skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SkyDrive fails if you have certain characters in filenames. Characters that are perfectly valid on OS X. When I tried SkyDrive I got 50+ warnings that files hadn't been synced because of the filenames.

If I was Windows only then I'd probably use SkyDrive, apart from the filename issue it worked quite well, much better than Google Drive.
Making it hard for the compiler to optimize your memset-zero away is not a long-term solution. At some point in the future the compiler might be able to analyze this and optimize it away. As a cryptographer you should not rely on bad compilers.

Actually, using his memzero solution would work, but not because of his reasons. Putting memzero into another compilation unit (.c file) requires to compile it separately. memzero itself cannot be compiled to a NOP, since the compiler does not know how it is used and a call to memzero cannot be optimized since the compiler does not know what it does.

Nevertheless, link-time optimization in theory could still optimize across compilation units. The only solution which comes to my mind is to use 'volatile' for the memory access, but that will never be fast.
Why buy one instead of the other when you can buy both, write a review and post here? ;)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a " ... purchased outside the US" missing from the title of the piece?

The article says: "... seeking to knock out the "first sale" doctrine on goods made abroad" (emphasis mine) - surely a product made abroad, but sold in the US by an authorized importer/reseller will still be subject to first sale? And it would still be legal for students to buy books for themselves abroad? Even the example mentioned where US students buy books directly on Amazon UK doesn't seem to be affected - just their right to resell that book in the US?

It's still a big deal, but it seems that Ars is making it quite a bit bigger than it is.
Oh dear, how much linkbait are we going to have to go through with this case? Look, your first sale rights within the US are perfectly safe. This case only affects people who do bulk buys in an overseas market and then try to resell within the US. Claims that it will be impossible to sell anything without an exhaustive audit trail are absurdly overblown. The legal issue here is whether a company has the right to exert control over the distribution of its product.

The USSC will probably find for the publisher on public policy grounds (IMHO), since it would be difficult for publishers/manufacturers to execute agreements with distributors if it were not also prepared to go bat against unauthorized distributors. Not the most consumer-friendly situation since it allows producers to engage in market partition, but on the other hand exclusive distribution agreements are often the key to establishing a market presence in the first place. The arguments in Omega v. Costco (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_S.A._v._Costco_Wholesale_...) are particularly instructive in this regard; amicus briefs in support of Costco offered long parades of horribles, but were built on absurd premises, such as speculation that courts would suddenly start interpreting statutory protections for libraries in direct contradiction of their plain meaning.
Even putting it into a separate compilation unit isn't a long-term solution: compilers that do whole program optimization may still be able to optimize it out. I believe just declaring the operand to be volatile would prevent it from being optimized out, however. e.g.:

void* memzero(volatile void*, size_t);

(However, I haven't tested this).
Housing is the main variable cost so if you want lots of it (large family house in nice area) it will make sense to prioritise the cost adjusted salary. If you are single and happy to live cheap then the highest unadjusted salary should allow you to save bucket loads of money.
I like the product but I really dislike the way he's trying to fund it. You know, once upon a time people would just build and launch shit, instead of begging people for money even before building it. I understand this type of Kickstarter-like campaign is really helpful for building hardware products which require upfront budget, since building hardware costs real money. But building a software? Please... If I was so motivated, I would just build it and release it.
>>Could we not have strong emotions about tablets and phones without calling each other names?

>No.

Sure we can. Your comments have set off emotions in me. Behold: I can still be civil, because doing so is in the guidelines of the forum and I'd like to support the relative oasis of civility that exists here. I don't feel any need to break them because I'm quite able to make my point without doing so. I'm a member of multiple fora (trading, mountain biking) and just don't need to make any of them fit what I think they should be. If they have written or unwritten rules, so what? When I drive in a foreign land, it's just easier to drive on their side of the road than insist that mine is better because it allows more self-expression.

Ever heard of "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent"? Avoiding both insults and violence is probably a good strategy, until we really need them.
Kage shadows production traffic to QA servers
> There's a good economic analysis from the old thread: if the Court rules that publishers cannot prevent gray-market imports of textbooks that sell for $100 in the US but $20 in the Philippines, publishers aren't going to set the price to $20 in the US. They're just going to raise the price in the Philippines to $100 minus whatever it costs to ship from Manila to the US. Students in poor countries just get further screwed.

The problem with that is that they'd loose the PH market which presumably is worth >$0 to them.

An alternative strategy is to "edit" the foreign versions enough to make them unusable in the US, such as changing the homework questions enough that anyone working from the international version will get them wrong, or fiddle the fontsize/linespacing/margins so the page numbers are screwed up. That would automatically enlist the help of TAs to warn against the horrors of foreign books.
I think the best metric I'd use to see if Wikipedia is "complete" us to look at the major articles and see what proportion have [citation needed] on them.

Of course, I'm a little biased as that tag is the one I created so its really my baby. But I designed it for obsolescence, so I suppose I can't complain :-)
Wow, mampires...

"We became, in the coinage of one paleoanthropologist, “mampires” who feed on the fluids of other animals."
From the conversations going on on Kickstarter the LIFX was a mesh network configuration, whereas with the Hue you'd be connecting a bunch of slaves to a central hub. This could come into play depending on the amount of bulbs you plan to use and where.
The same applies to the rest of the world. However, the article seems to omit one important factor: career opportunities.

Cities with high salaries and high cost of living also offer plenty of opportunities in case the job doesn't work out, the company goes belly up etcerera. Anyone with desirable skills and a bit of a local network can get a new job there within a few weeks, if not days. In most places with a low cost of living however, things are very different.
Good posts those two. The second is http://blog.stata.com/2011/03/09/understanding-matrices-intu....
Whenever someone tells me that certain ruling only applies to X, and people worrying about Y are misguided, I almost always side with people who are worried about Y.

Court cases set a precedence, and there are unintended consequences for it. Given that a court cases are not 100% exploit-proof, you can bet your bottom dollar that eventually there will be some lawyer referring to previous rulings to justify some other rulings.
Whoa, hold on... you were the guy that invented that tag?!
Google Produces Map Allowing You To Monitor Hurricane Sandy
Database Sharding the Right Way: Easy, Reliable, and Open source - HighLoad++
I don't see why it's that bad. You describe it pejoratively as "begging for money", but it does take time to develop anything, and you need money to live. What's wrong with someone wanting to be able to work full-time developing it? And what's wrong if some people want to provide monetary support so the person can do that?
And keeping in mind the hue kit starts at 160 + 60/ bulb, mesh networking can be more cost efficient.
I'm adding my answer on quora now. Many hugely disruptive breakthrough technologies will require massive upfront funding before revenue is possible, but perhaps those kinds of startups are not accessible to those in YC. This was supposed to be a message to companies that start with $250K to not just spend money building a team and tech-demos assuming more funding will get them to revenue-generating products.
I had talked to someone inside Amazon once. I forgot the name and the position but his role had something to do with evangelizing AWS. According to him, Amazon runs only part of the infrastructure over AWS. That probably explains why Amazon remains mostly unaffected by EC2 outage.
So the idea is that companies bid against each other on talent? What is to stop them from colluding and bidding just the current bid + 1? E.g. the first company bids 150k, the next one 151k and so on. Also, are the companies supposed to bid on the candidates without even having met them? What if someone has a kick-ass work history but turns out to be a tool in real life?
Some being all that delicious whey. Whey chock full of protein! Discarding is optional of course.
If you're white & the race war's tomorrow will you stand w/the whites or blacks?
It’s often referred to as: “The Day of the Rope” or “The Day of Reckoning” but Whites eager for a race war in America between blacks and whites, where they look forward to hundreds of thousands of blacks being killed and the “siminan race of sub humans’ being returned to the shackles & chains of slavery, don’t know they both missed and lost it. Why? They already lost their acclaimed fore-coming race war because they based it singularly on numbers associated with current US racial population statistics rather than the greater fact it should be based on: genetics.
Doesn't it seem like this analysis is done completely incorrectly? You can't directly compare two indices together that are based on different magnitudes (cost of living vs. salary).

If average cost of living in absolute dollars is $30,000 and average salary is $100,000, living in San Francisco nets you ($100,000 * 1.36) - ($30,000 * 1.63) = $87,100. Living in Pueblo nets you ($100,000 * 0.76) - ($30,000 * 0.88) = $49,600.

I'm afraid this will spark an unnecessary mass-exodus to Pueblo.
The peaks in your scope image clearly show a phase shift, which is kind of logical if you take into account the fact that the main component in a switched mode supply is a coil.

If you look a little more carefully at your scope trace you'll see the coils reactance at work in the lower trace, the peak is where the FET in the supply is closed and is drawing real power, the purple trace past the peak and beyond the 0 crossing is inverted and drops slowly back to 0 before the next peak hits. If you use the controls on your scope to zoom in on the bottom trace by increasing the vertical sensitivity you'll get a much better idea of what I'm getting at here. You'll see '0' voltage and yet current is still flowing.

You can't correct for power factor by simply increasing the resolution and averaging. The base frequency of your oscilloscope does not enter into the discussion here, it could be 500 Hz for all I care and that would be enough.

Furthermore, the power factor of a switched mode supply changes as a function of the load applied and gets (much) worse if that load is also reactive or capacitive. Under some circumstances it is possible to draw negative power from the wall socket if you do a naive measurement, or you'll see wall socket power decrease as output current increases.

All this is possible because voltage and current are more or less out of phase with each other.

The kill-a-watt will work well with some reactive loads (such as CFLs) as long as they're of the ballast type.

A switched mode supply presents challenges that can't be met at the cost constraints of a consumer device like that.

Vampire power is a new term, I'm not familiar with it. Dead load (or simply the losses) is anything that does not end up in your consumer (the live load), I'm not sure if that is an accurate translation of the terms. It normally goes up as a function of the amount of power consumed, the base line (consumption without any load at all) is probably your 'vampire power'.

Total efficiency is 100 * ((output power)/(input power)) and will in practice be anywhere from 60% to 98% depending on how well load and supply are matched, and can vary wildly from one powersupply to another due to component variations.

Finally, classical power factor correction applies to sinusoidal wave forms, as you've already discovered switched mode supplies waveforms on both the input and the output side are anything but sinusoidal further complicating an already hairy problem.
Perhaps the difference is due to the fact that East Asians domesticated different kinds of cereal crops than Europeans did. Perhaps milk wasn't as important in a rice-based diet as it was in a wheat-based diet? (But then again, Indians eat rice and they're lactose tolerant according to the article.)

Or perhaps East Asians developed different kinds of social and economic structures that mitigated the disadvantage of not being able to consume milk.

Or perhaps the necessary mutations just didn't get incorporated into East Asian genes. Also according to the article, the lactose tolerance gene spread as far as India but didn't cross the Himalayas.
OpenBSD has a function called secure_bzero. All it currently does is call regular bzero, but if external compilation isn't enough to do the job, we come up with something else.

Regarding the article, I don't at all understand why the three arguments are necessary. Why would the following patch not work?

- memset(x, 0, n);
+ memzero(x, n);
You can install it but it's a barely working joke at this point.
This reminds me of the sequence alignment algorithms we use in bioinformatics to find scores to rank nucleic acid or amino acid sequences by similarity[ex. 1].

It's cool to see it extended to data beyond discrete base/aa values.

The "time warping" aspect also kinda reminds me of the methods used in remote sensing for comparing spectral signatures (SCM/SAM) [ex. 2].

I'd be interested in learning where/how this is being used for problems in finance or economics.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith%E2%80%93Waterman_algorith...

2. ftp://geo.arc.nasa.gov/pub/stevek/Spectral%20Correlation/Osmar_1_carvalho__web.pdf
What's wrong with the emulator? It is fast and works pretty well. Also check out http://www.manymo.com
The way these rules are currently set up does not solve this problem: you simply "make shit up" when talking to reporters and then let people reference the secondary source (which is usually designed to fact check information by simply calling you and asking "was this true", at which point you can easily just lie; more information on this in my upstream reply).

You simply cannot use secondary sources to solve the problem you are describing, and if you tried to do so in an academic article you would find yourself unable to get published: you would simply find a note attached from peer review asking you to instead cite primary sources... as otherwise there is nothing to prevent you from "simply making shit up".
It runs in Chrome as an extension.
That implementation will die with a bus error for seven out of every eight possible values of mem on most non-x86 architectures, zero out the wrong memory regions for these values on some more exotic architectures, and be horribly slow everywhere else.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1496848/does-unaligned-me...
I think in most places you are earning enough to live comfortably. Far more important to overall happiness than $10k more or less is whether you enjoy your job, get along with the colleagues and have friends and a cool environment outside of your workplace.
"Modernizing" something doesn't mean removing 80% or 90% of its features, that would be "bastardizing" or something.

Your comment seems weird to me. It sounds like "Use an underpowered tool for your everyday task but turn to a vastly more powerful tool only in some strictly defined situation."

Wouldn't it be a little more sane to go the other way: use a super powerful tool for your daily work and only turn to a far less powerful tool when there's no other choice?
"First hop redundancy" such as HSRP, VRRP and GLBP use similar techniques to load balance and redundancy. This could be a reason for it's use.
this is an americanism, i think. not being one, when i first heard it, i found it confusing too.

what it means is that you put some money away for yourself (ie, pay yourself) before you spend it (ie, pay others).

if you're hearing it the first time, it sounds like the opposite of saving. i, for one, upon hearing it for the first time interpreted it as: "do something good for yourself, ie spend it on yourself" :)
My opinion: There is no killer app for remote programming.

Working remotely is a skill. It is very different from working in an office environment, and requires that you compensate for your lack of physical presence with proper behavior and strategy.

Remote, you can often get lots of uninterrupted work done, but sometimes this can be a danger, because interruptions often imply that you're a "go-to" person. You also miss out on a lot of the social stuff, which (because we're primates, get used to it) turns out to be important for reviews and who-gets-to-work-on-what decisions.

Tools help, but they are a nearly insignificant part of the story once you're beyond the simple capacity to check in code.
This is the fundamental point of the article... Enzyme on/off.
Steve Jobs' yacht Venus unveiled in Aalsmeer, The Netherlands
Interview With Graphic Designer Paul Rand (1991)
IMHO, this was one of the lost magical things about tapes .. you could just endlessly add lots of them as you needed them, seamlessly even in those days. I recall loading rather large stuff, tape at a time, as an old-school operator in-training and so on ..
Its Google-od, looking through the Mirror.
MulticoreGeneral
Why not eat the bulls for meat as well?
Information Landscapes (MIT Media Lab, 1994)
The problem with battleships is they were incredibly vulnerable to air attack.

Ambrose's book "Citizen Soldiers" details the failure of Hitler's fixed fortifications, and Galland's book "The First and the Last" details Hitler's failure to understand air power.
If the ruling is narrow enough to allow the resale of goods purchased from the US that were imported under license, and forbid the resale of unlicensed imports; that would be one thing.

But... It won't necessarily be that narrow, and it is but one battle in a long war over who gets to control a good once it has been sold. It certainly would be possible for the Supreme Court to produce a ruling in this case that would see grandmothers being cuffed for illegal reselling at flea markets.
GazeMetrix - Social analytics for pictures
Great Startup Teams Foster a Culture of Likability
Amir, thanks for writing this article. Very informative! Just a few weeks ago I tried out ZigFu and really liked it. I'm sorry to hear the team has left. But I hope, ZigFu keeps being successful, even if not in the VC sense.

In my humble opinion, one, if not the biggest problems is, that the Kinect is just not good enough, yet. My experience is, that the Kinect works well for the T-pose and anything that resembles it, but not well or at all once your arm is pointing towards the Kinect.
Here [1] is a recent paper, with the most detailed validation of the MS Kinect I have seen so far. They report a maximum error for reaching movements with OpenNI of 46.9 deg in the elbow angle estimation.
Another problem is lag. From what I hear, the main problem here is the USB 2.0 bandwidth. Hopefully the next generation, Kinect 2 and co., will improve a lot.

[1] S Choppin, J Wheat , 2012, Marker-less tracking of human movement using Microsoft Kinect
http://w4.ub.uni-konstanz.de/cpa/article/view/5271
I've already clicked the up arrow but I wanted to express my agreement more directly.

I agree.

That would be "Agnosticism", I think.
I gave a link to IRIN (Integrated Regional Information Networks), which is "a service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs". That has links to several organisations which are trying to increase uptake of ORS+zinc. Their biases are clear.

The figure I give is just the cost of a course of ORS+zinc. Givewell will want to include other costs such as distribution and administration and so on.
"I can almost guarantee that it would be easier to fix whatever it is you don't like about vim than to start from scratch."

That's just not true. I'm a huge vim fan, I've customized my vim a ton, I have maybe 30 installed plugins. But when I open Sublime Text and type "ctrl-p" to go to another file, it just works plain better than any vim plugin can achieve.

Vim is made to work on a terminal. Great for some people, lousy for people who want the vim model of text editing with a modern gui.

A few specific things that you simply can't fix in vim:

- Making pop-up boxes, a-la Sublime Text, that moves you to a new file. Simply cannot be implemented in a nice-looking way in vim.

- Making some fonts smaller or bigger, to display extra information that isn't code. Simply impossible to do, because vim is a one-size font. This alone is a huge limitation.

- Making a decent-looking code-folding system. The code folding in vim doesn't look good, and since you're limited to one font size and to only putting in characters, you're stuck with the very ugly way of doing things. I'm a huge fan of vim folding, and the way of controlling them is just amazing. Except for the way it looks, which is terrible.

Now, these aren't just "I want my editor to be pretty" issues. A lot of these things are functionally important to get working faster on your code.
20 Lines of JavaScript - Super Mario Tribute
It definitely looks like you're right, and that Ars seems to be misstating this. But I also agree, it's still a big deal. What industry hasn't attempted to get every inch out of law that they could, even if it's apparent they will eventually fail? It's in their financial interest to try, after all.
I read once a theory that the enzyme that splits lactose in the body is destroyed by sunlight. People living near the equator have a much higher lactose intolerance because the constant sunshine destroys the enzyme.

Likewise, people in Sweden for example have a 100x higher lactose tolerance, because there's less sunlight throughout the year.
Volatile is definitely a better solution than the approach in the article. I think your solution works, but also am not certain. I haven't tried either, but I also wonder if this works:

(volatile void *) memset(a, 0, 3)

I think the answer for both of those is in this link but I'm not savvy enough to figure out for sure: http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=22278#c43

But there's a safer and clearer approach I'd probably actually use (although also untested):

volatile void *prevent_optimization = memset(a, 0, 3);