skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recoil from Wall Street getting involved in water markets not because I'm opposed to putting a fair price on water (I'm OK putting prices on lots of things, like air or light) or water-rich regions selling to water-poor regions. I am terrified of Wall Street getting in on the action because Wall Street means bubbles.

For instance, speculation is frequently blamed for many spikes in food prices: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/speculation-food-p...

The goal of capitalism isn't to allocate resources efficiently, the goal is to make money and good resource allocation is sometimes a nice side effect.
Virus threat hit Israeli Foreign Ministry computers
How to back up Dropbox automatically - daily, weekly, monthly snapshots
Firefox 16.0.2 Released
Yahoo to ignore IE10's "Do Not Track"
In response to: Dropbox Bug Can Permanently Lose Your Files http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4703943
> (And I will never understand why people love Visual Studio so much. Oh well.)

Me neither!
What about "An historian"?
One thing I use on a much lower volume site is very simple and looks at the volume of posts people are making, on my site spammers post a lot more than regular people, that lets me automatically flag them and not show their posts to anyone but themselves / other spammers.
It just blows my mind. I once discussed this issue with a tour guide in China, and his response was basically that censorship was ok, because people would just get all upset about things otherwise.

How do you even respond to that?
You want to make the same list for civil rights?

If you want to evangelize computer science to the masses, then by all means. I applaud that. But I'm not going to do it, and I can't ask someone else to. Turing is not bad enough to be disqualified, so if there's only one and the chips have fallen such that it's him, I'm okay with that.
Monopoly's Anti-monopolistic History - The Airspace
At least the Nexus 7 is a cheap platform. I'm almost tempted to get one if I can stay away from Android (and the related Google dependence/data leak).

The other advantage is that it could help people fully commit rather than switching backwards and forwards.
I only use Windows to play games on steam. Would it make sense for me to upgrade?
I'm afraid it means "was intended to" here.
Er, I don't think that's true at all. First of all, indies didn't used to do as many Mac ports before Steam for Mac/Humble Bundle. But aside from that, you have franchises like GTA, KotOR, Civilization, Assasin's Creed, and others. I think Steam for Mac definitely had an influence.
I expect to see people selling PC's as Linux gamestations of the back of this. Opertunities for a cheap Linux box already setup with steam to pull down games are now alot more tempting that I'd bet you will see kickstarter projects before the year is out.

Now the real question is, will this steam distribution system handle non X86 chips, and if so will there be limitation on the games selections above and beyond processing ability to run the game. If they can crack that then, I will be truely impressed and see more momentum than you. But it certainly will add momentum, the indirect effect on stabalising and opening up graphics drivers has been one of the greatest side effects of this port of steam onto linux than steam itself.

Be ineteresting how things are a year from now, I smell some roses; But we shall see.
SC Governor: 3.6 million Social Security numbers hacked
Agreed. Early in my Dropbox days I lost some files due to my account going over the 2GB limit. Since then, I've treated Dropbox as a syncing server, not a backup service.

My current scheme is to make rolling snapshots of my Dropbox folder backed up to a local RAID array which backs up to a separate RAID array nightly. More info: http://aaronparecki.com/2010/190/article/1/how-to-back-up-dr...

Hackernews link for that post if you're in to that sort of thing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4704667
I happily stand corrected.

I've definitely seen imperial in local manufacturing and construction. Woodworkers seem particularly stubborn.
Or one can plainly tell the truth, like my SAT instructor used to say: you're competing against other people with similar capabilities to yours. If you don't bother to do the coursework, they'll get a higher score and you'll get a lower one, and it won't be because of some inherent reason, it will happen simply because they did take the time to study.

(the SAT here is normalized to form a perfect Gauss curve, so essentially the only thing that matters is one's percentile, but I guess this saying is generalizable)
You know it's a great party if the music is performed live by the guy who wrote the book in your field.
I'm curious as well. It's been like that for years from memory. What possible value could this site have for the owners? Apart from maybe trolling purposes? And just who are "Steam Tunnel Operations" anyway?
Surprised by the lack of Asian and Black males. I thought they would have a more diverse team.

edit: totally forgot about the East Indians.
Hash tables, in general, have average constant time lookup. Only some hash tables have amortized constant time lookup.

An amortized bound is a bound on the total cost of a sequence of operations. Loosely speaking, it guarantees that you can't keep hitting the worst case indefinitely. An average bound is averaged over all possible inputs, but doesn't protect you against hitting the worst case over and over.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_(1940s_subculture)
Contracting in the UK. You are either paid per day or per hour. You bill per month typically.
You presumably pay people for their skillsets. Screwing a light bulb in or doing your grocery shopping doesn't require a special skillset. There are some tasks that just aren't in the same ballpark as building homes, growing food, and cutting hair, and I think shopping is one of them.
Email: A psychological self-defence course
Upvoted. This is something I've thought about as well. My general motto is "We gain nothing by denying the truth," but I've also learned that the mind can sabotage us in very subtle ways. On LessWrong, the idea is that "our brains are untrusted hardware."
No, analogue signals do not have a limited range. Analogue dynamic range is only limited by the noise floor of the cable and the resolution of the DACs/ADCs. The DACs/ADCs will probably do 24 bits.

Of course analog signals have an effective limited range. As you yourself mention the noise floor makes sure of that. Only an idealized analog signal of infinite precision doesn't have a limited range.

After the DACs, the signal will likely go through another pre-amp, then main amp in the sound system, then some analogue filters, then loudspeakers. All these are analogue and not usually limiting the dynamic range (though they will add some distortion).

Precisely. So that's why keeping the signal at as high a level as possible without clipping all the way through the pipeline and only limiting at the end is an advantage. All those stages have their own noise floor. Several other people have mentioned on the thread that this is also the general recommendation for audio work.

Finally, the signal will enter a room with noise aplenty, which will limit the effective dynamic range of the signal significantly. But that is out of control of that volume slider we talked about in the beginning ;-)

That's of course true, and again I admit my ignorance as to how much of a difference this really makes once it gets where it matters, your ears. Originally I was just responding to the idea that using floats in your audio framework eliminated all sources of reduction in precision.
Designing Web Applications
I ask some questions about test coverage, coding standards, code reviews.. I'm sometimes more interested in whether I get the same answers from different people or not than the particulars.

I always ask for an example of a technical or tools decision that was made. I'm usually looking to see whether decision-making is well distributed or things get bottlenecked by a manage or lead.

Probably most of all I pick at how the organization decides what to build. I'll ask about features or products that have been sunset or rehashed, how requirements are discovered and communicated. How prioritization works. One of the easiest ways to get red flags here when applying for a spot on a team is to ask everyone I interview with what the team is currently working on. A large variety of answers makes me nervous.

Oh, and also big points off for "Yes" to the following:
- Do you have an exchange server?
- Do you have a sales team?
- Is the person who makes the purchase decision for your product your primary user?
They key thing to understand is that if IE10 did not have DNT enabled, that the default setting would be _just as arbitrary_ and would still therefore not "map to user intent" in their words. There has to be a default in one direction or the other.

That, and many users will use IE10 knowing that it ships with DNT pre-enabled. To ignore this is totally immoral and unethical. This is totally shameful.
Did anyone else read the title as "10 bajillion bytes archived" or was that just me?
Or you can ask it along the lines of, what changes good and bad have you experienced in your working enviroment over your time here. If they can't list something in either then I'm usualy wary, most will at least complain about the canteen or some change, even if cheaper coffee. Though if there is no good changes and no bad changes they can think of then it does sound like it could be a boring company.
I'm still thinking about your modular perspective. I believe that is an accurate restatement of one of my cases, but it is not all of them and would not be sufficient alone. Whereas all the cases together, however, are exhaustive. To summarize, my above comments/claims boil down to:

1) any even number input taken will produce a sub-sequence ending in an even output, by exhaustion (see above), that is guaranteed to be smaller after a maximum number of steps

2) this new even can be taken again, as often as necessary, to reach the smallest integer in that sequence greater than 8

3) the next even number (at most 1 odd away) is by definition below 8 and, while it may not have a next even by my arguement of necessity, it will still be below 8, and all inputs below 8 terminate

4) there is nothing about this reasoning that limits it to a particular sequence/input (all initially-odd inputs adhere after 1 iteration), so it is true of every sequence

Am I saying anything untrue or ambiguous?

Thanks for taking the time!
My point is the whole process needs to be taken into consideration when talking about performance and runtime complexity. If you just use the address of an object for the hash, that has a implication to performance. If you choose a cryptographic function, that has another implication. If you use something like cityhash, that has yet another.

If you use rehashing or a linked list to handle collisions that has another impact on the performance depending on what is going on.

If you choose to auto grow the hash table upon a certain number of collisions, this is another thing you have to worry about.

The process of lookup might use a precalculated cache of the hash code calculation if it is expensive and sacrifice some memory for this storage.

My point of all these examples is that the simple runtime of the collection isn't the whole story and lots of crap can happen under the covers. We stand on the shoulders of giants, but we have to know what weaknesses and strengths we are exploiting. While just picking the right data (or wrong) structure makes a huge impact, you need a lifetime of experience to really know what matters, and what the trade off of one or another is in a given scenario. Hard to test for that intuition and I always like people that interview with me that start talking about these sorts of issues.
No it's still ridiculous because that remains effectively impossible. Think of this analogy: it would be like running into someone with your exact same genes, but who isn't your twin. Genomes can be seen as a series of bits, and they're sufficiently large that getting the same sequence twice cannot happen by accident.

Furthermore it's a misunderstanding to say that people attach value to a 'large number', the value is in the effort it took to arrive at it and the fruits it can give in the context of society. The sequence of bits by itself is meaningless because it only becomes a song or a movie using the right interpretation & context.
I never wanted to manage as that involved people and it is much harder to code around those problems.
> The aio branch has several performance improvements apart from allowing multiple disk operations outstanding at any given time. For instance:

This sounds like a bad idea. If the improvements aren't tied to asynch, why weigh them down with the async albatross instead of merging them to the mainline?
Copyright Office fails to protect users from DMCA
I urge you to think deeper about this. You are saying these people chose to list their time, but why do they consider it in the first place and why don't you? Alternatively, think about the array of choices they have to make money and yours.

I'm not saying its an immoral service. I'm implying that "distributed labor" startups are problematic for me to participate in as a customer because I find the notion of spinning up people like we do servers to do tasks that I can buy my way out of to be problematic.
A while ago I wrote that perhaps the greatest contribution the Bitcoin experiment will make to humankind is to teach you and me and our neighbors more about the realities of economics. And later I added that the Bitcoin experiment will also contribute to greater understanding of attack surfaces and online crime. Many of the ideas about how to mine Bitcoins, store Bitcoins, and trade with Bitcoins as a medium of exchange illustrate both the strengths and weaknesses of any other medium of exchange in a world full of human beings. Seeing the discussion of Bitcoins here on Hacker News reminds me of early online discussions in the 1990s of online payment systems such as PayPal, and the arguments beforehand that PayPal wouldn't have to invest a lot of time and effort (as it eventually did) building defenses against theft and fraud. If a weakness in a system is attached to a lot of money, the way to bet is to bet that someone will go looking for that weakness, even if you haven't thought of it.

This prompts a question for all the security-knowledgeable persons who participate here on Hacker News, a question once asked of the inventor of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). How expensive do you think it would be for the United States National Security Agency (or a comparable organization from another national government) to crack a Bitcoin store, given that we know that some Bitcoin caches have already been cracked? And if the organization storing Bitcoin data held personal bank account data too, how attractive a target might it be to thieves?
The actual beta sign up page was just posted to the group.

http://www.valvesoftware.com/linuxsurvey.php
Speaking at DevOpsDays, New York on Mobile DevOps
I'm curious what the actual stats are with regards to that theory. More than a few historic immigration waves were prompted because things were so bad "back home" - for a variety of reasons including social instability - that the fear of setting out to a new place was far less than the fear of remaining. I'm not sure if that was so much an issue of individual freedom.

Examples off the top of my head would be the rise of the communist party in China and the Irish potato famine.

However, the first wave of Europeans colonists to come the US definitely did value individual freedoms over stability. I don't know how strong their influence is on the population itself, but their views are definitely reflected in the laws and historical document (e.g. The Constitution).
this is my dream come true!
Aside from the shameless plug, what will you use it for?
Singly Focuses In On Social And Mobile
I think I consider photos to be some of the most important stuff to be backed up... obviously you can live without them, but as you said, some photos are irreplaceable, and can hold so much meaning. At least with Facebook / Picasa Web Albums many of the most important photos have been backed up (potentially at a lower quality).

To be fair I never would have considered such a bug when using dropbox - I would probably have considered it safe considering you have a local copy of your data, especially since as other pointed out they present themselves as a backup service.

I almost got hit by this locally actually, I synchronize folders against multiple PCs, and the exact same thing happened, and a number of files had their bytes zeroed out and then this was propagated through the network. Thankfully I spotted it before all copies were overwritten and fixed it, but that's where you also want something like Time Machine.

Ugh, so many ways to lose data, even when you're doing the 'right' thing!
Kickcrasher

*Crashstarter?
I want to know what this byte was a piece of. Probably Philosoraptor or some cat video.
You weren't just asked 30 questions. You were asked 30 questions and evaluated on dozens of other non-answer based factors.

Imagine: I walk in, get 27/30 and then proceed to be a sexist bigot who says I refuse to work on a team with gays or women and I decide to start claiming that you have to get 100% to get hired.

I'm not saying you did something like that, but you're just automatically assuming that that question was the pinnacle of your rejection and not the other things listed.

I mean, unless you've been implicitly implying that you're a perfect interviewer minus the 3/30 you missed...
I just noticed the dude in the white v-neck thingy -- WHO ARE YOU and what are you doing with your hands?!
Crashed my browser, FF 16.0.1, too. Or rather ate 200% cpu and locked browser, which I then had to kill.
An example: "good" engineer thinks management are a bunch of idiots, leading him to constantly criticize and question decisions. This criticizing is done amongst the team, leading the entire team to question management and, therefore, the direction of the product. Now, instead of doing their best work, they are doing the minimum required to not get fired.

I've seen this happen. The engineer sowing the poison was complaining that management wasn't hiring enough engineers, even though the product was "profitable". He never considered that the analysis had been done that the product would not be any more profitable by cranking out more features and would, in all likelihood, be less profitable.

As a result, other engineers picked up on the meme and significantly reduced their efforts. After all, who is going to give their best efforts if management is just going to be stupid and waste it?

So maybe 0.1x is a bit of an exaggeration, but I can live with that.
I really, really doubt that. They pulled back on “patriotic education” which is honestly something a relatively large minority cared strongly about. If they tried to phase out Cantonese everyone who didn't move from the mainland would go ape. Also, Mandarin isn't even an official language, Cantonese and English are it.
I'm not exactly sure what you want to do. If you just want to handle touch input in Windows 8 then take a look at this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/xaml/hh... .

If you want to simulate touches programatically then take a look at this api: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh80...

Edit: I don't think you'll need to write a driver either way.
As a founder (2x) she has some absolutely fantastic advice. Though I haven't seen every problem/monster, many of them apply to my experience. In addition, the examples she gives are fantastic.
Isn't this one of those 'it depends' questions?
Is there something similar but just for shit APIs? I'm spending as much time writing an API for as I am implementing a library for TVDB because the API is so... just stupid. By time I'll be done with this it will cache from TVDB and be able to serve all of the content back in a SANE REST API rather than in the random URL, extract string, request url, get a zip with 3 conflicting xml files inside. Ugh.
I'm looking for people to play devil's advocate here and help me refine the model. I think I've figured out a pretty strong model for how much each app in the top 100 grossing in the iOS store takes in each day.
It looks like Amazon Lockers are available in SF as well. What differentiates BufferBox from Lockers?
Headaches, delays plague Windows Store, dev claims
I have no experience with this subject, but clicked through in order to think about how I might want to attack such a problem.

At a glance, it looks like dzone.com there doesn't even try as the new page is full of accounts which shovel in half a dozen or more links per minute. I'd think that some basic means of rate limiting would be a start, a base cooldown which grows if an account continues to bang into it.

From there, further limit and eventually blackhole new links from accounts whose previous submissions fail to gain traction.

I'd also think about how to score the trustworthiness and relationships of accounts to qualify submissions. I'd expect that spam accounts wouldn't spend much time promoting stories other than those of their own network. On the other hand, promotion by a trusty account could indicate that a link and the submitting account is less spammy.
Thanks! Great piece, by the way — my goal is to be a successful starter and builder. And I agree that many seem to focus only on the former.
How much do you think Americans mind the Julian Assange affair?

I get the impression the difference between the societies is only of degree, not quality.
Of the 4, only one is asked to do what they do during the interview. Event writers submit existing copy. Or at the very least, prepare it ahead of time before submitting it. Actors auditioning know what they are auditioning for before hand. They can prepare.

Programmers, however, must take a test. It's not an interview, it's a test. Pass or fail (regardless of what people say), it's a test. It's a test of which you have little preparation for. You hope that what they are looking for is what you can provide. What they are asking for is what they will test for (this is fairly often not the case).
State of the “journo-programmer” with Dan Sinker
Musicians' Guide
Could you at least write a rebooter that would rewrite /boot and then have two "partitions"? You could go into Ubuntu and choose "reboot into Android" and it would rewrite /boot and then restart the device?

I wonder how the bootloader for the Touchpad works. It had the functionality I describe though I have no idea how it was implemented.
Man Claiming Facebook Ownership Arrested on Fraud Charges
Clearwire to use Huawei equipment in network upgrade
Do you have specific criticisms of the iTunes store, PS3 store, Xbox store, etc.? People keep talking about legal downloads like they're a theoretical concept...
I think the point of the image is more that starting small makes them less likely to fail SPECTACULARLY. There is zero chance that Instacart will lose $830 million before it sees traction, which is what happened to Webvan. If Webvan had just been a small grocery startup, nobody would have cared if it failed.

Also, "historically notable" is a pretty high bar you're setting.

Finally, I'm sure Instacart hopes to reach that kind of scale eventually. But they don't want to start there because again, that's how you fail spectacularly and lose tons of money without giving people something they want.
Think you’re busy? Johann Sebastian Bach had 20 kids