skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Post-Microsoft Bill Gates is a much more interesting person. I'm not a Microsoft fan, but I have a huge amount of respect for how he's choosing to spend the money he made. Interesting contrast to Larry Ellison, for example.
1. He used the network closet because they booted him off of the wireless network.

2. He changed his MAC address because they blocked his old one.

I don't think that this alone should be enough for a conviction though. For instance, he wasn't privy to the reason that his network connection wasn't working anymore (so far as the MAC address was concerned). The prosecutors wanted to argue that changing the MAC address was a purposeful attempt to thwart restrictions, but from the outside he couldn't have known why the old MAC was no longer working.

3. Instead of using Harvard's network and signing up with his own name, he used MIT's network (which is open to the public) and signed up for access with a fake name. The prosecutors would have argued that this was his way of hiding his identity because he knew what he was doing was wrong.

4. The US Department of Justice has had a hard-on to expand the hacking statutes to cover "any crime with a computer." See the case about the MySpace/Facebook mother that drove her daughter's classmate to suicide. They tried to go after her for 'hacking' into the website because she signed up with a fake name which is against the Terms of Service (i.e. "unauthorized access" to the website).
So where's the LOST-like series then? Surely that has to be one of their biggest hits.
> Regardless of whether you are looking to become an iOS developer, a Mac developer or a Web Developer [...]

Yes, because those are the only three types of developers. iOS, Mac or Web.
I know we shouldn't rely on security by obscurity but I hope people will stop posting proof of concepts within the first 24 hours of the announcement.
They've already said it on Reddit; but, he has to be the fastest Reddit AMA that I've ever paid attention to. He's responding to so much, so quickly; and a lot of the questions don't seem like ones he could pass off to someone else, not to mention the wording, etc seems consistent throughout.
Welcome to the new iKnode
Powwie is my hero! Congrats guys!
Entrepreneurs: Avoid These 8 Fundraising Deal Breakers
Yeah, we're working on an appliance version of the product.
If I'm not using AR (mongoid instead) and I don't have any explicit JSON.parse in my code, am I OK?
We're grandparents doing a startup and Logan's run can bite me
Funny -- and true.
Your website: fewer flaws, more conversions. Here’s how.
Dell: Going private is the 'best' move for the company
Developers shouldn't have this kind of control unless your product is for developers. I say this as a developer.

The article mentions it only works if you hire insanely smart people, but that's also not a sufficient condition. You can have really amazing programmers, but if they don't have a strong understanding of your demographic and your goals, they're not "smart" in the way that's most relevant to this particular sort of decision.

I also dislike the phrase to begin with. Asking forgiveness rather than permission is often more effective, but that doesn't mean it isn't also irresponsible and a breach of trust. In an environment that doesn't claim this sort of non-regulation (i.e. most of them), if your integrity sells for the value of one commit and the risk of breaking or misdirecting your employer's project, you have more fundamental problems than potential bugs in production.
You're missing the point that, on average, insurance benefits the insurance company, not the policy holders. How do we know this? Because insurance companies are eager to sell you a policy.

As a general argument, this is not valid. Consider a parallel argument: on average, selling food benefits the grocery store, not its customers. How do we know this? Because the store is eager to sell you food.

The argument ignores the fact that the things being exchanged have different value to the two parties to the exchange. In the grocery store case, the store values the food less than the money you pay them, while you value the food more than the money you pay them. The exchange is a net gain for both parties.

Similarly, if you value the transfer of risk highly enough, buying insurance can be a net gain for you as well as the insurance company. That's really the underlying logic of your statement that you should only buy insurance if you cannot afford to lose the item.
Cool! I also really like http://colorschemedesigner.com/
Is stuff like this vulnerability present in Django as well, and just not being discovered as quickly, or is there something in the water (or was there years ago) in the Rails camp that caused all these bugs?
| this is about a government agency trying to set
| an example clearly pressured by businesses.

Which businesses? JSTOR recommended that the DoJ drop all charges. MIT possibly was pushing for the charges, but I wouldn't call that 'pressured by businesses.'

More likely that Aaron was: 1) a feather in the prosecutor's cap 2) a way to show the public that she is/was 'tough on crime', and/or 3) another attempt to stretch the Federal statutes on 'hacking' (setting precedent).
With Titan/BerkeleyDB you will get blazing performance for a single-machine distribution. One of the wonderful innovations of Titan is vertex-centric indices that is even necessary at single-machine scale.

http://thinkaurelius.com/2012/10/25/a-solution-to-the-supernode-problem/

Next, if you decide to scale horizontally, then you can simply change the storage.backend=cassandra and thats that (of course, you need to do a bulk data transfer from BerkeleyDB to Cassandra).
There is no official date for 4.0. "When it's ready."
Yeah it's not an impossibly complex task, which is why I'm working on it, one step at a time. But it's much more involved than it sounds at first.

Of course a simple "widget" library is relatively easy to make, provided you already have powerful drawing and text functions. Then you realize, integrating text entry and copy paste consistent with the operating system gets much more tricky if you're making all your own widgets from scratch. More complex rich markup is even harder though... getting text to flow around correctly while achieving the layout you want at the same time. I think CSS does a fairly good job here, but I think we can do better.

A lot of the work before you even get to this stage though lies in good cross platform drawing and text rendering. OpenGL support is a 'must', of course. Then, 2D and vector graphics need to be implemented. OpenVG is supposed to provide this, but is useless as a cross platform solution, because it's only supported on a handful of mobile only systems. So I'd either have to implement all of OpenVG through OpenGL (and I certainly don't look forward to implementing the mess that is SVG) to get HW acceleration, or make my own VG library.

But that doesn't even solve text rendering. Text rendering western fonts is relatively easy, but it gets much more complex when you need to support unicode cursive fonts like Arabic with HW acceleration consistently. Fortunately the actual shape generation is already solved in the GNU world, but caching fonts efficiently on the GPU and with smooth antialiasing is another matter. It would be nice to just use the operating systems text renderer, but not only would the results be inconsistent across platforms, but I don't think it's possible to do this on an OpenGL framebuffer on all platforms.

So once I have HW cached text rendering, and vector graphics, only then can I even start thinking about building a widget library on top of it.

So it's much more complex than it initially sounds when you have to essentially reinvent the entirety of what the OS GUI API should provide. And if you can't settle for lowest-common-denominator functionality provided by all OSes, then reinventing the wheel is your only remaining option.

I know how to do all this, it's just a lot of work. If I was working on it full time it would go fairly quickly, but it doesn't seem to be a very profitable task so that's not feasible right now.
You clearly have no idea what SEO really is.
A geeky valentine gift
I didn't even think of that. Good on him.

Though it looks like he won't get to answering this popular question:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18bhme/im_bill_gates_c...
I've actually tried this game out and it is very clean. Good work sprite. What was the most challenging part of the app development process?
I'm not a Rails dev so this doesn't affect me, but from a software standpoint, discovering vulnerabilities is a good thing in the longer run.

These are not new vulnerabilities, but are being discovered now, which means more spotlights are shining on the project. That's a sign of maturity too. From a maintenance standpoint, it will be a pain to apply patches to older software and those seeing heavy use, but it will cause some reexamination of existing code and practices.

There will be a domino effect of more eyes focusing on the code now, which in turn will lead to more discoveries of course, but hopefully, new fixes too.
This could be fun. https://github.com/search?q=state%3Aopen+cowbell&type=Is...
It's kind of crazy when you think about his goals of eradicating some diseases completely. Totally. From the face of the Earth.

There are definitely worse ways to spend your time and money.
Thanks for your feedback. Do you think this tool has potential (in other words, does the world need yet another backup tool)? Essentially, I'm trying to position this as a slight step up from rsync/hardlinks backups (such as rsnapshot, etc), in that it has a backup catalog database, and compressed backup files (also file-level deduplication if you are backing up multiple servers). Yet it is simpler to setup and use then the heavy-weight backup utilities (Amanda, Bacula, commercial solutions, etc).
> the more intuitive the tools are the better it is.

"Intuitive" is a pretty vague virtue, and I'm not sure that VS has it.

If we're talking about discoverability of a feature, I guess you could say a tool that exposes most of its options and features through a wide swath of icons and giant tree of menus leading to various dialog boxes of doom has something of an edge in that one can walk down all the paths until a desired option is found (or not found), and each point is something like a flag that says "Hey, feature here!" Then again, it's hard to tell how relevant or irrelevant it is to what your needs are, and I can similarly walk/search through documentation for a given text editor until I accomplish the same thing.

> What if somebody just wants to get things working fast and does not want to learn how to make the cursor move up in vim?

There are some pretty nice text editors out there that have keybindings considerably more intuitive than vim. Even gvim has two intuitive ways to move the cursor (arrow keys + mouse).

There's the question of which keybindings are most rewarding to the user who puts time in, too. The longer you're going to spend in a tool, the more important this is relative to how easily discoverable features are.

> it's becoming more and more about the result and not about the process.

Becoming?

> hours spent on figuring out why something is not working when it should is becoming rather an avoidable annoyance

Certainly not my experience with Visual Studio over the last year.
Interesting uses of sun.misc.UnSafe
Tips to Improve Your Customer Acquisition Efforts
Not at all. It's like complaining they don't break down enough.
Technological innovation in a competitive free market has nothing to do with the original point. Meh, I'm over it. At the end of the day, I feel that copyright infringement is stealing, and other people don't. I am fine with a legal distinction, but I see no such distinction from a layman's moral standpoint.
As the author of the article, I share your concerns.

I asked Vesterbacka for comments when I posted the first version, but he only responded later this afternoon. (I'm now waiting for feedback from the Marketwatch/WSJ reporter where the claims originated).

If you've followed the post, you'll see that I updated it regularly in the course of the day with information from this thread, with a window of a few hours where unfortunately I couldn't update the post because the site went down.
Elon musk is claiming that the article is misleading:

NYTimes article about Tesla range in cold is fake. Vehicle logs tell true story that he didn't actually charge to max & took a long detour.

source: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/301049593385340928
Yes. Ruby reminds me of perl. Too many #@$ characters with special meaning.
Yes, SEO has clearly a negative notion for me. To deceive the search engine and make it less useful for me is practically the job description of SEO, in my opinion.

For all the "no-evil" stuff, it's just plainly the work of a website programmer. Properly formatting your HTML, making it accessible and easily "readable" for machines is part of your job when you create a website. Same for creating a robots.txt. If you say many people don't know how to do that, then those people are just bad in creating websites and they need help of a professional website programmer/creator. No need for a term like SEO here.
The 7 Best SEO Plugins for WordPress Blogs + One Reality Check
In fairness, Lisp is the goofy looking kid everyone bullied in school who had secretly trained at a Shaolin monastery.
I think this is where my views differ from many on HN. As a business owner, I will do whatever is best for my business, without regards to what is best for society. My job is not to worry about what is best for society -- that job belongs to the government. The government sets the rules and we play the game. As long as I am not breaking any laws, I will do whatever it takes to bring my business to the top. I have to do this because if I don't, somebody else will. Riding a moral high horse will only lead to my business being stampeded by others who are willing to engage in tactics I am not.

This is not to say that I actively work against what's best for society. My point is that I will do what's best for my business, with regard to nothing else. I think that is what makes a good business owner. Another trait of a good business owner is the belief that his business provides the best value in its market. If you truly believe that, then by engaging in SEO to rank your business at the top of its market, you ARE doing what's best for society. If you suggest that engaging in SEO tactics to rank your business at the top is BAD for society, then you are inherently suggesting that your business does not provide the best value to its market.
There is an official marketplace offering from Mozilla: http://marketplace.firefox.com but others are free to implement their own and no one has to use the official one. The apps will run on both the OS and Firefox for Android, Firefox Desktop.

I tend to agree there are advantages to a packaged SDK but there are project initiatives such as Mortar to cover this base also.
This is what everybody says when studying mathematical proofs of theorems, especially the good ones. Obvious, isn't it?
This is cool and really nice of Bill Gates.
Would be nice to see well-formatted Q/A results after this ends.
Ask HN: Typical bay area data scientist salary?
Hi,

I recently moved from Europe to SF bay area, and received an offer from a startup in San Francisco to work as a data scientist.

I'm not sure whether the offer they've made me is a good offer for someone of my age and experience.

I'm turning 32 in June, have 2 masters in business and a Phd which I did on data and text mining. I worked 6 years at a university teaching programming classes to business students and working on my PhD. I've analyzed a big data set of a European retailer, wrote many sql queries, shell scripts and custom Perl programs to analyze the data set. Besides my experience at the university, I've worked 1.5 years as a data analyst in a company in Europe. I have broad analytic as well as programming skills.

I also like'd add that I have permission to work in the US.

So, this is what they offer me. Before hiring me full time they would hire me as contracter +/- 100usd per hour (no benefits) for 2 weeks. After these 2 weeks, they want to hire me as an employee and would pay me 115K/year (including benefits).

What do you guys think about this offer?

Any feedback is highly appreciated.

Thanks!
I just asked him the following question: Do you still program? I have always been incredibly interested to find that out.
Demo Day at Stanford's StartX accelerator -- the story in pictures
> "Free Markets" clearly aren't the answer for everything, but they are when efficiency is the primary goal. Laws and regulations aren't there to promote efficiency. They are there, ideally, to promote safety. In my experience, the overlap of safety and efficiency is vanishingly small. Would that it were not.

I always wonder if people remember the rolling brownouts caused by Enron in the chase for profit. De-regulation did nothing to help keep the lights on in California.
Noob question: I just installed the newest version of rails with "gem install rails" but when I run "rails -v" I stil get 3.2.11

How do tell the computer to start using the newest version of Rails?
Hindsight is 20/20, but when you by IDEA Ultimate, you get all the other derivatives as plugins to IDEA (I have the Python, Ruby, and PHP plugins which is the same as having PyCharm, RubyMine, and PHPStorm).

I almost did the same thing you did during the sale but one of my friends let me know about the plugins, which they could do a better job of talking about.

Can't go wrong with this great software either way though.
I have been using Microsoft's live.com and haven't had any trouble with it so far. From what I have seen, setting up custom domain email addresses is actually more simple using live.com than gmail.com. You can also have something like up to 500 emails account per domain. Gmail used to only give 10 so there is that. I would really suggest you try out live.com just see what you think. Worse case scenario you don't like it and you move on.

As a side note, if you use live.com you get access to skydrive which, in my opinion, is pretty awesome.
Type-safety is hard with macros; you can't use a macro as a function pointer, for the obvious reason that it's not a function; such macros would tend to trample all over libc functionality, and glibc is not the only libc; the kernel and userland should arguably be separate.

It wouldn't be too hard to create (generate) a "libwrapsyscall" that just provided syscalls; if this is worth doing, it's worth doing properly.
DiceTech Salary Survey 2013-2012 [pdf]
Interesting article which asks the right questions.

These days, nobody should need to use Java to reap the JVM platform's benefits.
Looking at the AMA, the "verification photo", and the posted video, I see nothing convincing me it's real. However, the responses seem non-trolly, but I'm still not convinced.
Alfred can global hotkey system commands. You could try binding that key to `open /Applications/Spotify.app` or something similar.

http://support.alfredapp.com/tutorials:global-hotkeys

This probably isn't the best forum for a question like this though, try http://superuser.com/ if Alfred doesn't work for you.
>> You're missing the point that, on average, insurance benefits the insurance company, not the policy holders. How do we know this? Because insurance companies are eager to sell you a policy.

> As a general argument, this is not valid. Consider a parallel argument: on average, selling food benefits the grocery store, not its customers. How do we know this? Because the store is eager to sell you food.

You're comparing a tangible purchase with an intangible one. They aren't comparable. It's one thing to walk out of a store with a loaf of bread, but quite another to walk out with a promise to deliver a loaf of bread only if a certain series of events takes place.

With insurance, you aren't buying a tangible thing, you're buying risk immunity. Pricing risk immunity is not at all like pricing bread -- there are many more issues.

There are any number of people who make the same mistake you're making -- they think of insurance as a straightforward commodity purchase. Insurance companies love this way of thinking -- it keeps people from evaluating the transaction in realistic terms.

But insurance is not bread. Insurance is one strategy for managing risk, but it's not the only one. For many people, self-insuring is a much better approach to managing risk. And as an institution becomes larger, the likelihood that they will self-insure also becomes larger, for a simple reason -- it's more cost-effective.
hi, author here.

Unfortunately, you HAVE TO do it. If you do not set a threshold for what is acceptable, how do you determine whether or not your are providing an acceptable experience to your users?

No amount of aggregate metrics can help you answer this question unless you know whats acceptable, and what isnt - for each important set of URLs in your app.

I agree that its "hard" to do. In our own product (https://www.leansentry.com), we solve this problem by grouping urls, and using good defaults / making it easy to override the thresholds for users.
One of my 'things to do: not urgent', includes porting all the examples from 'Practical Programs for the Acorn Atom and BBC Micro' to JavaScript.

I checked, and yes, there is an accessible developer console even in Chrome on my Chromebook, so it seems fitting that programs designed to teach the basics of programming to one generation, should be brought up to date to be used to teach another generation.
I'm no color expert but I'm pretty sure color distance in RGB space is a pretty poor metric compared to other color models (at least some of them). Looking at an RGB color cube I see big splashes of near-identical colors while the entire spectrum of oranges is hard to even find.
Apple should use git instead of subversion :)
'bundle update rails' should do it subject to your Gemfile specifying a particular version.
Mikeal Rogers' Interviews With Node.js Gurus
I guess, this is a lot about the taste and preference, but an IDE is much more than a text editor. Talking about debugging, there's an illustrated listing of top 10 Visual Studio debugging tricks here: http://visualgdb.com/debugging/

It would be interesting to see how could one do something as efficient with just a text editor.
There should be enough ground to deem it unconstitutional technically, and not just loosely a "bad" law. But I'm not a law scholar to spell all the details out. One of the areas where DMCA is seriously problematic was already pointed above - i.e. the issues of free speech and etc.
The people at Reddit are pretty careful about establishing identities. They certainly did for my two AMAs. Here's a link to my most recent AMA -- notice the bona-fides at the top:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/q9qzn/iama_former_nasa...
China overtakes US in world trade
Parkinson's Drug Linked To Artistic Spark
I created a Reddit account simply for this moment.

Amazing. Bill has had his fair share of flak and has made some decisions in his career that I wouldn't approve of, and I am not particularly a fan of Microsoft, but his humility, modesty, and great work has made him one of my greatest inspirations.

He's a multi-billionaire with a heart that is worth so much more.
Ask HN: Anything fancy in your .vimrc?
Anything particularly esoteric in your vimrc?

Couple I find invaluable:-

" Yank block visual selection to space separated line
vnoremap <Leader>y "+y:let @+ = join(map(split(@+, '\n'), 'substitute(v:val, "^\\s\\+", "", "")'), " ")<CR>

" Yank block visual selection to comma separated line
vnoremap <Leader>Y "+y:let @+ = join(map(split(@+, '\n'), 'substitute(v:val, "^\\s\\+\\\|\\s\\+$", "", "g")'), ",")<CR>
Change your Gemfile so it says "gem 'rails', '~> 3.2.12'"
NLTK may very well be better. I only compared OpenNLP and Stanford because I was implementing my thesis in Scala and I wanted a library running on the JVM.
The Algebra of Algebraic Data Types, Part 2