skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But we can compute the optimal strategy for an abstract version of poker that, for example, during pre-flop betting treats pairs of aces the same way as pairs of kings.

Not a big deal, but the wording of this seems off. It doesn't sound like you're computing the optimal strategy for poker-prime, where poker-prime has the property that in pre-flop betting (but nowhere else?) pocket aces are no more valuable than pocket kings.

Rather it sounds like you're computing a sub-optimal strategy for poker, by taking an optimal strategy and making it computationally simpler at the expense of some correctness.
Sounds like the job of a junior-level developer at Facebook, without the product management oversight of the feature. Whoopsie.
So Wikileak's famed "Anonymity for sources" does not extend to them if they are dead?

Poor show, Wikileaks (assuming the Twitter account poster is in fact associated with Wikileaks).
Which is to say, where you'd say him or her, rather than he or she.

"He, or whoever took that screenshot..."
"Her, or whomever that screenshot was sent to..."
I guess a related question is how do you synchronize a users perception of time with a program's perception of time -- a program that the user is interacting with. To effect this synchronization, you somehow need to know of the latencies involved in the user initiating actions that the program can sense and when those actions register with the program and in (latencies involved with) the program initiating actions that the user can sense and when the user senses those actions.
Sites try, but can fail.

My favorite story was someone playing 120 tables simultaneously, who was verified to be human. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1899310 for discussion on that one.
Its not like you are printing a phone- just a useless case.
In older versions of C that was the only way to declare variables in a function after the first non-declaration statement.
This topic comes up again and again. But I mostly read only about the problems, not about the solutions.

This post advises to use Unix timestamps. That's already what I'm doing mostly everywhere. And it seems to me like most people do and like this is somewhat accepted as the best available option - but still not perfect.

Then I am wondering again: Isn't there really a perfect solution? Esp., the problems with Unix timestamps are the non-monotony and that e.g. two equal timestamps can actually represent two different times (seconds). This could be bad in cases where seconds matter (e.g. some log-files which need to be very precise about time).

Maybe TAI is and we all should store TAI timestamps instead of Unix timestamps? But is there an easy way to get TAI timestamps? Also, I haven't really seen other projects doing this - why? Maybe it is just too little gain over Unix timestamps and too less tools available to work with them... Btw., I just checked, there is http://cr.yp.to/libtai.html and http://pypi.python.org/pypi/tai64n, maybe I should just start using that.

This of course still doesn't solve anything about synchronization or inaccurate system clocks but it would be better than Unix times.

Edit: Getting the TAI timestamp is probably not easy or maybe even not possible... I just saw this: https://github.com/stoni/libtai/blob/master/tai_now.c ...
I don't think it's a terribly bad idea. As someone said above, doing at least some of the technical legwork yourself will buy you a ton of credibility with experienced programmers when you go to hire. It often becomes somewhat insulting to developers when he/she has to argue schedule with someone with no experience. Often the client thinks it should X should take Y long, and you're telling them that X might not even be possible, but you can do X' in 4 or 10 Y. "What do you mean? You must not be as skilled as so-and-so said you are."

However if you've fought even the initial stages of the battle yourself, you understand the idea of the vision, and the reduced scope which is your next step toward the larger goal. Further, we understand that the part of the learning curve you're in right now is the steepest, and if you're willing to endure it you're either stupid or you really do believe in your business.
Politicians rarely read any bill or law that they vote for. Instead they have underlings to do this. Even then it's a problem because they have to wade through the legalese of a 500 page document with constant changes.

For half of their tenure Congress is preparing for re-election. Much of the other time left is meeting with lobbyists who pay enough to their campaign to represent one side of the issue.
Just so I understand this correct, if everyone is only sharing things explicitly with friends or friends of friends, doesn't that render the open social graph search useless?
I think it's quite different for a company to use "creepy details" to deliver targeting advertising than it is to make that information available to the public in an easily discoverable fashion.

Graph Search is really interesting from a data standpoint, but I don't at all see how it's going to mesh with the realities of how people like their data to be managed.
> It's so tempting to keep build quick and sloppy

That's normal when you're starting out. The only reason more experienced developers do not give into this impulse is because they've learned of the consequences through painful experience.

I would recommend looking at the people who contribute to Rails, Ruby and related projects on Github. The core developers will be far too expensive but people who throw some code out every so often (assuming that their pull requests are usually accepted and nobody is shouting at them in the comments) will likely know their stuff and may have reasonable prices.

IRC channels on Freenode such as #ruby and #rubyonrails will likely prove useful too. Look out for people who answer a lot of questions (and get them right). One strategy is to try to design a solution for a feature by yourself, then summarise the design (i.e. show the relevant code snippets) in a Github Gist or pastebin page and ask for feedback. If there are any glaring faults or simply better ways to achieve the result then they will be pointed out to you.
From his twitter feed just now:

"In 3 hours it will be exactly 1 year after the US government destroyed #Megaupload. In 3 hours #Mega will be born."

http://twitter.com/KimDotcom

edit: that'd put Mega online ~10:45am PST
Magazines Use Digital Editions to Ramp Up Pricing
No way am I going to trust my data or my payment info to a man with as many convictions for crimes involving ripping off people as Dotcom has. The only times in his adult life he appears to have not been involved in fraudulent activity is when he has been on parole for prior convictions, and so HAD to refrain from his normal behavior.
Some background would be nice. Wasn't LaTeX notoriously hard to port – to the point that a LateX app for iPad actually ran in an emulator initially [1]. Is this port based on web2c as well?

[1] http://www.litchie.com/?p=419
For over-the-paywall viewing just search via google for "Magazines Use Digital Editions to Ramp Up Pricing"
Thanks for the great PDF. I'm always fascinated how great pipe works in Linux.
Since Unix time does NOT count the leap seconds, it allows the computation of the human-readable time from the Unix time without knowing when the leap seconds occurred. If knowledge of when the leap seconds occurred is required, then those events would need to be available somehow and used, introducing i) more expensive computation ii) difficulty in future-proofing an app since a reliable and updated data source supplying the times of leap seconds is required.
Is Mega[upload] down on its launchdate?
I like this guy, he's beating copyright enforcers at their own game. That's literally DRM the other way around.
$password = str_shuffle((substr(str_shuffle('ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'),0,3).substr(str_shuffle('abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'),0,3).substr(str_shuffle('0123456789'),0,2).substr(str_shuffle('!@#$'),0,2)));
With that it will always contain 3 capital letters, 3 lower case letters, 2 numbers, and 2 punctuation.
Ki(ng)m Mega is down.............. Oops - 404...n0t found
I don't think what I've laid out is unrealistic. I'm young that's true. Though I still hope that in 20 years I have a job that I love and want to spend a lot of time at. I might also have other things I want to spend time on, but I don't want to sacrifice in my work situation in order to do that (which I interpret freelancing to be). Hopefully I'll be careful enough not to have kids without significant savings (though I currently don't think kids are a great deal bang for your buck (time, commitment, opportunity cost) :) )
Well in your case a fine and paying for damages. Repeat offenses maybe could constitute jail time. But wouldn't non violent crimes be better served by keeping the person out of the prison system with hardened criminals, further preventing a life of crime. In the end, is that better for taxes and society in general? I don't have all the answers, but in many cases prison for non-violent crimes (i.e. this JSTOR case or drug cases) are misguided and perpetuate the problem. Would you be happy if that person that stole your car was a first time offender and later found out he got caught up in a gang in prison and entered a life of crime? Or would you just collect your insurance, buy another car, and hope that there is some non-violent offender programs that could stop that, or that over time he could repay that to insurance? We have to change that I believe, or we can expect many more situations like the recent events. I hate even talking about the private prison system we have here that profits off of incarceration of non-violent crimes.

In Swartz's case, putting someone in prison that is contributing to society in exchange for locking them up for 30+k per year seems completely backwards, cruel and ancient thinking. A system that can create larger criminals easily from imprisonment of minor or non-violent actions. We should at least differentiate them better.
Two key points I feel I should make:

1. Decoupled aiming with a Razer hydra or something is the first thing pretty much everyone who pre-ordered a Rift devkit plans to implement.

2. While the resolution is low, it is still an early prototype. Top of the feature list for the commercial version is; higher resolution screen.
>Yes, we should try to stop suicide. So why not listen to the professionals & experienced?

Because general-purpose advice doesn't always fit specific circumstances. I look at it as taking the long view or the short view: If we talk about this now we may increase the risk of copycats in the short term, but fix it and indefinitely on from that point the justice system is no longer putting so much pressure on its victims that so many become a suicide risk, to say nothing of rectifying the real injustices against the accused who are only pushed up to the line but not over it. It's cold math but that's the way it is.
and you never get a random beautiful girl's email address straight away, peter.
Brad Feld tells us his tale as a VC
Simultaneous raids are well within the capability of US law enforcement, even overseas.
This is going to get a of lot startups worried

I find it really silly that a startup wouldn't be worried to begin with. Think about this for a second: building a network effect is extremely hard. Extremely hard = lots of time = lots of money. All of the sudden, a company (like Facebook) is giving away access to their massive identity database away FOR FREE. Let me rephrase, they are giving away something they've spent massive amounts of money to create for free.

If someone can't compute that, then I feel no sympathy for your startup that goes tits up.
This question gets asked alot. I've never seen a good answer.

The only good reason I've seen for teaching a child programming is that the child is interested in it...and that tends to be several orders of magnitude less common than a parent who wants to teach their child programming.
Are you a product/analytics/operations/little-bit'o-everything type?
I see your legalistic approach to MIT's responsibilities, but this fascination with "endorsement" is missing the point. Universities are not government labs, where you'd expect every participant to clear every activity with their superiors. Research doesn't work that way. And if universities do not stick up for exploration, who will?

Was MIT obligated to defend this fellow? No. Should it have defended him? Most definitely.
One thing you should know is,
the search has become more easy rather than typing some name in search and selecting "education,location,workplace".
SO, the search i believe has now been turned out more like ruby syntax.
Why can't you use intervals in a smart way? Single number is the easiest and fastest method to use for intervals.

The only true problem with storing unix time is leap seconds and relativistic effects, which can both be safely ignored for most time keeping usages.
It is not bad publicity at all. In fact he has, despite his problematic past, shown the strongest commitment possible to his clients. He could have sold or left Megaupload long before things came down. He could have left the Mega idea behind and put his focus and money towards saver ventures. But instead he continues to stay dedicated to the cause he is fighting for.

Showing that you are willing to fight for your cause, despite having powerful enemies, and sticking to your mission even after your company, your home and your private life have been raided, demonstrates integrity. And integrity is probably the best publicity you can get - especially when operating in controversial industries.

I personally would love to see a Mega incubator that fosters an environment of similar challenging ideas (for example building on Mega's in-browser encryption).
Posted 9 hours before this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5082809
Linux users can use Dropbox + encfs. But I wouldn't mind having an extra encryption layer, and 50GB for free =p
Pointlessly awesome. Care to describe why it would make sense to run LaTeX on JS?
The other reason to choose projects that appear to have a decent chance of success is that the longer the project goes, the more work you'll have without having to go through the hassle of finding a new client, vetting their idea, doing the contract back and forth, doing the negotiating, and establishing a good working relationship.

There is also the excellent resume and street cred of working on a successful startup, possibly with name recognition, vs a 'failed' one.
I'd be willing to bet good money the Rift is considerably lighter than the HMD you describe using!

If you really cant see the potential of VR finally being technically possible then I feel bad for you son :(
Posted 1 hour before this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5082809
This part of the document isn't rendered correctly in the resulting pdf:

In printing, text is usually emphasized with an
\emph{italic}
type style.

In my pdf it looks like the every other letter, starting with the first, is missing from the word italic. It looks like " t l c ". Maybe something is wrong with the fonts. I'm using the latest Chrome on OSX.
Posted 3 hours before this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5082809
Only newbie founders are equity rich.

Smart, experienced founders would rather spend money than equity on anything other than a top quality cofounder.
Brilliant! this opens up for collaborative LaTex files generation online.
NCTA's Powell: Usage-Based Pricing About Fairness, Not Capacity
No need to get all riled up about it. It's just a heads-up, don't follow the advice in this article if you're working on something that needs to deal with time on the seconds level.

Obviously you don't need to go trough all that trouble if you simply want to display the date you published a post on your blog.
Are you deliberately spamming this board with FUD ?

spring-beans and spring-core are the fundamental building blocks of most Java EE applications and using them in no way causes the aforementioned vulnerability.

The only case that causes this vulnerability is when a JSP page contains this code :
<spring:message text="" code="${param['message']}"></spring:message>
Any admin can run fgrep or equivalent on all jsps to see if they contain this text
<spring:message text="" code="${param
how are you seeing the page?
I don't think that's true, especially in the last years. Quite the opposite. Every product launch is surrounded by a "Why this will fail" article and every single problem with a product gets magnified to extreme lengths. Apple doesn't get hype anymore or at least it doesn't get the positive hype people tend to associate with the company.

Regarding the topic. Hey, feel free to to comment what you you want about the article, thats what comments are for. This is a side topic on this case. I think it's a good observation. Of course this is not what the case is about but its a related item and therefore it seems logical to bring it up.
Does it matter? Your point of view seems to be that unless a politician shares your every point of view then you can't agree with them on any issue. Seems like a good way to never accomplish anything.
Oh, common. Encrypted online storage is nothing new, period. It's the proudly extended middle finger that makes all the difference.
You could be right. I don't know which was my point. There are many who want turn turn Aaron's death into a movement.

I just want to get the story straight to know where I stand.
Yup, had to wait a bit, then enable popups from GitHub [Iceweasel 10.0.12, Debian Wheezy].

Would a download button appearing when the pdf has compiled be harder to do?

Nice demo
If Microsoft was a B2C company, the article would be spot on. They are not, however, Apple. They are primarily B2B. Windows didn't come to dominate the desktop because consumers loved it. It dominates because it provides a value proposition to businesses. Success with consumers is part of that value proposition, and one of the things which gives it an advantage over Linux.

RT is a long term strategy. It's not a tablet OS. It's the phone too, just not yet, fully.It's not targeted at consumers. It's targeted at enterprise.

As a B2C company, Apple will not offer a roadmap or backward compatibility. Google being an advertising agency, will always seek to read one's data. Microsoft knows what it is.
Awesome! I looked at this approach for https://www.writelatex.com (which does the LaTeX editing in the browser but compiles on the server), but I didn't get very far with it. It would be interesting to read more about how it works / obstacles you had to overcome.
Not even that; relativity doesn't allow a single special frame of reference. There's no such thing as universal "time elapsed since x". Putting the clock in space would be as arbitrary choice as putting it on my roof (albeit definitely more practical).
Show HN: Snake - a package for Sublime Text 2
How can you feel about clicking on an Ad that matches one interest of yours if you don't know the additional targeting criteria?

The more specific the criteria, the more likely the "advertiser" is a spear fisher.

I can think of a couple exploits (Err- links) one might pay to send to "groups" like:
All Oracle employees who like sailboats and tennis.
All Universal Health Care employees who like Oracle.
All apple employees who hate google maps.

The total cost of these 3 "campaigns" might be $30. You may hit these targets with a wider google campaign, but that would cost more and entail greater risk (i.e. people at mcafee who like nmap and Oracle.)
This looks like emscripten to me
I wonder how much of a house of cards would be necessary to distance MEGA from such indexing sites and yet still profit from it. Dotcom did say he is interested in new business models. How new could it be?
This is where my other rule comes in: "I am either a freelancer or a cofounder".

To be your cofounder you must also convince me that this project is something I want to spend the next several years of my life on and it must be great enough to convince me to drop other projects and start working on this full time. I don't believe in part-time cofounders, that way lies burnout and failed projects.

And despite all that, equity still isn't tasty so I will need to earn at least some of my normal rate anyway.
I think in 2006 the answer would have been different.
And it should be done such that the server treats everything the same. The incentive comes from deduped files counting less against storage quotas, and no time spent uploading the file. I'm just commenting on the general approach here, not the applicability to any particular type of service.

But your 'random salt' idea suffers from the attacker just generating all possible encryptions of the plaintext due to the small number possibilities. The "convergence key" is solely a security-parameter-length key that you can pass around to your friends so that your files will dedupe with theirs while not being susceptible to confirmation attacks by others.
Because there are (especially in No Limit) many places human intuition destroys the bots. On top of this, the aids allow them to have some of the advantages of bots including, summary statistics of hands, betting patterns and styles for every player met, post play review tool for learning to plug leaks and weak spots and a bunch of other stuff.

The combination of stats, practice and experience is better than a bot or pure human. I know this because I have a close friend that does this stuff and makes close to a 100K a year and botting might have once been a hobby of mine.

There is no infinite computation, so brute force play is not possible - even in chess (PSPACE). The problem with bots is that they tend to have blindspots they are blind to since they can't very well model their understanding. Human Computer Combinations still win and will probably continue to do so until the day something comes alone that can beat us at the kind of higher order pattern recognition we are so good at. http://www.palantir.com/2010/03/friction-in-human-computer-s...

For poker, only the very small and IMO uninteresting subset of 2 player limit is effectively solved. The combination of human minds + machine computation will be the top intelligences for the foreseeable future.
"asymptotically superior" is exactly what my sense is as well.

I've bookmarked the page for later reading as the discussion is far too huge to process in a single sitting.
Cool site. I remember you from WebHostingTalk :)
Yes, that too. Funding out of pocket only goes so far, eventually there needs to be some sort of traction by either making sales or being able to attract investment. Without that, I might be out of a client sooner rather than later.
Windows 8 Pro price going from $40 to $200 on Feb 1
Show HN: Service for photographers who need to retouch their photos
"RT is a long term strategy. It's not a tablet OS. It's the phone too, just not yet, fully.It's not targeted at consumers. It's targeted at enterprise."

Comments on the original article point out that Windows RT lacks outlook and active directory integration. Is that the case?
Wow, I really would like to know how this was achieved...

Note that it is somewhat broken for me: http://imgur.com/twIG75m
> you're either stupid or you really do believe in your business.

haha, I'll refrain from trying to answer that for now ;)
You're right in that by far the most challenging part of the learning so far was the first day, and trying to get rails working on a Windows PC. For a person with no technical background, it takes a huge amount of persistence or stupidity to get past that stage.

I actually learned to program so that I'd be in the position to build my own MVCs. The idea came to me as I was learning.

I don't have a lot of money, so I figured the only way to win over a good developer was with credibility (an actual product that at least somewhat works and has some traction).
When is a Crazy Thought a Crazy Thought?