skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In a world of perfect information, that would work. In a Bayesian world (ours), it doesn't work.

Say that you have two types of widgets, widget A and widget B. Both have tolerances that fall along the same normal distribution but with different means. The mean for widget A is off by 0.1mm, and the mean for widget B is off by 0.2 mm.

Now, say that you measure each widget before accepting it, using a perfect measuring function. In this case, it doesn't matter whether you use widget A or widget B.

However, in the real world, you have an imperfect measuring function. Say that it gives you an answer along a normal distribution with some standard deviation.

Does this make the case for widget A or widget B different? Yes, you'll have more widgets fall within tolerances if you only use widget A.

To further improve the model, you would want to know the rejection cost of using an incorrectly sized widget and the supply-demand costs involved in only using widgets of type A. The results of the optimization problem would tell you how much of widget A versus widget B to use.
How the API works: what and how it tracks. Almost all the key parts are revealed in the post, something makers of Leap didn't want to leak early and did made their point very clear multiple times throughout registration process.
Looks awesome, graphics are terrific.

I'm curious to know how your animations work, specifically the animating of the attacks/weapons. What engine did you build with?
Every bubble pops. It's a fact of life and a function of surface tension, internal pressure, and bubble diameter. Learn Java (or Python) and don't over inflate your bubble.

On the other hand I am baffled why anyone in possession of free will would write 20 lines of Java to "determine if an input string is a palindrome" when plainly this is bait for perl/ruby one-liners.

Oh wait, this is just a sampling of codeeval submissions? I have no idea what that means.
H.264/AAC/MP3 support now enabled by default in Firefox on Windows 7
I set up this database in response to the HN story about a site that had the gall to not only copy another site but then to issue a DMCA on the original site. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5174121 IANAL but I'll try and match cases to lawyers interested in helping prosecute this stuff.
This used to be Town vs Gown - the conflict between usually rich University students and those who actually lived in say Oxford.

Are well funded techies forcing out old people from their homes? No. Are they crowding out the marginal turnover of housing stock - yes. Will this matter? I don't know enough about SF to say for sure, but a town with a proud history, functioning democracy and plannin laws and plenty of juicy tax income has a problem that lets say Detroits mayor can only dream of
Too true... (I work at a SCADA/HMI software company :)
Pros and cons of releasing Perl 5.20.0 as Perl 7.0.0
I think it's because there was a sentiment among some reviewers (Anandtech/The Verge) that in spite of the remainder of Windows 8's flaws, there was actually some merit in having the touchscreen as an additional input type, to the extent that they found themselves touching non-touch laptops even after the review period ended and the units were sent back.

I think what they're going for is to continue to have ChromeOS be primarily mouse/keyboard based, but to support the new hybrid form factor since as an interaction model it seems to have some promise.

As for the distinction between ChromeOS VS Chrome on Android, I think the key is in their focus. ChromeOS is a device targetted at the Desktop Web, whereas Chrome on Android is targetted at the Mobile Web. Google wish to be competitive in both so maintain two different teams/products attuned to each so there's no conflict of interest with regard to resources (Innovators Dilemma).

tl;dr Android is a mobile OS, attuned to that market whereas ChromeOS is a Desktop OS, attuned to the Desktop Web. Google needs a stake in both since those are the two main channels that Google depends on for its continued existence.
Oddly enough, out of the statistically significant sample-set Suffolk,MA (covers Boston/Cambridge) at $120K beat out San Francisco,CA at $105K. And rent's a bit cheaper in Boston vs. SF.

But perhaps the best statistically significant bet is getting a job at Montgomery, OH where the average H1B salary is $95K which using cost of living calculator in comparison between Cincinnati, OH (the nearest metro) to San Francisco, CA is worth $165K in SF money or $222K in NYC-Manhattan money. Woo! You guys know any companies doing hiring in Cincinnati?

Link to cost of Living calculator: http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/
$ type /bin/echo
/bin/echo is /bin/echo
$ time /bin/echo "hello world"
hello world

real	0m0.009s
user	0m0.002s
sys	0m0.004s

$ type echo
echo is a shell builtin
$ time echo "hello world"
hello world

real	0m0.000s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m0.000s
If you're talking about the in-client store UI, I believe it's PHP-generated markup rendered in an embedded WebKit browser. Given that the overlay browser uses the same tooling and also renders pages slowly, I'm inclined to believe they're doing something inefficiently, but don't necessarily need to resort to native code to fix.

Native code may be runtime faster, but there's huge advantages to leveraging HTML. You'd have to either -

* Define your own serialization/markup for describing a UI, then specify a network transport for it.

* OR, just bake the whole UI in native code and fill it in with data pulled down from an API. Update the binary when you want to make UI changes.

Neither solution comes with the ease-of-development and flexibility that HTML/HTTP provide.
Git tips from the pros
hi jolt,

I hear your sentiment re: hosting LeanSentry yourself. We actually started this way, but over time realized that in order to support our data processing and analysis needs, we needed to host this in our own data center. The majority of our customers didnt think twice - they just install it and done.

This model has been proven by New Relic as well - just look at their growth numbers over the last few years.

Certainly there will be people that are more concerned about security, and we get a fair share of them talking to us. The best we can say is, we've done everything we can to make LeanSentry safe (see my earlier comment) while still preserving the value we provide.

Best,
Mike
This might explain the odd scroll behavior I've experienced on my laptop. Mouse scroll wheel works fine, but touchpad scroll gestures never do.
I'm at Scholarpedia, and we're looking for people to help replace MediaWiki talk pages with, basically, this.

If this kind of thing sounds interesting to you, please contact support@scholarpedia.org
It's not that hard. Most of finance is about the efficient allocation of capital, and to this point in history our model has worked better than any other.

It's not without its problems, namely the boom/bust cycle and propensity for fraud and periodic crises, but there are known solutions to those, if difficult to implement sometimes, especially when governments and regulators are captured to some degree or another.

But to say that finance makes a contribution to society is not false.
> * Bread and pastries. No contest.

I'd give that one to Austria, of the places I've lived, actually. The US has some pastry type things that are not common in Italy, like muffins, but like many things there, many people put too much fat/sugar in them, icing on top, etc... which kind of wrecks things.

Another surprising one I'd give to Italy is hot chocolate - it's thick and creamy, not like the watery stuff you get elsewhere.
Playing whack-a-mole with vulnerabilities doesn't help make anything more secure. Security vulnerabilities are, by and large, systemic issues; fixing individual issues will never make things better, they just reduce the appearance of risk. If you want to fix things, there are two things to keep in mind:

1) Attackers always have an advantage over defenders. Attackers have to find one bug, defenders have to fix them all.

2) Given #1 and the fact that we have such a systemic security fail on our hands, the correct approach is nuking whole classes of bugs. We did this with stack canaries and stack buffer reordering; we did this with CSRF tokens in popular web frameworks; we did this with safe, managed code negating the vast majority of memory corruption bugs.

We need to move past thinking of bugs as isolated incidents and figure out how to make everything better at once.
> I've put my programs in C:\ since my pre-Win95 DOS

I see your problem, you're confusing WinNt from the Vista-and-after era with MSDOS.

> IMHO there's nothing wrong with installing in the root of the drive, especially if it's only a default that you can change if you want to.

I disagree, the default is in C:\Program Files. Oddly, windows agrees with me. You are welcome to change that on your system, however.
That's too bad. As silly as it sounds, dial in voicemail is one of those things I don't think I'd ever willingly go back to.
Large companies do it primarily for security. I like to feel safe at work.
It would entail throwing away Chrome OS and just using Android. After all, Android has a superset of the functionality.
The biggest insight Milken was that you could create junk bonds. Lookign back this seems trivial, but no one else had thought of doing this.
Junk bonds used to be the so called "fallen angel", bonds issued by highly rated credit companie sthat later were downgraded. All of the bonds trading in the market were bonds that lost their rating. The big idea was that companies with poor credit could issue bonds, which no one had realized yet.

This opened up a lot of capital to firm, some of which were startup in nature, that previously couldn't get capital. This drove real economic growth that built real things.
I believe it would be simpler and faster to use the table DOM methods, like this: https://gist.github.com/bteitelb/4726756
What's the password doing on their server?

Also, why is there no salt in the comparison. It calls a naked crypt, that whole ... interesting ... hash() function is sitting there unused.

I have serious doubts whether this code actually serves the user's interest - despite trying to be cute and helpful
I know a dev on the OLPC project who told me they found bugs in the firmware of the SD cards they were using for their laptop 'harddrive'. I imagine it'd be a whole lot of fun fixing them.
Otixo will no longer offer a free account - cloud/file management
No condescension is intended. Fuzz testing is often not what many folks think of in a situation like this.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if there are other issues that don't depend on these exact circumstances to get something to fall over.
I love Gamasutra's postmortem articles. I wish more software projects would share their lessons learned, helping others avoid the same pitfalls.`
Sorry typo :(
It's all because congress requires the USPS to fund the pensions of the current employees, and future employees some of whom have not been born yet with cash TODAY.
I was mainly referring to the steam UI (friends list, library, etc). The store UI might not have the best UX, but it's not "slow"
" that would advocate for no improvements anywhere else"

Amdahl's law advocates starting from the part that takes the most time. In a database application, it can be interpreted as either A) improving the connector or B) reducing the application's demand for database resources.

"Why did Ruby 1.9 bother with a new VM? Why try to improve GC? Why bother with invokedynamic? Why speed up JSON parsing? Why bother with speeding up YAML? Yet there's obviously value in improving all these areas and they speed up almost every Ruby app."

JSON parsing improves those applications that use JSON parsing, and in many applications JSON parsing is the main operation. There are many other applications for which garbage collection is the limiting factor. You are taking my comment, which was addressing the parent comment's remark that "This fallacy about DB access and not needing to optimize really needs to go away though.", way out of context. It's not a fallacy -- you need to know what is dominating execution time and how to improve that aspect.

Take it to the logical extreme -- you could just write in x86 assembly directly. The program would be faster than ruby, but the development time would not make assembly a worthwhile target.

"And even in the link you supplied"

What link did I supply? I recommend the Hennessy and Patterson "Computer Architecture" book :)
Sounds like Singtel.
Has this been getting better or worse over the past couple of years?
My non-medical opinion would be to stop taking amphetamines and any caffeine and get more sleep.
I wonder if this will allow creation of folders with characters such as ":" in their names. Dropbox supports these characters in their clients but the API rejects them making it impossible to operate on some files. Very annoying when you've put the effort in to making an app to work with Dropbox then discover the API is subtly crippled and they apparently have no plans to fix it.
Nice to see an Old Man Murray shoutout. Last I heard, one of the writers of that site and other web classics was working at Valve, so maybe some of the wit and wisdom can live on.
Have you been turning down a lot of people who are interested in seeing your Leap setup? How secretive do they want you to be?
I can see uses for a touchscreen, for example I think some of Apple's trackpad gestures would be better. Think three finger swipe to switch virtual desktops on a 15" screen instead of a 4" trackpad.

I do hope they work out a good solution to smudges.
(Draft) Deep Packet Inspection and Its Predecessors
There are only two data points for that
No revenue accrues from hardware that's already been shipped :)
Debian keeps a minimum imposition policy on their package management. Often they will do the packaging for you even.

In a walled garden, apps are taylored exclusively and you have to do it. They also impose conditions going further than licence and stability. Eventually they ask for a cut of anything you sell over there (which is something Debian hasn't ever done and won't do).

That's where they are going. Stay tuned.
Tumblr Adds Real-Time Notifications To Its Dashboard
Seriously. I have a very niche (but killer--at least for me) application for a Leap Motion–Oculus Rift combo. I can't wait to give it a go, but I'm waiting for the consumer versions to be released first.
Hey thanks! The game is built on the AndEngine framework. The framework has an animation library that lets your move, rotate, scale sprites. However that by itself was not robust enough for us to build decent animations on. So I built a little xml framework on it that let my partner build animations, and storyboards from sets of these animations. Then I take those animations and apply them to the characters.
Also a happy scalawag myself. Let's pull an outsourcing scam where I do all your work for 50k while you keep the rest and spend your day watching cat videos.
Heh. Here's some previous data: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=486317
HP Issues Statement on Dell’s Leveraged Buyout Plan
would be nice to see a hardware teardown to get an idea how it works
Just resign immediately. Seriously. If you've worked for a smaller but dynamic company and you get swallowed by a bigger company, nothing will be the same.

When I worked for EMC, they took away on-site benefits, stopped the Christmas Party, cut my pay and forced me to take personal financial liability via a corporate AMEX card. They took out the old processes, pissed off the client base with their big-company stupidity, then treated the smaller business unit as just that: a smaller business unit that was a bit of an annoyance.

But hey, I had health benefits - in a country that doesn't need it.

Resign while you are still on top.
I would remove the left rail that shows how much you have sold and what your goal is. I would focus more on drawing attention to the apps themselves.

Have you ever visited http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ ?
(More page real estate = more money)

Good idea though, good luck. :)
There's a joke about their dataset being from reported foreign workers' wages in there somewhere.
If that is the case then I would say giving a high level over view of pretty much everything about computers is probably what you want. Individual areas can become very deep and diving too much into the specifics will be time consuming and will not likely to benefit kids who do not go into that area.

Some topics off the top of my head that are pretty good for providing a broad understanding that could likely be used by everyone are:

-Typing

-basic browsing of computers

-Hardware vs Firmware vs Software

-How the internet works

-Browsers

-Concepts of basic security and protecting your information online

-Main parts of a computer and what are they responsible for

-Troubleshooting basic computer problems

-What programming is

-How to use commonly used programs (ie word, excel, powerpoint etc)

I think areas like these are good to give someone an idea of how computers work, how to use them on a day to day basis, and how things relate to each other. But I don't think that this is really enough material to cover four years worth of learning.

Some areas that maybe useful to teach kids about but won't likely be beneficial to everyone going forward:

-Programming (focus more on the logic and concepts as oppose to language specifics)

-experience with different OSs

-Specifics of how main components work internally

-Using the command line/terminal

-Basic Analog and Digital circuitry as it relates to computers

-Computer networking

-Photoshop

-CAD

But this is probably to much information for high schoolers, and can become very deep and dense. Again it all depends on how deep you want to go.
Another reason for Dell's decline: the shrinking importance of PC customization.
Seems like they could offer both. If they watch the traffic they could approve the most popular games but still allow people to use games immediately if they want to.
I WANT ONE! (Or two if supplies last).

Seriously though it is about time we saw some more change in the laptop market. I love macbooks as much as the next guy but they aren't perfect.

Higher vertical resolutions rock.
> I don't think anyone here would disagree with that

Why, I disagree. In the majority of programming jobs that exist in the world, any attempt at creative expression will be shot down.

In fact, if the feel-good stories are true and women are indeed better than men at communication and creativity, that might be already sufficient to explain why there are so few of them in programming jobs, writing Java beans to automate payrolls and such. If you had such strengths, would you want such a job?
Looks cool, certainly seems to provide value above and beyond typical monitoring tools.

It would be great if there was a simple calculator on the pricing page, to give a really quick and rough estimate for how much we'd be paying, especially considering the volume discounts and prepay. E.g. 30 large Azure instances for one year. By my calculations that would work out to ~$2300/mo when prepaying for a year (ouch!).
Right! Except it sounds worse--sounded like you needed to cycle power to bring them back.
This is a weak trademark, it has no secondary meaning that I can discern. You have marines. They're in space. Thus, "space marines." That would seem to fall under the weaker classes of trademark protection[1] and even though I have long known about Warhammer 40K, the words "space marines" do not make me (or most other people I know) think of Warhammer 40K. Personally, that term makes me think of the Aliens movie and Starcraft. They're nowhere near as famous.

Of course, the problem here is that they have more lawyers and wherewithal to contest this than most. Your average person does not have the resources to make a federal case out of this and their lawyers have a perverse incentive to be assholes when trying to prop up a weak trademark claim.

[1] http://www.bitlaw.com/trademark/degrees.html
Flagged for blogspam. Original: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary I think this was discussed recently, but I can't find it.
How to get traffic that converts
"- Justin.TV's chat system (front and back end; The back end was at the time the world's largest public IRC network, by a factor of at least 3)"

Out of curiosity - oh? 175,000 concurrent IRC connections? (Based on IRCnet's 58,000) - that would have been an interesting setup.
And a hand model.
Yeah - It's kinda hard to say "salarly" without sounding a bit drunk.
A good explanation, and further, many times a good analogy relies on the things being very different in every way except for the one way it intends to emphasize. An analogy is often a way of saying: "Let's focus on this (often very abstract) aspect of interesting similarities. Yes, you can easily point out many other dissimilarities. That ease means I'm not talking about those aspects, so if we understand each other those don't even have to be mentioned."
It seems like they encourage sharing demos / videos, as long as we don't talk about API. So I've been talking with other friends quite freely about Leap: after all, most people are not interested in inner-workings as much as just the magic of wiggling a finger in the air and see computer respond immediately and precisely.
That's not entirely true, but yes, that does seem to be the only sort of "integration" that makes any sense.
This is the normal, predictable demographic shift that occurs in any area that becomes popular quickly. Prices go up and poor people are pushed out. When the demand disappears and the town goes back to where it once was, then people hanker for the good old days when it was a bustling boom town.
My old Blackberry Curve 3G, which I use alongside an Android phone, still gives me a battery life of 3 days solid under normal usage.

Will they match that?
I've thought about removing the counter / goal but really think it draws people to the site to check out how much it's gone up. Maybe I can move it elsewhere and have it smaller and not such a focal point. I'll think again about this :-)

And you have got me thinking that 'more page real estate = more money'. Maybe I can have the logo smaller and the two columns of text next to the logo as a drop down. Thanks for the message / tips! Really appreciate it.