skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is quite true, but that is not what I meant.

I can't speak for everyone who works in the financial services industry, but when I was in London working at a hedge fund, the word banker denoted someone who did corporate finance (e.g., M&A, IPO's, etc), not someone who works at a bank. All the traders I have met in my life loathed investment bankers, so calling them bankers is the surest way to infuriate them.

Like you said, in the old days, banks did not do trading. Back then, everyone who worked at a bank worked in banking indeed. These days, banks do everything. In fact, a few years ago Goldman Sachs was generating most of its revenue via trading, not via investment banking deals. Therefore, denoting someone who works at a bank by banker is saying absolutely nothing because the guy could be a banker... or a trader, a broker, a quant, etc etc etc.

What I meant when I wrote that traders and bankers are entirely different beasts is that their cultures are totally different, though they might work in the same bank. Traders like to think they're much smarter than bankers, they work less hours, they don't work during the weekends because the market is closed, they cultivate a culture of aggressiveness, and they can be quite rude. Bankers on the other hand have to schmooze clients, obey more social norms, work 90-100 hours per week, put facetime to impress their bosses, and stare at Excel tables until their eyes bleed..,
To be honest I actually kind of like office 2007 especially the improvements to organization, to be honest I have to use word 2003 at school and have 2007 at home and when I'm working at school some things seem so much harder than they have to be. The hardest part is that we were all used to the old version and layout that a new ui seems counter intuitive and I'll agree that when I first started using it I didn't like it and was angry at the new interface. But after some use I have found that the ribbon system works well for me.

Some hard things for 2007: turning on the analysis tool pack in excel and probably quite a bit more if you weren't using shortcuts and used the top menu for everything.

This just shows that people don't like change especially when they use something so much, not that office 2007 was a flop.
XP Mode in Windows 7 is a scam
Amchem Products v. Windsor (SCOTUS 1997)

Found the case I was looking for. In this case, the court struck down a settlement which abridged absent member's substantive rights, in parts on the grounds that it was a violation of their due process to be bound (and to have their substantive rights abridged) without adequate due process, notice and the right to opt out of the class action.
In our Google case, the orphan authors are in the same position as the absent class members in Anchem; their literary rights have been transferred to Google without proper notice and opportunity to opt out of the settlement.
Underrated response.
Come on, it's the flu. You can leave your house for god sakes. Especially in the U.S. where there have been barely any reported cases (wait, any?)! How about this idea for an iphone app: iPaperBag. You breathe into it to stop hyperventilating over swine flu.
>"I’d spent a year walking around studying flashcards with maths problems, multiplying random licence-plate numbers in my head, just to prepare for the interviews. I memorised The Wall Street Journal every morning."

This feels like bullshit.
Not Smart: Warner Music Issues DMCA Takedown On Larry Lessig Presentation
Two nanotech optical cloaking prototypes
RIAA’s Hostile Takeover of the Internet
Airbnb is hiring Software Engineer - Ruby on Rails
I gues I got here late, site is down.
This guy was working for UBS. The same UBS that hired Phil Gramm as their Vice Chair.

This wasn't some multi-national corporation stuck with working with Phil Gramm in order to make a killing in some scheme. UBS went out and actively sought that idiot, and gave him a position of responsibility and leadership.

I have little doubt any multi-national that went out and sought Phil Gramm to lead them was also taking all this decadence to entirely new levels.
SHA1 collisions down to 2^52 [pdf]
I actually think this is one danger of the internet and increasingly specialised communication channels - individuals are never exposed to contrary opinions, and either gradually grow to believe that their opinions are the only valid ones or fail to see legitimate threats to their world view.

The best example I know is politics - so many partisan sites exist that individuals who are firmly within one camp can get all of their news through their preferred filter - unlike MSM which at least pretends to be objective and achieves somewhat middle ground.

For HN, I think it's fair to say there are some characteristics we have in common which are not common in the wider community (say, respect for rationality and intelligence). I hope we're not too insular to only find news and conversation here; if we're are insular, we may wake up one day to discover our values have been even more marginalised in the wider community and we didn't even see it coming.
You should probably consider re-titling this submission. It has a redittesque feel to it.
This is a horrible idea. However, since I've worked in "bio defense" and have family members who still do, I can assure you that if you write the grant proposal properly you should be able to pick up some US federal dollars to work on this. Possibly to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

You don't even ever have to finish it - you just need to write the reports at the proper times.

</cynicism>
and another button directs the CDC to drop a fuel-air bomb at that location...
I'm using OpenDNS, and reddit.tv doesn't resolve (yet?).
How about a link to the actual site instead of a blog post written in broken English?

http://www.zimbra.com/products/desktop.html
Both Safari and Firebug employ similar "tricks" to try to infer the name. The point is that none of them is fool proof (especially in cases of generated functions), and its nice to have something to fall back on when you run into this problem.
Lactic acid doesn't cause pain or decreased performance:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/16/health/nutrition/16run.htm...
>I find it fascinating that the lethality of the disease seems to be linked to those of a "Mexican-American" background (i.e. native American).

I don't know where you're getting this from. AFAIK there has been one lethality case in the US. Also the majority of the Mexican population is of mixed race rather than purely native American.

>The one thing that they are stumped about is that the foreigners (mostly "white" - of European descent) that have contracted the disease seem to have an easier time dealing with it. It makes you wonder if there has been an outbreak in Europe's past that has protected the decedents of the survivors.

It could also simply be that foreigners (white and of European descent) have better living conditions and healtcare systems than 80% of the population of mexico city.
It's boring. It's not news. It's nothing. Some guy put porn in a presentation. wow. Move on. I thought techies would be able to resist falling for this sort of ridiculous hysteria witch hunt thing.

(Assuming your definition of porn is some women wearing clothes).

Same thing about the 'Women in tech' thing. Guess what. I, like most other people I'd wager, started programming at home, on my own. I didn't have to ask permission, I didn't need acceptance from some 'community'. I just decided I wanted to do it.

Please stop complaining, and just get on with it.
On a site I ran, spammers routinely signed up then submitted spam weeks later--I'm fairly certain it was automated.
For some strange reason I love photos of abandoned buildings. There are a few more photos of the house from the photographer's flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tunnelbug/sets/7215759415352040...

I didn't have time to look around it yet, but his website looks promising as well: http://www.terrastories.com/bearings/
The following code is for a backtester. I created the application on tickmarkt. It checks when an exponential moving average with 5 day lags crosses over the 10 day moving average and will open a trade. You might need a large time period for this to work or you can lower the lag and it will fire off sooner. I have some technical analysis indicators built into the system that I will soon open source as well.

here is some example backtester code:

var hasTrade = false;

function Init()
{
}

function Tick()
{
//5-day exponential moving average
var ma5=analysis.Technical.ema('AAPL',
1 ,
1 ,
5 );

//10-day exponential moving average
var ma10=analysis.Technical.ema('AAPL',
1 ,
1 ,
10 );

//invalid time data because of weekend
if (ma5.length == 0 || ma10.length == 0)
return;

if (ma5[0].value > ma10[0].value)
{
//open a trade if we dont have one
if (hasTrade == false)
{

api.Broker.OpenTrade('AAPL',
100,
'open trade on cross');

hasTrade = true;
}

}
else if (ma5[0].value < ma10[0].value)
{
//close a trade since we have one
if (hasTrade == true)
{
api.Broker.OpenTrade('AAPL',
-1100,
'close trade on cross');

hasTrade = false;
}

}

}

function Destroy()
{
}
My niece had the same experience in Biz School. Turns out that the lecturers and tech support are so limited in their understanding that they run screaming from anything that they don't understand / take the time to understand. File compatability with Excel was also a major issue with macros and add-ons. Interestingly at the same Uni if you do CS or IT course, you can use whatever you damn well please because tech support is more broadly skilled. BTW, most CS majors use Macbooks.
Operating systems, drivers and small embeded systems. I'm sure there are a few others. These also happen to be C's problem domain in the modern era.
The site is basically a website where you can write backtesters and screeners and there is a bit of social network/trading thrown in. Screeners and backtesters work on algorithms to actually find and trade stocks. I have traded in the past and always wanted something like this. There are software packages but they are expensive and you need a lot of money for them and the data feeds are expensive as well. My goal is to bring all this information in an easy to use way.
Oddly enough, I'd rather get swine flu than watch the movie version of "I am Legend" again.
[video] Keving Smith discusses Superman Returns (Great story, 20min)
I'd be curious to know what hackers think of this story. I'm a designer by training and this kind of rhapsodic BS drives me nuts. I get that some things are hard to put into words, the grand canyon, a view of the rockies at sundown, a volcanic eruptions, but this car? Its timeless and modern? That is just lazy writing that makes designers look bad. Also, its not really that original. The front end looks like and Aston Martin. The rest looks like a basic sedan. The Audi TT, The Lamborghini, Porches, etc. all have a distinct look this could be confused with 25 other cars.

Also, enough puffery. 11 designers working for 8 months is unreasonable? Maybe that is what gets car companies in trouble.

Again the technology is cool, the car is not bad, but this terrible writing and overbearing ego is distasteful and unwarranted.

Jason, Thanks for posting this, even though I don't like the narrator I enjoy how this adds to the richness of the community.
Erlang follows Jeet Kune Do principles
Erlix - A Ruby wrapper for Erlang
Sorry... I forgot it's un-politically correct to point out obvious differences between people. Just like there can be no losers at sports day any more...

http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n11/mente/eisntein/cerebro-ho...

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/heshe.html

http://library.thinkquest.org/26812/gather/cgi-bin/messages/...

If you'd rather pretend we're exactly the same, up to you :)
Sex, certainly, is equally or more natural. No sex, no babies feeding.
I maintain an S Corporation for my freelance work and take care of all of the corporate accounting and payroll with GNUCash. The documentation that comes with it is enough to get up and running, and the direct interface to double-entry bookkeeping may come a bit more naturally to a hacker than using QuickBooks.

For a startup, this can save you thousands of dollars in accounting fees, and it helps for at least one active business partner to have a clear picture of the company's finances. Your finances won't be that complicated initially, and the IRS publishes timely guides to current tax law that can usually be grokked in less than 15 minutes. It is trivial to transfer from GNUCash to software like TurboTax Business, which will keep you from making mistakes on the tax forms.

A tax professional should be able to advise you on business forms and all of the filings required for your business form. You could set up a one-time consultation if you don't wish to learn enough to make the correct determination.

Of course if you don't trust each other that is a different story..
What is it about hashes? Every single one gets broken eventually.

Encryption doesn't seem to suffer from this - the keyspace might be small enough to search, but they don't get broken.

2^52 isn't small, but it's a lot less than the expected 2^80.
If Everything Was Made by Microsoft
http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n11/mente/eisntein/cerebro-ho...

There are several such results...

>> "One of the most interesting differences appear in the way men and women estimate time, judge speed of things, carry out mental mathematical calculations, orient in space and visualize objects in three dimensions, etc. In all these tasks, women and men are strikingly different, as they are too in the way their brains process language."
Really? I personally found "I am Legend" to be a good movie. Sure there was suspension of disbelief, and sure, the ending was a bit hokey, but the acting was quite good, at least in my opinion.
I still just don't see what harm it does to have not-notable-enough-to-you, but reliably-sourced, verifiable information in Wikipedia. What is the problem that deleting solves in this case?

(of course, the flip side: I have, I'm told, for a while been hovering just near the bare minimum criteria to be "notable" enough for Wikipedia, and the thought of having to endure the endless stupidity that is having an article about one's self frightens me to no end)
Only that the amazing GC JWZ states as examples (Smalltalk, Lisp) are used in production ourdays.
Cloud Computing and the Internet - Vinton Cerf
How The Big Players Trade [Vid]
Ask HN: Do you have any code or projects of your own you would like to talk about instead?
Tired of other discussions dominating the front page? Tell us what you're working on right now, and please include a link to actual code. Let's get back in touch with hacking!
2 ^ 52 = 4,503,599,627,370,500

If that equals a number of seconds, then it is equal to 142,808,207 years. If kilometers, it is equal to 476.03 light years.

So 2 ^ 52 is still a big number anyway.
e.g. Here is the code for my Extension Methods rewriter:

http://github.com/raganwald/rewrite_rails/blob/master/lib/re...

Context:

http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-04-2...
I have found that I have more trouble remembering things I read on-screen. I'm not sure why. I have no trouble reading them, in fact I tend to read slightly faster from the screen, mostly because scrolling is faster than turning the page and re-acquiring the text. So I mostly restrict my on-screen reading to browsing and fiction (Baen).
A more appropriate title for this post would surely be "Why I love Linux and If You Were a Real Developer You Would Too".

While one could argue the original article was biased towards OS X and not entirely objective, this rebuttal is so frustratingly incorrect on so many levels. Either the author is misinformed or too stubborn to care that they're mistaken.

This article wouldn't come off as a troll piece if there'd been some explanation as to why Linux was quantifiably better for their particular uses instead of merely spreading misinformation about OS X.

It's about the same as having the opinion "I like Chevy because Ford sucks!"
Also does JSONP for use in the front-end.

It would be nice, vicaya, if you fact checked before throwing stones.
Encryption doesn't seem to suffer from this - the keyspace might be small enough to search, but they don't get broken.

DES is vulnerable to linear cryptanalysis (2^43 plaintexts). RC2 is vulnerable to a related-key attack (2^34 chosen plaintexts). RC4 is broken in too many ways to list. Khufu and Khafre are subject to differential cryptanalysis.
Rumor: New Sony PSP Go Loses UMD
Of course. It's another awkward failure mode, since it becomes unavoidably clear that we're just saying stock phrases. :)
I'm not swearing at you, raganwald. I'm swearing near you.
If that equals a number of seconds, then it is equal to 142,808,207 years.

Yes, but it isn't a number of seconds. It's a number of cryptographic operations. My laptop can perform 2^23 SHA1s per second. SHA1 collision-finding is getting into the "idle resources from a university computing lab for a few months" range.
Is the Silicon Valley real estate market so bad that not even Steve Jobs can buy another piece of property that would be easier to build on, or is there something particularly special about the location?
And if you do a billion operations per second, it's equal to .142808207 years.
Use the various suggestions below to estimate your market size. Do both top-down and bottoms-up. Then, for both estimates, consider what would happen if you were off by 10x (in a bad way - you'd overestimated your market size by an order of magnitude).

Do you still have a viable business? Yes? Great, go for it and stop worrying about market sizing! No? Revisit your assumptions in the market sizing calculations - if they are as good as you can make them, and you find that being off by an order of magnitude will kill your business, then proceed carefully, because the actual market size may in fact be 1/10th what you originally estimated.
Once again, everyone in the tech industry assumes everyone not in the tech industry is stupid. That seems like exactly who I'd want to issue a takedown notice to if I were Warner (assuming I had a reasonably compelling case, which I make no judgment on here since I'm not an IP attorney, and I'm guessing neither is the author).
It's more like Steve Jobs is so rich he can afford to have his estate in Woodside, the most expensive place in all the land, sit empty and be absorbed back into nature.
Knowing Microsoft's history, it won't matter how broken XP Mode is. By Windows 8 or 9, it'll work well enough they can dump the old system entirely and move to something better, like Apple did with Mac OS X. (It will never be perfect, but the number of users they'll lose due to backwards compatibility may become small enough to be worth writing off.)
DES, RC2, RC4, Khufu, Khafre. Now can we get an analysis for something that isn't in the "don't ever use" list in Practical Cryptography?

Because it is the case that hashes are less well studied (and thus possibly less "hardened") than our workhorse block ciphers.

You're the expert here, can we wheedle you into giving us the real answer?
"idle resources from a university computing lab for a few months" range.

Out of curiosity, what sort of time frame does that translate to for a government agency such as the NSA?
My take on high-end vs. cheaper Staples office chair:

I used to think you need the absolute best office chair out there: I had some German high-end chair and then a Swiss Giroflex 33 (Model 33-7777... below on that page http://www.giroflex.com/content/produkte/giroflex_33.php), both around a thousand bucks.

Now I'm sitting comfortably in some decent Staples office chair (adjustable armrests, mesh back, leather seat), that I picked up for 150 bucks.

Not much difference.

The MAIN thing is that your posture is good, and that once in a while you stretch and exercise!

Advice for founders and small business: buy a decent but cheap Staples office chair at first (not the comfy big one, but the lean adjustable kind with good armrests, so you can relax your arms while you're typing). The high-end market doesn't really improve your experience that much.

OTOH, if you have the spare cash to blow... a high-end office chair IS marginally better.
The author seems to miss the point. This isn't like Apple emulating classic in OS X (or even PowerPC on Intel). This is Microsoft emulating one operating system from within another operating system where the compatibility between them is extremely high. You can take most well written XP applications and run them on Vista without a hitch and the situation will likely be better with Windows 7.

So, if the operating systems are so compatible what's the point of XP mode? There's a huge body of badly written software designed for and test only on XP that are necessary for businesses. These businesses haven't just been hesitant to upgrade to Vista, they aren't even considering it. If it doesn't run their app, there's no point. XP Mode is a way to coax them into upgrading by giving them an option to run their old crappy software on this new OS. That is all.

You're not supposed to be using XP mode to run games, so it's lack of GPU support doesn't matter. You're not supposed to be using it to interact with all sorts of devices. That's what the host operating system, Windows 7, is for. If you're going to virtualize everything in XP, you might as well just be running XP.
Do you have to be funny for this to work? ;)
They already know what you were hashing so it doesn't matter.
A Sector Assembles to Turn Video Pirates Into Gold
For those of you that don't know a Stirling engine is an external combustion engine that generates movement by alternately heating and cooling a sealed volume of working gas. Due to the lack of high-velocity gas moving around these engines can be nearly silent, can burn almost anything available and result in complete combustion of their fuel (so less nasty monoxides). They had some applications in industrial usage around the turn of the 20th century but are now largely unknown. They are slow to react to changes in fuel input, making them largely inappropriate for conventional automobiles (although demonstration which varied the pressure of the working gas have been shown to work). However in a series hybrid this isn't an issue as they may operate at a constant power output.

I'd really like this to work but there are serious engineering issues with Stirling engines for example their low power to weight ratio etc. I'll keep my hopes up but will not hold my breath!
I don't see anything in this article about DoS, where are you getting that from? these are benchmarks against static files, still very impressive but not DoS protection.
Laptop gender wars: What your netbook (or Toughbook) says about you
Quick context:

A reasonable attack against SHA1 is cause for alarm. The "next step up" is SHA256, which is a function that designers actively avoid because it's expensive. Virtually everything that used MD5 had a trivial upgrade path to SHA1.

Most SSL certificates are signed with SHA1.

Interestingly, the SSL protocol itself uses both MD5 and SHA1, but is not vulnerable to these attacks, because Paul Kocher got them to use both MD5 and SHA1 (on interleaved portions of the handshake).
Vastly outdated? Really? It's been quite a while since I've used Java so I'm curious to find out:

Does Java have lexically scoped functions now? Macros? Inlined functions?

Does Java have closures now?

:keywords?

CLOS-style multi-dispatch?

It's not like there weren't languages out there, that certain co-authors of the Java spec did their PhD and postdoctoral work on, that implemented all of these features...
A creative, non-legislative way to get guns off the street
Amazon to offer free cloud services to academics
The video in question:

http://blip.tv/file/1937322

And yes, Lessig is going to fight this.
Okay, okay, humour is by far the best way to diffuse tensions and give people an opportunity to really reflect on matters without making knee-jerk reactions.

Well done!