skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Miguel Nicolelis: A monkey that controls a robot with its thoughts.
He does seem wicked smart. What would you gauge as his level of culpability in the questionable S1 filings prior to IPO? Was it something he overlooked, didn't understand, or the finance people doing their thing?
And that doesn't work on mobile, because they have a "forgetful" mobile site :(
Prerna is a good CEO and did some great things at Khush which helped her acquisition. Even still this intro is maddening:

>The freedom to work outside a traditional office was one of the main reasons I left the corporate world eight years ago, at age 23, to start a software company.

Maddening because she spent about a year in that "corporate world." Hardly a good sampling period.

I don't disagree with her conclusions, however to cast that wide of a net seems a little cheap considering not all business structures and markets are conducive to the same flexibility "knowledge workers" have.
The main issue is collisions. For that reason alone it will probably never take off. I have a reasonably obscure name, and even mine is taken in that system.
Amazon has very clever marketing which is evident in the sentiment reflected in the comments.

One comment mentions that Amazon is the "cheapest possible way" to get anything. False. Many other retailers are likely to have the item you want at a lower price, even including shipping.

Another comment mentions the customer service. Honestly, I don't think Amazon has very good customer service: every interaction is handled in the form of giving you your money back. "Hi Amazon, I really liked item X, when will it be back in stock?" "Sorry about your experience with item X. We're refunding your credit card." "What?" (My specific experience involves buying bike tires. I ordered a certain model of road bike tires, but got mountian bike tires instead. I emailed customer service, who wrote back apologizing and overnighting me two new tires. Same problem. Same email. Same result. Now I have 6 incorrect bike tires. Thanks, "great customer service". While I'm never out any money after dealing with Amazon, sometimes I'm annoyed because I know my concerns aren't being heard. And I'm never going to get that time back that I spent talking with them.)

Amazon's real assets are a huge inventory and a great order-fulfillment system. I never really wonder if my order is going to show up or not, modulo occasional randomness from the shipping companies.
> So because 12px font was super readable on 640x480 CRT on Win95, we should continue to use that and never update our blogs?

Nope.

> Are you seriously trying to defend shitty readability in 2013?

Nope, not as far as I can tell. Do read my original post.

In case you're too young to understand why I wrote... I was explaining a possible reason why the site has the font-size it currently has. I went on to say that I'm sure that were the site redesigned today, it would have a larger font... JUST LIKE ALL THE WEBSITES YOU LIKE THAT HAVE 16px FONTS... YES, THEY PROBABLY HAD 12 or 13px FONTS IN THEIR PREVIOUS ITERATIONS.
It's #3 if you use quotes https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Stack+Overflow%22 (wikipedia is #2)
Yep, it's a completely mechanical way to recover the energy expended in braking and apply it to getting the vehicle rolling again. In this way the gasoline engine is mainly used to maintain speed and climb hills.

Other experimental vehicles have used flywheels to capture braking energy, but the advantage of compressed gas is that it can store the energy indefinitely (assuming no leaks).

Sounds like it could be more efficient and reliable than the electrochemical process that electric hybrids use, with less weight and environmental concerns related to battery manufacture and disposal.
It's the same reason natural cryolite isn't used - it's not economically viable. Lots of countries grow all the agricultural products. Aluminum isn't hard, just potentially more expensive.

> While I'm nit-picking...

Me too, Pinjarra is where the refinery for the largest producing bauxite mine is. And the refinery operates today because of cheap coal in Australia.

As is the case with many industrial minerals, it's often far cheaper to ship raw ore or concentrates to smelters built where electricity is cheap. Aluminum is no exception, and electricity cost is the reason there is a refinery in Iceland, despite being far from any bauxite mines.

The story really isn't that no country can't make a can of Coke, but why they don't. It's a fascinating story, unfortunately mostly told through feasibility spreadsheets.

I'm in the industry and it's not hard to think of all the steps ranging hundreds of millions of years to put an apple on my desk (there's volcanoes and inland seas! Dinosaurs if you stretch your mind!). This is a good summary. If he got any deeper, it'd be a book.
There could be huge gains if it really can store all the breaking energy and subsequently release all of it quickly (even with what must be pretty large losses in a system like this). On my Prius anything more than light breaking engages the disc brakes and the electric motor is not able to accelerate the car at all.
Show HN: Objective-C Tetris engine
Well, there's always a risk when you're storing energy. In this case it would be explosion. Could be a very small risk, though.
Looks nice, but the text reads as if it was written by a non-native speaker of English, or at least someone who is not really sensitive to the nuances of the language. I suggest you run the site past a few people who are sensitive.

A few quick thoughts:

(1) A comma is not a clause separator.

Life is complicated.

We made dating simple.

(2) Actually, I think "We make dating simple" sounds better.

(3) Truffle accesses, not access.

(4) "Folks" sounds a little odd to me.
If you're using postgresql strictly as a programming data store, its fine. Your app will certainly abstract away the ordering of the columns

Its just nice though, if you often find yourself working on raw tables using one of the many Admin tools. Sometimes you just need it to work like Excel to be productive. MySQL makes all of that trivial. PostgreSQL obviously keeps track of the order you created the columns, so being able to edit this ordering seems trivial in my mind.

It just seems odd that there certainly is some demand there for it, yet nobodys picked up the slack in 18 years. Obviously there are workarounds. Why dont they include the work arounds as scripts with the distrobution, etc?

Maybe I will try to implement something and submit a patch. No experience in database dev though :(

Like I said though, its not a deal breaker. I'm just used to Open Source projects over-implementing features. Not under-implementing them. Especially after 18 years.
What wouldn't support SSL? I can't think of a single product.
Building Open Source Communities
As a shameless plug, here's how we at Review Board have solved this problem: http://blog.chipx86.com/2008/08/05/django-development-with-d...
Generally true but definitely survivorship bias
I'd like to see a wealth data compared to data on how people spent their free time over their lifetimes.

The only thing to get upset about is wasted potential.
In their Security Notice they write "Never click on 'reset password' requests in emails — instead go directly to the service".
And after I changed my password I received confirmation email saying

"This email confirms your recent Evernote password change.

If your Evernote password was changed without your knowledge, then please click the link below to change it again:"
And big "Reset Password" button.

A bit funny as they just told me to never click on something like that.
Unfortunately our plan for disrupting the Inspector General market got leaked a bit early.
I have actually thought of the same idea dozens of times.

I feel like the thought isn't that far out there, but obviously privacy and security issues come to mind, as mentioned in the article.

Personally, I do use my domain name on as many platforms as possible; it not only helps with SEO to ensure that people are finding the correct person, but it also helps to better manage my digital brand by ensuring that anything that could possibly have my name (or "ID") in it can be controlled by what I post, upload, tweet, share, etc.

I see using a domain as a unique ID as a digital brand management strategy (and a good one at at that).
interesting - so did you decouple dependency management from tge build process and still use maven/ivy for that part?
I think people still trust amazon because they are an easy to understand company: at it's core, amazon is a business that sells things for a profit. Everybody can understand how they make their money.
Addressing US regs doesn't necessarily mean you are compliant with assorted international regs.

Crypto, export, and service availability can be tricky things.
I spent less than 3 months total in the corporate world at her age and quickly knew I wanted out. I haven't been back in over 10 years and don't believe it makes my thoughts on the matter irrelevant.
I suppose to make a claim that something isn't "x", "x" needs to be well-defined and agreed on by all. The central points of what constitutes science aren't widely debated, but maybe the more nuanced points are.

For me, I think the most powerful definition of science is this: science is the capability of prediction. If you can accurately predict something that happens at a future time or in a different place, then that's all I need to consider it science. Of course, the more powerful your prediction, the better the science it is. Predicting the stock market based on a hunch then is very poor science.

So does computer science make predictions about reality? Yes, it does. There's many algorithms describing things that will happen when run, and curiously enough, we can test these by writing a program! We can even easily reproduce these programs for other people to run.

To give an example of the more scientific nature of CS, the study of quantum computing is almost solely in the domain of computer scientists and physicists. Scott Aaronson, for example, is a computer science who has many interesting things to say about it (http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/).

Now, the application of computer science degrees to something like a startup may be more of an engineering task. You're not necessarily predicted anything new; you're taking what has already been discovered and developing a practical application of it. I'm still somewhat conflicted as to whether I consider software engineering to be in the same category as traditional engineering disciplines; I suppose "engineering" isn't so concrete a word as "science", so your answers will vary a lot by person.
Not true at all.

I am American (lived in three countries) and can assure you that is not accurate. America has more foreign owned businesses than any nation on earth. When you think about it, America is almost entirely made up of immigrants. I have done quite a bit of business in Europe and would say that it would compare with London or Zurich.
I know, I know. Its a minor gripe. But think about how trivial something like this would be to implement. And with the power of an Open Source project as big as Postegre, just seems odd nobody's had a weekend to knock it out. Here we are discussing all these cool advanced features, and it doesnt even have something as simple as this :P

I'll certainly try, if I thought they'd ever accept a patch from a total newb.

PostgreSQL obviously keeps track of the column order, as far as the order you created them in goes. So being able to edit this order doesnt seem like that tall of an order. Would be a pretty convenient feature that many other DB's do infact have.

Its just a nicety that PostgreSQL should have, if its hoping to win over people who are familiar with MySQL, which does sorta seem like its goal these days.
If you're running above-capacity, a single failure of a box in any working set (routers, database shards, app servers, etc.) doesn't matter. Just wait the few hours and let the rest of your boxes silently absorb the load.

If you're running exactly-at-capacity: why?

(This presumes, though, that you're Highly Available enough to begin with that one node lost is a quantitative, not qualitative, failure in your system. If you only have one app server, time-to-reprovision is the least of your worries.)
Out of curiosity, did you actually read the linked article or did you just jump to conclusions based on the title?
Yup you do have to sign in, but it definitely lets you see the entire book, it just starts on a random page it seems.
> Actually, an infinitely recursing function in Go never completes on my machine.

Maybe your function is tail-recursive? Try to use the return value from the recursive call in a nontrivial way, so that stack storage is necessary to store some local variable.
This is interesting, but I think completion rates (and enrollments, to a degree) are bogus statistics. All the incentives are aligned toward signing up for lots of courses, with or without any intention to finish. I'm "enrolled" in 13 Coursera classes at the moment, but only active in two (and something close to this has been my moving average for the last six months).

The only cost to me is a few too many automated emails. And since course quality still varies widely, trying out lots of courses and sticking with the best ones is a good strategy.
Indeed, especially considering it's painfully obvious that the problem isn't on Heroku's side but rather on their app's dismal performance. You should be able to easily do a couple of dozen requests per second; this is the kind of performance we're getting out of a single Heroku dyno on a dynamic page with no caching:

$ ab -n 1000 -c 20 https://*****-staging.herokuapp.com/**********
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.3 <$Revision: 655654 $>
Copyright 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Licensed to The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking *****-staging.herokuapp.com (be patient)
Completed 100 requests
Completed 200 requests
Completed 300 requests
Completed 400 requests
Completed 500 requests
Completed 600 requests
Completed 700 requests
Completed 800 requests
Completed 900 requests
Completed 1000 requests
Finished 1000 requests

Server Software:
Server Hostname: *****-staging.herokuapp.com
Server Port: 443
SSL/TLS Protocol: TLSv1/SSLv3,AES256-SHA,2048,256

Document Path: /**********
Document Length: 9670 bytes

Concurrency Level: 20
Time taken for tests: 7.130 seconds
Complete requests: 1000
Failed requests: 0
Write errors: 0
Total transferred: 10034000 bytes
HTML transferred: 9670000 bytes
Requests per second: 140.25 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request: 142.606 [ms] (mean)
Time per request: 7.130 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate: 1374.25 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 55 59 31.7 58 1057
Processing: 37 82 43.8 66 308
Waiting: 35 74 42.7 57 298
Total: 92 141 53.4 124 1096

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50% 124
66% 138
75% 153
80% 166
90% 199
95% 239
98% 282
99% 301
100% 1096 (longest request)

Edit: formatting.
The Challenges of Managing Student Data in the Cloud
Disclaimer: I was a '12 grad, and currently doing a PhD in CS there.

> because some of the faculty just weren't that great

I think this is anecdotal evidence against anecdotal evidence. In my case, a lot of the faculty were that great. A few concrete names that immediately pop to mind would be: Margo Seltzer, Mike Smith, Greg Morrisett, Matt Welsch (now at google), David Malan, Howard Georgi, ...

> admissions office [..] selects [..] "excellent sheep"--kids who do (or appear to do) what they're told extremely well

Au contraire, my anecdotal evidence is that the admissions office tends to lean a lot on the "liberal arts" side. I come from a background with a strong respect of science and academics, and would often get very surprised to see some people not focus on those areas as much. But then I'd see them play their instrument, direct a play, qualify for the Olympics, etc. Most of those people ended up in consulting or teaching (TFA and the like) actually.

But no, I am not going to argue that a lot of people don't end up on Wall Street. And quite frankly, I don't see anything wrong with that. In the tech sector, we are quite fortunate that a large fraction of funding is provided through VCs. But a lot of other sectors don't have that luxury and need to resort to other sources of liquidity, private equity firms and i-banks. In those areas, it is much harder to define an actual measure of product goodness (in CS, we can always say that app X runs Y% faster or that Z% of the large number of users prefer it), and individual performance is evaluated much more based on _soft skills_. This is the exact skill set that is developed by the non-acacdemic parts of college. As tech people, we might feel cheated in some sense by that (the same way we feel cheated by a good salesman who "doesn't contribute anything"), but as long as there are requirements for capital, I don't see any alternative.

edit: grammar
I have to echo to some degree the opinion of those who say that this essay is presenting a false dichotomy. I went to MIT, but all throughout my grade school education and high school education, I was required to study English, which was largely about writing creative essays of one sort or another. And if I hadn't done very will in those English classes, MIT would not have accepted me. And then as a student at MIT, we were required to take a full year of humanities. I assume this is because the MIT culture understands that you need to be able to think in all sort of different ways, and with your entire brain, to successfully solve problems.
I'm much the same, plus I don't have the discipline to work from home. What's on the tv? What's online? Hey, I nearly finished that level in that game! What can I find in the fridge?

Plus if you have decent colleagues, it makes the job more enjoyable.
I more or less agree with what you've said, though it still makes me uncomfortable that it only applies to women. Some level of advice on ways to reduce risk is clearly necessary.

But, as I've said elsewhere, it is my strong impression that the advice given to women regarding rape does not merely mirror other safety advice. There are many places where those starry-eyed freshmen would be forgiven for letting down their guard against muggers (inside their own dorm, for instance), but women are allowed no such safe spaces. The freshmen are given just a few rules to remember ("Don't flaunt your expensive headphones south of 61st St."), but women are given endless lists. The freshmen hear their advice when they show up at college, but women get rape prevention tips drilled into them from childhood so they completely internalize it. And by and large, the advice those freshmen get is simple enough that it doesn't contain any Catch-22's like my earlier example: a woman can be blamed for angering the man who raped her by being rude OR for leading him on if she's polite, so some people will fault her either way.
I sure that is a problem we could solve. For example you could have name.familyname-[UNIQUENUMBER].com That would work as long as the unique numbers didn't get to big. If they were categorised by country it's unlikely it would be more than 5 digits.
I'm very curious about this as well. It's the only topic he's not willing to disclose in a public statement, yet he states that the documents upset him a great deal. He's not even willing to mention the specific agency involved.

That makes me think that disclosing this topic would create even worse charges than he already faces. So a reasonable guess is that these documents are actual compartmentalized information. But of course then the question is how he was able to access them given the impression I get is his office was rather low security, not a SCIF.

It's hard not to think that there's a significant part of the story here that isn't being told.
More or less the entire reason I use Amazon to buy things online over any other online retailer is predictability of delivery. If I order something and it tells me it will arrive on day X after ordering it (next day or two day generally since I'm a Prime user so two day is free), it actually arrives when stated. I don't sit around waiting for two days only to be informed the item is backordered or two-day shipping means two-day shipping but that's two days after we sit on your order for a week before we ship it from the warehouse, etc, which are events that happen all too often for me on other sites.

Of course this only applies to things fulfilled by Amazon, things fulfilled by Amazon affiliates are just as much a wildcard as on any other site and thus I try to avoid them as well generally.
> on the Murray River in Western Australia called Pinjarra

always jarring to read something you know to be so obviously false so early in a piece. *waves to fellow Sandgropers
Most Bitcoin owners do not use secure hardware for storing their digital money, and payee identities are poorly verified. Therefore if Bitcoin became popular, it would be eaten alive by fraud and computer intrusion.
Why do you think natural key(s) (w/index(es) as needed) are bad practice? Data model refactoring?
"protective custody". Right. Like if he were let out onto the streets on bail he would flee, or go on a murdering rampage.

You are blaming the victim.

The military is entirely responsible for the conditions he is held under in custody. That's part of what the word custody means. A UN Torture Investigator (Juan Mendez) concluded he was living in "inhumane and degrading conditions".
Of the MOOCs I've participated in, the student surveys have never asked the most relevant question I can think of with respect to completion rates: "do you (or did you) intend to complete the course?"

Anybody here ever been asked that?
Anonymous dumps tons of Bank of America spying data onto the web
privacy is a genuine concern. May be develop a software can run on my PC but for true scaling it must move to the cloud.
I would say privacy concern makes it a harder problem but if there were no privacy concerns this would be an application with high utility ...
Somehow I don't think people would enjoy being contacted at john.smith-19F3A.com.
So, they're saying that light's speed of propagation is a function of the properties of the medium in which it propagates. In other words, michelson-morley experiment is bunk, no?
While "This phrase is definitely not in the dictionary" is true, every component is. If this sort of password became popular brute forcing passwords would just start using whole word combinations when cracking passwords. i.e a word becomes the equivalent of a character (though from a larger set of characters).

Also wouldn't a hash of a long passphrase be longer? (I am completely ignorant the details of hashing algorithms)... so if I'm cracking a table of hashed passwords, I could set a "passphrase" cracker on hashed passwords of above average length?
While I don't disagree with the principle of this logic, can it be backed up some how with past examples? Were "the smartest people" really hacking on serious phone apps before iPhone and Android came out? (as an example)
Keeping an Eye on Online Test-Takers
The author is correct. But computing science sure is one. Yeah, I'm opening that can of worms. There's a reason biology isn't called "microscope science."

The author's mistake is thinking that computing science (incorrectly referred to as "computer science") is the same thing as software development, and that it is strictly concerned with the machines we commonly refer to as "computers" and the programming languages we use as tools. Whether that makes computing science more or less a science is another question, of course, (though I think the study of computing can be very rigorous). It's important to remember that these are very separate subjects.