skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went a Electrical Engineering program to doing Computer Science full time and I agree with the other poster who says that you should definitely apply for a Masters in C.S. Try to make your application at least thematically related to Chemistry. Once you get into a program, you generally have more latitude in deciding what courses you want to take. I knew a few people who used to work in computational chemistry/aeronautics and I am fairly sure they spend all their time in computer labs (as research assistants). The nature of a good masters program is that you will have tons of courses that can count towards your credits and if you are ready to work your ass off (100 hours a week average), you can come out with as good a C.S. background as anyone.
TypeScript, git support...what's next, an open-source Windows OS to compete with Linux?!
I don't think you are wrong about the way China perceives the US influence, and I don't think China is wrong to perceive it that way, either.

The US government publicly avows its support for human rights and democracy around the world in general (even as it diminishes those very principles within its own borders -- but that's another story). It's not exactly a secret, although America definitely makes exceptions for its own convenience all the time (e.g. its support for the Shah of Iran, or the dictator Mubarak), and doesn't tend to publicly proclaim its support for revolution by as-yet unknown actors in nuclear-armed states like China.

However, I don't see any evidence that this notion is related to this specific case of hacking. Concern about US influences that would threaten the autocratic regime that currently controls China may be one big reason why they developed a large-scale military hacking capability.

But in this particular case, it simply looks like the principal(s) of the regime using those capabilities to try to find out the names of people who leaked sensitive information -- presumably, so that those people can be imprisoned/tortured/murdered.
Looks good, sadly seems to require work on the part of the developer. Would be great to just be able to do this on arbitrary webpages.
I still remember the incumbents trying to impose the same low bandwidth caps to the independent ISPs that leased their lines via the CRTC. At the time the CRTC was pretty much corrupted by the incumbents, so it took the Cabinet overruling the CRTC for them to stop. The director ended up leaving, and it is much less corrupt now.
I can confirm that this exists in iOS 6 also.
What do you expect the law to prohibit? Encrypted data?

The issue with file lockers is this: The service that actually hosts the file doesn't know what it is. It would be totally impractical for e.g. YouTube to preemptively screen all uploads for infringement by hand. It's just not economically possible.

So YouTube has a lot of infringing stuff on it. They also have a screening system which does fingerprinting etc., which keeps a lot of infringing stuff off (and also keeps plenty of non-infringing stuff off when there are false positives.)

But you can't even do that when your service is general purpose rather than specific to video. You don't know what a password-protected RAR archive has in it, you can't fingerprint it. So there is a ton more infringing stuff on the general purpose sites. The file locker takes it down as soon as the copyright holders identify it, but then the infringers just upload it again in ten minutes.

So you say, go after the uploaders. Okay, they're in non-extradition countries or are using anonymizers. Now what?

There are two fundamental facts that make stopping copyright infringement extraordinarily difficult: First, sending bits is very, very much cheaper than identifying what they represent and whether it's infringing. Second, normal law-abiding people have a legitimate interest in the privacy of their communications. In other words, good people need the same encryption that bad people abuse, and even if they didn't, there is too much volume to economically sort it by hand anyway, and the algorithmic methods are unreasonably inaccurate. (See: huge list of all the stupid nonsense YouTube ContentID does.)

So we have a problem without a good solution. What law do you propose could fix it?
"Government" is not one cohesive entity, certainly not in a country as big as China. Sure, there might be some rogue actors sympathetic to such attacks. But that doesn't imply that "Chinese government" in general is supportive of such acts, just like a few corruption scandals do not imply that entire US government is corrupt.
Revolutionaries tend not to be known for dealing in practicalities.

And yeah, you're right, Arabian culture is distinct from other parts of the Muslim world, but neither are they totally disentangled either. Both the green revolution in Iran and the Egyptian revolution against Hosni Mubarak had well defined religious components for example.
The biggest advantage of a pure column-oriented DBMS comes from having the positional information indirectly available without the requirement to store this ID information. During query execution the required position lists can then be generated.

In addition. If you considere the record format of traditional row-oriented databases you will see that the overhead of storing a single attribute record is rather high. Since with column-oriented DBMS its all about IO performance (Disk/Memory, Memory/CPU) such overhead can diminish the advantage.

Thus typical column stores tend to use only single strings of sequential memory to store the data. This can even be enhanced by applying dictionary compression and as a result only storing integer values. And modern CPUs are good in processing lots of them.
Some of us just use our name for email. (Though I have no A/AAAA records).
Hey, I'm slava @ rethink. If you have questions about how things went, I'm happy to answer.
PVS-Studio 5.00 release: support Embarcadero C++Builder and WinRT (C++/CX)
Obama receives 500 death threats per month
Unlikely :-) That final comment was tongue in cheek. It would make an interesting argument, but I suspect the house wiring would still be viewed as "fixed", despite the plug.

My gut feeling is that the law doesn't really achieve much, past a level of discouragement via FUD, since it's pretty well unenforceable. Electricians are supposed to write out "compliance certificates" for any work done, but I gather an awful lot don't. Even then, unless the work impacts the external connection, the only copy of the certificate resides with the home owner. I imagine an awful lot of people file it under the sofa, or in the garbage bin. As far as I know, there is no central record of a house's wiring configuration. Practically, the only way of telling that a job wasn't done by an electrician is that the job is really bad (and dangerous), or of a standard that significantly exceeds that achieved by a typical electrician.
> "This is why the Chinese government feels that it is under attack by the United States, and it does not see a line between NGOs, the NYT/WSJ, and the US government..."

They are neither incompetent nor ignorant. They can tell who's who. When they want Industrial info, they know where and how to get it. When they want advanced tech, they know how to get it. When they want to retaliate "cybernetically" they know how to do it.

I would say, as others have pointed out, that this is in retaliation to the pieces about graft and wealth building by CN officials counter to the spirit of the revolution because it could cause internal PLA dissent/strife -and to see if they could obtain info about sourc(e)s of that info.

>"and in general even the NYT does tend to side with the USG against China or Arab regimes"

This is like comparing people's comments about the weather and saying "see, they are aligned, they agree on aspects about the weather". I think it's more that their views coincide rather than the implied "pseudo-state-organ-piece" view. They (CN) are not naive.

I'd predict that if you began hosting Fa Lun Gong sympathetic views and began getting traction that you (your site) would become a target -not because you'd be assoc with the gov't, or even think you were related to the gov't, but because FLG is something they consider counter to their interest. You could be based in North Korea, but if you published things they found counter-productive, they'd look into investigationg your nature, I suspect.
Totally. I've only once heard the ACS mentioned outside of the immigration context, and that was a senior manager in a bank asking why we (his best tech staff) weren't members.

I'm not sure if (Insert nationality here) Computer Societies are as irrelevant in other countries, but in Australia I'm pretty sure it serves no useful role other than in immigration.

So, if that's the case, they have no basis for qualification to determine the merit of an IT skills based residency application.

A self-proclaimed peak body.
I think our culture (well, American, capitalist society is all I can really comment on) has a very strong implied link between income and worth/value. We have magazines that routinely have lists of the highest paid / richest people. People give incredible leeway to highly paid execs, as if due to the number of zeros on their paycheck they clearly have to be right/smart. There are sayings like "that decision was made above my paygrade", that seem to show there is a pretty tight linkage, mentally, between income and value as a human.

I don't agree with this mindset at all, mainly because I don't believe most organizations are truly meritocratic in any objective sense. It's a good PR story, but people, evolutionarily, tend to "look out for their own", for whatever traits puts someone in that in-group. I have seen many examples of people espousing meritocracy but clearly considering those with the most "merit" as being one in the same with "those they already seem to like", coincidentally enough. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, with balance. I think a 100% meritocratic org would be lacking in basic humanity and kind of a terrible place to work. All humans make mistakes, have struggles, have setbacks, etc...

Even with that being said, and me not believing in the income -> value/worth link in general, I would not be comfortable talking about my salary with most friends/family. I live a comfortable life with little stress about money, but bragging about that (which even trying to downplay it sounds like a humblebrag) seems wrong somehow.
I have two examples where I'm of the opinion my title was clearly better suited for HN.

Goodwill Hunting (http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.nl/2012/11/goodwill-hunti...) which I changed to something like "An investment bankers take on the Autonomy take over. This blog is well written and I've read every post on it but in most cases the subject of a post will only become clear when reading the post. Thus it is a bad title for use on a news aggregator.

GNU Typist (http://www.gnu.org/software/gtypist/) which I changed to "GNU Typist: Universal typing tutor" which is a variation on the first sentence of the page. My title clearly describes what one can expect, is not overly long or linkbaity.

Interested in the opinion of other HN'ers on my edits.
This is interesting to hear. I'm in the process of applying for an Australian visa (no CS degree). To get an independent visa, I need 2 more years of work experience, before I qualify to apply to have my skills tested by ACS in very specific (and almost esoteric) programming knowledge.

And this is only the first step to apply for an 'invitation to apply' for a visa.

What are my job prospects as a US software developer seeking to emigrate to Australia? How often do Australian companies sponsor visas for overseas workers?
Office 2013 is out. I know because I bought it yesterday.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/buy-microsoft-office-and-m...
If you restrict the metric case even further and only allow planar graphs, you get even some neat approximations. For example, there exists an O(c^(1/e^2)n) epsilon approximation scheme: http://cs.brown.edu/~pnk/publications/tsp2005.pdf

This manuscript, http://planarity.org/ , contains most of the material in a planar graph optimization course I took a few years ago.
>>>> Smarts don't replace atoms. Nor do they replace joules.

Again, platitudes and proof are very different things. So far I've seen "sensible studies", and I can't see how they are different from the equally "sensible studies" in 70s that predicted worldwide resource exhaustion and mass hunger by 2000s.

>>>> After the Great Depression we had vast stores of oil and most of these resources were barely touched

We still have vast stores of oil and other hydrocarbons, many of which aren't even touched for ecological/political reasons. And there are also biotechnologies that allow conversion of solar energy, which are not very economically viable now, but if we start running out of stored hydrocarbons - can serve as one of the replacements. Of course, Sun will go out too sometime, but let's not worry about it just yet.

>>>> So it's highly likely there's a causal relationship there that will have negative consequences as we slide down the other side of the energy resource curve.

That's like saying since winning the lottery positively correlates with income increase, the only way to have sustainable income is to play a lot of lottery, and if one gets rid of lotteries, economic collapse is sure to follow. Of course having tons of oil is useful to whatever little petro-monarchies that have it. But it does not make Venezuela world's most advanced country and it does not make countries which do not have it less advanced.
The only book you'll ever need is this video:

http://vimeo.com/22053820

Mike Monteiro - F*ck you, pay me!

It was made for creative work, but is still very applicable.
Just payed the required $450 to have my Australian Master degree accredited by the ACS, that was only after I had spent $60.000+ in tuition fees in two years.
only to see that the temporary residency application fee rose from $315 to $1250, (almost 400% increase in only one year)... :( some much money.
I truly believe they have gone too far and soon they will start missing all the money from the international student and skilled migrants. (sorry for any grammar mistakes)
When looked at from the very long term position, the removal of dictators is indeed a good thing that is worth suffering through. I'm not sure that anyone can judge whether it's worth it, though- that a personal judgement.
Is this effectively a read-write inverted index?
Well, he did say he was an Apple fanboy. I'm sure these retina displays are nice and all, but even with a retina, I bet my eyes are too poor to read that contrast!
Good points. Though Tor exit nodes can be run by or run under the surveillance of governments.
I don't think you disagree with the premise of the post (which is incorrect supported OS on app listings)

You disagree with one of the proposed solutions - which is to remove ios6-only apps from the store, as seen from these devices.

Perhaps still listing the app, fixing the supported devices list, and removing the install button (or updating the error message) would suffice.
Great Firewall architects fingered for GitHub attack
> Well, for me they ruined it somewhere in the transition from '03 to '07.

> Of course, my take on this is heavily skewed because I am more of an engineering user of these tools than a typical office worker

Agree to disagree.

Excel 2007 was a radical improvement over it's 2003 counterpart from an engineering standpoint. The row limitation was increased almost 20 fold, from 65k to 1.5 million. Filters and pivot tables both became noticeably more responsive and performant.

> I remember going from being a "power user" to feeling like an utter idiot.

Most of Office 2007's failings were of a UX nature, beginning with the relatively infamous "ribbon". While this is a problem of a subjective nature, IME it wasn't a major sticking point.
> Or that all theories are not worth our time, since they are just that, "just a theory" (implying there is no proof?), like creationists (of which, America is filled with) like to say.

congratulations on the beautiful ad hominem
Can You Tell the Difference Between Arial and Helvetica?
For those beyond 5K meters, they should try Exede. The latency is still high but speeds average around 10 mbps.
Yeah, the first thing I did was switch off #777 on this website.

Whoever designed it, please see high contrast looks good: http://contrastrebellion.com/
Off topic: You like Asterisks and Oblix? That's so cool. I haven't met another person who even knew who they were!!! Major props!
What's the benefit for a porn site to stick to .xxx, where they can be easily filtered?
Looking at their salary model, I think they got it very very wrong:

Position | Salary | Stock Options
———————————————+———————————————+————————————————
Intern | 50K - 60K, | prorated	N/A
Engineer I | 70K - 80K | 0.25% - 0.75%
Engineer II | 85K - 100K | 1.0% - 1.5%
Engineer III | 105K - 125K | 1.75% - 2.25%

Your highest-level engineer makes only twice as much as your intern (stocks are worthless, on average). That makes zero sense to me. True senior level engineers are dozens of times more productive than interns, make infinitely fewer mistakes, and know infinitely more. To max out your engineer salaries at 125K in Mountain View, CA is just crazy. No surprise it didn't work out.
If you like, turn on 'showdead' in your HN preferences. Matt appears to have responded to your original post directly from a hellbanned account (teflonhook).
>I would not be comfortable talking about my salary with most friends/family.

In my family, it was always taboo to talk about money --my father hardly ever discussed money with friends (that I recall). So it was instilled in me that "money-talk" was somewhat "vulgar". To this day, I can only guess my siblings' fiscal positions.

On the other hand, when I lived in the East (Asia), people there openly talked about money/salary, etc. It was one of the acceptable topics at personal intrductions, in addition to where are you from, what do you do and have you eaten.

So, I think it's totally cultural.
Storytelling on your team
Compare that to a Canadian coming into the United States as a "Computer Systems Analyst" - Show up at the airport 20 minutes earlier than you normally would, give them a one-page letter describing your employer, what you'll be doing, where you'll be working. Include a either a 2 year diploma + 2 (3?) years of work experience or a 4 year degree.

10 minutes later you have a Visa good for three years. Normally one expects lots of bureaucracy when dealing with the government, but the US/Canada have really streamlined their NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) down to next-to-no hoops to jump through.
that's the thing I don't understand. If accurately reported, this hacking attempt seems to be a sophisticated, expensive military operation with virtually no upside and high risk of discovery.

It just doesn't seem rational to expend that kind of resource for such petty motives, especially if they have any idea how western media works, which I believe they do.
If you go to Google and search "search" then well, you are not looking for a search engine to search.
The art of criticism
I love this tool. It would be perfect if I could save versions of the data, a la jsFiddle.
SR is .onion you don't use exit nodes to get to it. The only way they could get you by running infrastructre is if they controlled enough entrance and internal nodes they could do a timing attack, especially with SMF telling the world when everybody is logged in but why bother, everybody just eventually drops dimes on themselves through massive opsec violations like this one guy who announced the tiny town he lived in and that "cops will never suspect my packages because the place is so small" /facepalm. He's probably the only Tor user for 100 miles
But to install Tor and then leave such evidence behind on your PC screams of gross negligence. They obviously confiscated his electronic devices and were easily able to identify his SR account and various postings.

Had they not found that, would they have a case if they could only prove someone was sending him drugs in the mail?
If we tax by the seller's location then the sellers will move, at least on paper, to those states whose laws are most convenient. Much like various island nations today list fortune 500 companies in their chambers of commerce. Also, Delaware.

By using the buyer's location to determine taxes, states will still be competing tax-wise; it would be healthy competition, as opposed to a competition where the winning move is one to the Bahamas.
British army stages record-breaking virtual battle
That sums up non-professional non-real-life project. Sorry to say this but your particular example does not count for "productivity gain" discussion.
grundprinzip's answer is good. I'd like to add a remark.

In database systems it is important to distinguish between the logical and physical models.

When you design a relational database, you focus on the correct logical model.

"People can have multiple phone numbers".

"Phone numbers belong to a single phone".

"Mobile phones are possessed by one person. Landlines can be shared".

And so on. You express this logical model to the database, most likely in SQL.

Eventually you notice that query X is slow. Your first step is to check that your logical design was sound, because poorly designed schemata are hard for query planners to reason correctly about.

Then you start doing things to the physical representation. You say stuff like:

"I look up by phone numbers a lot."

Or, in SQL terms, you add an index to a column.

Similarly, as this article pointed out, there are times when grouping data by column rather than row is advantageous. So then you tell the database to use a columnar store.

And so on. Modern RDBMSes all support the same major logical model descriptions; but they can vary widely on what physical directives you give.
How could we not? If the immigrant becomes full citizen, he must have access to universal healthcare, social welfare, entitlement programs, etc. That's his right as a citizen.
As for entitlement programs being stupid - maybe you have in your pocket some other America, with different entitlement programs, that you could whip out and replace this one, but for me there's only one here, and it this America entitlement programs are what they are, and seeing the current political scene, are not going to substantially change, at least not for the better.

>>>> It wouldn't be difficult to say e.g. "no Section 8 housing for people on a work visa"

It would be. Section 8 is introduced because people feel that poor people that can not afford housing need to be helped. If you don't help poor people that can not afford housing, there's no point of having Section 8, so once these people are here, there always will be a push to provide them with the same benefits - for exactly the same reasons we provide other people with the same benefits. Poor people do not need shelter less because of visa status, and do not suffer less. If you do not want to tolerate such suffering in America - you would have to provide the benefits.

>>>> Immigration for a wide range of potential Americans we'd be wise to welcome is far more difficult now than it was fifteen years ago

Could you back it up with some data? As somebody who recently went though an immigration process and who have read a lot of immigration forums tracking what happens in the process, I got the impression the matters are actually improving lately (and they were not very good not because of some conspiracy but because of huge inefficient bureaucracy, which were made slightly more efficient in later years). In any case, I am seeing every day dozens of people who successfully immigrated in recent years. In what aspect it is "far more difficult now"?
I don't think having Tor installed would prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that you did anything.

Having thousands of SMSes discussing what drugs you have for sale might be a bit harder to explain.