skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The example where it made unreadable text legible was patricularly jarring to me. I've been mocking CSI for years now. I'm nervous.
Do you really believe that, in the near future, people will download and use an app. for every single service they want to access? Yelp is one thing. What about news? Are you only going to read The New York Times? Or are you going to download the iOS app. of every single CBS/ABC/NBC/FOX affiliate in the U.S.?

People complain about how Google uses their personal data. But because of Google's dominant position, they have practically every eye on them, watching their every move. If everything were more decentralized, it would be much more difficult to determine who has your data and what they're doing with it. Think about the many recent unauthorized data breaches at Gawker, etc. Google's model makes sense. Their product is great. If Google can't earn enough revenue and goes bankrupt, do you really think you'll be better off than you are now? Google has helped to develop many of technologies that are critical to your favorite apps. Their innovations push the web forward, and we are lucky to have them.

Next, think about how Apple controls their "App Store". If all of the ad. revenue shifts to Apple, will we be better-off with them controlling which apps make it and which apps are "rejects"? What kind of novel, 'core' technologies has Apple ever freely shared with the Internet? I'm sick of people bashing Google all of the time… Do you remember Webcrawler? Do you want to go back to using that? Or ---god forbid--- Bing?

Lastly, the author of this article, "Eric Jackson, founder of Ironfire Capital", said pretty much the exact same thing about Facebook on June 4th of this year:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/47674474/Facebook_Will_Disappear_in_5...
Can anyone think of a reason why a talking head for a financial TV network would think twice before spewing bullshit? This guy probably sends pre-publication copies of his articles to friends who short the stocks on his 'hit list'…kinda like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Plotkin
Code review is the next step.
DANE Stapled Certificates in Chrome
> They have a way to verify a primary source - use a secondary source.

I honestly cannot tell if this was meant to be a joke?
It's interesting how the US Dropbox leaderboard (https://www.dropbox.com/spacerace) kind of reads like the US News engineering university rankings (http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...).

Although, I was really hoping Georgia Tech would beat MIT for once in something...

(I was tempted to write a script to do something similar to what those guys did, but I can't afford losing my campus internet access if caught.)
Actually I bet there are a ton of people using JSON that don't have a c compiler. The technologies are spaces by several decades and I would imagine the majority of JSON people are using much higher level languages than c.

If I want to munge JSON I find it easier to do so in python, just convert it back to data structures and manipulate them and serialized it back to JSON.
Why Facebook Job Apps Will Ultimately Fail
Clojure vs. Scala smackdown
Here's the command line for the spectral-norm C# programs shown on the benchmarks game website:

/usr/local/src/mono-2.11.4/bin/mono --gc=sgen --llvm spectralnorm.csharp-2.csharp_run 5500

As you can see --llvm is used.

(Since June 27, 2012)
I own my browser. I may choose to replace all ads on content I consume with poetry, or white space.

We need to be careful here. Simply because an ad-centric revenue model grew up around web content doesn't mean it is written in stone.
This sounds like they could be building something awesome.
What if I told you... this could have been prevented by using captchas?
Then install Gnome 2 with

sudo aptitude install gnome-session-fallback

The best part is that you can install a multitude of window managers and decide at login time which one to use.

This is one of the big advantages of Linux.
Great guide! I've often thought about trying some DIY resin castings and this is by clearer and more thorough than anything else I've found online.
Nope, 1e9 = 1 * 10^9. He was fine.
In that case why bother using bcrypt? After all your queries are perfect and no one can access the database.

I'm being sarcastic if it wasn't obvious.
> "it is also imporant for us as a people to let go when nothing can be done, not to make things worse out of a need to be seen doing something"

In the case of cancer, universal care unfortunately seems like running in the opposite direction. Sometimes admitting that nothing can be done is the right thing.

Look at the case description - I wouldn't be surprised if the total bill was at least between 100k and 200k - for 20 days of useless care which ultimately resulted in the patient death.

There are some good economical analysis showing yearly cost that'll make you cry, especially if you consider the alternative uses of that money and how many lives could be saved - say in other countries.

With our current technology, universal healthcare for fighting cancer seems like trying to stop a fire with gasoline.
I misread it. Thanks.
Every keynote since the invention of keynotes ends with the same advice: Do what you are passionate about. After reading Mark's blog, I am starting to question this advice. Were all the successful entrepreneur passionate about their ideas way before they created their companies or did passion come after that.
For instance, was Zuck wholeheartedly passionate about social networks when he was in high school that he decided to pursue that passion and build Facebook in college? Or did that passion come while and after building the website and seeing all the responses he was getting?
Blogger Hires Woman to Slap Him Every Time He’s On Facebook [video]
Wow, I was a little unimpressed with the results until the text deblurring at the end. It was so crazy, I had to go back and actually read the article instead of skimming it :)
There's not that much literature, surprisingly. You can find some basic tutorials on how to create scripts to do basic things, but to my knowledge there are no complete compendium walking through the creation of a complex game like OGame or Travian (two of the most well known) from A to Z.

As far as users, I publicized the games to my friends and on forums where I was an active member, and it was pretty much all word of mouth from there. I never went past 4 digits though.

As for what stops people playing, it's a good question with varied answers. Some people have naturally a short attention span, and move on to other things. Some people just slowly fade away after a few weeks/months because they find another newer game they like better. Some stay for a long time even if they get bored by the game because they like the community. It's very varied.

Ultimately, if you want to keep your players, you need to be active in the community you created: organizing events, communicating with players to solve their problems/questions, adding new features (and publicizing upcoming features they can get excited about); and all of that is very time consuming and hard to do if you're not full time on that project.
Rentzar.com where you can find next to near free stuff! Seriously, what's to keep people from just paying for one day only to never return?
Reminder: Salesforce owns Heroku
Analysis of Haswell’s Transactional Memory
I'll add just keep working regardless of what discouragements you face. Startup failure is only so high because founders don't commit to their ideas.
As for the off cycle dud candidate, its a mixed bag. Reagan was obviously strong in 1984. Clinton had certainly been through his battles by the 1996 election. The massive loss of the House in 1994 had left him wandering in the wilderness for awhile.

But Bush Jr was vulnerable in 2004. Hell he probably only won in 2000 because Gore himself was a dud candidate. Anyway, two things contributed to the 2004 reelection: John Kerry being an out-of-touch dandy and playboy and the gay marriage referenda (which were a call-to-arms to the religious right).

This time around Obama is vulnerable too. A lot of people are disenchanted him over, for example, Iraq (still going on). Look at the difference in rhetoric between Obama the candidate and Obama the president. World of difference.

My view is you need to understand that each party understands who their bases are.

The Republican base is the religious right, corporations and the wealthy.

The Democrat base is unions, the poor, African-Americans and... trial lawyers [1]. It's why you see the Democrats fight, for example, tort reform [2] [3] [4].

Lawyers love patents, which is why you'll never see patent reform from the Democratic Party. Things is, big corporations love them too so you'll never see it from the Republican Party either. But at least patents may hurt companies enough to notice at some point. A lot of tech companies are against software patents.

Personally, I am 100% against software patents in any form. The idea, to paraphrase John Carmack, that I can write a program and then someone else can independently write that same program and violate any number of my patents is horrifying. The fact that any given smartphone may contain and/or violate hundreds if not thousands of patents tells you the system is broken.

Patents are intended to protect innovation but it seems clear it does the opposite. Patents on aviation in the early 20th century left the US unable to build planes when it entered World War One, to the point that it had to buy them from France and Congress needed to intervene [5].

[1]: http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202473540921&Tria...

[2]: http://voices.yahoo.com/democrats-against-tort-reform-regard...

[3]: http://citizenwells.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/obamacare-and-n...

[4]: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230383020457744...

[5]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wright_brothers_patent_war
I would not be too surprised if action were taken to create a new law which makes it illegal for content creators to sell content directly to consumers. Such laws already exist that prevent car manufacturers from selling directly to the public, and they exist for no reason other than to create an artificial market in which car dealerships can pretend to offer a valuable service. Content distributors are now in the same position. They need to have an artificial market constructed to make it look like they are doing something of value.

Consider the viewpoint of a typical person in power today. They see these gigantic social institutions that provide a measurable portion of the nations GDP which might soon be torn apart and replaced by a decentralized, unorganized system with unknown economic value. Much of the history that they believe is worth knowing consists of the creation of massive centralized systems to aggregate supply and demand to solve the problem of distribution (both physical distribution of product and logistical distribution of work). To them, a move to a system where content creators distribute and sell directly to consumers is, at best, a horrifying step backwards.

The first step to making sure content creators can't sell directly to consumers, of course, is to insert themselves in the new means of distribution in order to wedge the old distributors into some new place created for them.
I think it has more to do with bureaucracy than with fear of litigation. In an ecosystem as complicated as medical care, lots of policies and procedures accumulate over time and there's nobody with the authority to cut through the bullshit and redesign the system.

I imagine that these policies come about not from lawyers' memos, but from the physicians themselves.
In general, things said in general about the benchmarks game tend to be mistaken :-)

Here's the command line for the spectral-norm C# programs shown on the benchmarks game website:

/usr/local/src/mono-2.11.4/bin/mono --gc=sgen --llvm spectralnorm.csharp-2.csharp_run 5500

As you can see --llvm is used.
That's more untrue that true. Most popular applications of AES could just as easily use CTR instead of CBC (I'm not particularly interested in litigating the conversion of applications that use ECB); many of those applications even have an option to do that. Most settings in which AES-CTR is acceptable admit to any other stream cipher.

Even most message-based crypto --- applications where the designers can predict the size of most encrypted messages --- are well served by CTR, or by a native stream cipher.

So, while there are fundamental differences between Salsa20 and AES, for bulk encryption purposes those differences come nowhere close to the difference between GCC and Windows 8. It's really more of a "GCC vs. LLVM" kind of difference.
I definitely appreciate Cuban's words.

I think the truth is that one must question the sincerity of their passion if they're unwilling to put forth effort for it. For many, I think a passion is something they'd like people to think they do. If they're really passionate about it, they'll do something about it; at that point, there'd be no question.
You don't redistribute a distribution
Money is fungible and people are creative; My expectation is that, in the middle-run, that they will be make this no more than a small problem for them.

What are their investors doing with the money? If they intend to pile up a bunch of dollars and swim in it like Scrooge McDuck, then yes, that pile might shrink as a result of this law, but I expect that represents a relatively small fraction of institutional VC money.

As the parent said, if they sell to retire, the income isn't taxed so highly; if they sell to cash out of this investment and put (at least 80% of) it into something else, then the money is being reinvested, and hopefully can be handled as such in the accounting.
Ignite UI for Building jQuery Apps
RE: Defining A Growth Hacker: Growth Is Not A Marketing Strategy
NIST doesn't build systems. It standardizes technology for the US. NIST standardizes far more than just crypto algorithms, but in the crypto cases, NSA reviews potential standards before the standard is published, for suitability to DoD. It is entirely reasonable to propose that NSA pushes NIST towards standardizing crypto that NSA is in a better position to use than industry is.
I imagine requiring your users to fake a MAC Address is a pretty effective captcha. For Dropbox, it's probably better to reduce the friction in the sign up flow than to prevent against these kinds of edge cases.
Since no computational bound has been placed, this problem could be solved in n^2 by an insertion sort and keeping the list of numbers sorted in memory as they are received. Then the problem then boils down to encoding a list of sorted 8 digit decimal #s, where it's possible to insert new #s.

Since the #s are stored sorted and bounded in size, they can be encoded as deltas which will be more space efficient than storing absolute values. Now we just need to figure out the worst case encoding and will 1 million values fit?
I don't think I will ever be convince that someone has a better syntax for HTML. Markdown is not bad for writing a quick document. But authoring a whole webpage nothing beats pure html. I'm still on the fence for CoffeeScript as well.

More power to you for trying.
I would usually use some other language with a JSON library as well, but this utility is conveniently one-function, after Unix fashion. I like composability. Also, a C compiler is usually on hand whether you use it or not; even if none is, they’re not exactly hard to obtain.
Uploadr.io
Reasonable concern. A credit card hold or a cash deposit could solve that. What solutions have been used for other 'sharing economy' startups?
I submitted a couple bugs a while back, and they asked for some clarification on one of them which I didn't ever take care of (just haven't had the time or motivation). Given that, I really don't have any opinion on their bounty program either way thus far; should I ever put some real effort into it, I'll probably write about my experience.
I have to hand it to the Hollywood marketing machine here.

This article was written in 2007 and tells a story I had never heard.

Today I read the article and thought "wow, what an interesting story. Might even make a good movie".

Then I came here and read the comments and found out it was made into a movie that was released last week.

Tomatometer gives it a 95% -- I'm probably going to see it now.
IOS Jailbreaker Turned Apple Intern Loses Job
This would work well if it were also a storage service...charge for storage, rent to offset costs, send me the difference.
The author still thinks that you need to pack it up and go somewhere to succeed. That message sidesteps the real debate: whether you can "stay home" with your startup. Most people that are willing to move end up in Silicon Valley.
It would have been harder to do but not impossible.

5 seconds per captcha * 30000 accounts = ~42 hours
That is if they use can't OCR.
Why does resharper exist then?
This article was probably dug up because the movie Argo just came out.
There is a lot of value in this comment. For example, the notion of abstraction as seperate from logic. Isolation and prioritization. etc. The importance of basic structures.

But: I'd be carful with language.

Example (1)

None of those skills involve or benefit from memorization

But consider <Memory> management is important from the perspective of <cognitive science>. Memorization helps you process and prioritize. Consider the notion of abstracting structure from data, using pattern matching. How does one get better at this? (1) you have empirical data; or (2) you process it efficiently. Memorization facilitates data processing. It also provides for important empirical data-sets and a means of prioritization both of which are crucial for heuristic reasoning. Not to mention formal modes of analysis.

Example (2)

Math is also about finding structure and patterns that don't arise in any of those three contexts.

Where do you think the "pattern" in pattern matching comes from (if not Geometry)? It's the basic things that are most often overlooked. Consider the most elementary use of applied statistics: Linear regression. The abstraction Y=mX+B? That has nothing to do with geometry, rigt? The point is that these most basic things are <critical> to more advanced concepts. Things you seem to take for granted, but are things of great value to the novice and advanced practitioner alike. And if they are not learned (so they can be "forgotten" in memory) they are <impediments> to progress for many students.
Am I the only one who thinks this was someone's homework assignment?
I don't recall ever wondering "why" I would ever "need" mathematics. I just always enjoyed it. To me, trying to convince students why they should enjoy mathematics (just because we do) seems like a good way to make students miserable.

Is mathematics education really failing because it doesn't produce many mathematicians?
Stage four cancer? These are things I've learned from almost twenty years as a "hospice spouse."

It's probably time to call hospice, not the "We can beat this oncologist." It's probably time to write a living will and a sign the DNR. It's probably time to decide how and where you want to die.

It's most assuredly time to decide how you want to live the rest of your life.
thanks that's actually cool news. Last time I checked (half a year ago or more) I couldn't find a single hint about that.
Heh. Not to take the fun out of the story (and it might be true!), those kingpins -- along with a lot of other Model T parts -- are still in use and on the road today, almost a hundred years later in some cases.

Good Model T enthusiasts and restorers try to use as many original parts as possible, not just because it adds to the vehicle's antiquity, but also because the old parts actually seem to be more reliable than the hundred-year-old parts. For example, during Model T production (I don't remember what year), Ford engineered a rear axle shaft that would twist under extreme stress instead of breaking, helping mud-stuck T's get out with less risk of an expensive repair. (Hill climbs are still a popular hobbyist thing with these cars.)

Typically it's the sheet metal on a T that is in the worst shape -- lots of blister rust, pinholes, dents and warps and so on. Even then, an accomplished welder or backyard blacksmith can have a fender fixed up in about an afternoon and ready for its first finishing step.

Paint, too, was different. Certainly it was a bigger environmental problem, and we've switched paint formulations and techniques for good reason; still, you never see paint coming off of old Ts in flakes and chips. Instead you'll see a spiderweb series of cracks and a sort of a lackluster dull finish that can sometimes be spiffed up with a few hours of buffing and polishing.

Intellectually I get why the automotive industry has moved the way it has -- modern cars are safer, more comfortable, and much more efficient -- but it's also easy to see why old car guys are so annoyed with modern vehicles. I seriously doubt there will be even one slightly "original" Honda on the road in a hundred years.
Microsoft/Oracle/Nokia sponsored Fairsearcheurope - anti Google FUD
Since code size is not restricted, the obvious solution is to store the entire list of numbers received in the program counter. In short, put every possible input combination into the code, and just follow whatever branch pattern you receive.

This requires no memory other than that for the networking stack. It is, of course, also completely impractical.
¿Qué son las Bolas Chinas?
El uso de las bolas de geisha en occidente parece que comenzó en el siglo XVI, cuando un viajero inglés, Ralph Mitch, las descubrió en sus viajes asiáticos y las trasladó a Europa.
Very impressive compilation of information for the robot hobbyist (among other stuff) !
I find the idea of replacing "mathematics" in the curriculum with "computer programming" rather baffling. As important as programming is in our world, only a small fraction of high school graduates are going to need to do what we currently think of as "programming", while everyone will need to interact with technology and understand the world quantitatively. That calls for a much broader view of math and technology education than just "programming", even including machine learning and statistics.

Also, expecting anyone to have any kind of understanding of machine learning and statistics without a real grasp of what is currently considered "mathematics" doesn't make any sense to me. You're going to need algebra and linear algebra at minimum, and probably calculus as well, to have a chance at meaningful use of ML models.
I am guilty of that as well. When I am passionate it usually mean that I want to scratch an itch. But now I think that passion is something that comes after you put a lot of effort on the subject matter.
BTW, I submitted Cuban's post to HN to challenge the notion of passion
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4680098
And what happened to him? Thanks for the link, I'll look into it later. I have read about how the US negotiated with the "Mullahs" so that they could replace the Shah with them (in hope to have another Saudi Arabia?), but the US was "betrayed".

If we had some real journalist rather than those sad bunch of propagandist working for the corporate/state interests, we might have had a better understanding of what is going on in the world.
Interspecies Pair (Purr) Programming
Reminds me of the Total Perspective Vortex, a torture machine from Douglas Adams' sci-fi book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

For when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says "You are here."

This, according to the book, completely annihilates your brain.
A bit similar to Hiccup https://github.com/weavejester/hiccup
Automated testing and research software
How do you choose the black box if you don't understand the problem? It's not as if there exists a single black box for all possible problems.