skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's an interesting thought. I take a lot of pride in making my papers flow as "naturally" as possible. I never thought that by doing so, I might be making them harder for a non-native speaker to read.
The SEAS (School of Engineering and Applied Science at Harvard) is a actually surprisingly decent. The one thing that gets some people is that CS is taught from a very mathematical bend - about a third of the CS classes don't require any significant work on a computer (besides typesetting the problem sets in TeX). I actually prefer it that way - I'd rather focus on theory in class, I can pick up the idiosyncrasies of the tools and languages on my own time.

I understand that Harvard's Math department is pretty impressive too (near the same level as MIT/Princeton/etc).
You're missing the point. This is the festival of inappropriate technology. If you take your little tri-color prism and mount it end on, on a stepper motor with an optical sensor to detect which color is facing in the signal direction; then you're talking.

Extra points for if it:
a. has an ethernet port
b. reads rss feeds or email
Can this device communicate via USB during runtime or is the USB port only there for programming purposes?
What an excellent counter-argument you pose. Well done.

I guess I should have also put:

Don't use a standard hashing algorithm without salt

In addition, make the salt secret - type it in when the program starts.

Or as sho suggests transmit it from an out of jurisdiction site over a secure channel.

To be honest I assumed those points would be obvious. We're on Hacker news, not Digg.
"That operator better type carefully, because there's no way to check whether he's "right", and any mistake will screw up everything :)"

Why can't the system know the hash of the salt and check that? Getting from the hash of the salt back to the salt would be pretty impossible.
Ah. Thanks for the link, I get the relevance now. Quite a sobering tale.
Pop-up Windows
This effect will help to make pop-ups or for advertisements, announcements, news, etc.. If you have dreamweaver I’ve already written code and you have to do just copy paste in your web page.
Giveaway Riches by Jason James - My Real Case Study
Giveaway Riches by Jason James is a new program that shows you how to add thousands of new email subscribers in days, not months! The best part of all is that with this method you can make money WHILE you build your email opt-in list. During my recent case study with Jason I got 2,000 new email subscribers in 10 days and made about $3,500. Watch the video on this page to learn more: http://www.10daygiveaway.com/giveawayriches.php
Japanese people actively avoid conflict, which is certainly part of why they're always so polite.

It's an awesomely safe place, but they've got a high suicide rate and the occasional repressed salaryman on a killing spree.
Having been in the same situation, but much later in my PhD program (4th year), I would strongly encourage you to move with the prof, assuming he is willing to continue working with you at the new university. It's very difficult to survive and perform well in a PhD program (and subsequently in an academic career) if you aren't mentored in person by a top notch faculty that works in your area of interest. Good luck with your decision and your studies!
Strange -- it seems faster in Linux to me than in Windows, though I've never done any formal benchmarks.

Haven't had any crashing problems, either.
On the earnings side that is hard to do since so much cost is shared between the retail and web services side, with not a very clear way to allocate it out between the businesses.
As someone who's currently taking a break from school and doubting the value of it, I keep seeing these articles and thinking "Sweet! Maybe I'm right, if $publication is saying it!"

But then I read the article, and it's always some sob story about average folks who went to college in a liberal arts field while making absolutely no attempts at establishing an independent career in the field or working outside of class on their trade. Then they get out, and they're a convenience store clerk or something.

They end up having the opposite effect on me, rather than confirming my biases.
So here is the methodology:
1. Hit http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2008/full_...
2. Randomly pick a company from the list... for instance: Pick Paychex Systems... company 921 on Fortunes list...On their career site they list 137 current job openings...
3. Add that to your total...
4. Repeat until you have a representative sample.
5. Extrapolate to 1000...

Question: Using an appropriate random number generation between 1 and 1000, what is the sample size required to then estimate the total job openings on the 1000 sites?
I wonder if the reporter meant OmniTI, http://omniti.com/.
President Obama wants to stop whaling in the Southern Ocean
We have received worrying rumours of a political deal that could result in increased whaling off the coast of Japan - threatening already endangered whales. We need your your help in ensuring that this deal is killed off - and not the whales.

According to leaked reports from a closed door meeting in Hawaii, the International Whaling Commission is currently considering a proposal that would involve the trading of a small reduction in the quota of whales that Japan hunts in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, in return for an agreed increase in hunting minke whales off the coast of Japan. Of greatest concern is that one of the minke whale populations in this areas is listed as endangered.
(http://www.solusiplus.net/president-obama-wants-to-stop-whaling-in-the-southern-ocean/)
It Should Be Free?
Interesting fact about TMs - while their computibility is equivalent to computers, the Big-O time for common algorithms is (possibly much) slower. Many O(n) tasks on computers with RAM are O(n^2) on a TM. The only commonality with computers in terms of time complexity is the Polynomial vs. Non-polynomial boundary.

The same is true for any model of computation.

Despite this equivalence, it's orders of magnitude harder to program a TM than the ugliest assembly language you've ever seen. This is one architecture that desperately needs a compiler :)
Lol, you got me there.

Yes, OK, if you have an operator standing by 24 hours a day to type in a long secret phrase which will not be stored on disk and will be used as a salt in hashes stored by the system, and will infallibly ensure the server does not fall into the wrong hands in a running state, and there are no other attack vectors, then that is kind of secure.

Since your system relies on a secret key, though, you may as well just use encryption in the first place rather than going to these absurd lengths to hammer hash functions into an encryption-shaped hole.
With the money in the stimulus bill, they could have replaced 20% of the nation's electrical capacity with nuclear (a million megawatts of national capacity, $5 billion for 1,200 megawatts of nuclear power, round down a bit to make the math easier). I doubt the actual bill goes towards anything so useful. I'm not sure what is actually in the slop bucket, but I have heard that some will go towards subsidies for rather useless, but sexy, green tech.

If they believe in nuclear, they could put their money where their mouth is.
Have used this before. Very nice project.
It's really amazing from the technical point of view, but I'm not sure if that's really a good thing to happen to photography. Photosynths are more like a rollercoaster ride in a fun park while a really good photo can be a piece of art.
That number is just the way the legal system works.

If you steal a something that's worth $100k, it's grand theft... which is, I believe, defined as anything over $500. (Depends on your state, probably.)

$100k and $500 are very different numbers; $500 is just the line that divides the legal slots that crimes fall in.
I don't mean to be a word nazi, but I think you mean "exacerbates."

It is a super cool word, and while it sounds like "exasperates," they are actually totally different. :)
Well here are a couple of things:
you show 99 records on your excel spreadsheet, with an average of 709 and a standard deviation of 1073.

With that large of a standard deviation and that average you can't assume a normal distribution so you need to use the T distribution.

Using the T distribution at a 95% confidence level I come up with an estimated average of [495, 923] which results in a number of jobs in the top 1000 from 495,000 to 923,000 with a 95% certainty.

Just for kicks I wanted to see what would happen if you sampled 500 times but had that same standard deviation. At that point your spread would be about +/- 100 for the average value of X.

If you are looking for a singular number you'll need to check all 1,000 of them, otherwise it will be an estimated range.
TI: RFID Customers Should Expect 'Business as Usual'
On Monday Texas Instruments announced it would reduce its workforce by 3,400 employees through layoffs and voluntary departures. Soon after, rumors emerged that TI's RFID operations were especially hard hit. RFID Update spoke with Texas Instruments communications manager Ellen Zeidler to set the record straight. "TI's message to our RFID customers is that it will be 'business as usual.' The RFID business is affected by the job cuts, but the business will continue," Zeidler told RFID Update.
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I'd say Mercurial because

1. in terms of design, performance and features it's about as good as git. sure it may be missing this or that but see point 5 below.

2. in terms of end-user complexity it's about as easy to use as svn (which everybody knows)

3. 99% of the code is in cleanly written Python and highly portable

4. http://bitbucket.org is great and they offer SSL for free private repositories (at github only paid plans offer SSL)

5. it's easy to hack (provided you know Python)

I'll grant that the last point may not matter to the lone web developer but personally I like things that make it easy for me to tinker with them when I want or need to.
Hmmm, tell you what. After you're done giving human rights to all of the humans come on back and we'll start talking about the machines.
Michael Arrington beaten to top spot on Forbes top 25 web celebs... by Perez Hilton
I'm amazed Perez isn't discussed more around here - it may not be a "technical" success, but his site is ridiculously popular.

He's achieved something most startups would die for, but rarely design for - mainstream "your mother" traffic.
The Economy According To Mint
In a few years, your comment will seem ironic too ;)
Founders/CEOs. Both are fine.
Digg? No need to get insulting.

Anyway, you're wrong about almost everything. You misunderstand what a hash function is. It is not an encryption algorithm. Both the hash and the salt are supposed to be known to the attacker. And by the way, salts are supposed to be unique per record.

An ideal hash function is supposed to be an irreversible, unfakeable process regardless of the attacker's knowledge of all components going in. That knowledge is assumed! My whole point is that while this is a very useful tool, it doesn't work for data sets small enough to brute force. This is elementary.

Your response, cobbling together some kind of poor man's encryption by padding out the plaintext before hashing with a secret salt, is ridiculous. If you have a secret key then just ENCRYPT!

Geeze man, GP was a bit rude, but if you're this stubborn about something you're obviously wrong about, maybe you should keep far away from security ..
Doing something like TechCrunch in an ever-growing Internet startup world, Arrington is (wrongly) perceived as a deciding factor to success, as a God to some, maybe even. Although it's wrong, I'm not surprised this happened.
Hey :)
I know what a hash function is. I also know the trade offs between using a hash and full blown encryption.

"salts are supposed to be public. Furthermore, they're supposed to be unique per record."

There are no rules you know :/
For something like this, where you're just trying to make a log of IPs unreadable by the government/hackers/whatever, I'd still say a hash is the best bet.

Your point about may as well encrypt is a valid one, but may result in higher complexity/cpu usage/mem usage/storage, for not much added security. It depends just how secure you want to be.

I think we've flogged this one to death though :)
>No, that bit about dividends can't possibly be right. Relatively few public companies pay a dividend, and basically none of the other companies face shareholder lawsuits about the absence of a dividend.

Relatively few public companies are in Citi's situation. I wasn't saying all public companies have to a pay a dividend or face a lawsuit. Supposing Citi is practically insolvent, it would be irresponsible (legally/fiduciarily, not morally) to shareholders not to try and launder out as a much money as possible. Once it is paid to shareholders as a dividend, creditors can't go after it.
Thanks!

So what if I did another 100 random sample resulting a "better" (lower) std dev? At what level of std dev could one assume a normal distribution out to 1000?

gne
Turing Machine Compiler:

http://www.breakingrobots.net/projects/tmc/
The best thing to happen to photography since the digital camera? Come on. The "cool" factor of Photosynth is undeniable, but the author doesn't address what Photosynth can actually be useful for once the novelty wears off (in my case, about 3 minutes in). A few points:

- Creating decent Synths is a PITA. You need either a huge number of photos or extreme care in making them evenly spaced and overlapping; otherwise your Synth will end up fragmented and will not render right. I was very disappointed with the results when I tried making a Synth of my bedroom and surroundings.

- We already have advanced video and photo technology, which obviates many conceivable uses of Photosynth. For example, 360 degree cameras (as found in Google Maps Street View) provide a much better user experience for providing virtual tours of physical locations. Or, simpler yet, just hold up a video camera and film the location, panning into and out of areas of interest.

Photosynth must have some practical future uses for Microsoft to be investing in it (unless this is just for publicity); I'm just disappointed the article didn't address what these might be. Maybe they're just reusing the same technology they use to patch together different satellite images for Live Maps.
Any chance of adding Javascript as an option? I spend half my life tripping up over Javascript/Python inconsistencies, this would be immensely useful.

Also, I'm not convinced your google account sign in thing works right; I clicked on it to login to google, and then google didn't know where to redirect me to.
I would vastly prefer a built-in package manager and fewer preinstalled packages.
Here's another good resource, Skiena's algorithm repository:

http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~algorith/

Feel free to post it if you want. Probably good for a good chunk of karma if it hasn't gone up yet.
I always hear about the importance of networking, especially at the elite schools. Anyone care to voice their experience?
Time to bring back Latin! Then everyone'll be equally confused.
Why Are Math Jobs So Much Fun?
One thing British schools do is have a year interning inbetween the rest of the years for the degree. This both gives the student real world experience and helps them get their name out. Plus, it encourages businesses to invest in the students, since they have the opportunity to hire a good candidate in a couple years.
I'm on a Mac, here are some of the stuff I use daily:

Terminal.app + Visor + start on login, since I use the command line for a lot of stuff.

LittleSnapper to catch those design inspirations.

iShowU + iMovie to make demo videos.

http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/ - for quick checks in IE, when I make little changes and don't want to launch VMWare

DrawIt for making icons and graphics. I used to use Photoshop Elements, but DrawIt's workflow just makes so much sense to me.

cron + Mercurial to backup almost everything daily except iTunes/iPhoto, which I just backup to DVDs

Inquisitor for really quick web search results
Remembering Martin Schaedel
I still can't believe Martin Schaedel passed away.

A few years back, I went to a party in LA with Neil Strauss, during the time that he was writing the book "The Game," which is all about picking up women. We were with the group of pickup artists detailed in the book, watching them work; one of the pickup artists went up to a girl and asked her, "do you want to go and get weird?"

My friend Sean Parker, who was with us, exclaimed with satisfaction, "I love that! 'Do you want to go and get weird' ... What a perfect way to describe the situation!" And it was true -- it was an utterly honest, accurate description; and it took a certain type of utterly honest, semi-crazy person to say it.

I remember going to a party in New York with Martin Schaedel a few months ago, wherein he went up to a girl, said hi to her by her first name, and then asked her why she wasn't wearing her engagement ring or accompanied by her fiancée. When the red-faced, astonished girl asked how he had known all of this, Martin deadpanned and said, "well, I ran a background check on you last week." Needless to say, I burst out laughing. Here, my friends, was a guy who liked to get weird.

In our industry, as in most industries, we constantly celebrate the in-your-face, out-in-public superstars and pundits. We fail to celebrate people such as Martin. They aren't looking for massive fame or acceptance; rather, they just want to do interesting stuff and live an interesting life. They are the true hackers -- hacking not only through code and business, but through the very way they lead their lives.

This is what I enjoyed the most about Martin, and what I hope this community should take away from his ever-too-short existence -- that you can do it all in an entirely different way. In fact, you can live such an insanely global, social, real-time existence that even those who meet you in person question whether you are really the person who is standing before them (mainly because they are so caught up in the standard model that they can't imagine such an enormously successful deviation). It really saddens me to know that he is gone; the full story of this amazing guy and his amazingly improbable life will forever be incomplete, told only in bits and pieces.

Hack your life.
The name immediately made me think "So, what, it's going to shit all over my site and be a general annoyance?" You need a better name :)

Bloodhounds come to mind.
I think this is due to a sense of control and fear of the unknown. People shrug it off because they think they could conceivably do better, or have helped the situation. But, the higher the barrier to entry the less accepting people are of error. Look at the discrepancy between about of airline deaths and car deaths, and the respective fear it engenders in people. Just about everyone knows about driving a car, but very few know what it is like to fly a plane.
To answer my question:

The Teensy's USB port is multi-purpose. If the HalfKay bootloader is activated (via a push-button on the board), the USB port is used for firmware-manipulation purposes. HalfKay lives on the EEPROM.

Once the device is powered off then on, the USB port is used as a normal communication device and can be fully utilized to speak with the PC or other USB peripherals. USB communication code is in your program and lives on the FLASH.
Indian security spending to touch $9.7 billion by 2016
"If your Teensy is not brand new, it will run whatever program the previous owner loaded, perhaps causing your computer to recognize new hardware and require drivers. Just cancel any driver setup. In the next step you will load the LED blink program."

So, yes - looks like it can.
gravitycop is talking about the future's potential, no matter how distant. He thinks at some point our level of competition with AI will be equivalent to chimps and us, therefore the same societal roles apply, but between us and AI.

You are just talking about the foreseeable future, and don't foresee this happening anytime soon, which gravitycop doesn't necessarily disagree with.
LEGO Announces Digital Camera
That's a plus, agreed.
Who needs a fart simulator?

Apparently some of the most successful iPhone apps that are totally frivolous, but fun enough that people show their friends to the point where they become viral.
Oh yeah, and this is the most priceless tweet to have ever been tweeted.

http://twitter.com/martin/status/1113180806
Oh co-founder where art thou?  
Hi. I'm mike. I am looking for a full-time technical co-founder to help us bridge the gap between e-commerce and personalized medicine. I've already amassed a team from Stanford GSB/Medicine, and closed key contracts. mike.biostat@gmail.com
I've been waiting years for someone to ask this question :)

Wishlited this last night on amazon:
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power by Victor Davis Hanson

Have read these and enjoyed these:

General Warfare theory:
History of Warfare by Keegan

Intel:
Intelligence and War by Keegan

Counterinsurgency:
"Ghost Wars" by Steve Coll. For a really enjoyable experience read "The Great Game" by Hopkirk first.

The Civil War deserves it's own category. Watch the PBS dvds, actually buy them. If you're hungry for more dig into "The Civil War" by Shelby Foote is hefty but it's satisfying.

1776 is a classic.

"Blind mans bluff" is a great book about submarine warfare.

For more current stuff Robert Kagan is probably the most informed pundit on war and military strategy.

WW-II
"The Last Lion" books 1 and 2 are about Churchill and they involve lots of military strategy. You should also check out "The gathering storm + the other six books Churchill wrote on WWII.

Man I could go on forever. I have "Panzer General" and "Caesar's Conquest of Gaul" on my nightstand...

Enjoy...

PS: Once you're well versed you'll hear people referring to Clauswitz a lot. When you're sick of hearing his name and you want more than the wikipedia entry go read "On War." Art of War goes w/o saying as well...
When we first started working on slinkset we played tennis probably every other day. Even when we were in Boston for YC. Because of the weather we haven't played too much lately...but we'll be starting up shortly im sure. So if you're in SF, let's get a match going.

If you're asking about what happens when you mouse over it...i'll leave that for brett to explain.
Super Bowl 2009 Tickets
you should join a compelling startup
Option 4. Start a compelling company
Along these lines get "The Battle of Algiers" on netflix. When Iraq started going badly they actually had a huge screening in the pentagon.
Good job on hitting a button.
No, he says monogamy is an important foundation of our civilization. Love doesn't really have anything to do with it.
Why is this topic so provocative for you that you can't understand what time_management wrote? That comment isn't about casual sex. It is about the importance of monogamy.
This reminds me of the distinction between "systems" and "theory" in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436058
There is another game based on Google Maps where you play a truck driver.

From a hackers perspective I like the idea of using Google Maps, but as a player, I guess I am more into fantasy and epic battles. I felt no desire to try being a taxi driver.
Playing Games in the Matrix
This is awesome. What about VB? :-P
Are these numbers right? http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/8227/picture9sh1.png

That equates to like 24 gigs of RAM per server!?

[Update: I thought 8GB was big (& 16GB was huge) - just from my limited experience - http://www.slicehost.com/]
Detroit Should Get Cracking on its Googlemobile