skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "Contains natural enzymes" to "The detergent has enzymes. Grains made of alcalase and esperase protein molecules are dissolved in the detergent, thereby making clothes cleaner."

I think the latter is a less complete explanation, in that it introduces concepts without explaining them. What are alcalase and esperase, specifically? These are unfamiliar terms to me, what do they refer to? How do they differ? And how exactly do enzymes make clothes cleaner, anyway? I find this explanation annoying and dissatisfying, because it's a specious explanation, and doesn't actually explain anything. It raises more questions than it answers.

The former "explanation" is complete, because it's just a claim. It doesn't even attempt to explain.

Of course, you can always request a deeper explanation (just respond "why?"), but one can work within a level of abstraction, which can be more-or-less complete and self-consistent within its terms. A gross example is sociology vs psychology vs biology vs. chemistry vs physics vs http://xkcd.com/435/ To introduce new terms without explanation or definition is incomplete.
StackOverflow DOES:

http://stackoverflow.com/editing-help#linebreaks

Notice the requirement for two spaces at the end, ONLY Github doesn't do that.
The SAT is good for measuring how good one is at taking the SAT, which in turn is an indicator of how much the test taker took preparing for the exam seriously, which is an indirect indicator of the person's work ethic and attitude towards putting in effort for a means to an end (yes, despite the pointlessness of this exam). It does do a decent job at finding such people who strive to excel within the limits of a (flawed) system, whether or not they realize the pointlessness of said structure. If an institution is looking for an indicator for such people, the SAT is an acceptable tool.

Of course, what it's truly good for is to measure how affluent the student's family is.
At some point if your company is any good, you WILL need humans to sell things. People will want to call in for more information, and the job of the person taking that informational call is to convert them. Unless you're Google where you don't give a hoot.

Not everyone is secure with a "F you, sign up online or else" policy. Good salespeople with domain expertise can be exceedingly helpful at introducing direction to the company - not just automatons who sell things.
That ignores that user tracking wasn't possible for the first 150 years of ad-supported publishing.

I also think your slippery-slope argument is excess drama. The notion that untracked users force us to a world of shitty ads is implausible to me. When I saw punch-the-monkey ads disappear, it was because publishers realized that terrible ads destroyed the value of their brand.

I agree that money has shifted toward more tightly tracked ads. But if large portions of the readership are untracked, there's no reason to think that the money won't shift back. Vendors won't stop advertising, and they won't go back to print.

And really, it's not clear that the current model is sustainable anyhow. CPMs have been falling for years. I was just talking with a founder of a (now-sold) ad-supported content company. He said that there's no way he'd do that again; rates are low and are headed lower. And there's much more competition for eyeballs from SEO-optimized, attention-getting bullshit.
In particular from the post:

>"The purpose of the SAT is to predict how well a high school student would perform as a freshman at a college or university in the United States of America (USA)."

>"...Another implication of the purpose of the SAT is that taking preparation courses that focus on the exact, narrow content of the SAT, no more and no less, is not "morally wrong". If a person does better on the SAT as a result of specific training or coaching, then, in essence, the SAT has indicated that the person has a quality (such as initiative, motivation, or money) that correlates with good performance in a college or university in the United States of America (USA)."
This sounds very similar to something that can happen at small scales too. It happened to me when I naively used a preforking apache and mod_proxy_balancer on a machine with 2GB RAM. We had a surge in traffic and the load balancer passed the "paging threshold" (it started swapping) and at that point the increased latency caused requests to pile up as users would get impatient and hit reload, leaving processes tied up waiting to time out.

In my case I was able to get things working again by disabling all non-essential apache modules and lowering the timeout. I even had to take the load balancer completely down for a few minutes to get the users to back off long enough to ramp up smoothly again. Then I switched to nginx and haven't looked back.

Obviously I am not comparing my apache instance to App Engine, just the broad strokes of the self-perpetuating failure mode. But, reading between the lines this post basically admits to oversubscription on App Engine. Talking about load as having an unexpected impact on reliability (especially during a "global restart") is a nice way of saying that they got more traffic than they could handle.
So it has been, so it always will be. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Even in the case of migration to avoid a bad situation, it's still a small minority that left whatever the old place was. The vast majority stayed there, so you've still got a tiny self-selecting population of immigrants.
The FTC reached a settlement with Google this year for a $22 mil fine because Google violated a previous consent order over Buzz.

Yahoo is not under an existing consent order with the FTC. For the most part, the FTC does not get fines unless a company violates an existing consent order.

Furthermore, Google didn't get fined because it circumvented Safari's privacy settings, but rather, because it lied about the extent to which users could opt out of tracking.

I've not seen anything that suggests that Yahoo is lying about the extent to which they will respect or ignore the DNT header.

The FTC's deception powers aren't going to be of much use against Yahoo here.

(Disclosure: I worked at the FTC between 2009-2010, and worked on the investigations of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter).
That puts Microsoft in a bind. Sensible defaults are important; if you can guess what users want most of the time, then you should just do that.

In their shoes I would have done some focus groups, spending an afternoon with people and really educating them on the details of tracking, and what the pros and cons are for them. If at the end of it most typical users would have turned it on, then this would have been the right default.

After all, if places like Yahoo don't like it, they could ask people to turn it off. If Yahoo's right, then presumably most people would turn DNT off, or make an exception for them. But I suspect Yahoo knows that people don't want to be tracked, and that a lot of their profit comes from keeping their users in the dark.
Interesting concept, though I'm not sure quite what they're trying to achieve. Are they trying to teach lexical analysis? Their `typename` method seems awfully verbose for my liking - in my opinion, definitely harder than the LALR(1) syntax that CUP promotes.

Personally, I learnt how to write compilers using a mix of FLEX (the Fast Lexical Analyzer - not by Adobe!) and CUP. From that you create a LALR(1) grammar which then compiles down to a tree (if you choose) which you traverse depth first generating code/assembly/whatever. I would say that this is actually EASIER to write and to understand than trying to do it from scratch - you concentrate purely on the grammar and the tree generation (which leads to code generation or interpretation - e.g. BASIC, code analysis etc).

This MAY seem complex as there is a bit of "black box" going on behind the scenes (how does it lexically turn characters into symbols? How does it turn those symbols into a grammar which eventually builds a working product?) however once you understand the grammar language (lexical analysis is easy) you find that compilers aren't that difficult. It's a matter of turning code into symbols which you then apply a grammar to. From there (tree/code generation/interpretation) is easy. I would in fact put lexical analysis and grammar generation into a separate toolkit which a compiler developer _uses_ - though it may be from my experience: I welcome other compiler developers to interject.

Learning how to write a compiler definitely made me a better programmer - especially in terms of OO languages and also understanding how languages are built (i.e. learning new languages aren't an issue when you know how the internals are likely to work). I highly recommend it for anyone looking to improve their skill set. Unfortunately the course I took at university (which WAS available free on the internet) teaching this concept has now died. It's quite sad that it has disappeared as that paper was hands down my most useful paper I ever took. I've now written compilers for companies converting legacy code to modern code (and native etc) from these skills - it's much more versatile than just generating assembly/machine code!

Anyway, I digress: I admire what they are trying to do, however I would recommend others to rather learn FLEX (or JFLEX, CSFLEX etc) and CUP (CSCUP etc) instead of trying to do all the heavy lifting themselves. If they want to write a lexical analyzer or a grammar parser then that is a different journey...
> 1. How would you detect the largest sub array (i.e. max sum of adjacent numbers) given an example array:

That's a fun one. The obvious solution is O(n^2), but there's a less obvious way to do it in O(n). (I'm not giving spoilers, because this actually is fun to solve.)
I've thought of doing this but never had the courage unfortunately. Maybe when I retire I'll have the time to go back and try this out.
Because ignorance doesn't equal informed consent.
Diving Into Titanium Alloy
This is the path to desktop disruption but Note: Nexus 7 lacks HDMI out

How does performance compare - what's an equivalent netbook/laptop/desktop? BTW: Nexus 10 is looking good, cortex A-15 http://www.phonesreview.co.uk/2012/10/26/impressive-google-n...
Maybe, but it's much bigger than Linux's game market.
I am always astonished by how many layers these bugs actually have. It's easy to start out blaming AWS, but if anyone can realistically say they could have anticipated this type of issue at a system level, they're deluding themselves.
It’s a Friday night….if you are reading HN on a Friday night then this applies to you – chin up - http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2012/10/what-goes-wrong...

If you read this on the weekend cool……if you don’t see this until Monday ……pussies.

Now go buy the book - http://bit.ly/FounderAtWork
The problem is that Yahoo's customers aren't their users. Yahoo's users are the veal calves. They don't seem to understand what to do with businesses where the customers are the users. Flickr, for example.
This is really helpful - thanks.
We basically do that. Harvard, Yale, etc, select based on SAT scores, then top employers select based on Harvard, Yale, etc.
Or we could have non-intrusive ads and non-targeted ads, there's nothing wrong with that.
What Kind Of Things Should You Include In Your Home Office Space?
>tldr; Consumers don't care what a product is or what it does, they just want "NEW".

Really? When I see "new and improved" on a product I use I think "Great. I was perfectly happy with this product and now they've gone and changed it. All I want is a frickin razor that works."
Take it easy, I wasn't trying insult you or suggest that I believe you don't know what you are doing.

I read "hopefully the zero-size test is reliable" as "is a reliable way to detect if there is a problem with my files" and that is what I was trying to comment on. Apparently I misunderstood.
I agree there is a problem with the lack of knowledge, but I wouldn't assume that it is all regarding "shadowy private companies". A number of public privacy scares like the concern of Gmail reading people's email seem to fall into the same category.

Again, there are good and bad players on all sides, but my point was simply that ignoring reality and making a complete swing to no monetization for content seems to assume all players on one side are bad. A more open standard that allows clear knowledge is probably a better direction for Microsoft to pursue.
Except that no-one would click them. We barely click on ads tailors to our behaviour - we'll never click on ads that aren't (and we never did).
The binary tree thing is simpler than it sounds; don't be faked out by the fact that it involves binary trees. You can traverse a binary tree from the root to any node, and record the nodes on that path. Do so for each of the two nodes, then compare the two sequences, looking for the first node that is common to both of them. You can do this in O(lg n) if the binary tree is balanced, or O(n) if it is not. And if this sounds complicated in words, just draw a picture and it'll suddenly look simpler.
Blackboard free app now requires in-app purchase for any functionality
Personally I'm fine with that.
I admit, I didn't read the whole thing, it was super long.

I personally think the ACT (and by association the SAT) is a better measure of intelligence than a GPA, and I would love it if companies used that more often as a filtering metric. Obviously, grades in general aren't the best metric, but they're simple and generally pretty reliable.

If I were hiring somebody, I'd look at a combination of test scores and personal achievements. If I were hiring a programmer, I'd filter by test scores, then look at examples of projects the applicant works on/is associated with. Grades aren't as important in my opinion.

If that's the premise of the post, I totally agree. If not, I'm not willing to read a forever long post that forces me to relive the horror of the testing I went through before I got into college.
Favorite quote: "While that build runs, we have time to think."
I found it interesting that this is ostensibly a notifications API, and nowhere is there any way to actually get notifications except by polling. I definitely understand why a push notification API would be a bad idea, but is polling with Last-Modified really the state of the art in notification APIs? What if you want to find out almost instantly when an event occurs, and not just at the granularity of your poll interval? At the API level, what do people use for this? Comet-style long polling? WebSockets? pubsubhubbub?
Yeah, but the top-layer app is where the author's statements would bear out: that's the code directly comparable to the old C++ code that it replaced. It's not really practical to give examples of that when you can't open-source the app; you could maybe do a few trivial snippets or put it all behind a big thick NDA, but neither method works very well.
Everything is a Freaking DNS problem :)
HealthConnect #HCTO Panel Event Review
Did China just fully block Google.com today?
With Firefox, I use adblockplus, noscript and requestpolicy, along with some thing I forgot that wipes flash cookies and other persistent storage at the end of every session, and probably something else that I entirely forgot about.

But that does fuck all, apart from making me guess which third-party requests are instrumental to making a page I'm visiting for the first time properly, until it's some sort of concerted effort at a default behavior for browsers so that websites are coerced to adapt to it to stay competitive. So it's up to those with browser marketshare.
I have the 16GB Nexus 7. Installing Batman (1.83GB), Horn(1.74GB), and Bard's Tale (3.5GB with best graphics) at the same time hits me pretty hard. It's pretty frustrating to shuffle apps just because I want to play a different game, especially when the downloads are in the GB.
Unfortunately, if nobody pays for the content, it will go away. That's probably bad (lets leave aside discussions of how high the quality on ad-supported content is, and presume that there are people who like to read it).
I was using Google/Gmail last night, and now all Google services are down this morning...
This affects me, though through backups and using Dropbox primarily as a sync service I don't think I've lost anything (I've got a decent sized list of zero byte files to go through).

I've confirmed files that should contain something (nav images for a website) and that do contain something in the original source folders stored elsewhere are empty in Dropbox. Interestingly, Ubuntu is one of the clients syncing to my Dropbox folders.
Slightly offtopic:

What I found out the other day is that Jesse Jaymes [1] who sang the song "College Girls are Easy" founded Marquis Jets, a similar-ish service.

He's also married to the billionaire founder of Spanx. Extraordinary career trajectory.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Itzler
Actually, how well people do on one of these questions seems to correlate strongly with how well they do on others, so saying that each question depends strongly on a single spark of inspiration is kind of misleading. Where do those sparks of inspiration come from? And why do some people seem to vary so much in their ability to conjure them up on demand?
I have the Nexus 7 and as I replied to another comment it is extremely frustrating dealing with only 16GB of space. Being able to pop in a 32GB SD card would alleviate a lot of my issues, especially during travel.

This annoys me a bit less on my Galaxy Nexus as I don't typically install large games (> 1GB) on it.

Devices can do fine without expandable storage, sure - but it's an easy differentiator for Android to make, and is one of the reasons I bought into the platform to begin with.
One of the original goals of Go was to be a practical systems PL; that isn't one of Haskell's goals which focus on higher-order programming.
two paragraphs followed by a "sign up to read more".

Content in that format is not going to do well on any social media site.

Even with a Vanilla Ice picture.
Microprocessors have been adding specialized components for a long time. A simple integer processor isn't very good at working with decimal numbers, so we have dedicated floating point units. Floating point units aren't very good at massively parallel tasks like image and video processing, so we have SIMD units. Encryption still wasn't fast or efficient enough, so now we have dedicated encryption instructions in our microprocessors.

Maybe one day we'll have dedicated IDCT or wavelet transform instructions in our microprocessors. However, you could argue that we already do, in the form of SoCs with on-chip GPUs and DSPs. Maybe we've already reached the point you want us to reach.
You're looking for the canned tokenadult post which summarizes as follows:

[paraphrased]
"Decades of research have established that the most effective indicators of whether someone will be a good hire are (on the one hand) a general intelligence test, and (on the other hand) a work sample. Outside the US, the use of intelligence tests in hiring is common; within the US, it subjects the hiring agent to legal difficulties. If you are hiring outside the US, use both. If you are hiring inside the US, use work samples."
I was thinking the same thing, there are fractional ownership deals [1], charter airline brokers [2], and of course air taxis [3] (which are not often jets but what ever).

I realized this evening when slogging southbound on Highway 101 in the Bay Area what I really want is something that attaches to my car roof with a big NASA approved docking connector on it (aerodynamic though) which when I call up the app schedules a Sikorsky Sky Crane to fly by pick me up out of traffic and take me to my destination.

[1] http://www.netjets.com

[2] http://www.rsvpair.com/

[3] http://www.garyair.us/
There's quite a lot of philosophical content on less wrong. I liked "Zombies! Zombies?", which is essentially a strong argument against the likelihood of p-zombies.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/p7/zombies_zombies/

> I'd say that if you postulate a mysterious, separate, additional, inherently mental property of consciousness, above and beyond positions and velocities, then, at that point, you have already stuck your neck out as far as it can go. To postulate this stuff of consciousness, and then further postulate that it doesn't do anything—for the love of cute kittens, why?
In a word: No.

Internal interviews can be a real eye-opener.
Why Are There So Many C++ Testing Frameworks?
In my experience, when somebody starts a monologue with the pattern "[assertion], but", what follows is a more honest presentation of their opinions than the initial assertion.
Six Ways to Remember Faces and Names
10x strikes me as an appropriate factor since it gives the provider a strong disincentive for outages.
Followed by Blue Screens of Death - http://mashable.com/2012/10/25/microsoft-blue-screens/
This was my first thought when seeing the current submission too. I have no problem with reposts, but one thing I would question is when one provides the date in the title. 2011 is too recent to do so? I don't know, for me that seems borderline. It is not in the guidelines. What do we think? Ought we to have a "[Repost]" tag? Is someone posting a link to the previous submission in the comments sufficient? I think I lean towards the latter, but agree with my sibling that an explanation of the link is preferred.
This reminds of me playing Hearts on a PC. You can try really hard to get a good score, or you can get the worst score possible and win the round[1]. I didn't read the whole article, but it was pretty clear that to get the lowest possible score you have to know the correct response to every question. (A little less black & white for the essay section, but you get the gist.)

Colleges should have a lottery admission available to people who can get a perfect score on the SAT/ACT. Students would inadvertently study harder and learn proportionally more than if they were to study hard enough to get a perfect score.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearts#Shooting_the_moon
Using Coq to verify LLVM optimization passes.
> Multi Availability Zone (Multi-AZ), where two database instances are synchronously operated in two different Availability Zones.

> The second group of Multi-AZ instances did not failover automatically because the master database instances were disconnected from their standby for a brief time interval immediately before these master database instances’ volumes became stuck. Normally these events are simultaneous. Between the period of time the masters were disconnected from their standbys and the point where volumes became stuck, the masters continued to process transactions without being able to replicate to their standbys.

Can someone explain this? I thought the entire point of synchronous replication was that the master doesn't acknowledge that a transaction is committed until the data reaches the slave. That's how it's described in the RDS FAQ: http://aws.amazon.com/rds/faqs/#36
Anything involving a test will simply measure one's skill at taking tests instead of what the test is actually about. If this wasn't true at some point in the past, it's certainly true now.

Furthermore, seeing as you didn't read the whole thing, you would have missed the part where the SAT itself explicitly states that it is intended not to measure intellect, but rather how well one would perform at a university.
> the ACT (and by association the SAT)

As someone who nearly aced both, the ACT is a noticeably better test. The SAT has a lot of dumb and predictable tricks involved. The ACT requires more actual ability.
It makes more sense for GAE to potentially have cascading failures since they failover for you. AWS does not so it is less vulnerable.
My point is that it's somewhat inaccurate to say that legal content is easily accessible when there are exclusive deals, fragmentation, delays, revoked content, time-limited access, DRM, etc.
I honestly don't know whether to be impressed or frightened by the level of obsessive attention to detail on display here.