skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>But really, how stable is that policy in the face of changing corporate owners, changing political administration (romney?), changing supreme court justices, changing geopolitics?

That's a valid point, but a few things reassure me. Firstly that confidentiality cert from DHHS probably isn't going to be made useless by a political entity any time soon (and I'd assume, though would need to research, that such a cert would also apply to any buyers should 23AM get picked up by someone else, and probably carries some requirements for them as well)

Even then, I doubt within the next 60 or so years left on my lifespan that there will be any shenanigans in that area... and after I'm gone, they can do whatever the hell they want with my sequence :)

I'd imagine that, given enough time and cost reduction, services like this will become nationalized, where your genome is sequenced at birth for identity and health purposes.
Apple was created my making devices on breadboards, that doesn't mean that the next Google/Apple/Microsoft will be able to do the same thing. Times have changed, the barriers to entry are slightly higher. $1MM to seed a company, that's the minimum... unless you are only interested in infantile businesses like glorified classified ads, crappy thow-away games, or one-trick pony "cloud" services... $80k doesn't even get you a hot dog stand!
> All DRM is a non-solution really.

I know that by now it's tradition to say this, but can we please stop?

It seems to be that a law of life is 'everything dies'. Is medicine therefore useless? Are all the people who spend money for nothing but delaying the inevitable getting ripped off?

We all admit perfect security is impossible. Yes, you're right! Controlling the spread of information is a very hard problem. Yes, you're right! It would be very nice if the things I want to watch and listen to were made freely available by their creators.

But no, you're wrong. DRM has a purpose, and it can be successful even without perfectly achieving its goals. People tend to avoid effort, and if you can make pirating content more difficult than obtaining it legitimately, most people will obtain it legitimately.

There is no fundamental reason why information deserves to be free, it's just easier to copy than physical things.
Get feedback for your startup with an ugly site
I did this once: http://github.com/charliesome/jsos
vavb: you appear to be hellbanned

I am from the US, and that is certainly not the case here. Contracts of adhesion are relatively weak here.
Well this just shows how little you know about deployments.

Using something like Hudson/Jenkins can make deployments simple borderline trivial and EC2 supports ElasticBeanstalk which makes deployments a breeze.
"Just a few bytes of brilliance"

Actually, 13 of them.
Well this was also a different time. You can hardly expect the early 1900s relationships between men and women to be on the same ground as the early 2000s ones. The world has (culturally) changed a lot since then. Do not judge people from the past with today's eyes.
I see this as a direct boost of confidence to Khanacademy, MITX, and the likes.
I have exactly the same question. In attempt to answer it, I did a cursory search for job listings for "university dean" on monster.[1] While there are better places to search, this seemed like a good place to start.

The first result for a "Dean of the University College and Library" in Ft. Lauderdale.[2] You can read it, but it seems to boil down to:

1. Ability to communicate.

2. Previous management experience.

3. Knowledge of finance (for budgeting).

4. Knowledge of libraries, and technology.

But actually I find this exercise too depressing, so I will stop here.

1 http://jobsearch.monster.com/search/university-dean_5

2 http://jobview.monster.com/DEAN-UNIVERSITY-COLLEGE-LIBRARY-J...

Edit: this one looks good, too: http://jobview.monster.com/Associate-Dean-Academic-Affairs-J...
What would you say the ratio is, of all the data the NSA has vs. all the data WikiLeaks has published?
Ask HN: Examples of startups where engineers design the UX
My experience as both an engineer and designer is that optimal UX is best achieved by having someone who can both design and code - not from someone whose only output is wireframes and diagrams or PSDs.

Essentially, I've witnessed the horrible UX created by "product designers" and every startup I've worked for has never clearly delineated UX responsibilities.

Are there examples of startups where the engineers do the UX? I'm really interested in the different ways various web startups manage and delegate responsibility regarding UX?
I prefer to believe this was the minimum viable product for the DRM market.
What the hell? That implies someone who can't implement security themselves was tasked with the design of said security. Actually, that sounds about right ..
And I also don't have the skills to make an OS. Yet, in school I'm making a simple one.

That's how you learn. If I had the skills, what would be the point of the exercise?
Black Friday Report 2012
I actually think the app is pretty well made; I didn't notice too many of the problems that the other people are critiquing when viewed on my iPhone 5.

Having said that, the bigger question is: why do all that custom work when you can make a native one much quicker and more easily?

I think what this app shows is the lack of a HTML5 framework to quickly put together mobile apps that feel native the way you can with the iOS SDK or Android SDK. In the HTML5 world there are a lot of frameworks and libraries to create a mobile website, but there isn't one that lets you make a native-feeling web app. There are a lot of disparate pieces addressing different issues (PhoneGap/Titanium for native app launching, Bootstrap/Foundation for UI controls, fastclick implementation for faster tap response times, removing the URL header, hiding browser scroll bars, ...).
No, it's not a snarl term. It's very real.

When dealing win an array is 400 times slower in a "modern OO language" then in raw C, well, the code id fucking bloated.

When you can use a simple data structure and some code to solve a problem and, instead, write an object with a pile of properties and methods because, well, that's all you know, that's bloated code.

Of course there are lots of places where OO makes absolute sense. And the fat and slow code is the compromise you might have to make. That's the way it goes.

With regards to my GA example. No, I had to implement a GA. That's what was required to even attempt to solve the problem at hand. Later on we used it to train a NN, which made the ultimate solution faster. But, the GA was required. There was no way around it and Objective-C was such a an absolute pig at it that it made it unusable.

> Simply picking a new language is laziness

See, there's the difference. I started programming at a very low level and have experienced programming languages and approaches above that, from C, to C++, Forth, Lisp, APL, Python, Java, etc.

I have even done extensive hardware design with reconfigurable hardware like PLD, PLA's and FPGA's using Verilog/VHDL. I have designed my own DDR memory controllers as well as raw-mode driver controllers and written all of the driver software for the required embedded system. My last design was a combination embedded DSP and FPGA that processed high resolution image data in real time at a rate of approximately SIX BILLION bytes per second.

So, yes, I am an idiot and make really fucking dumb suggestions.

Because of that I would like to think that, if the choice exists --and very often it does not-- I do my best to pick the best tool for the job.

More often than not, when it's pedal-to-the-metal time C is the most sensible choice. It used to be that you had to get down to assembler to really optimize things, but these days you can get a way with a lot if C is used smartly.
Dripping nourishing soap water on the thinning surface of the higher education bubble.
Except that these videos are playing on your local machine. With the most advanced DRM mechanism possible it is nearly as trivial to simply record the video output.

There is no reason to spend developer time making a complex mechanism that is no more secure than a simple xor.
"and a US citizen (born in Denver) "

I've never understood the emphasis on this point.

You're either for or against drone attacks on presumed terrorists, I can't understand how US citizenship plays any role in it. If his father was involved in terrorism and you think drone strikes are OK, why would you have extra sympathy for him because he's a US citizen?

I don't think the US citizen aspect is worth mentioning, in fact I think it just makes people who are against drones seem a little unhinged. By the way I am against the use of drones (on Americans or otherwise).
Do note that he said nearly impossible...
e=3 is fine, so long as you remember to pad...
Maybe I am missing something but since when was Einstein considered as a "popular folk hero" ? I have never heard of him portrayed as anything but a renowned scientist (with controversial political views).
And they say education needs more money. Not when so much of it goes to waste like this, it doesn't. If they audited every school from top to bottom, they'd probably save at least 50% of what those schools are getting right now.
A landmine doesn't recognize friend/foe. Robots are better.
I think you misunderstand. I wasn't asking why Unicode characters should be counted instead of bytes or ASCII characters, I was asking why you would even want to count characters at all.

> I fucking hate you ascii-centric ignorant morons

Nice.

> You ignorant, arrogant fuck.

This is why I quit posting under an alias, so I wouldn't be tempted to say such things.

> display welcome message character by character fro left to right

UTF-16/UCS-4/UCS-2 doesn't solve anything here. Counting characters doesn't help. For example, imagine if you try to print Korean character-by-character. You might get some garbage like this:

ᄋ
아
안
안ᄂ
안녀
안녕
안녕ᄒ
안녕하
안녕하ᄉ
안녕하세
안녕하세ᄋ
안녕하세요

Fixed width encodings do not solve this problem, and UTF-8 does not make this problem more difficult. I am honestly curious why you would need to count characters -- at all -- except for posting to Twitter.

Splitting on characters is garbage. (This example was done in Python 3, so everything is properly encoded, and there is no need to use the 'u' prefix. The 'u' prefix is a nop in Python 3. It is only there for Python 2.x compatibility.)

>>> x
'안녕하세요'
>>> x[2:4]
'ᆫᄂ'

I tried in the Google Chrome console, too:

> '안녕하세요'.substr(2,2)
"하세"
> '안녕하세요'.substr(2,2)
"ᆫᄂ"

I'm not even leaving the BMP and it's broken! You seem to be blaming encoding issues but I don't have any issues with encoding. It doesn't matter if Chrome uses UCS-2 or Python uses UCS-4 or UCS-2, what's happening here is entirely expected, and it has everything to do with Jamo and nothing to do with encodings.

>>> a = '안녕하세요'
>>> b = '안녕하세요'
# They only look the same
>>> len(a)
5
>>> len(b)
12
>>> def p(x):
... return ' '.join(
'U+{:04X}'.format(ord(c)) for c in x)

>>> print(' '.join('U+{:04X}'.format(ord(c))
for c in b))
>>> print(p(a))
U+C548 U+B155 U+D558 U+C138 U+C694
>>> print(p(b))
U+110B U+1161 U+11AB U+1102 U+1167 U+11BC U+1112 U+1161 U+1109 U+1166 U+110B U+116D

See? Expected, broken behavior you get when splitting on character boundaries.

If you think you can split on character boundaries, you are living in an ASCII world. Unicode does not work that way. Don't think that normalization will solve anything either. (Okay, normalization solves some problems. But it is not a panacea. Some languages have grapheme clusters that cannot be precomposed.)

Fixed-width may be faster for splitting on character boundaries, but splitting on character boundaries only works in the ASCII world.
Killfiles probably wouldn't solve that specific problem But I think they might be more equitable. Maybe if users could spend karma to upvote them out of a hellban?
How is that supposed to help? Official responsibilities for Deans (which are hardly the only administrators who have been ballooning anyhow) probably haven't changed in the last 16 years, but somehow the work field has. Therefore, such a search is highly unlikely to produce any answers to my questions.

Less snark, more thought please.
A cool new game that uses ordinary playing cards
Heroku employee here, don't abuse the free. It's there for a design/prototyping/staging and as long as people don't abuse it will stay that way.
I would avoid the project unless you truly understand the scope of what you're doing and are dying to get your hands dirty with vm and filesys implementation despite little reward (other than the satisfaction of learning). OS dev is quite low level and infamously hard to debug
How do those prices compare to the UK pricing for the same SKUs of Windows 7? Do you get the discounted Win8 upgrade deal there too?
They're honestly not doing much at all. These are quite cushy positions. Work usually gets sloshed around and offloaded onto staff who make much less but work much more.

For example, at my public law school (1,000 students), there was the dean (who many suspected had an alcohol problem and appeared drunk at commencement) who makes $330,000 per year. His job is to just go around the country/world selling the school to "recruit" (we don't actually need more faculty) in order to boost our "prestige" so we can climb up in the almighty US News rankings. He doesn't engage with faculty or students at all.

Then below him is another Dean, who is a prick. He makes something like $280,000 and also doesn't do much at all. He is also a "recruiter." At least he answers emails when you have a question.

Then there are other Deans, like Dean of "Student Affairs." She makes $130,000. Mind you this is just for a law school of 1,000 students situated on a larger university campus that will have its own Dean of Student Affairs as well. I have no idea what she does. She does get dressed up every day in fashionable clothes and walk around the building chatting up people. That's all I ever saw her do.

Below that is the "Director of Student Services" or something like that. This guy works his ass off, has a mediocre basement office, but literally runs the school. What does he earn? $80,000. Anytime anyone had a question, they had to go to him. After exams, he gets a pile of USB keys, one for each exam. Takes each grade for each class and logs it, curves the grades, reports them, etc.

It's all a big scam. A big one. Tuition at this school has risen every year -- they want to build a new building (Why does a law school need a fancy building? All you need is a room and a professor). They think it will boost their "ranking." Nevermind that "ranking" doesn't do anything for the local job market, which is still stagnant, and every year new graduates enter it looking for work to pay their $150,000 in loans (at 8% interest, non-dischargeable).

This school isn't even that bad compared to the other law schools out there, namely the private ones. Even a top school like Columbia states on its own site that students will spend $250,000 for their law degree (this includes a conservative housing budget).

The only thing more mind blowing than the scam itself is that we all sit around and don't seem to care as these people eat our young alive. In fact, they worship these institutions. It's their "alma mater," after all, it's like family, isn't it? Some even DONATE to them! The federal government enables the scam by flooding the industry with easily obtained credit, with no restrictions on tuition charged, and even letting for-profit "schools" get the money if they want.

This is a racket that is in big need of disruption. Where does it start? Perception. Once we stop perceiving these degrees as meaning anything, once we stop valuing prestigious names as absolutely required, and look more at individuals themselves when hiring, the racket will die.
Really? Do you work on your own car? Is it because you think you aren't smart enough to do it or because you think that spending your time on other efforts is a more valuable configuration?

AWS is the electric company. Heroku tends to be the circuitry, outlets and light switches for your house. You may take it for granted because it looks so simple, but it's the simplicity that makes it great.

As PaaS providers begin to mature and turn attention to more worthy challenges (like geo-agnostic deployments, easier scaling, for example), then their value is only going to increase.
Which begs the question of what a freaking moron Knuth must be to have presented TAOCP in terms of assembly language.
Could you not have communicated your examples without the hostility?
This works:

https://www.23andme.com/special_offer/49NOV2012/
Thanks for the feedback! will few more lines to explain.
interesting article, Neal.
The author here. You bring up a very good point. The caveats will be different for all different devices. And this does depend on a very deep knowledge of HTML5 hacks and tricks as well as a lot of experimentation.

Have you considered titanium appcellerator for your project?
Fundraising, or managing the primadonna tenured professors.
As the resident Serb here I should point out a Wikipedia page on Mileva Maric who was a brilliant scientific mind in her own right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mileva_Maric
There are even some theories that she helped him early on in his career although there is no strong evidence to support that theory. As part of the divorce agreement Einstein made with Mileva, his Nobel Prize money was transferred to her and in trust for their two sons.
A simple and clean ios toolchain based on llvm/clang under linux
Right, I was not disrespecting Heroku in any way - I truly do not know what product they sell. That being said, great analogy.
I would urge you to really think that statement through. Are you proposing that writing all the drivers and low-level code that already exists is trivial? I don't think you are. What, then, is bringing up an OS on a desktop platform?

Writing some kind of a minimalist hobby OS on top of the huge body of work that is represented by the drivers and code that serve to wake up the machine is very different from having to start from scratch.

My original comment has nothing whatsoever to do with anything other than the originally linked blog post which describes almost literally starting from scratch, ignoring decades of wisdom and re-writing everything. That is simply not reasonable for someone who's experience is limited to doing web coding and dabbling with C for hobby projects. In that context, just writing the PCI driver code is an almost insurmountable task.

If I were advising this fellow I'd suggest that he study and try to implement the simplest of OS's on a small embedded development board. This cuts through all the crud. Then, if he survives that, I might suggest that he moves on to Tanenbaum's book and take the time to implement all of that. Again, in the context of a working web professional, that's easily a year or more of work.

After that --with far more knowledge at hand-- I might suggest that he start to now ask the right questions and create a list of modifications for the product that came out of the book.

Far, very, very far from the above is the idea of starting with a completely blank slate and rolling a new OS that takes advantage of nearly nothing from prior generations of OS's. And to do that all by himself.
How PRWeb Helps Distribute Crap Into Google & News Sites
As alluded to in the post, I think that the 80k/startup rule is probably not a good one either.

80k might not be enough and "doing more with less" can just as often lead to failure. Case in point is the recent post about the lean startup that only provided the minimum viable product (MVP), but failed to really provide what was needed. If pressure is put on startups to provide a product faster for less, then less of a product will be provided. Granted, YC will provide more support and try not to let such things happen.

I think the funding should be decided on a case-by-case basis instead. Possibly more funding could be given to those with a better idea that have greater need through some sort of point system, and either provide a range of funding from 40-120k without requiring more from the VC's, or provide 80-150k if the VC's are able.
> If his father was involved in terrorism and you think drone strikes are OK, why would you have extra sympathy for him because he's a US citizen?

As of April 2010, the open, stated objective of the CIA was to kill Aulaqi's father (and others on President Obama's "hit list") and, if and only if he could not be killed, to arrest him, charge him formally, and bring him to trial.

In other words, "if we can kill him, we don't have to prove he was actually guilty."

I don't support the drone strikes against non-US citizens, but the idea that a single executive can issue capital punishment on a US citizen[1] without a trial is downright unnerving. Imagine if police officers wielded that same level of power - it's no different.

[1] The US Constitution does not provide the same levels of protection to non-Citizens, which is why drone-strikes on foreigners is still disgusting but not as terrifying (from the perspective of a US citizen).
Give him a break? Why? That guy is awesome. Look at him go! "What does the IDT look like? Do I have to fake it up before I switch to protected mode? And are interrupt handlers just C callbacks?"

Here's the thing about all this: those are questions with answers that are straightforward to find, and he is probably going to find them, because he seems totally fearless.

I could never in a million years write a blog post that so forthrightly laid out the stuff I don't know and sort of plaintively said "I'm going to try to figure this stuff out, and in the meantime, I'm putting system configuration under /system/configuration and not /etc". I think I envy him intensely.

Note to people babbling about what a herculean task building an OS is: I started coding as a teenager in the early '90s and multiple friends of mine wrote plausible protected mode operating systems. A basic operating system is not that hard. Going head-to-head with OS X as a one-person project is insanely ambitious, but who cares? By the time that becomes totally apparent to him, he may well be an unstoppable systems programming juggernaut.
Nice to see these spreading to SF! I used to go to the ones in Seattle. You might want to consider creating an event on Meetup, it's tended to work better for us for recurring events like these should hopefully become.
> Counting characters doesn't help.

Why? If you can count characters (code points) then it's natural that you can split or substring by characters.

Try this in javascript:

'안녕하세요'.substr(2,2)

Internally Fixed length encoding is much faster than variable-length encoding.

> Unicode does not work that way.

It DOES.

> Splitting on characters is garbage.

You messed up Unicode in Python in so many levels. Those characters you seen in Python console is, actually not Unicode. These are just bytes in sys stdout that happens be to correctly decoded and properly displayed. You should always use the u'' for any kind of characters. '안녕하세요' is WRONG and may lead to unspecified behaviors, it depends on your source code file encoding, intepreter encoding and sys default encoding, if you display them in console it depends on the console encoding, if it's GUI or HTML widget it depends on the GUI widget or content-type encoding.

> I'm not even leaving the BMP and it's broken!

Your unicode-fu is broken. Looks like your example provided identical Korean strings, which might be ICU module in Chrome auto normalized for you.

> You can't split decomposed Korean on character boundaries.

In a broken unicode implementation, like Chrome browser v8 js engine.

> I happen to be using Python 3. It is internally using UCS-4.

For the love of BDFL read this

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0414/

http://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.3.html
So you genuinely feel that this initial risk has a value of infinity? How is that mathematically viable or honest?
Internal Apple video documents Apple Store philosophy