skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure that even if a 1st grader could sign a contract that it would be legal. I believe these are public schools, and I think they're legally required to accept students.
75 Percent Of China’s Internet Population Is Connected From Mobile Devices
+1 ... this happened to some of the users on my plan as well. Was finally able to turn it off but it took a lot of drama.
>The Bible is not remotely as well written as the Iliad, nor is it comparable as a work of philosophy to Plato.

Tens of Thousands of top notch literary critics, philosophers and intellectuals beg to differ...
Make Love Not Porn (Beta)
That explains why it is in Apple's interest for prices to be low , but not really why prices are as low as they are.

I imagine this is because of there is relatively little "value" in most mobile apps.

A great number are basically just novelties or an alternative to using a browser for some specific task.

A popular area in mobile stores is games, but most mobile games are more of the "Play for 10 minutes on the train" variety than "sit down and play multiplayer until the sun comes up" games. I might pay $40 for a game in the latter camp, but would be hesitant to spend more than $5-10 on the former.

You could apply similar economics to desktop PC apps, where some similar effects can be observed in some cases. You could still argue that it is in a computer manufacturers interest for all software to be cheap or free but you still see plenty of big ticket desktop software that hasn't been particularly disrupted by low cost alternatives.

Examples would be office, photoshop and the ilk.
Yes it is, which is why I really felt President Clinton should have resigned when he was proven to have perjured himself in the Monica Lewinsky investigation. But as we saw with him, Barry Bonds, and others, it is not effectively prosecuted. This is in part because the English language is so malleable to interpretation that 'reasonable doubt' becomes a massive impediment to conviction.
I still have a hard time believing it, but it seems to be true. It was said in a Dutch documentary about the "panopticum", and it's mentioned in the privacy policy of my carrier.
You seem to make the assumption that an interview question should be representative of the work you would do on the job. You could also see such questions as measuring a variable of interest to the interviewers; in this case that would be creative problem solving. The fact that it's neither something you did in algorithms class nor something you will do on the job is on purpose, it forces you to come up with something new.
Yep, traffic is largely self-regulating. Most people know how fast it's safe to drive and do it anyway. The others don't care about the "speed limit". Net effect, the actual posted speed limit and associated laws and corrupt bureaucracy are totally useless.

And never mind that "speed limits" are reverse engineered from observations of the natural speed of traffic in a given area in the first place.[1]

[1]: http://www.ite.org/standards/speed_zoning.pdf
JOINs : now possible in MongoDB
There's a lot of blank space in the year one map. I bet there were people living in those places.
it's funny how people praise Sublime Text when plain old Emacs can do most of the things that Sublime Text can:

> 5. vim compatability!

evil-mode - a very advanced vi layer for emacs, probably much better than vintage, I hear only good things about it although I use the standard emacs mode

> 4. Powerful Keybindings in JSON and Plugins in Python

powerful keybindings

(global-set-key (kbd "<f2>") 'split-window-vertically)
(global-set-key (kbd "<f3>") 'split-window-horizontally)
(global-set-key (kbd "<f4>") 'delete-window)
(global-set-key (kbd "<f5>") 'delete-other-windows)

and modes (plugins) in Elisp

> 3. Package Manager and the More Centralized Community

since Emacs 24 a package manager is included and there are awesome repos for all of your needs:

(setq package-archives '(( "elpa" . "http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/")
("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/")
( "melpa" . "http://melpa.milkbox.net/packages/")))

after that run

M-x list-packages

and choose from around 1000 packages

> 2. Project Sessions

there are many modes that support that if you want it. I personally don't like it though. "projectile" is pretty nice though: https://github.com/bbatsov/projectile

> 1. Ctrl+P - GotoAnything:

helm is what you would use on Emacs: https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm

it's awesome
This is an absolutely critical point that often gets missed in discussions of online banking.

It is extremely rare that customer money is at stake when it comes to banking website security. If someone guesses your password and empties your account, the bank will cover the loss--same as if someone held up the teller with a gun.

Online banking security measures--and the regulations that govern them--are more about helping/forcing banks to mitigate the financial risk to themselves, not to their customers.
If I had the resources of a Google I would innovate a solution so that the interviewer can focus on the problem that she is actually trying to solve: determining fitness.

Compare this for example to the NFL combine. Or the amount of time and money put into farm systems, feeder teams, and scouting reports. Why not pay the candidates to solve an engineering problem and judge the output? I don't have the answer, but I'm fairly certain that there has to be a better way than stress traps and good-ole-boy networks.

I work very hard to tailor my interview questions to the actual background of each particular applicant so that they can in efffect ask their own questions and demonstrate ability (ala "oh that's interesting how did you solve that problem, and what if you did this instead how would that work in the design, here's a whiteboard show me, etc). It is very hard and I regret very much the "good hires" I have probably let go because they couldn't engage well with me or talk about their own experience well. This obviously takes time and effort so I depend on recruitment/referrals properly to weed out wastes of time.

Is anybody working on this problem? It seems clear google isn't and HR innovation is extremely profitable.
True, somebody can always just clone your app and charge 1/2 the price.

OTOH if you can create something that is non-trivial to clone with advanced functionality then you can probably justify a higher price for longer. I just feel that apps with advanced functionality don't often get used on phones.
I think the complaint is more about the C++ compiler needing to expand the template every place it's used, as opposed to Java/C# generics and OCaml functors (functions taking modules as arguments and returning modules as values) which necessitate a pointer indirection at runtime (which a VM/JIT/smart linker may or may not be sophisticated enough to optimize away) but allow the call site to be ignorant of the implementation details at compile time.

There are workarounds in C++, but they're less elegant.

Arguably, the decision to keep using the C linker and use name mangling and template expansion in the compiler instead of making the linker smarter (or adding a phase between compilation/assembly and linking) was a mistake. Some kind of object file pre-processor that performed name mangling and template expansion on object files probably would have still been necessary, at least in the early years. Certainly incremental compilation and linking would be easier if template expansion were performed on object code (or a low-level intermediate representation) rather than source code.
Raspberry Pi – One Slice At A Time
Played with it a bit last night. Initial impression is it has a much lighter feeling than other frameworks I've tried. Will be diving in deeper for sure.

Thanks for releasing this guys!
Malarkey. Where is his evidence app prices have fallen, or better yet, apps have become less profitable.
If your former student becomes famous you can cash in: Look at the current interest in finding yearbook photos as an example.
This is a cool website. I was wondering about some kind of ranking system like this.

> Speed percentile: 98.82%

While I have to acknowledge that some instinctive/animalistic part of me is excited at being in this percentile, it also prompts me to remember that karma is effectively worthless and I really need to get busy on class work and research...

It's really strange the impact something silly like karma has, because I tell myself I'm above accumulating imaginary points on the internet, but obviously, I don't seem to be.

In some ways, it's curious. My highest rated comments aren't what I would consider my best. Instead, they are ones that appeal to a wide audience with some kind of emotional (rather than technical) insight. My last comment, a quip about about how every programmer thinks they're the best, was worth 64 points. However, a detailed post I wrote on molecular dynamics simulation where I fact-checked and reviewed the literature was only worth 3 points. Go figure.

EDIT: After thinking about it some more, I've decided karma isn't entirely worthless in real life. It is a metric that lets you know how well other people like your written work. Over time, I've slowly come to realize what will get upvoted and what will not. This ability could have interesting repercussions in the way I write about my research, or the way that I craft something like grant or fellowship applications. Every person is different, but posting on HN reveals to me that, in the aggregate, there are certain things you can say that have a certain appeal to others, and the capacity to recognize this could in fact be useful in many life situations.
Err, plenty of answers would get you the job besides sorting, including order insensitive hash functions and tables, neat automata based solutions, etc.

FWIW: I've hired people who even never got an "optimal" answer, but had brilliant ways of thinking about it that didn't turn out to be better/faster.

In any case, they deliberately ask questions that require applying knowledge, and designing an algorithm, rather than memorizing the way to reverse a circular linked list or whatever. So they are questions designed to test whether you can solve problems you haven't seen before by applying basic computer science knowledge.

I get/can afford to spend 45 minutes with a candidate. If you've got a better way to understand whether a candidate can apply computer science knowledge, I'd love to hear it.

Most problems being worked on for real would take at least 20-30 minutes to introduce (probably a lot longer to explain constraints, etc)
Nobody is going to have interesting insights in fifteen minutes, and engineers are too busy to spend hours per candidate.

If you can't see how the anagrams question tests basic data structure and algorithms knowledge, I don't know what to tell you.
When has Apple ever "competed on price"? As far as I can tell, low cost competition has not been a problem for Apple.
Prof Patterson/Fox, are you listening ?
Ginger Mayerson Collage (lots of collage)
The old Android vs Apple is the new Android+Apple
I was confused as to how a lot of folks took the post to mean I didn't know what polymorphism was...and then I experienced the whole Arrested Development-esque "I've made a huge mistake," probably a little too late.

A lot of folks drew attention to "You can reuse code with inheritance. Absolutely crazy. Brilliant." and took as equivalent to me saying "It's absolutely crazy and brilliant you can reuse code with inheritance." I get that both in- and especially out-of-context that's how it comes off, but it's not what I meant. It was sloppy and I should've been more careful in writing.

I meant it to come off more like "...everything is dynamic and decided at run-time, plus you get a great plugin architecture if you do some polymorphic tricks with these RowType objects. And all of these benefits came from just one simple refactoring. The power of small refactors is absolutely crazy. Brilliant." (I've added this as an addendum to the post)

Like the point of the whole thing wasn't about the refactor itself and if/how the code "rocked my world", but the fact that a refactor could have a seismic effect on the future of a project and the direction it takes.

The addition of many more row "types" wasn't even in the orbit of my thinking without the refactor, and it really helped shape where the project went: there were just those 4 branches in the `if`/`else` tree in this post, but there are now 20-odd default row configurations.

Hope that helps some folks to add more context
I have agreed with very few things Gore has ever said (I won't get into details because this shouldn't devolve into a Gore flame war). However, I agree with this one. And I hope he can use the influence he has to influence change.

Citizens United may have been a death blow to our functioning republic. It was already on life support previous to that, but with the addition of unlimited amounts of corporate funding, Congress now has little incentive to look at "real" people. Instead, its constituents are now people of the corporate variety, and all of its decisions are made for them[1], even if a veneer of "it's for you" is laid over it.

Without a way to undo the damage of Citizens United (and the path that led up to it), I don't see how we can solve the fundamental problem of Congress not representing the "real" people. And any attempt to solve Citizens United would be met with huge amounts of lobbying and media buying against it, making a grass roots effort nearly impossible, especially when most people would much rather just pick up some coins on Dullsville.

I'm greatly disheartened with the US at the moment, and I'm not sure it is going to get better. We need another social revolution akin to the 60s, but I think it will be much harder to make happen today. I know I have no ideas of how to make it happen.

1. I believe there are a few representatives who are outside of that mold, but they tend to be freshmen with little political power. By the time they've gained political power, they generally fall into the "mold". Of course, there are always exceptions, whom I admire greatly.
Seems like a long shot.
This is already pretty common at the college-level.
Usernames could still be normalized to lower (or upper) case before creating/reading/writing the file. (Admittedly, the simplest method is without doing this.)
TLDR - The cost of competing against Amazon is a magnitude higher than competing against Apple (see Android).
Yes, no argument here. I wrote "hack" as a shorthand because I was typing via mobile and was lazy this morning :).

edit: (I mean I agree with the background facts you've stated, but I think it is still a "hack" based on other related facts, and it's my fault for not elaborating in the parent comment)

In any case, I was just pointing out that the military's information infrastructure is not bulletproof, so to speak. This applies to public facing websites and in Manning's case, to secure access protocols (for example, in what other organization would unmonitored, unchecked access to critical files be given to someone barely older than a college senior?).

But I do think that this was a "hack", if an unsophisticated one. He may have had authorized access to those files, but he did not have authorization to transfer those files over the "air gap". Here's how he described his exploits to Adrian Lamo in chat logs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning#Diplomatic_cabl...

...lets just say someone* i know intimately well, has been penetrating US classified networks, mining data like the ones described ... and been transferring that data from the classified networks over the “air gap” onto a commercial network computer ... sorting the data, compressing it, encrypting it, and uploading it to a crazy white haired aussie who can't seem to stay in one country very long =L [...]*

(02:12:23 PM) bradass87: so ... it was a massive data spillage ... facilitated by numerous factors ... both physically, technically, and culturally

(02:13:02 PM) bradass87: perfect example of how not to do INFOSEC

(02:14:21 PM) bradass87: listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga's Telephone while exfiltratrating [sic] possibly the largest data spillage in american history [...]

(02:17:56 PM) bradass87: weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, inattentive signal analysis ... a perfect storm [...]

-----

Yes, this "hack" of Manning's required little more than a USB drive, perhaps, but that was my original point: parts of the military system are relatively untested, allowing such critical oversights...so a SQL vulnerability in a public facing military website is not a huge surprise.
On top of that, if you can't even be bothered to cram some basic data structures for an interview, you're not going to fit in well at Google.

This. If I'm going on an interview I will look up what the company does and hopefully how they tend to interview and study a bit. Of course I know things like FizzBuzz, but if I haven't done it in a few months I'll quickly throw it together in a few languages I have on my resume. It's common sense preparation.

but I'd simplify the problem a bit and make up some slightly silly story about kids selling candy or something.

I have found that generally the people I want to hire love thinking and talking about these sorts of problems. I hate when people ask 'what does this have to do with programming?' Ugh. Programming is problem solving.
HBO Wants Google to Censor HBO.com
Startup lessons I learned in 2012 while raising 550,000 euros in funding
That's like saying: it's four main active ingredients are all types of drugs, therefore it is an drug based drug by definition.
Tapbots made Netbot for iPhone and for iPad free "to spur adoption of App.Net"
The article states that a company with high margins, is at risk of being outcompeted by companys with lower prices. This makes sense, but in the case of Apple, lower priced products have been there for a while and people still choose Apple.
Another thing we can expect is further specialization with different standards.
Pirate Bay: survey says that 80% of our torrents are legal (2009)
One of the guys who is working on this is Eran Hammer, who also co-authored several OAuth specs. He's working on OAuth alternative called Oz (https://github.com/hueniverse/oz).
"Defensive" citations are arguably consistent with good research practice in that they reference all relevant research by the most prominent names in the field; it's certainly no worse than the sort of open trading of citations a PageRank style algorithm theoretically encourages.

Sorry, I don't think Twitter and Facebook's quality filters "aren't typically gamed to a large extent" and I do think they're incomparably worse.
Something tells me you did not read the manual.

The post focuses on the least safe mode (NONE), and barely touches on REPLICA_SAFE at the end of the article. Leaving the reader to wait for "a future blog post".

Choose the tool and configuration for the job. For a Mongo user that needs fault tolerance and consistency guarantees, I would recommend (based on documentation) choosing a configuration that attempts to provide those.

The safest server configuration would be a multi-node replica set (3 or 5) that spans multiple data centers (preferably 3 or more). The safest client configuration would be a write concern REPLICA_SET (majority).

If you have examples of Mongo not providing fault tolerance in this setup, the world would be a better place if you shared.
Cool...

But it would be nice if all these "small" (not criticizing in any way here) websites allowed either query parameters in the URL or directly "short URLs" (like bit.ly etc.) so we could share links.

(maybe I missed it?)
I don't mean in just this instance, I'm talking the suppression of knowledge and learning throughout many areas of the globe. It would seem doubtful that the rebels are planning on revitalizing the role that Timbuktu had in learning during the Mali empire.
There are a few things about this article that I must not be following correctly:

- Apple's core business is something 'everyone can do'. If so then why aren't there more people chasing down their position as 'most profitable tech company'?

- 'Practically nobody wants to' do what Amazon do?

I get the premise: Amazon are playing a long game but will be entrenched, whereas Apple's products tend to have a far shorter lifespan, therefore Amazon isn't being chased as furiously as Apple. However, it still seems a bit... wrong?
Are there any other countries where the education systems often reach this level of legal activity/deliberation/antagonism?

Or do they just quietly get on with teaching students?
Remarkable that the French & English won WWI when you look at the year 1900 map. Between Germany, Austria, Ottomans, and Italians, it seems that ~75% of the at war landmass was on the German side.
I came within one point (on my last math final) of not graduating; teacher made a mistake grading the exam, a 69 turned into a 70, a 70 got my GPA just to the point where I got a diploma. Otherwise, I guess, summer school.

High school sucked.
It would probably need to be more complex than that if the bank is watching for unexpected activity from individual IP addresses.
You're right that the cost isn't the main issue. It shouldn't be disregarded though: with 2 million articles published a year, a $2,000 cost per article means $4 billion a year that could be spent on more research. To put that in context, the NIH's budget for tackling cancer is $4.9 billion a year.

The main issues with the journal system are the effects it has on the speed and quality of scientific communication. Peer review by two people is not robust, and it is very slow; secondly, the full range of scientific media aren't shared.

These are the problems that, I believe, require an overhaul of the reputation system in science. The only way to incentivize scientists to share their comments on papers quickly, and at scale, is to provide rewards for them to do that.

The range of media that scientists will start to share will be shared on platforms designed for that media type. Code will be shared on Github. Videos will be shared on YouTube. Data-sets will be shared on sites like Figshare or other sites dedicated to handling that content format well.
In the 90's, Windows machines competed with Macs on price, and nearly made Apple extinct.

With the iPod, iPhone and iPad, Apple have been going from Early Mover to Early Mover, which has allowed them to keep their high margins. Unless they can keep finding even more new markets to move into, they are going to find it harder and harder to maintain high margins. They will then almost certainly have to lower their prices to remain competitive, or lose huge amounts of market share.
After seeing many cases where Amazon is not the cheapest, I wonder if Costco (and costco.com) could ultimately eat away at Amazon. It has incredible pricing power and an efficient infrastructure, and costco.com itself is growing rapidly. Most importantly, on many items Costco can beat Amazon's price by a significant margin (even comparing Amazon's tax-advantaged price to Costco's after-tax price)
The Next Supermodel
The idea that will likely change the world the most in the next major time span, is through improved neuroscience and imaging, the understanding that we do not have "free will" as we currently perceive it.

We can currently, with fMRI tech, already see a decision being made before the agent is conscious of the decision (though we can't determine what that decision is). As this technology develops, our ideas of free will, consciousness, responsibility, and ultimately justice will shift.

EDIT: not just the knowledge of this, but the general acceptance of it.