skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an interesting hypothesis, but the one example they give of what they actually tested leaves me skeptical.

In one case the product contains "natural enzymes", in the other the product contains "grains made of alcalase and esperase protein molecules". The problem is this latter explanation does not really explain more since the meanings of alcalase and esperase would only be known to experts who probably make their own detergent in their private lab.

To reach a credible determination whether people like more complex explanations, the more complex explanations need to be good ones, and not ones intentionally designed to intimidate people with undefined specialist language.

It should be one that someone reasonably knowledgable would have a fair chance of understanding. For example, someone with a high school education level could be told "Contains enzymes for better cleaning.†" and then in explanation, "†Enzymes are protein molecules which can act as a catalyst to change the energy levels required for chemical reactions. We extract enzymes called alcalase and esperase from bacteria found in bird feathers and hay. These enzymes allow water to bind with the proteins that hold grass and sweat to your clothes, allowing them to be broken down by the soap into more soluble compounds so that they can then be washed away by the water."

Now maybe people would hate knowing that, but at least it explains what is really going on to a depth that an intelligent non-specialist could understand it. Myself, knowing that a given detergent uses enzymes known as alcalase and esperase, where they come from, what they do and how they work gives me more confidence in the product. Knowing that it has magic beans called alcalase and esperase isn't very helpful though and is just frustrating because the explanation is obviously lacking sufficient detail for much anyone but a detergent specialist to follow.

I am not surprised that people told the detergent had specific types of enzyme magic beans rated their understanding of their product at a lower level than those told it had enzymes generically. Nor would I be surprised to find in a more detailed study of actual understanding should both groups actually have identical and very shallow understanding.

I suspect, or rather, hypothesize, that with a good explanation, people might rate their understanding higher and actually have real understanding of the product rather than the superficial one they would get from either of the descriptions tested by this study.
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> In fact, it's much harder (...)

It's not a fact, just an opinion or anecdotal observation. And I submit it depends on the person in question. Some folks may find it easier to have a co-founder, some may find that to be more of an obstacle. Both cases have merit. Agreed it helps to have other people support you, be a cheerleader, be a listener, etc., but that doesn't have to be a cofounder. Since cofounder implies equity stake, all kinds of painful problems become possible when a newborn business venture has ownership split between multiple people, with different vision, different motivations, different life circumstances, and often (but not always) different equity stakes. In an ideal world, having co-founders/co-owners can be great. But it can also be a path to hell. Depending on the situation.
strange. maybe i read too much reddit :(
Very nice looking, well done! As you have endless scrolling on the playlists, I would suggest having an element follow you on the left (Possibly the submit Playlist) - You'll have to try it to find out, but I feel it may give the site a "fuller" feel when scrolling down, rather than having an empty space.
I've been doing lots of interviews lately. Most of the coding questions have been fun, and I've learned. Some have been just plain strange - they seem like well intended questions in a specific context (which I'm not aware of). Those are the hardest.

I've noticed the strange ones seem to be coming from people that aren't prepared to be interviewing. So just a word of advice (and I'll elaborate with a blog post soon) to interviewers, please prepare ahead of time. I'm interviewing you too.

Asking the most abstract or complicated question possible probably won't help you find the people you're looking for.
So I'll see you guys all out at Barcade later then right?
The Standard Hotel - HTML5 Video Loop and changes with time of day
Tarsnap isn't going to vanish tomorrow. It's steadily profitable so I don't need to worry about "runway".

Even if I get hit by lightning tomorrow, the service runs perfectly fine on its own for months at a time, so you'd have plenty of time to get your data back.
How much are developers making on the Windows App Store?
The Main Reason Why Windows 8 Sucks
Gojee also based in NYC is another, but they took down their team page for some reason, mostly Asian and Whites. My buddy's startup up Skim.me is another, but they are mostly Asian with a White CTO. I'm not trying to gather a posse against kickstarer, I just thought their would be more non-whites with the geography and focus in tech.
> The default is to send a null value in the header meaning that no intent has been expressed, that's not arbitrary.

My statement that there has to be a default in "one direction or the other" is clearly wrong, as you've indicated. I would still argue that a null value is arbitrary and does not map to the user's wishes. My opinion is that having it 'on' is no more or less arbitrary than having no wishes expressed.
Is Nexus 7 the first hardware of choice for Ubuntu developers?

I would love for them to start with Microsoft Surface (with keyboard as standard in some models it would kinda be the logical choice) but I understand that Nexus is a) earlier b) cheaper c) you have to start with something.

Right?
I don't think this approach would scale, due to the time investment required. It also suffers from making it hard to compare one candidate to another in a fair way, unless you have everyone fix the same bugs. Having a bunch of canned bugs to be fixed doesn't seem much better than asking a CS puzzle.
I saw that kickstarter team page and it reminded me of the standard hotel's website.

I think they have 3 sets of videos for morning, noon and night that correspond to the location's time. It's pretty fun.
it's also a very useful feature of the internet, that browser's like safari 6 have broken. there are other uses to third party cookies besides tracking - a/b testing. many web properties are shared between multiple top level domains. ecommerce sites will do this for example to sell different product lines, but they might want to have similar user preferences shared between the top level domains... you can't do that if you kill third party cookies... or block the same features that we'd use in ad networks to track you... IE10 isn't so bad it's just saying don't do this... so - we'll happily ignore it. safari 6 is the real story that hasn't gotten enough attention in comparison... thankful it's not as widely used or is it... iphone,ipad...
It's a bit weird to argue that Next failed because its technology didn't live up to its marketing. On the contrary, its technology was excellent but there was no product-market fit. In other words, Next's failure was in marketing, not in engineering.
> Recently, Microsoft unilaterally decided to turn on DNT in Internet Explorer 10 by default, rather than at users’ direction.

> It basically means that the DNT signal from IE10 doesn’t express user intent.

Blatantly false. Not only are you presented with the option to turn off DNT on first use (that takes up the entire screen), but I'd imagine users would choose to have advertisers track them about 1-10% of the time if made to choose. So a default On setting does represent the consumer to a degree that you can't ignore.
> "We're only going to support it if it's not turned on by default"

No, they are only going to support it if it is _actually_ the users intent, not a vendors intent. This is completely reasonable and the actions of MS are undermining the efforts to get this voluntary standard going. Keep in mind, DNT is completely voluntary.
My opinion is that _any_ setting that has not been chosen by the user is arbitrary. I understand your opinion, however.
It's fallen empire syndrome. Britain had the largest empire in world history, and lost it within living memory, so they would suffer from it the most.
> I would still argue that a null value is arbitrary and does not map to the user's wishes.

It's not arbitrary though, it clearly spells out that the browser vendor doesn't know what the users intent it.
A passionate workplace full of young, attractive people. I'm sad to say that I've nearly forgotten such a place could exist.
In pro audio there's usually a meter you can watch, or at least a clip LED that turns red during clipping. Otherwise you use your ears, or if you're really serious, you can use an oscilloscope with test tones and watch for the shape of the waveform to change, or beyond that, you can use dedicated test gear (or software) that measures THD directly.
I thought Linear Algebra was the easiest math-class?
I use Arq to backup files on my MacBook - it saves them to my S3 bucket, so even if everyone working on Arq dies (I sincerely hope they don't!) and their servers all explode, my backups are still intact on S3 - which is less likely to go down permanently and lose all my files than Tarsnap (not that that is particularly likely either!).
0 byte files are not necessarily a sign of a bug. There are many cases where you, or the tools you use, may intentionally create 0 byte files which would appear in DropBox. There is a problem only if you see empty files which you expected to contain data.
One could also argue that Microsoft is not being pragmatic in expecting these companies to continue to honour it if it is on by default. At least when it is off by default, it will be honoured if a user opts to turn it on.
I agree that the store process is not great in providing feedback - however several of the problems mentioned could have been mitigated by good practice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_(contemporary_subcultur...
3.6 Million Tax Payers Exposed in South Carolina Cyberattack
That's a nice play on the "What are you biggest strengths and weaknesses" interview question, in reverse. The only problem with that -- as we've been conditioned over the years of being asked this stupid question -- is to list a strength as a weakness (http://jobsearch.about.com/od/interviewquestionsanswers/qt/w...) so you don't actually get much meaningful information (other than maybe subtle red flags, like "stability" or "benefits are good", as someone mentioned).
Yet somehow software developers are quick to screech that users agreed to 'license agreements' that have the same weight, right? (Words on a screen that everyone just 'clicks through blindly'.)

You can't have it both ways. Either having something show up and clicking next manifests consent or it doesn't. IE is extremely clear that DNT will be turned on and lets you opt out of doing so. Users are expressing intent by using the default settings; it isn't like it's a hidden default that they don't tell anyone about.
Apple's investment manager wrestles with $120bn problem
But Einstein is sufficient to represent science? He's not even sufficient to represent physics.

BTW, who is McCartey? Did you mean John McCarthy?
I second this request. That is impressive!
It seems like anything like this should try to educate users about appropriate open-source licenses, and make license selection a highly-visible step in the upload process. It would be a shame if a community like this were plagued by the kinds of issues that eg. game mod communities suffer from due to unclear licensing status.

And they definitely need to make a clear statement about what rights the site gets and what rights the uploader retains.
I think it is perfectly reasonable to assume that users intend to not be tracked by the very large number of third parties they are involuntarily exposed to on the web.

Yahoo are resorting to this whole buzzword-laden meaningless rhetoric around ~user experience~ and ~value proposition~. That just reinforces the impression that the only reason anyone was prepared to go along with DNT was that they assumed that 99% of users weren't going to be in a position to express their ~user intent~ to not be tracked. Since, you know, most people have better things to do than to learn how to teach their computer about obvious preferences like "please don't spy on me".

Microsoft is simply making the benefits of the DNT scheme more accessible to its users. It's pretty telling that Yahoo is already backpedaling from respecting the users' intent, faced with the possibility that more than an insignificant fraction of users might actually be enabled to benefit from DNT by this decision.

(Edit: Personally I think rather than squabbling about DNT, browser vendors should be taking much more aggressive, technical steps to make tracking users harder, instead of having a default configuration that stops just short of transmitting the user's SSN via request header. Disabling features like user agent and referer headers for and quickly discarding cookies from untrusted (by individual user "intent", not based on SSL certs or anything) hosts would be a start.)
Great work!

Might I offer a suggestion? I would argue that most of the work that goes into a compiler is not the front-end functionality but rather the "middle-" and back-end functionality, i.e. making the generated code fast. It would be very insightful to those outside the compilers community as to what it's actually like to work on one to go over the basic optimizations, such as global data-flow analysis (reaching definitions, live variables, partial redundancy elimination, constant propagation, etc.), loop unrolling, and so on.
Again, fair point - but then by definition the second clause of my statement is correct - the user's wishes are unknown, so any direction taken is then... arbitrary? :)

At any rate, you seem well-versed in this area, so let me ask you a question: what is the difference the website's behavior between a "null" and a "track me, please" value in the header?
This comment is pretty irrelevant to the question of DNT defaults.
MS clearly tried to kill(intentionally or stupidly, idk) the whole DNT thing and those fools were celebrating it.
One could just as easily argue that a user should only be tracked if it's their explicit intent to be tracked, in which case DNT should be on unless the user turns it off. That makes more sense to me, and I think a lot of people would agree. Obviously, Microsoft thinks that should be the case.
Still waiting for that iTunes client for Android...
Introducing the Windows 8 Challenge
I left this as a comment on their blog which I assume will never be approved:

"We fundamentally believe that the online
experience is better when it is personalized"

Um, doing so is not impeded by DNT as that does not relate to ads. That a bit of a white-lie to imply that it is they way you've worded that first paragraph.

"It basically means that the DNT signal
from IE10 doesn’t express user intent."

Actually I think it does - you think your average person on the street wants targeted ads? Seriously - who is writing this.

"In principle, we support “Do Not Track” (DNT)"

In principle China, Syria, Iran etc support Human Rights...

"Ultimately, we believe that DNT must map to
user intent — not to the intent of one
browser creator, plug-in writer, or third-
party software service."

Again - seriously - what reality are you apart of?

I had hoped for a Yahoo turn-around of sorts, I really did. You've lost me.
Advertising companies can be shameless. What makes you think they ever would have respected DNT even if was opt-out?
Rob Pike: Go at Google
Issue aside, I'm curious about this site itself. The first thing I noticed is that they're running a pretty old version of WordPress. They're on 3.0.3 (December 2010) when the latest version is 3.4.2. For security purposes, I'm surprised they don't stay on top of that.

Also I was really confused if this was an official Yahoo site. No real mention anywhere on it. After some quick digging, it appears to be. But I'm surprised it's not hosted under the Yahoo.com domain somewhere.
Have you ever lived somewhere other than the United States? They are in fact a theoretical concept in many places.

Services like netflix, spotify and pandora are also just as rare and they usually have extremely reduced libraries outside the States.
Hrm, I can see where the confusion is. Actually, on the sidebar of each project, you can see that the projects are creative commons.

The "All right reserved" is for Cubehero itself, not the projects hosted on it. I actually took the lead from Github, as they also have "all rights reserved" at the bottom of their website as well, even though they don't lay claim to the projects hosted on their site (AFAIK).

It wouldn't make sense for me to own what you upload. I want to provide something useful to people, not to Own All The Things.

What would make it more clear when you're looking at the project? Bigger license badge?
I think this is an interesting one, I might make a distinction between studying and preparing. Working through some interview questions as an exercise in intentional practice provides a different type of preparedness from trying to cram CS theory that you don't truly grok. I think that the former helps you manage the unfamiliar interview scenario better, the latter can lead to you digging huge holes when you start talking about something that you don't know much about.

There is also a difference between an experienced industry hire - as you say, if you've been doing this for 10 years you can go into an interview and show them a pretty good picture of what they are getting - and a less experienced or campus hire, where what is important might be an expression of potential - the practice helps with letting the interviewer see that, if your interview is the first time you've tried to code at a whiteboard, or solve a problem with someone trying to push you to the edge of your comfort zone, then you are doing yourself a disservice.

I have, however, encountered candidates who just didn't know, they didn't go to a top school (or indeed any school), they haven't worked in this environment, they don't have any understanding of what to expect - even the simple web-search that would have warned them requires some level of a priori knowledge - not every candidate has that - I suspect most of these candidates do badly, but just watching how someone learns through a day of interviews tells you something, that higher level bit about learning when in over your head is one of the most valuable.
What the hell? Seriously, what. Why? Why not use a token? Oh if only there were already protocols written to handle identity and access auth.
Project mObi - 21st century personal robotics platform
"that they missed their deadline" <- For the belated record, when I said "they" in this phrase I meant "the copyright office" (not the EFF, for example).
What method are they using to determine if it's _actually_ the user's intent?
I have a hard time believing MS is doing this for their users benefit. It seems much more likely they think this will hurt Google.
I believe it is far too early to be asking this question. Not only are there very few developers who have apps in the app store, but the platform was just released yesterday, so a tiny number of consumers have access to the app store.

I suspect we'll start seeing some numbers in about a month regarding Windows 8 installs, and then we'll start getting a very early idea of what percentage of consumers are downloading apps from the windows store.

I don't think it's a guarantee that windows users will download and pay for apps in the same way that in the early days of android, the store wasn't very lucrative, but I believe as android has improved and become the platform of choice for many, they are not comfortable paying for apps.
I'm using the latest Chrome Canary with the default Ghostery settings. The site looked fine once I temporarily disabled the plugin.
Awesome Kickstarter (Embedded) projects, expiring now, almost there
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone (expiring in 21 hours, almost there)

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/18182218/freesoc-and-freesoc-mini (expiring in 1.5 hours, already kicked)

And plugging my friend's project about ancient politics, a nontheistic Jesus, and the kung fu 3 wise men: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dfko/three-sovereigns-ancient-syncretic-silk-road-wuxia
Doesn't that make sense? If someone doesn't care enough to go in and turn on DNT, why does it matter if they're tracked? The default should obviously be 'null', that's the most equitable choice for all parties involved.
It's not binary, it's ternary. 1 opt out, 0 opt in, null unknown choice.

In practice the difference between null and don't track me please are probably non existent. However, in the future if this were to take off it's possible that someone would come up with creative benefits/uses for tracking that provide incentive for users to be tracked.

edit: Don't think I addressed your question. The difference between null or tracking ok and don't track are likely just to be generic advertisements shown to a user instead of targeted ads, the prevention of some back end selling of user interaction data and some other things that most people have no idea is going on. If you can't track users across sites you lose some of your ability to build up profiles for them. Advertisers will argue that the ads will have significantly less value without those secondary or tertiary ways to monetize eyeballs and I suppose you could see some decline in what advertisers are willing to pay for impressions. Ultimately I've been removed from advertising for a few years so I'm not entirely sure how much it will make a difference.
Apply for Linux Steam Beta
Indeed, the Turing Test is far from perfect. The value I see in it is taht as far as a tool to assist ethical decisions, I have yet to hear of a better alternative. (The necessity of such a tool is, at this point, hypothetical. However I think it is important to have one in the event that it ever becomes necessary in reality).
On the other hand, for an overwhelming majority of people "being apprehensive about the big GUI changes in Windows 8" means sticking to Windows 7 (or even Window XP), not switching to Linux...

That said Steam on Linux cannot be a bad thing, I think it helped bringing quite a lot of games to OSX as stated elsewhere in this thread. The bad news is that most of the times it means Cider (http://transgaming.com/cider), so the result pale in comparison to rebooting on Windows. I expect the same to happen on Linux: many ports using Wine...
Maybe Yahoo should respect IE10's DNT defaults, but display huge modal screens that tell the user "Your browser vendor is inhibiting our value proposition. Please allow us to track your behavior for maximum value extraction."
They already know they're on to something. If Gabe's worst nightmares about Windows come true, Linux will be his only refuge.
True, but laws such as mail fraud, tax evasion, and racketeering are designed to be general enough to catch fraudsters and mobsters who can't be prosecuted under a specific law or are too skilled at hiding their crimes.

The famous mob boss Al Capone was only ever convicted of tax evasion and served 11 years in Alcatraz for that.