skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Holding everything else constant, shorter session tokens reduce one avenue of exploitation, yes.

But everything else isn't constant: shorter sessions mean more password-typing-transactions, and especially into older tabs that have a "logout successful for your protection" message. That increases the risk of a successful phish, including by the same vulnerabilities you fear could compromise a session token. And practically, the problem with a password compromise is that it gives access to a indefinite stream of new session tokens.

So there's a balance between session-token-risks and login-transaction-risks. I doubt 15 minutes is the optimal tradeoff time -- I'm sure it isn't for me, with my habits on my own computers, and I haven't seen any rigorous evidence it's the right level for the banking masses. Its maddening uniformity across the industry "smells like" an arbitrary check-box from some regulatory document somewhere.
+1 on A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.
"Gays and Lesbians have a right to live as they choose,
they don’t have the right to redefine marriage for all of us."
http://www.nationformarriage.org/site/c.omL2KeN0LzH/b.447559...
"Disrupt[ing] the scientific journal industry" is a massively ambitious goal. Good luck! I'd really like to know more about startups that are trying a less ambitious first step; something like "wordpress for marine biologists who want to start an open-access journal" or "reddit for geneticists." The issues in different disciplines seem different enough that intimate domain knowledge is almost mandatory and something that starts with the idea "I want to talk to these people about this subject in this way" could work out better than "kill the journals." Since it's fun to quote PG:

> The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.
[1]

I guess, "I want to read other people's research for free" counts as a problem, but I'd actually be surprised if it were literally a problem that the founders of this startup (and the others mentioned in the article) were facing.

I mention this in a comment below [2], but Economics is extremely open by a lot of standards (maybe because of the policy-relevance of a lot of the research, but that's speculation on my part). There is a large blogging community that includes very accomplished researchers, most working papers are available online well before publication (and will typically reflect at least one round of referee comments), there are comprehensive citation-based rankings, etc. Anyone interested in this stuff should check out http://repec.org; the html is dated, but it seems like an established unwalled-garden version of what this article, and others, describe (one that uses email and rss feeds rather than direct-messages and social-network-type friends; decide for yourself which you prefer).

Economists still publish any important research in peer-reviewed publications, and most of them are closed-access. So I find it unlikely that just the right infrastructure and "metrics" are going to kill peer-reviewed publication. I think it's possible that some set of tools could kill the crappy scientific journals in one or two fields and certainly could kill all of the crappy closed-access journals in those fields, and then iterations and incremental improvements could lead to something that worked across fields and worked for higher-quality publications.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5160633
Yes, it sounds like you took your role very seriously and the applicants were probably extremely grateful.

I just think the whole process as you recount it seems inefficent and probably as useful as a fraternity hazing at getting the desired result. That the process is daunting is used to screen out the undeseriables even when completing the gauntlet has very low truth value on the question of performance in the role. But I'm sure that Google has some A/B testing right? Like measure some candidates effectiveness on the job that didn't go through the process (like I dunno low badge numbers) against those that did go through the process. (I had to sneak that in, lol?)

Not a bad thing in an interview, measuring how the candidate responds to failure/blocking as long as it is done honestly because creative solutions and overcoming failure/roadblocks is pretty much the same thing in engineering.

I have to agree to disagree with you on your conclusion. Cramming data structures seems to me like a waste of time.
Actually, the performance might not be as bad as you would at first think. A good chunk of the work done by a graphical application is actually done by the graphics system supplied by the "OS", and in this case, that code would be natively compiled.

It's analogous (performance-wise) to writing gui apps in python - provided you're not trying to do any heavy lifting in the actual application code, it could work quite well.

Apple's Rosetta technology for running PowerPC code on Intel Macs actually worked this way, and the performance for most apps was really quite acceptable. That said, Rosetta had the advantage of moving from relatively slow CPUs to the fastest in the world. In the case of ARM / Android, you would be trying to run Windows apps on a slower CPU, so the results wouldn't be as good as Rosetta...
This is the one thing I have always missed about slashdot discussions. I rarely value the "humorous" posts on sites like this. It is not that I do not find the jokes funny, I do, its just that I'd rather increase the SNR even at the cost of a few chuckles. I think the big impediment to widespread adoption is the difficulty in creating an useful interface for tracking "kind of upvote" and then filtering based on type of upvote. I always had my slashdot prefs set up so that I never saw the "+5 funny comments."
am I missing your point or are you really just citing movie plots?
I think that it is hacker etiquette to only pass judgement when you are qualified to do so. This is why funny comments that don't require specialized knowledge are upvoted more than insightful comments.

The Slashdot comment system tries to correct this by awarding karma to "interesting" or "insightful" comments and not giving karma points to users with "funny" comments. Of course, the downside to this is that the poster of a comment that many find to be funny can end up with bad karma because one "flamebait" mod counts for more than six "funny" mods.

The problem with Slashdot is comments that are flat out wrong are often moderated as insightful. This probably happens because moderators feel obligated to upvote what they perceive to be "intelligent" comments even when they are not qualified to judge them as such.
An alternative to grades is to just have passes: all your transcript should comprise of is which classes you've passed. Then, require students to take a certain number of courses, and to pass a lesser number of them (or just require students, in order to graduate, to pass a certain level, such as English 11 and Geometry, in order to graduate, in addition to attempting a specific number of classes). This makes it easier for teachers to have high standards, because they can see it's hugely unfair to their top students to allow students with no understanding to pass. Furthermore, it teaches students it's OK to challenge yourself, because no one will know that you didn't manage to get through Calculus or upper-level English, while if you do manage to get through it, you'll be able to be proud of the accomplishment, rather than embarrassed of a C.

Brown's curriculum was created with some similar ideas. No one sees which classes we fail. However, we still have A/B/C (though we got rid of Ds, because if you are getting a D, you shouldn't be getting credit), and the C grade is often deflated, which means taking a class pass/fail is seen by many as "slacking off." I really do think it'd be better to just have everyone take every class pass/fail, with the fail cutoff at a little above where most Cs are given now, but external audiences (read employers, med schools, etc.) really seem to dislike that, so the pass/fail option is way underutilized. At the very least, it would make sense to require all freshman-year classes to be taken pass/fail, because students come into college with such different backgrounds, that they need the first year to ramp up before they can begin to be evaluated on level ground (otherwise, students with less rigorous high school backgrounds can get a 2.5 their first year, and never have a shot at being seen as a "successful" student). As a personal anecdote, I've gotten more out of most the classes I've taken pass/fail than for a grade, because they were either the ones I pushed myself the hardest just to be able to pass, or the ones that I cared the most about the material, rather than how tests work/memorizing material, etc.
That's weird. Themed on FF on Ubuntu. I will look into it and try to fix it. Thanks!
Stop defining success in terms of praise from others. At best you'll spend your time doing unfulfilling work and not learning much, and at worst you'll be manipulated.

From the discussion in this thread I don't believe that you're a particularly effective developer - it seems you're used to playing the hero programmer role and have been too poorly managed for anyone to question that. Your descriptions of the C++ STL show that you don't know what you don't know, and if I were working with you I'd be asking all sorts of questions about what was going to jump out of your code and bite us further down the line.

You're probably smart and have a lot of potential, you just need to realise that there is a vast amount that you don't know.
Tips from the trenches - working remotely
Personally, I would cut out the middle men. Avoid glossy-covered and over-marketed summaries of other men's work. Grab a copy of Epictetus' discourses and his Enchiridion. Read Aurelius' meditations. Get familiar with Plutarch's Lives.

This will get one started cheaply: http://www.ebay.com/itm/LUCRETIUS-EPICTETUS-12-Britannica-Gr... Be aware, this volume includes Lucretius who is not a stoic, rather, a typical reductionist Epicurian. The Enchiridion can also be found cheaply: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Enchiridion-Dover-Thrift-Editions-By... . Here's a fine translation of Plutarch's Lives: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Plutarch-Great-Books-of-the-Western-... . These works are cheap and readily available used on eBay and elsewhere. Take advantage of it if you are seriously interested in learning.

Avoid the marketing. Read Knuth or K&R rather than "How to Program in 24 hours", etc. The same goes for philosophy. There's nothing new under the sun. Seek out what's stood the test of time, incorporate it into your fundamentals, and proceed from there.
The company he is describing is not dropbox, it is Evernote. At least today. Dropbox does seem to be going towards adding value on top of the stored documents instead of just being a cloud FS. So, Evernote and Dropbox are on a collision course.
Correct. PG County is only "low income" relative to its neighbors.

If memory serves, it's the wealthiest majority minority county in the nation.
Regarding the general concept of pushing state out to clients and using cryptography to protect it, I agree, and further think the DOS vector you're considering isn't very attractive.

Regarding this particular implementation: it's not documented well enough to tell, is it? It does use an HMAC. It does use AES. In the few minutes I gave myself to go through the code, I can't even figure out what mode they're running AES in, though, or what order the operations are applied in. How are keys generated? What keys are shared between client and server, and what keys are held serverside?

The latter questions are irrelevant to the academic project of proving the Trickles concept, so I'm not criticizing the team. I'm just saying, there's a lot of detail you'd want to have before saying they've got things covered.
Don't forget ARM.

With mobile device sales taking an ever increasing share of the market, Intel cannot afford to miss out on this front.

This is definitely driving Intel's recent push towards efficiency.
To get a better understanding of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, a king, you should read The Discourses of Epictetus, a slave, who has truly affected the philosophy the of former. They have a deep relationship although they did not live in the same era. Marcus was a king who lived like a slave, and Epictetus was a slave, although freed later, who lived like a king.
Counterfactuals are hard, but I wonder if anyone has studied whether or not the FDA is actually a net saver of lives. It seems to me that every time the FDA approves a new drug that will save X lives a year, it has necessarily cost X lives every year that the drug was delayed in the mandatory approval pipeline.

If FDA approval was optional (perhaps requiring a big "NOT FDA APPROVED" label), would the number of people who die from taking unapproved drugs (and who otherwise would have lived) be more than the number who die from being denied a drug (and who otherwise would have lived)?

As I write this, it reminds me a bit of the IP issue, and whether the patent system really is a net benefit or not.
Alexander The Great's Battle at the River Jhelum
> Also "no man does evil knowingly" seems wrong - sorry, but a tiny minority of people really want to see the world burn.

I think the point is that those people believe the world deserves to burn, or that by burning, it would be a better place. Hence, they are not doing evil while thinking "Ha ha ha, I'm so evil", but genuinely believe they are doing good.

> Shy away from religion. Find the truth by yourself.

You can't find the truth by yourself. It's just too big and complicated. Individuals believing that they have discovered some kind of truth is at the root of a lot of suffering. Going after the truth is a good thing, but you cannot and should not do it alone.
Here you go: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kudzu.plan...
The Nordic countries: The next supermodel
Alrighty, I see I stepped on a toe and have emended the post accordingly. Now go read some Byron.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21700/21700-h/21700-h.htm
A Practical Way to Fight Sexism in Tech Today (Literally, Today)
I know that's not how they make their money, but it's a large part of their value proposition to customers. iPods might have been successful without iTunes, but nowhere near as much as they were with it. Just because something is free doesn't mean it has no value. That's the fundamental principle the free/libre software movement is built on, but they're not the only ones that can leverage the power of free. Apple is very sophisticated in the way they use free or break-even software and services to massively ratchet up the value of their paid-for products.

There's not wishful thinking in any of this. Amazon and Apple are not startups, they are both mature businesses in their prime. They still have a lot of risks and opportunities ahead of them for sure, but Amazon started business I think 17 years ago. Arguably Apple's reconstruction into the company it is today started at around the same time with the NeXT acquisition and the return of Steve Jobs. That's a significant track record on which to evaluate them.
As far as the C++98 standard library goes I think vectors are by far the most useful construct it provides because they're like arrays but manage memory for you.

Lot's of people prefer printf to cout/cin.

Iterators in my opinion are a bad idea because there are so many cases when you need to do index arithmetic. The idea of having common interfaces for data structures with very different performance characteristics is one that probably seemed great to some people at the time but it doesn't work too well in practice.

The C++11 standard library seems to have a lot more features that may be very useful, like regular expressions, but I haven't started using it yet and if you care about cross-platform code it probably won't be truly useable for several years.

EDIT: Had a nagging feeling I was forgetting something when I wrote this. Yes of course std::map is incredibly useful it's definitely something one would need to implement if it weren't in the library.
That's a depressing read. There was nothing like that happening in the 70's. I can't express the contempt I have for techers who would cheat like that.

For me personally, I did not attend Caltech in order to get good grades. What I learned there has given me a huge advantage in my career. Interestingly, my experience with Caltech's honor system has also shaped my interactions with others for the better. (For example, I've never used DRM on any products I've built, despite sometimes strong pressure to.)
> So this b-tree implementation must be tailored to cache-line size, and it may performs badly on some CPUs.

Um, no, Btrees are always going to win here as long as key size is relatively small compared to the number of items in the structure. Btrees, for small keyed associations, have a much better "branching factor per cache line." This means that fewer cache misses are needed to find relevant items (insert, delete, read, …), because the trees are shallower, and the cost of a cache miss on a btree node isn't much more expensive than an R-B node.

Benchmark everything and tune your B-Tree container size appropriately, definitely. You could even instantiate the template with multiple different sizes at compile time and benchmark them at run-time, then elect the most efficient implementation for the hardware currently being used.
Under Their Feet
Is this you? http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/09/23.html
There are definite similarities, though I think Stoicism and Buddhism have fairly different philosophical motivations and conclusions. In particular, Stoicism tends to emphasize rationalism more, and is less suspicious of attachment to the self (if anything, being in favor of cultivating the self). It's a fairly complex topic and there are a dozen variants of both Buddhism and Stoicism, so that's probably wrong as a generalization, but it seems to me to be where the emphases are.

This random Google Books result expands on a comparison along those lines: http://books.google.com/books?id=yLQ-GQTcwVkC&pg=PA67
Better use some older movies. If I could take this quiz I would not need the result!
demo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec_Xfny6B_c
I love the Super Bowl ads: they have high production values, and often inform or remind me about things that might make my life better in some way. They enhance the experience for me! I wouldn't want to watch a game where everything is lifeless, gray, stripped of the money it takes to do it all artfully.

Edit: downvoting me without comment is not the same as answering me. In what way does my preference for advertising during the Super Bowl make me a loser? (That kind of put-down reminds me of high school, and not in a good way.)
But OH NOES, they are teh socialist!!11oneeleventy And we all know that socialism always fails because socialist governments go bankrupt; at least, that's what rags like the Economist have been telling me for the last 30 years.

<sarc>This is why free-market, no-social-services USA has such a low public debt/GDP ratio, whereas quasi-socialist (public health: boo!) Australia has high debt/GDP, and socialist hell-holes like Denmark have off-the-scale debt/GDP ratios.</sarc>

Just look at the numbers in my (highly debatable and somewhat cherry picked) loosely ranked list of least to most socialist countries.

Debt to GDP ratios (2010)
USA: 73%
UK: 86.8%
Australia: 30%
Canada: 83%
Germany: 82%
Japan: 208%
Finland: 49%
Sweden: 38%
Denmark: 46%
Norway: 49%
Singapore: 118.2%
France: 86%

DERP. Oh dear, the numbers appear to have little correlation with with how socialist the country is, but may be more related to how 'innovative' a country's banking sector is, how many 'state owned enterprises' there are, national demographics, corporate political capture, and how distorting the tax system is.

Even the neo-liberals at the Economist are starting to understand that government provided social services, transport, health, and education aren't the primary factor that sends countries broke. Perhaps one day they'll notice the elephant in the room: the banking sector.
Very nice. I particularly like being able to spin off the final page on a separate URL. Great for demoing HTML5/CSS3 features. I am teaching a class on HTML5 tomorrow and will definitely mention this.
A Brilliant Parody of DRM
The SFTP plugin for Sublime allows me to operate on remote files via ssh/sftp quite easily. Set up a local directory with a simple config file with the remote server and file path, and it takes care of the rest. When opening a file, it will automatically sync it down from the server, and when I save the file, it automatically pushes it back up to the server so I can immediately test it from there. And because I keep a dedicated terminal session up, it's a simple alt-tab to switch over and test my changes.

The best of both worlds, if you will.
I agree with everything you have said. I would just add that I think many of the most useful (and widely used) Windows applications do do heavy lifting in native code — Word, Excel, and Photoshop are all good examples here. They aren't explicitly number-crunching like BTC mining or SETI@Home, but there is a lot of x86 code running under the hood.
Submitting stories. Whoever submitted Bellard's jsLinux story received as much karma (3000+) for that one URL and title as I had from several years of comment writing.
Not to mention the former Soviet members of the EU, some of whom have had the opportunity to be swallowed up by other empires several times now.
If you are going to read it take note of the various mistranslations it makes. 'Hell' isn't actually a concept in the old testament, but the KJV engages in Whig History and uses it throughout.

Even the first words of the Bible "In the beginning" are a mistranslation (though that mistranslation occurred thousands of years before the KJV and was a result of written Hebrew omitting vowels or something).
You can now view the page without the .json and it should show the the data in a html page.
>Do you want to see pseudoscience stem cell "therapies" sold on late night infomercials as a panacea?

Mandatory FDA approval is orthogonal to over-the-counter sales. Surely you don't think the government should prohibit a medical decision between a patient and her doctor...

> when startups overpromise, misrepresent, and take risks, the worst that usually happens...

Yes, the risk people are willing to bear is proportional to the damage it can cause. This is probably why terminal patients are willing to risk experimental drugs.
A few questions:

1) Why are they adamant they they use an "open source cms"?

2) What is the primary use of the website? I don't imagine that "one of the larger financial services companies in the US" would leave the restructuring of the website design to one individual. Is this simply an internal site to serve one function of the business?

3) I'd lean away from the Github idea for now. Financial institutions are typically last in line to try and lead others in that regard.
Not sure if you strictly mean karma per submission, or karma per comment, or both. As for karma per comment at least, reaching a critical mass of absolute karma points seems to have a big impact on your KPC, regardless of the comment's content, thus partly invalidating the value of KPS/KPC.

I just anecdotally see karma peasants post comments that are functionally identical to comments from the karma kings, and the peasants just get buried at the bottom. It would interesting to have some kind of NLP-based crawler go through HN and see to what extent that actually happens though...maybe it's just my imagination.
I can also recommend Cicero. But like any Stoic needs to be read critically.

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Cicero#Stoic_Parad...