skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Just doing quick ratios and squaring them, if the comet follows the initial projections, there are only about 230 large objects coming this close for every one that actually lands on Mars.

How did you come to this estimate? The Martian radius is 3,400 km while the current projected closest approach is 109,000 km. I think the uncertainty the maximizes the chance of impact is just the difference of those two, so my best guess for a chance of impact is (3.4/109)^2 = 0.1% (one in a thousand). And any other quoted uncertainty by the scientists should only decrease this probability.

EDIT: Ahh, I see, you must have used diameter. I think radius is more appropriate here, but I don't think either of us are accurate enough for a factor of 4 to matter much.
I wouldn't even consider penetration/security testing to be in the same field. My experience in the traditional QA areas is that in order of likelihood to freelance are performance testers, automation/development testers, and finally manual testers.
Hmmm, interesting. So that's going in the other direction to the HTML5 spec, in which you considered a header in relation to the section it's contained in, without worrying about the section's relation to the whole document. It was the browser's job to do the latter.

I will keep an eye on this. Thanks for the pointer.
Normally, I'm the first to scream bloody murder about AT&T and their shenanigans, but I wonder what the author's point is to be honest.

In the first case, he seems to be decrying IP regulation and wishing us back to a non-IP world (which we haven't been in since the dawn of DSL). In the second case, he seems to believe that having copper telephone service is essential to survivability for the elderly. The latter point is more apt and the former has had little bearing for almost 20 years.

No, what the author should've said, instead of keep copper alive, was "let's regulate IP communications". The US suffers because of a lack of modern common carriage laws, and we will continue to lag in technical development until this problem is fixed.

Forget copper, stop fighting a war from the 80's. Let's regulate IP.
"cryptographic deduplication"

How is that even possible? Surely a custom crypto scheme is needed?
George Lucas's daughter goes from 'wimpy fat kid' to pro MMA fighter
So far it beats Trello on the one issue that bugs me most. When I complete something it actually goes away instead of sitting there forever.
Korea can't destroy the planet, thankfully.
Screen resolutions have increased over time which makes on screen fonts smaller (assuming unchanged OS DPI). Beyond that I agree it'd be nice to see some real data here.
I wrote this specifically for this type of interview: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing.... However, there are lots of companies that do "trivia" interviews, and that sucks.

Some interviews are just unfair and there isn't really anything you can do to prepare, so don't waste your time worrying about it. Try to get a good story out of it and pity the company (I know, cold comfort if you need a job).

Decent interviews will stick to what's on your resume: "you say you spent 10 years working on networking internals, can you tell me about how you'd design a reliable network protocol?"

You can find lists of common interview questions online for almost every technical topic, so look up "SQL interview questions" and make sure you can answer the common ones if you're worried about them.
Thanks for replying. I do want to say that I enjoyed and appreciated the rest of your blog article!

You might consider that just because you were able to download a file from somewhere does not give you the right to redistribute it. It is possible that the site you got it from may or may not have had the right to distribute it themselves!
The Hidden Cost of Being Right
If you have only one copy of data, especially if it is important, the chance of something happening to that copy, either hardware, software, or human error, is always big enough to justify a backup. No hindsight needed for that.
>Bring Judge Greene back from the dead and break these carriers into thousands of competing tiny operators.

That would be one option. A more pragmatic option might be to just have the FCC classify last mile IP telecommunications service as a telecommunications service that would be subject to mild regulation instead of an information service that doesn't even have to meet common carrier requirements.
I did not say founders should not interact with users.
What I said was that if possible, a marketing person should be assigned or brought it as soon as possible. Founders have to realize that they don't have to do everything. Letting others do for them is what helps a business grow.
We Can't All Be in Google's Kansas: A Plan for Winning the Bandwidth Race
Asperatus Clouds Over New Zealand
If you split AT&T land lines up, how would they be competing with each other? They'd just be 1,000 separate local monopolies. There is no monopoly on internet access at a national level. Go to any carrier hotel in the nearest major city an you'll have 10-200 options. The issue is government granted monopolies on the last mile.
You can be "personally in control of the trusted root CA" using SecureBoot. Just replace the Platform Key with your own key.[1] Or am I misunderstanding your objection?

1. http://blog.hansenpartnership.com/owning-your-windows-8-uefi...
(I'm a co-founder of Balanced)

Here are some links to our docs:

1. Create a bank account: https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/api?language=bash#crea...
1.1. You'll want to use balanced.js for this: https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/overview?language=bash...

2. Bank account verification: https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/api?language=bash#bank...

3. Add bank account to an account: https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/api?language=bash#addi...

4. Debit an account: https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/api?language=bash#crea...

5. Use callbacks so you know if the debit was successful: https://www.balancedpayments.com/docs/api?language=bash#even...
Only 3 exit Tor nodes in the Bay Area? I'm surprised, I would have expected a lot more.
Several years ago I sat next to a homeless guy on a Southwest flight from Burbank to the East Coast. He told me he had just been released from prison, and California was paying for the ticket to fly him out to Rhode Island to live with his son. This might have more to do with prison than homelessness, though.
No, fluorocarbons in general are very inert, with the astonishing result that they're generally less toxic than water.
Here's some brutally honest feedback for you then: you're being a dick, your account is less than 24 hours old, and it's probably not going to make it past 24 hours before you get hellbanned, so don't be a dick.
mike cane, you excerpted the wrong bit of the original article:

• Create a first rate storefront+reader on Android and the web.

• Shift more resources into the iOS app and make it better than anybody else’s.

• Perform a series of commerce-oriented experiments, e.g. subscriptions, bundling, in-book payments, etc.

The bit you quoted and respond to is what he said other people's advice was.

Note the sentence AFTER those bullet points: "Those are all good but I’d argue that doing this wouldn’t solve B&N’s problem in the long term."

The actual advice was to exit the app business entirely:

• Discontinue the tablets.

• Milk the eink cow until it topples over.

• Make an awesome storefront.

• Discontinue the reading app and license somebody else’s.
Byliner and the rise of e-shorts
> What's the stack behind this? Very nice by the way!

The entire app is written in CoffeScript - we're using Node.js on the backend and the front is mainly SVG/D3.js/Backbone.js.
Because the measurement of success is different. In '96, we paid for a nationwide fiber network, and the big telcos decided they could deliver 10mbps symmetrical over last mile copper. Today a 10mbps symmetrical copper circuit is delivered via Ethernet-Over-Copper and costs ~$1000/month in downtown SF. Every home in America was supposed to have a 10mbit symmetrical fiber connection by mid 2000's.

What you see today is a pale reflection of what might've been. You're happy you have connectivity, and that's great, but your connectivity sucks and you shouldn't be happy about it because you paid for a better network and didn't get it.

Does that make sense? AT&T and the other big telcos stole the dream of ubiquitous fast Internet by mortgaging our future for continued copper obsolescence. And we wonder why there's no money for metro fiber networks...
Honestly, you don't. The IT engineering in power and other SCADA systems is downright scary.
It's nice that the paper is freely accessable to boot.

to be convenient: http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130228/srep01319/full/srep01...

One observation, that the bbc didn't note, is that the decoder brain in the end had a representation of the encoder's whiskers.

To be a bit hyperbolic, the rat started to think it had two bodies. Or maybe it thought it had an extra set of whisker's some where. I can't quite imagine what the rat's body image would be.
First, it's Geoffrey, not Gregory Hinton.

Here's a very good tech talk from him about RBMs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M

That said, both approaches loosely mirror the function of the brain, as neurons are not simple threshold devices, and both backpropagation and the RBMs training algorithms do not have a biophysical equivalent.
Bradley Manning pleads guilty to 10 charges but denies 'aiding the enemy'
Zooming requires an adjustable lens which will never be added to Glass. Digital zoom isn't real zoom, you can just do that with a photo editor.

Just because Glass' prism is lit doesn't mean someone is recording. They could be looking at something else.
To paraphrase: if you go with a awful hack job for your disaster recovery plan, testing is more expensive. And to extend: you won't actually test because it's "too expensive", and your disaster recovery plan won't work.

How is this distinct from "Don't hack your systems to make them work. Absolutely do hack at them to test."? I don't see it.

This just sounds like "my business doesn't have the financial capacity to engineer data recovery processes". Well, OK then. Just don't claim to be doing it.
This was not a junior engineer's fault, but the DBA's fault. Any company should be backing up their database regularly, and then testing the restores regularly. Also don't give people access to drop table's etc. This was a very poor setup on the part of the company/DBA not the engineer.
Or that existing members of a community have more influence on the community in question than outsiders do. Shocking no?

I think anyone who's ever done any kind of training or system implementation figures this out very quickly. The first step is always find the influencers and get them on your side. After that it's a piece of cake.
Yep +1 on this. I started to look into implementing this on a project but we too are not ok with giving Github access.

On deploy posting the Gemfile is something that came to my mind too and would work.
Kindle, Nook, and ereaders in general have sold like crazy.

E Ink (the company that makes the screens) posted losses in every category except Q4 last year, not coincidentally the first full year that tablets above 200 dpi have been on the market. Amazon essentially ordered nothing from them in the first quarter. And this came right after Amazon slashed the price of the cheapest Kindle to well below $100.
Glass would be less dangerous than using a GPS. You don't have to look away from the road.
Breaking Bad Business Survival Guide
I don't think flagging is enough to take a post from #2 to ~#200 in less than five minutes.

My guess is the voting ring detector got triggered or it was mod action. The subsequent submissions of the same story from other outlets going dead suggests that it was mod action.
Totally agree. I should probably clarify that point to say that we looked at both revenue and expenses. This is especially important if you plan to bootstrap for some time as we do.
It is absolutely gorgeous, but it is also looking a lot more like a traditional text editor from what i can gather.

I'll download and play with it a bit anyway, to see what i get from it.
Measuring value in software development is difficult. If you can tie your activities directly to either higher revenue or lower cost, that's great. As an international tax lawyer, I'd think you have a relatively straightforward way to demonstrate value: it's proportional to the money your clients save on their taxes. patio11 has the same advantage: consulting time spent optimizing conversions through A/B testing can be directly tied back to increased revenue.

But what if you end up working on a product for a company that never makes them any money at all? You haven't provided any direct business value, although you may have done quite a lot of work--maybe months or years. Are you going to charge them nothing?

Rates are a proxy for value that accounts at least in part for the risk of project failure. High-risk individuals might account for this by trading equity for hourly rate or accepting some other form of in-kind compensation, as many startup employees do. But you have to be a strong believer in the project in order to do so, and most freelancers, to put it bluntly, aren't. Otherwise they'd be employees.

Nonetheless, don't start at the bottom by calculating costs. There's a market value for your services in the area where you live. If you can, start by asking other freelancers and consulting firms. The value of a good is what people will pay to get it, not what it costs to make.
you're very rarely going to 'make' someone money - you're going to save them money. A well-tested app doesn't necessarily out-sell the competition if the competition gets a better distribution deal through 'good old boys' networking. Demonstrably bad software often becomes dominant in specific niches, and people put up with the bugs, because "it's what everyone uses".

Your well-tested software still has a huge marketing battle and possibly integration issues to replace incumbents, regardless of how many bugs they have. You end up needing to create a negative campaign about the headaches and hassles of using XYZ, and that you don't have those issues (because it's well-tested, but you generally can't promote that to most people, as it's 'too technical').
Further, AT&T was a quasi-government entity for almost 40 years starting with World War I.
Scientific Software Developer (Image Analysis) University of Heidelberg
I think the idea of DNA portraits are pretty cool. Could make for a cute (albeit pricey) family portrait.

Is this service affiliated with DNA11? This service seems very similar, right down to sizes, pricing, and colour options.

They also provide DNA canvas art. ( https://www.dna11.com )
Well it wouldn't have been a fud storm if Microsoft hadn't insistet on it being turned on by default.

But if I were to remove a MS key, am I right in assuming that that would prevent anybody from running windows on that machine (at least without installing the key or turning it of)?
Major League Baseball Expands Use of Apple's Passbook
"Right now Mankind's main priorities are in inventing weapons and finding most ingenious ways to kill each other."

This comment is absurd. There are, what, maybe 100,000 people in the entire world right now actively working on creating new weapons. Certainly less than 1/1000 of the population. This has hardly been a priority of mankind since the atom bomb - far more people are directly involved with preventing climate change. Most people are pretty forward thinking.

As far as preparing for a meteor/comet collision with Earth, we would definitely need to see an imminent threat before we really started making progress. If we got a first-hand look at a significant collision with Mars and were able to document just how catastrophic it is to the planet, I definitely think more attention would be paid to preparing for a similar situation on Earth.
Well the author doesn't understand a lot; he wanted to talk about a quote but it doesn't help when you aren't right on the technology. The suggestion that B&N needs to focus on building a better a ebook reader and should license someone else's is downright strange. No one buys ebooks because the quality of the application on their smartphone isn't very good, buy them because of the content network behind them. Additionally, the author doesn't understand an ODM can't license what you have built to someone else. One of the advantages that Kindle and Nook have over other tables is their builtin content distribution network. That is the reason they can offer the tablet at all at the prices they do.
Most consulting companies that I've worked with don't have very many non-billable employees. For a company of under 50, you probably only need a handful of sales and support folks. For billable employees, that other 30% is supposed to cover management and business development tasks.

Once a company got the size of needing non-billable managers, I assume that you'd add a fraction of that person's salary to the overhead numbers.
"Through his lawyer, David Coombs, the soldier pleaded guilty to 10 lesser charges that included possessing and wilfully communicating to an unauthorised person all the main elements of the WikiLeaks disclosure. That covered the so-called "collateral murder" video of an Apache helicopter attack in Iraq; some US diplomatic cables including one of the early WikiLeaks publications the Reykjavik cable; portions of the Iraq and Afghanistan warlogs, some of the files on detainees in Guantanamo; and two intelligence memos."

How is any one of those not under the protection of whistleblower laws? If they aren't, shouldn't they be? And being guilty of leaking warlogs? Isn't that what happened with the Pentagon Papers? Something tells me that if he would've sent all of that to NYT, things would be a lot different.
Thoughts on Memory
This is such a well written post.

"Design by definition is the study of how people emotionally respond to an experience."

This is one of the most concise definitions of design I have come across.

I wish I could've seen a sample of what I am buying but the idea is awesome.
Is that a problem? There are plenty of other sites filled with cat memes and incoherent ranting for those that seek that.
I absolutely do NOT think it is a good practice. I think it is what lazy companies full of people afraid to lose their jobs do. I think it's most companies.

The reality is that fear is a greater motivator than any other emotion - over anger, sorrow, happiness. So companies create cultures of fear which results in productivity (at least a baseline, 'do what I need to do or not get fired' productivity), but little innovation and often at the expense of growth.

Plus, it's just hell. You want to do great things, but know you are stepping into the abyss every time you try.
ITunes U Content Tops One Billion Downloads
MM's choices have made perfect sense to me. A lot of commenters don't seem to realize just how bad Yahoo's situation is, and how much of a task Mayer is trying to accomplish. It's true that a lot of her decisions wouldn't make sense at normal, functional companies-but Yahoo isn't a functional company, so policies like no working from home or approving every hire make sense.
@mikecane: In your Fallacy of the B&N Fallacy response, you quote and reply to bullet points baldur is already saying are fallacy. I'm copying my comment[1] on that HN post here:

--

mike cane, you excerpted the wrong bit of the original article:

• Create a first rate storefront+reader on Android and the web.

• Shift more resources into the iOS app and make it better than anybody else’s.

• Perform a series of commerce-oriented experiments, e.g. subscriptions, bundling, in-book payments, etc.

The bit you quoted and respond to is what he said other people's advice was.

Note the sentence AFTER those bullet points: "Those are all good but I’d argue that doing this wouldn’t solve B&N’s problem in the long term."

The actual advice was to exit the app business entirely:

• Discontinue the tablets.

• Milk the e-ink cow until it topples over.

• Make an awesome storefront.

• Discontinue the reading app and license somebody else’s.

--

1. Crosspost of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5299419
Yes I know this but its more the fact that there is no CRL that a new device can import so you are not in control of the pre-seeded keys. So if you have kit on the shelf for months and MS's private key is leaked or cracked then you have a large stock of compromised machines waiting to roll. I doubt any average PC retailer will be able to deal with manual key revocation. The same goes for your average government agency or health service.

It should ship with no PKI/certificate scheme at all. We don't need it and it doesn't work and its blatantly obvious.

Secure boot is entirely worthless from end to end.
There's something weird going on when using the trackpad on OS X. My trackpad is set to "natural scrolling", but if I scroll really fast the editor seems to scroll in the other direction.
Artpacks Archive (BBS-Style ASCII & ANSI Art)
Facebook trials tweaked single-column Timeline design and new ‘Like Page’ button
You know, your pricing page says the same thing you just did "It's priced based on actual usage". That's not true. It's a flat fee of $25 per month. Priced on usage would be $0.01 per push message or something, so the price scales based on actual usage.

That being said, I want to use this.
Of course you can. You just haggle with the dealer.
Like others have mentioned, charge by the value you provide. I know a few parables that illustrate my point that i often tell people, this is one, excuse my terrible paraphrasing.

"Guy walks along and sees Pablo Picasso chilling in a cafe watching the world go by, the man goes up to him and asks, 'Wow nice to meet you, can you draw me a sketch on this napkin? I'll pay you for your time!' Picasso scribbles on the napkin for a minute or two and hands it to the man, the man asks 'Thats great, how much?' Picasso replies '$5,000', astounded the man says, 'but it only took you a few minutes! I'm not paying that much!', Picasso says 'Yes, but it took me decades to be able to do that in a few minutes, you're paying for the decades of experience, and in decades to come, that drawing will be worth a lot more.'".

My point being that you shouldnt be leasing your time, you should be providing $100k worth of value and charging $20k for it, regardless of how long it takes.

And if i'm the customer and i know that you can provide $100k of value to my company, then i'll happily pay you $20k to do it.
One of the reason is that people are scared to freelance for a month full time, and the next month not getting any job the next month, In SA we dont have lots of companies that are looking for freelancer.I believe its always good for a company to get new tester that can produce quality assurance into their systems.
It is, but that's because we have to have a solid editing experience for the "simple" stuff before we can do the more interesting things. What good is it to have these awesome function oriented editors when you can't even modify a file efficiently? :)

We use tabs as a simple way of wrapping up a context. In the future they will include all sorts of neat things - and they aren't limited in any way. If we want, we can drop an infinite canvas into one, or a codex (a document made of many parts of different files). So yes, right now we wanted something beautiful and efficient to use while live coding, but as I said in my bit about 0.4.0, the really interesting semantic-oriented stuff (functions and the like) is what's next!