skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I probably shouldn't have upvoted you, but that really sums up my feeling. Ebert was another old man who I loved, and they seem to keep dying. Which makes sense. Maurice Sendak, Kurt Vonnegut, Paul Newman, my Grandpa... folks who populated my childhood and who I never really pictured leaving. Well, fuck.
Banks explains, in one the books, how the universe somehow produces humanoids all over the place, for unknown reasons; probably it's simply an optimal shape in a certain type of gravity and atmosphere; and that this is why many of the species in the books are humanoid. It's a writer's way out, really, and a perfectly adequate one.

Banks has other weird and interesting species appearing in the periphery. But the books are ultimately not about weird aliens.
The next big thing won't be the next big thing until it is obviously was the next big thing. It may be more productive to focus on a problem and see how far you could make progress on it. If you make enough progress, it becomes the next big thing. For example, I've been dreaming about speeding up software development. There are a lot of pieces of that puzzle across tools, project management, training, etc. I think about it a lot and over time through my career I want to explore all sorts of ways to go faster and faster. Years from now, I'm sure software developers will say how slow things used to be just like we surely can make comparisons to the past of punch card computing and manual memory management.

In terms of watching the future unfold as a spectator, perhaps self-driving cars or 3-D printers are the next big thing.
"Scaled Score" vs. "Raw Score"

Learn. The. Fucking. Difference.

This article shows a graph of the _scaled_ scores on the NAEP Math test. The _scaled_ scores remained flat. He then uses that fact to show that students are about as good at math now as they were 35 years ago.

There's just no fucking connection.

It's true that the scaled scores have remained the same, but all that shows is that the group of people taking the test now is about as diversely-skilled in mathematics as they were in 1978. For all we know, the raw scores could have plummeted 50%.

The only thing we can conclude from this graph is that the test _itself_ is just about as good at ranking students as it was 30 years ago, and, maybe, that student math-skill-diversity has remained constant. The "bell curve" is the same shape as it was yesterday. But that doesn't mean it hasn't been bitch-slapped to the left. To the left.

The only thing we can conclude from this article is that the author doesn't know shit about statistics. We can't conclude anything about General Plastics, or any other military commander.

SOURCE: Psychometrics is my bitch.

TL;DR - Kids might suck more at math than before, or not; the relevant data isn't in this article.
I can believe 10x. Though, when people start throwing around numbers like, "A great developer is literally 1,000x more productive than an average developer!" I raise an eyebrow.
WebCode - Vector drawing app that generates JS+Canvas, CSS+HTML or SVG
They shared WebCore: pretty much all of HTML, CSS and JS parsing and CSS positioning. That's most of what a front-end, PSD2HTML kind of developer has to worry about.

So yeah, they will probably differentiate even more now.
I think the author's point was we should start calling a spade a spade.

Stop calling the 1/10th developers normal baseline and admit that even thought they may be the majority of developers, that doesn't mean we should accept that as the status quo.

I imagine this phenomenon is common in most professions. They are tons of accountants and arborists out there. I wonder if they have the same ratio of 'able' to 'efficient', or if some professions are better or worse.
Computers Can 'See' People's Dreams
First one to be used, perhaps.

That's not the Bitcoin paper, but it looks interesting. It says the code runs on mostly-trusted servers. I found a copy not paywalled: http://sclab.cs.umn.edu/papers/ecash_ICDCS2007_corrected.pdf

And here's the Bitcoin paper (pdf): http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Facebook Home: The Facebook phone is not as dumb as I thought it was going to be
Aren't the odds of making a single bitcoin as a lone miner, with an ordinary computer, over any sane period of time pretty microscopic at this point? To make any money that way, you'd need to join a mining pool, and at that point you're not really just dipping your toes in the water anymore.
"Also I hear the system itself can only be attacked via brute force, do you claim this is not the case?"

The best known double-spending attack on Bitcoin requires work equal to the sum of all work done by the honest parties in the system. That is not a very high security margin; by comparison, attacking many of the systems from the Google search would require work that is exponential in the parameters of the system, while the honest parties only do work that is polynomial in those parameters. Forcing the attacker to do exponential work in the system parameters is the typical requirement for a cryptosystem to be "secure," and thus Bitcoin is not actually secure under the commonly accepted notions of security (at least among cryptographers).
Dang. I'm really missing the miniature picture that was used to indicate who was assigned to an issue. With that, it was dead simple to scan a list and see exactly what was on my TODO.
The maximum value is approximately the cost of a machine for mining it, because if you have that amount of money, you could instead buy the machine and use it to mine more than one bitcoin. The minimum value is probably some function of its reliability. If hardware costs continue to fall, and bitcoins become more useful (i.e. people gain confidence in its security and reliability), the value should become more stable.
Those ASICs just hash SHA-256, which isn't specific to bitcoin. The NSA probably has enough of those already, for other purposes.
I upgraded my Firefox to 23.0a1 but still it says 'Video chat is disabled because your browser does not support WebRTC'. Am I missing anything?
Very few indeed. Have you read Gene Wolfe? One of the few writers in the genre I truly admire as a literary writer. A good starting book is "The Fifth Head of Cerberus".
Working trick to sign up Google apps free for 1 user
I'm not a 10x programmer. Probably will never be. I do know of programmers who not only are slower in shipping, but are very bad at designing coherent programs and data structures. That's my main observation. It's not that I'm X times better, its that they are X times slower and make poor design choices. Why? My experience has shown that this tends to happen with people who stop keeping up to date and stop learning.

Let's take my current job, for example. I'm working with a Python program designed to interact with 2 other programs. It is a middleman. The input comes in as text files, and the output goes out as text from a SQL query. The two programmers who built the system I'm working with (one from IBM, another from NASA, believe or not) had never heard of XML, or JSON. Every data structure inside the system is handled by reading and slicing around the contents of the text files. Slow, error prone, and tedious. My first step was to clean this up. I now have a small script that takes the input data text file and turns it into JSON. Since this data comes from an outside vendor, I don't get to pick the format (though I'm developing an API to handle this). After cleaning the data and saving it as JSON, I then simply load up the JSON file into memory and go through the program flow without issues. I removed the size of the program to about 25% of its original size. Plus its way, way faster. I also removed a bunch of database queries that simply did nothing. Was even able to add logging to the program.

Anyhow, the crazy part about it is that the actual code was worse. For those who know Python, using global variables for
everything is considered pretty bad form. Here is an example that mimics the code base I inherited:

#they called lists arrays
an_array = []
def foo(array):
global bar, global hello, global hi
if bar <> 1:
print "something"
array[0] = hi

Yeah. But wait, there's more. There is a web app written in (what else) flat PHP. It handles very critical information, and is plagued with:

$foo = $_GET['foo'];
sql = "INSERT INTO TABLE.NAME VALUE($foo)"; //not actual SQL

They never clean, or sanitize the data. They don't even check if the GET array is empty.

It is obvious these two programmers stopped learning. They simply fell into what I call a learning slump. Where all new data simply goes out the moment it goes in.

#Like so
def new_data(data):
return data

#Instead of
def new_data(data):
#process data
#insert data into database

Yet, I don't want to call myself better, because most people here are better than me. Yet this leaves me with quite a strange view of everything. I'm not a great programmer, but I'm not as bad as those guys who worked at some big name place. Where does that leave me? Who knows.
Gamers teaching Gamers
Yea, it looks like we might have some pretty severe fragmentation ahead.
I disagree. I think it's very healthy to open up the conversation again. I've been surprised at how much it hasn't been talked about in the last few months (not referring to online but in person). It was weird to be at startup events shortly after Jody's passing with people who knew him well and have absolutely no mention of it.
P.S: Please first read this document, you guys have mentioned somethings which I have already touched upon in this document http://bit.ly/10xNPsS
I am doing this to learn. If I earn enough money to buy a pizza a month, I'll be happy.
>>As far as I can tell this is just another third party launcher with the same privacy implications as any app that has GPS permissions.

No, it doesn't. I was, till recently, using Nova Launcher and its permissions would pale in comparison with Facebook Messenger's permissions. Mind it, I am not mentioning the full fledged Facebook app here but just the messenger. I am just uninstalling it, to hell with those in my friend list who have virtually ditched all other communication media.(never looked at it's permissions before today)

Why, when WhatsApp and all other apps might be doing it(not mentioning any G app)? Track record. Facebook is a history-sheeter when it comes to privacy and the pledge to keep repeating their act is their business model. Otherwise Google already has everything I do.

>>You have access to a few things you don't on iOS but it's not "whatever you want"

Though it's technically true, the whatever you want part; but the part "have access to a few things you don't on iOS" is such an understatement that it leans towards being a bs.
Depending on which phone you buy, it might not be you installing it.
Over time, the maximum value can go up a lot more than that.

You buy that machine which can profitably mine bitcoin. Lots of other people do the same. The bitcoin network then adjusts the difficulty, so that the same number of coins are created per hour despite the increased computation. Now the cost of the machine you need to mine that bitcoin has gone up.

These difficulty adjustments are why people used to mine thousands of bitcoins with CPUs, then had to switch to GPUs, and now are buying custom-built ASICs.

Because of the difficulty adjustment, the total cost of the machines and electricity mining coins is a function of the cost of the coins, not the other way around.
The Steam overlay uses WebKit, as well as every Source game that renders HTML.
First question, yes, I think you'd be talking about a timespan of months before seeing a reward as a lone miner.

Joining a pool is pretty painless though. You just create an account, and probably give them an email address, and then start running GUIMiner or something. You also give them a Bitcoin address to send the rewards. That's it, no other personal information needed.
I believe AppScale is a plausible way out. I tried to use Typhoonae, but couldn't make it work.

I've been playing with the idea of building a App Engine gear able to run Python apps on top of OpenShift, but my day job is interfering with my hobbies...
Domestic, First class mail requires a search warrant to open. It also requires costly physical effort and is not done lightly. The metadata on the front of the envelope can be collected.

Other classes of mail (priority, parcel post) can be opened by postal inpectors at their discretion. Mail entering or leaving the country can be inspected by US Customs. My dad used to correspond with HAM operators all over the world, and letters from soviet bloc or certain third world countries were routinely opened.

The problem with using the mail to deprive another of property or "honest services" is that it is a serious crime, a criminal (which can be defined very loosely under the "honest services" umbrella) can be fined up to $1M or jailed for 30 years. Politicians filing ethics financial disclosure forms always file these in person, as inaccurate information can result in a slam dunk case for the US Attorney.

So for your normal correspondence, 1st class mail is as safe as you can get.
There isn't a good public database of scientific literature; that's part of the problem.
Reminds me of Tor.

"Tor was originally designed, implemented, and deployed as a third-generation onion routing project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. It was originally developed with the U.S. Navy in mind, for the primary purpose of protecting government communications. Today, it is used every day for a wide variety of purposes by normal people, the military, journalists, law enforcement officers, activists, and many others."
https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en
I think that may be just because Tesla hasn't sold very many cars.
Mining on your own is playing the lottery. You probably won't get anything but if you do strike it lucky you'll have $3000 worth of bitcoin.
SoundCloud getting creative to attract developers
Go to http://soundcloud.com and checkout the javascript console. Pretty awesome!
Anybody else think this is like, inherently bad? I mean making money from nothing, producing nothing, doing no service to anybody. The only way you could possible get that billion without doing nothing is to take it from other people, essentially stealing it. Why is this legal?
Clickable link here http://soundcloud.com
And now the OpenTransactions people are building Chaum-like systems for trading bitcoins.
Why would you say that, other than concern of privacy(if at all) and if so, why it(privacy concern) would be confined to just the 30+?
Ah. My read of the PGP comment was that the offshore-banking individuals / organizations had tried to use PGP but bailed. Seems that your interpretation it was the investigative team that tried but failed is the actual case.

Interesting. Sadly, far too common. I've been using PGP for well over a decade, know a small handful of people (outside of technical mailing lists) who have and can access their keys, and have actually been chewed out by some of these for sending encrypted mail.
The next crash is gonna be painful. My popcorn drawer is well stocked.
Cheers. I do upload some images, but generally I collect them for reference (mostly I shoot documentary style subjects). I've found printing / mounting shots and taking them out to see friends a worthwhile way to share that is a good alternative to internet venues. I've noticed that people appreciate and communicate around physical imagery in a different way to digital. Meeting people like this I've given some away, sold others. If someone appreciates an image and you can give them some happiness, then it can be a lot more rewarding than an incremented hit-counter somewhere in the googleplex/FB/flickr.
I think that any model that bifurcates coders based on skill is absurd; but this description was uniquely outrageous. It assumes that skill is binary, and that there is never any room to improve beyond being a competent developer. If the maximum "level" a developer can attain is 1x, than there is no differentiation between competent and amazing coders.

In all honesty, these scales and the terminology which makes reference to them are absurd. There are average developers, there are mediocre developers, and there are excellent developers. People operate within a massive range of skill levels and have both talents and shortcomings. Trying to express ability as a binary determination made against an arbitrary baseline simply doesn't work.
No reference to "dongle", so it is probably safe.
I think Derby and SocketStream might sit at the 7-8 spot.
About enabling experimental features via flags - I hope there will be an option buried in there somewhere for curious people to "go nuts" and enable a large slew of functionality in one step, appropriately warned. I can see that being a pain, but much easier than having to go one by one on obscure features with a non-technical audience.

I love seeing what creative devs are doing out on the fringes, and having to dig around in flags every time something new gets added could potentially get pretty annoying. The benefit of vendor prefixes was this - if you were on a latest version, not just dev/canary channel, there was a lot which was turned on by default, even if theoretically it wasn't stable. That was actually quite a good driver of fresh technique and innovation, seeing this straight away, despite the major hassle of bloated CSS.

It's inspirational seeing people who maybe aren't totally technical being able to get their hands on very fresh stuff without having to completely hand hold them on every step required to get it going.

Really, a lot to be said on this topic, but just wanted to mention this as didn't see it discussed yet.
RenTech doesn't do "nothing". They do a ton of research and write a lot of code. Then, they purchase securities from people who want to sell them, and sell them to people who want to buy them. Why is this more palatable if there is a trader in between?
The Impossible Mission - Indie Game Marketing
In Norway everybody's total balance is published by the government. I really find irrational some ordinary people desire to keep stuff like net worth, salary, etc. secret.

Wow, that's horrible. I'm assuming it's some kind of "societal good" social engineering Norway is doing there. But why anybody would think that's a good thing is beyond me.
One of the many reasons I value Ebert is that when I read his reviews, I can tell if a movie will be worth my time, regardless of his assessment of the film. I love some films he hated and I hate some films he loved, but I've never felt like a single review has led me to waste my time on a bad film, even though he personally enjoyed many bad films.

The trick is to actually read his writing and ignore the stars. The stars are secondary, and he says as much - he only attaches them to reviews because the customers demand them. See, here's the thing: Ebert was great as a writer, not as a movie star-giving guy.
Hey, would you mind elaborating? I always wondered why RDP was miles faster than X when working remotely. Mind you, whatever the Teamviewer guys are doing is even more amazing.
How is it hearsay any more so than quotes from McClure and others? McAfee was quoted about their discussion, and Jody clearly went there - shouldn't be any dispute about that.

Why does this 'piss you off'? Seemed entirely reasonable to me.

EDIT: Perhaps you don't see any 'new' information here, but a lot of this was news to me. A great many more of us live outside the bubble that is the few square miles on the planet where so much tech activity takes place. We all didn't know Jody personally, and there seemed precious little in the days after his death that was anything more than "we didn't see this coming" and "he was always so full of life". Perhaps this will serve as a call to investors to have a closer eye o the books, regardless of how charismatic the head of the company may be. And I don't just mean for financial reasons - other people having a closer view of the books might have caused some serious discussions to happen - a forced face to face, as it were - which might have allowed them to see what was going on and offer help. Or it might have pushed him to suicide faster (assuming it was suicide) - who knows?
Noted. Will add it, thanks.
>>Do you think that is invariably true? Do you think that is invariably true?

I guess he is not referring to an entire time-line of incidents and taking an average out of that. But the isolated lows and highs. Minimums and maximums. Read it as a friend posting an image with a sensational and stupid caption posing it as a video which leads to a link to a spam site, now imagine that friend doing it again again(marking it spam/hiding doesn't work - Facebook gives you the option just to screw with you). Now, imagine a friend posting sth not stupid, like an informative link or a question or s statement or his thoughts that sparks a very healthy discussion - this is extremely rare on Facebook, unlike HN and Quora(better still). You've got your high and low.

It's an entirely different aspect if you have a highly curated list of Facebook friends. Spam haters, privacy aficionados(can't think why they would be on Fb), thinkers, minimalists etc etc. Or simply your (all, without even curating the friend list) friends are just what I have mentioned above. You are lucky because mine aren't and I don't know anyone whose are.
To be frank, I have not tested it extensively on Firefox. Will do that over the course of next week.
Tips for Work/Life "Fit", Not Balance
You shouldn't forget to compare general health of one who runs versus one who doesn't. Not only just wellbeing, but sick days (missed on income), medical bills etc.
All the articles about "10x" developers, "1/10" developers, or "super" developers have not taught me anything about how to improve my skills, or a team's skills. Even the articles that promote the "10,000 hours" or "Just F'ing Do It" mantra feel like proselytizing without practical, or proven, methodologies.
If you like the Fitzgerald quote, you'd probably also be interested in the idea that it essentially summarizes "Negative Capability"[0] which was originally developed by the poet John Keats.

Particularly relevant I feel in a world of comment thread polemics

0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_capability
So it's a spelling mistake. Who would've guessed?
Patent trolls are useless. These people do not innovate at all. They purchase, or file for useless patents, and turn around and sue everyone for the almighty dollar. There has to be a stop, and I applaud Rackspace!
Is it really that arrogant to point out that the Bitcoin community has basically ignored the vast body of published, publicly available research on digital cash? Even if the point of Bitcoin is to go in a separate direction and have no central authorities of any kind, that previous work is highly relevant.

There is no particular need for me to design a better digital cash system; such systems have already been designed. It is not even clear that digital cash without a central authority can be provably secure, since nobody has proposed a security definition for digital cash that does not involve some currency issuing authority (no, Bitcoin's definition does not count -- it does not rule out feasible attacks). Personally, I have no real problem with having a "bank" that issues currency, as long as the bank cannot frame people for double spending or other cheating (which is the kind of protection that was described by Chaum and other researchers in the 90s).

So really, the ball is in the Bitcoin community's court. The research results on digital cash and secure multiparty computation is all publicly available and mostly available at no cost. Let the Bitcoin community develop a definition of security for digital cash without any "bank" if that is their goal; all that I am saying is that the definition must rule out feasible attacks if we are expected to take it seriously.
Software is like Architecture and Business is like War
At least according to this blog post, there is hints that IE 11 might have some form of OpenGL support in it http://withinwindows.com/within-windows/2013/3/30/blues-clue...