English.
If you think about it, climate change is actually the most obvious cause for the disappearance of a civilization completely dependent on agriculture.
Women 2.0 » Debunking The Myth Of Meritocracy In Business For Women
Some common rewards:

Free use for some number of months.
First shot at their preferred user names; lower user #n.
Badges; points; karma; etc.
Public recognition.

A bit more expense and with fulfillment hassle:

Physical swag: t-shirts, pens, buttons, etc.

A bit more leg work:

Complimentary, complementary partner service.

My favorite:

Make your product so awesome that the value it provides is reward enough.
I'm sorry, working to fix it now
According the David Allen book, you should also be keeping track of your long term goals and making sure you're doing (or not doing as the case may be) the things necessary to reach those goals.
I think it's probably more on the side of "sad", considering the way I did it. No mods. I wrote a little android app that you could put the words and number of correct letters each try into and it would shorten the list each time you did.

After a while I figured out "the trick" and could do them in my head and didn't need the program anymore. It was a fun little programming exercise, though.
It's important to keep reminding everyone (including myself) that creative time most often looks like wasting time when you feel the weight of the world is on your shoulders.

I've gotten some of my best ideas and insights by farting around on twitter. Or on a four hour coffee with a random friend.

It would be extremely difficult to justify either of those as anything but wasting time.
SoundCloud Backbone.js Stack by Nick Fisher
http://spadgos.github.com/sfjs-next-soundcloud/#/step-1
Thank you for checking it out. I think I fixed it.
(I don't think you should have too high expectations of facts and logic from ucee054, at least re politics. :-) )

Thanks for the link, I didn't know the name of the law. Also, there were some ... cough ... controversial interrogation methods in the 70s, until there was too much human rights criticism.

Anyway, I'm not an expert on the UK and IRA, but believe/assume part of the inspiration for the wonderful T Gilliam movie "Brazil" came from this.
Agreed. The keyboard is about smartphone-size. At which point one has to ask: Why not just use a smartphone?
Beverly Hills Cop MIDI track? Yes.
>I imagine there's no polarity in european plugs because the "use a third lead for grounding" solution was chosen right away instead of trying to patch things with forced polarity first

I remember when polarized plugs started to appear on appliances in the U.S. (probably in the 1970s) and by then the third lead was many years old.
Future U: College newspaper heralds future of journalism
To go straight to the slides, go here:
http://spadgos.github.com/sfjs-next-soundcloud/#/step-1

Once I get the video recording of this presentation from my friend that is editing it, I will post it as well.
> You also mentioned the Brahmi script is "unquestionably based on the scripts of the ancient Near East". That is also news to me. Could you provide citations, please?

Brahmi and Karoshthi (the two major origin scripts for the writing systems of the subcontinent) are generally accepted to be related to the Semitic writing systems.

Source: an undergraduate class in writing systems several years ago; also, the relevant Wikipedia pages agree, giving Aramaic as the parent script.
Or, you know, if you try to brute force 180k accounts, you're bound to get 2000 of them by chance alone. I'd like to see him change the words to food-related items and see how many he gets.
Truly fascinating read.

One might conclude, though the evidence put forth here indicates otherwise, most of this intermixing probably occurred within Africa before spreading outward.

I suggest this because traces of earlier, middle, and later stage evolutionary branches are all found in African fossils of modern humans (apparently through various stages of history). So though the evidence of mixing with Denisovans exists in Asia, with the Neanderthals in Europe, and with Homo floresiensis in the islands, in modern human fossil records (which seem to originate from Africa) apparently traces of each still exist.

Thus, one might conclude that either recent mixing has reintroduced these genes back into our most common ancestors, or that the distant mixing occurred in a period that we no longer have evidence of (but might in the future).
Awesome service, fast and easy and ofcourse user-friendly. Keep it up man!
Is there a real controversy over whether the Harappan script is writing

Yes. Again, this is a familiar issue to people who are familiar with linguistics, and one of the criticisms of the Rao et al. publication is that none of the authors are familiar with the methodology used in historical linguistics to solve comparable problems in other parts of the world. (I am able to read ancient Chinese and am intimately familiar with the history of the Chinese script, which is an illuminating example for comparing periods of early ornamentation, proto-writing, and full writing as that script developed with attested archeological finds.) I am also very familiar with the extent of the Indo-European languages and with the fact that many languages spoken in India (e.g., Tamil, a language spoken by many friends of mine) are not Indo-European. The links I already provided give much of the needed background information.

But here are a few more links, for onlookers who are curious about this issue and may be interested in responses to the Rao et al. publication.

http://www.safarmer.com/Refutation3.pdf

http://www.safarmer.com/more.on.Rao.pdf

http://horadecubitus.blogspot.com/2009/04/indus-what-did-rao...

http://earningmyturns.blogspot.com/2009/04/falling-for-magic...

(The link immediately above is by a former president of the Society for Computational Linguistics.)

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/coli_a_00011

(The review article linked above from the journal Computational Linguistics discussed the methodological issues involved.)
thank you very much glad you enjoy the service.
Sure no problem, not familiar with the RPi Wiki, drop me an email at tapajob at gmail dot com with the details.
Will Windows 8 emphasis on Tablet features drive users to iPad?
Sounds like some bad team work to me, and I don't see that a set of full-timers would necessarily do better. If your a part-timer, you make extra effort on the team communication part for obvious reasons.

& part timers aren't fully invested? I call bullshit. Again, sounds like some bad team-work going on there.

Altho, with this question the truth doesn't really matter, what really matters is whether employers think this will be true, so you may have 2 good points here.
>Right, just like they charge a fraction of the price outside the USA vs pumping insurance for all it's worth in the USA.

This US is where they recover their development costs. People in poor countries just can't afford to pay what it costs to develop a drug, and the US has only so much influence when it comes to drug patents. Witness India's abrogation of patents on AIDS drugs. When you're Pfizer and Canada tells you "this is what we're willing to pay for your drug. If you don't don't like it we'll just invalidate your patent and give you nothing" you take what you can get.

>After all, the cancer market is so small, only one third of the entire population has cancer at any given time, it might take them more than a year to start making net profit.

A third of the population has cancer? Not even close. Cancer prevalence in the US is something like 12 million people,

http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/CancerBasics/cancer-prevalence

out of a population of about 314 million, which works out to something less than a 4%.

And there is no "cancer market". Cancer is a class of diseases. This drug is specifically designed to treat prostate cancer (which is itself not one disease but a class of different types of cancers that start in the prostate) that has metastasized, which isn't even most prostate cancer patients. So no, this isn't Lipitor or the next big allergy medication. They're not going to sell this to very many people, and the people who take it are very sick, so most of them won't be taking it for very long.

>Please stop defending and apologizing for billionaires.

Name one person who made a billion dollars in legal pharmaceuticals. Hell, I wish people were making billions from drugs like this one instead of adding "time release" to drugs that have been on the market forever.
I'm not sure what "role models in popular culture" I had in the 80's that steered me to be an engineer. It sure wasn't anybody on MTV. And assuming none of my school teachers were engineers, I didn't encounter my first (known to me) engineer until I got to college. But I started out just wanting to be a computer repairman because that looked like the future and the money would probably be good. It was after college that I realized my true passion was software and not hardware.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
This is what crosses my mind quite often when gender is brought up here. The sentiment is that gender imbalance is a problem that needs to be fixed. And as you say, any other reason goes out of the window.

I'm also of the opinion that there's a hint of arrogance in saying that men are the reason there are fewer women in the field. I generally take a feminist stance with these things, and am of the opinion that women's jobs being at the mercy of chauvinistic 'brogrammers' or some such bullshit is exactly that: bullshit.

Given the desire and the determination, any woman interested in the field can pursue a career in it, and the field does not prevent that.

> "For Yeung, having parents who were both engineers spared her the sense that computers weren't for girls."

This conveys the real truth, hiding in the mound of rubbish that is the majority of that article.

It's not Silicon Valley's fault; it's not the fault of technology, or programming; it's not the fault of the men working in those fields. It's society's fault for dictating what qualifies as 'girly', and what doesn't. Tech is not 'girly', therefore society fails to provide the same incentives to pursue those interests to young girls, that are available to young boys.
I'd really like a similar device with a full sized keyboard. This certainly replaces a little pocket notebook, but personally I don't use pocket notebooks. I'd like something to replace a full-sized notebook: easy to type on, basically just good for text, sort of a portable digital typewriter.

Anyone know any good resources for larger screens? I'm curious if you can get 7" + screens with slightly better refresh rates than eInk, but not as power-hungry as a full-color backlit display. The perfect screen would be something like the TI-86, except 8 times as large. Does anyone make 1000-2000 character displays in a 7-14 inch form factor?

I feel like you ought to be able to make something like with 30-40 hours battery life (if not better) for around $200-$300.
Thanks, I enjoyed reading that article. I often wonder myself what I would or would not accomplish during a sabbatical.

The part about learning a new language struck a chord with me as I'm currently learning Italian and am finding it all too easy to declare there is no time.

I now know I have to get my arse into shape and become fluent in Italian, thanks for sharing.
Designers: YC (S12) health data company. 
We tackled an old health data standard and made it simple for consumers and developers to use. Now we want to make it elegant and engaging for our audience. If you are a designer looking to change the way people interact with their health data then we'd love to hear from you.

Full timers or contractors are cool -- ping us to talk more: ycsummer2012@gmail.com.
To be fair, Meg Whitman is not a technology person, she is a classic business executive.

The article makes some fair points that are right on target. There is a significant disparity between the number of "hacker" types with regards to gender.

Frankly, I think the article is saying we need more of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa_Mayer
Course, that assumes the company wants a whole employee. Why do companies think of IT workers in terms of complete people? Why do they rarely say "Actually, we don't have enought work for a whole extra person but 2/5 of one would be ace!"?

Happens all the time in other industries. Like admin work; tons of small charities/companies advertise for an admin person several days a week to just come in, do the paperwork then bugger off again, and you could argue that's just as much of a knowledge role as an IT worker.
Yep. Pry supports a per-project .pryrc file.
At the time of the introduction of C, there were plenty of different architectures that used different kinds of signed integer representations. C was evolved to be the "lowest common denominator", so things that operated differently on different hardware were made undefined to preserve portability.
Have you taken a look at the ASUS Transformer Prime? It's not quite what you're looking for, but it might do the job. The keyboard dock gives it a total of around 18 hours of battery life.

http://eee.asus.com/en/eeepad/transformer-prime/features/
Hal Abelson talks about those examples in this interview: http://www.codequarterly.com/2011/hal-abelson/ . The students who were taking 6.001 had just had a course in calculus the previous semester, so the math in the examples would be fresh in their minds.
Show up.
>The idea that a lone polymath experimenting in his basement, a la Ben Franklin or James Maxwell, could make a genuinely important scientific discovery, disappeared a long time ago.

You could have said the same thing in 1900, eight years before the publication of the first paper on general relativity, arguably the most important advance in physics, ever, and something Einstein did independently.

Tthe Einsteins and Maxwells of the world don't come along very often, and the fact that we haven't had one in awhile is more a reflection on that rarity than any characteristic of modern science.
Prediction: Higgs Boson Discovery Before 2013
Betteridge's Law of Headlines: "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'".