skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I strongly disagree. It's completely possible to build useful, beautiful native apps with PhoneGap, et al. In fact, it is beneficial in many cases, allowing developers to get from zero to prototype significantly faster. Not to mention, porting from one OS to another is magnitudes faster than writing multiple native versions.

It's not the right solution for all cases, but it's definitely right for some.
Most companies I've worked for have had some kind of annual fire drill / alarm testing. They announce it the prior week, and then, say, Tuesday at 10am the alarm goes off, everyone files out of the building into the parking lot for 5 minutes, then back inside. In 15+ years (at several different companies), only once has there been an actual fire department call where the evacuation was "real" (even then, there was no actual fire).

In those same 15+ years, mostly working for startups, there have been numerous drive failures. Unfortunately, failure (a) to verify backups before there's a failure, and (b) to practice restoring from backups has often meant that a drive failure means loss of several days' worth of work. In one instance, the VCS admin corrupted the entire repo, there were no backups, that admin was shown the door, and we had to restart from "commit 0" with code pieced together from engineers' individual workstations. That was when I got religious about making & testing backups for my work and the systems I was responsible for...
Google and the Great Firewall: An Interesting New Twist
I assume the author is in dire need of a list of things he should have known at age 30+.
I agree with the premise, that over-engineering is bad.. but the only way to know it when you see it is to have done it before in the past.

i know i wouldnt have been as completely allergic to complexity as I am, had it not been for some very important life lessons on the subject.
I'm picking up Obj C but it's early stages yet. I'm also building a couple of things in Python but not to the level I'm comfortable risking someone else's project on it at the moment.

I do know a fair bit of C and spent 3 years in a Perl shop but tbh, I'd rather not go down that path right now :)
Cant agree more. Especially startups should be very careful not to get trapped in an infinite loop of engineering. In my previous failed attempt we did just that. Built feature after feature but nothing could ever see the light of the day until it became an overkill.
True, both methods can provide statistical significance. My only point is that in general A/B testing may require less number of visitors as compared to A/B for same amount of confidence.
When I see this "How soon statistical significance (of p-value < 0.05) was detected (in a two tailed Z-test)", I think of http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html

tldr: The methodology is flawed.
I hardly consider myself cold or heartless scientiffic, but I cannot imagine why someone would give up all reason and curiosity applied to the moment surroumding a persons death.

If a clock stopped at the time of my wifes death, just how would it be natural to attribute it to something supernatural if I wouldn't usually do that?

Just because it is a highly emotional moment?
Who else thinks that Metro on the desktop is the new Vista?
It would not have improved the piece. Short & punchy would become long and meandering, with all sorts of little details and things to nitpick at and complain about.

(Indeed, the cynic in me can't help but read this as a complaint that the essay isn't full of such small things to nitpick about and use to casually dismiss it, as is our mental habit... but perhaps that's too cynical.)

Besides, all attempts at wisdom transfer like this have the problem that if you understood the explanation, you almost certainly didn't need it in the first place. You're better off just spending some time in thought about these sorts of essays, asking yourself how and why someone saw fit to write these things, wondering what experiences they had that led them to these conclusions...

... or, more likely, not, until about 15 years later.
Is it possible to play a dota-like game in single-player? I don't enjoy playing multiplayer games and registering to play.
There were many previous references, but zero previous confirmations.
I'd really love to hear your thoughts on what's wrong in his view. I tend to agree that he's wrong, but I can't put my finger on why, honestly. Personally, the zero-day market is beginning to look very interesting to me; I went from reverse-engineering things in public, to working as a security consultant, to now working as a software dev. After everything I've seen of the security world, it seems to me that the vulnerability market is the most interesting, lucrative part of the industry.

I just wish that there was more information available; behind-closed-doors meetings introduced by friends-of-a-friend seem to me to not only be dangerous (to me and everyone else) but inefficient from a market perspective.
Rescue Time Comparisons, Infographics + Time Tracking
This is a neat concept and I liked it. The website is a bit confusing and I thought BP is a text editor like LightTable. The links are clickable and doesn't lead to anywhere added to the confusion. A few use cases will be helpful. Is it customizable and supports other languages?

I would love to see this evolve into something bigger. Keep up the good work!
Article 6 of the NPT obliges the US, and other nuclear powers, to make good faith efforts to reduce, and eventually eliminate, their massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

The US is so far away from ever putting any effort into this that Article 6 is all but unknown, and no one even remotely takes it seriously. International law is for nations without the power to effective ignore it.
You know what's most surprising about this? That the developers, knowing fine well it was for a single target and the damage it could do in the wild, didn't implement a kill switch.

Quite frankly cowboy coding like that is why we'll end up with Skynet becoming self-aware.
I don't think that's contrarian.

If your choices are between allowing Israel to start a new war in the middle east, or work with Israel on this risky new cyberweapon, I think most people would pick the cyberweapon.
It's not flawed. Wouldn't you assume that whatever bias (due to "peeking" at results) was there for one algorithm would also be there for another? Also, to offset this effect somewhat, I waited till I saw statistical significance at least 10 times. (I know it's a heuristic) Moreover, I'm curious if there's a theoretical result that compares statistical power of randomization and MAB.

Though like a commenter said, comparing these two algorithms is actually like comparing apples to oranges, and that was precisely the conclusion.
Multi-armed bandit isn't an algorithm, it's a model of how to view the problem. Like it or not, the problem web designers face fits the multi-armed bandit model pretty well. The algorithm called "MAB" in the article is one of many that have been developed for multi-armed bandit problems. Traditionally, the "MAB" of this article is known as "epsilon-greedy".

The point of multi-armed bandit situations is that there is a trade-off to be made between gaining new knowledge and exploiting existing knowledge. This comes up in your charts - the "MAB"s always have better conversion rates, because they balance between the two modes. The "A/B testing" always gain more information quickly because they ignore exploitation and only focus on exploration.

I should say also that multi-armed bandit algorithms also aren't supposed to be run as a temporary "campaign" - they are "set it and forget it". In epsilon-greedy, you never stop exploring, even after the campaign is over. In this way, you don't need to achieve "statistical significance" because you're never taking the risk of choosing one path for all time. In traditional A/B testing, there's always the risk of picking the wrong choice.

You aren't comparing A/B testing to a multi-armed bandit algorithm because both are multi-armed bandit algorithms. You're in a bandit situation either way. The strategy you were already using for your A/B tests is a different common bandit strategy called "epsilon-first" by wikipedia, and there is a bit of literature on how it compares to epsilon-greedy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit#Common_bandi...
Are you disagreeing with his assertion that the 0day market creates an incentive for internal code sabotage?

I agree that that part is speculative, but I think his major point (as I read it) is that the monetization of exploits by third parties (bad guys, govts, etc) is predicated on the value of keeping the software exploitable, to the detriment of all but those on the high side of the informational disparity curve.

I agree with him that that is unfortunate, but it seems like business as usual to me, in every industry everywhere.
Yes, comparing MAB with A/B test is not accurate and that is what the conclusion (in summary) is. These algorithms optimize for different things, and our customers should know that.
I posted a comment explaining my view on where Schneier was wrong here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4053210
How do you put a kill switch in? The entire point was for it to be on an offline system, and the traffic for it checking for Internet to in turn check for an order like that might have given the game away.

It sounds like they had something to check it wasn't outside and someone just screwed up.
Why Global Talent Rocks and Offices Suck
Well, the clock part is what I consider "scientific". If you had told me that Feynman was so struck by how the clock stopped that he kept the clock enclosed in a crystal box and tattooed "9:21" onto his arm, I might believe you because it's natural to assign meaning to a number and object that would otherwise be unremarkable.

In fact, people might do this anyway just to commemorate a moment of death. But when something very unexpected occurs at such a pivotal moment, it is practically irresistable to think it more than coincidence.

What would Feynman Lose by just accepting that, in this moment, there appear to be more things between heaven and earth than what science could reveal, especially in matters of love lost? Instead, he took time out of his grief to dispel such a notion.

And yet, he loved his wife and her memory as the deepest romantic. The "love" part can exist independently of logical, scientific method...or at leat it did in Feynman's case.
As it happens, most trial court judges in the US are elected. See here: http://www.brennancenter.org/content/section/category/state_...

Judge Alsup is a federal judge, so he's an appointee, not an elected official. But most judges do need campaign donors. It's a problem.
More of these please for us scientific programmers (VS2008 with Visual Fortran)
Diablo Mining Company financial report for the month of May 2012
Kim Dotcom's Website Circa 1999
Must watch the two movies behind the flash site.
No, it's more like saying "GNOME is basically another Linux program". Which is true.
Failure is the fastest way to success. I wrote over 500,000 lines of game code before I ever graduated high school and only 1 project ever saw the light of day. Learning from all of my mistakes back then made getting the degree in college much easier.

Also, completely rewriting things is a major skill for a professional. Churning out great code, and doing it fast and with few bugs is worth a lot in the industry
You can be anywhere (we travel - UK, SF, currently Hong Kong, next stop Tel Aviv, then back to SF).

We're Buffer, a smarter way to share - http://bufferapp.com

Looking for devops - PHP (CodeIgniter), MongoDB, beanstalkd, Apache/nginx on Debian.

We have just two focuses - building an awesome product and wowing our users through outstanding, speedy, helpful and fun support. We work hard to focus completely on these two things.

We have over 200,000 users, great revenue and the most amazing investors and advisors: http://angel.co/buffer

We care most that the whole team has a great day, every day. We work hard and make a lot of progress. We also talk a lot about happiness and improving ourselves.

Sound fun? Whether you're interested in the role or want to say hello, drop me an email directly: joel@bufferapp.com
Depends on who "someone" is, what the "newspaper" is, and what was said with "said so".

In this case "someone" is a double Pulitzer Prize winner, and what was said was something of a nature that means the editor in any reputable newspaper will demand hard evidence, i.e. he will have the names of all the sources, and confirmed with at least some of them. If the story is a fraud (possible, look up Jayson Blair), the editor would have to be in on it, and it would be a larger scandal than the story itself, which really just confirms what everybody already suspected.

The story is as good as investigative journalism gets.

And yes, reputation matters a lot in journalism. Jayson Blair is a life coach today.
In laymen terms what does this mean? I understood SQL injections are one of the most common forms of attack, therefore why has this happened on such a popular framework? Is it user error or rails error?
Years ago, I overheard a hallway conversation about some performance tuning they were doing in VS 200x. Apparently they discovered several thousand hash tables during the startup of the IDE.

Not instances of hash tables. They found several thousand /implementations/ of hash tables.

While I'm sure this story expanded every time it was told, I'm also sure there was a kernel of truth to it.

Software is hard.
It's Collusion the same as iPen by Cregle?
http://www.cregle.com/ipen and their Kickstarter page http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ipen/ipen-the-first-acti...
No but the original article states a fear that the facility could be used to create a stockpile that could then be enriched to weapons-grade should Iran chose to do so. I'm not saying whether that is right or wrong but The article in the NYT states the President's fears.
That actually kind of worries me, because right now I can avoid a lot of annoying web developer practices by not having Flash installed.
Concerning your conservative remark: hands down the best high school class I took was my US government class. It taught one all the shit about the political process...practical stuff (as opposed to the literary significance of Hamlet) every adult should know in order to make informed voting decisions. Stuff that one most likely will not learn anywhere else unless they put effort into doing so (and we all know how motivated the general public is to do that).

One of the things they touched upon in the early chapters was how people, in general, are more liberal in their youth and, as they acquire wealth and other serious assets (mortgage, family, 20 foot boat, etc), they become more set in their ways and thus, conservative. Makes sense when you think about it...
I still remember being in awe of the effortless full screen scrolling of scores in Sibelius on RiscOS, so far ahead of the offerings on PCs of the time. I remember thinking the concept of RISC was a bit of novelty though, yeah I may have been wrong about that.
> Are you disagreeing with his assertion that the 0day market creates an incentive for internal code sabotage?

No. I'm disagreeing with his speculation being stated as fact with nothing to back it up. This is something he does a lot. I realise he's not the most technical author, but a link would go a long way.

The monetization of exploits has been around for a long time, a lot longer than OWASP and longer than people had mature software security programmes. Whatever incentive there is, so far hasn't resulted in a public incident that I can clearly think of, so I would say that while the incentive may exist, the relationship damage between the governments in question buying an exploit of a deliberately introduced bug and getting caught doing so would be too high risk for the government in question to buy it. I admit that there may be more look in finding a private sector customer, or even some intermediary, but again, we're not aware of this ever happening, this market has existed for a long time and if it was a real incentive I would have expected something high profile by now.

I am happy to be proven wrong on this one, so if anyone has any examples please do call me out on this.
Wasn't the US all up in arms about how China was increasingly using cyber-warfare on both foreign government and corporate interests?

Then it turns out they are doing it themselves? Tut Tut. Though not really surprising.

I do feel though that with the success that lolsec had last year very few companies / governments are prepared against a concerted attempt to access their data.
Your Startup Needs a Dashboard
This comment just sold me on MAB. You can just keep on throwing variations on a design at the system without having to make tenuous decisions. I hope all the A/B tools implement this soon.
It's a trial decision, so it doesn't set a binding precedent at all. You might want to wait for the appeal before starting your scheme.
Erm they ported BSD to Acorn machines (RiscIX).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX
Littlelines (Dayton, OH) - Full time, local.

We're looking for rails and front-end developers to work with us in our new headquarters. We're a small and talented team of designers and developers that love making clients happy.

You'll have the opportunity to learn, hone your skills, and contribute valuable work to real projects.

We work exclusively on Rails web applications, so some familiarity with Rails views and how a Rails project is set up is a plus. Ideal candidates will be able to work with us at our headquarters.

Send us an email: jobs@littlelines.com.

http://littlelines.com
I'd love to see someone who knows more explore this, but: Statistical tests and processes can not be blindly applied. They all have prerequisites before they mean anything. A common one is the assumption that the underlying distribution is Gaussian. In that case, average + standard deviation tells you something very useful. On the other hand, nothing stops you from taking the average and standard deviation of a Poisson process, but the numbers will be much less meaningful, and often quite deceptive.

I'm concerned that the assumptions that are necessary for those statistical tests are not being met. Generally the significance tests are based on an assumption that all samples are independent as far as I know, but MAB grossly violates that assumption, and I do mean grossly. MAB doesn't pass those tests because it is, itself, a statistical significance test in some sense, and it is "deliberately" not feeding the independence-base significance algorithms the data it thinks it should be getting. This is not a bug, it's a feature.

(Pardon the anthropomorphizing there. It's still sometimes the best way to say something quickly in English.)

In fact, the fact that you agree that MAB has a higher conversion rate, which in this context basically means nothing more and nothing less than works better, but that there's this measure Q on which it does worse, is probably better interpreted as evidence that Q is not a useful measurement, rather than that the thing that works better shouldn't be used due to its lack of Q-ness.
"A/B testing is meant for strict experiments where focus is on statistical significance, whereas multi-armed bandit algorithms are meant for continuous optimization where focus is on maintaining higher average conversion rate."

Who cares about conversion rates, right? I'd much rather have statistical significance than more clicks on my buy button / signups for my site / etc.
Incredibly Efficient Way To Build A Company
Or more commonly according to the article: a user accidentally removes (and perhaps even shreds) the wrong file.
You engineer a solution. Quite frankly if you can't think of how to put a kill switch into something like this then it shouldn't be getting written or allowed into the wild. You can't add that to Bugzilla and hope to fix it later.
Greek drachma showed up in Bloomberg terminals as a currency
Google takes back one of its few losses in the Oracle patent trial
Salt Lake City UT - Black Diamond (blackdiamondequipment.com)

BD is one of the iconic outdoor industry brands - we make equipment for rock and alpine climbing, skiing, and other outdoor sports. We're not in the software industry, but working here is far more fun than I ever had in that industry. BD has a smart, driven software team that is helping the company grow internationally at double-digits every year.

I'm looking for someone with strong SQL and development skills to join my team in a role that's part business analyst and part developer. This is not your typical corporate position - this is an opportunity to play a significant and highly visible role in the company.

You don't need to ski or climb to work here, but it's a plus!
No, we are the aggressors here and I remain highly skeptical that Iran is even trying to do develop nuclear weapons. All the news outlets that speak English are biased as hell on this.

If you want real news instead of propaganda you have to watch RT or Al Jazeera. Both of which condemn the US and Israel. Not Iran.
No. I'm not really an early adopter, and I'm sure we'll see plenty of news about nReduce (what silly capitalization!) on HN in the coming months.

Unlike Y Combinator, which is a value add in many ways, nReduce seems like it would be a distraction.
With $1.5M, SumAll brings data to the mom and pop shops of the Web
Is there a way to tell approximately how many 1943 character long string are expected to have the same md5 hash? A lot, or just a few? Or it's not possible to tell because of the properties of md5?

Sorry for all the silly questions, I'm curious, but my cryto knowledge is weak.
I have an iPad 3 with Paper, Penultimate and Inkflow (my personal favorite) and they are all laggy using a finger or a stylus, so, maybe, the lag comes from the iPad 3 with Retina display?
What a walk down memory lane. I built my first website on one of these 14+ years ago as a coursework component (it was a fan site for the UK dance band The Prodigy). The browser (Fresco?) was awful and didn;t support frames, which was a huge bug-bear when Hotmail begun using them in its new mode.

I also remember playing Lander for hours at the back of computing class. And upgrading our home system to 2MB RAM and adding a HDD so we could install a game instead of swapping between the 12 floppy disks (it was a flight sim called Birds of Prey/War I think).
As a health nut, I may be overly cautious when it comes to what I put into my body, but hacking your brain doesn't sound like a good idea.
Hardware Start-ups Are A Tougher Sell
I was burnt once when both hard disks in my Raid1 fail at the same time, unlikely but it happened. And Raid is not a backup strategy.
I've never seen software with a 'Pick whichever license, as long as it's OSS' licensing before.

I'm not really sure what the implications are, but it could make things hairy if people are releasing modules or extensions to this that use various licenses.
Don't wait: http://mynaweb.com/ [Yes, this is a shameless plug for my startup.]