skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I imagine they're using genome size (number of bases in exons) as their measure of complexity, not something ill-defined.

I don't think it's sensitive the way you say, since they're basically just linearly extrapolating the logarithm, but I haven't read the paper. If you somehow manage to shoot high or low by a factor of 100, that's only a temporal error of six or seven doublings. The bigger issue is that they're extrapolating over orders of magnitude that we have no direct evidence about.
Life saving genetics discoveries - open source or patent?
Jekyll v1.0.0.rc1
The biggest question for me is "would they do a better job of running Tarsnap than I can do?" I built Tarsnap because I want the world to have good, secure, online backups; it's a profitable corporation simply because that's the most natural form for a backup service to take.

Leaving Tarsnap out of the picture -- supposing I was working at a startup instead of being the sole founder of a startup -- hiring me would involve:

1. Having a technical employee (or possibly a formerly-technical employee who has moved into management) approach me. Even the best recruiters have enough cultural mismatch with me that they utterly fail to get my attention. Rough ballpark: If I say "use the address in my whois" and you manage to contact me, you pass that test.

2. Telling what you're doing -- on the ground. I don't care about your elevator pitch, and aside from being satisfied that you can pay your bills, I don't care how profitable the company is going to be -- I'm never going to work somewhere in the hopes of getting a big IPO payout.

3. Telling me what you would want me to work on. Give specific examples of technical problems. I'm never going to move to a different city based on "we're doing lots of exciting things and we're sure you'll enjoy working here".

And if you're really serious:

4. Flying me down, renting me a hotel room, and giving me a desk in your offices for a week. Don't pay me, and don't assign me work to do; just tell people that I'm there. By the end of the week, one of two things will have happened: Either I'll have spent most of the week working on my own stuff, and won't be interested in working for you, or I'll have been talking to people and solving problems and writing code and I'll be excited about joining your team.
Yesterday I watched an old TV show with Sagan, Hawking and A. C. Clarke. At some point, discussing about violence and politics and the future, Clarke said: "we are a very unevolved species."

Seems kind of appropriate in this context.
"We are a design & development studio based in Amsterdam. And by we, I mean Jonathan Puckey, Roel Wouters & Luna Maurer."

Oh hey, that's one of the people who was involved in the late lamented Scriptographer[1] plugin for Illustrator.

[1]: http://scriptographer.org
Remember this is the SECOND time it has happened.

Before it was the widespread hacking that resulted in Bitcoins being stolen. And users were never told exactly what happened and what was done about it.

People have every right to expect the worse with a company with a track record as poor as Linodes.
glassdoor.com is a good place to find salaries for established companies and positions in your field. Every company will think "good salary" is different so you just have to figure that out while interviewing.
They couldn't. I'm much happier working for myself. I know that's a non-answer but it was an important realization for me.
> Am I the only one who is more confused about why there are compiled java classes and AMI BIOS updates in the www directory than about the hacking itself?

Sysadmins being lazy.

Somebody needs to get a file from a workstation to a remote machine. There's a firewall in the way somewhere that prevents SSH directly between them or one of them is a Windows box that isn't running an SSH server.

The "correct" solution is complicated and takes 5 minutes to setup. So the sysadmin just copies the file to the web server and downloads it with a browser on the other end. Because port 80 is always open.
So you'd let the guy die? So that the NY Times could blow that up into a bunch of bullshit, too? Right. That makes you a better person.

As for citations... Are people required to cite first hand accounts?
The experiment only tested male resumes. So, no, it did not perform this analysis. Personally, I'm not sure what to expect if we changed the gender.
Ask HN: Is software creation more fashion than rational? 
Let's try this example.

Think about navigation websites before Google Maps. Think about it after Google Maps.

Look at Node.js. Build a time machine, go back to the past before Google Maps. Tell people about Node.JS. Now go think what their response would have been.

Javascript has pretty much existed for a while. People knew about the language. They had a chance to test it. The major specification of Javascript was there for all to see.

So why did people change their opinion on Javascript? How did people who previously hated Javascript and all it stood for all of a sudden change their minds to the language when everything about the language was there for all to see?
The only downside to this is that typically, there's little promotion angle here.

I have no idea who wrote/contributed to the vast majority of the many wikipedia links I reference in comments and emails.

It does bode well for resume-padding however - you can just link to your body of contributions and some stats (edited 1k articles, etc). As a hiring manager/customer, that'd definitely pique my interest.
Can I add some more options to the poll?

- remote working plus monthly flights and hotels to meet the crew

- collegiate atmosphere and focus on learning and experimentation
I remember reading somewhere that a surprisingly large number of terrorists / bombers / what have you, are guys in their 20s or 30s with an engineering background, otherwise pretty normal and unremarkable.
If the author stopped at the title, he would be one hundred percent correct.

It's easy to rant about unit tests. Don't fall into that trap. Be aware that it's a hype, and correct for that fact - and once you do, use your best judgement. In the end, it's you, the engineer, who's shipping the product - not the countless ever-arguing denizens of the internet.
If you watch it interactively, it explicitly asks you to draw a smiley at that point.
Have you considered study abroad? In a friendly country, people will initiate conversation with you just because you're from a foreign culture.
What a jerk! Being inspired to donate to charity and whatnot!

/s
You learn something new every day. I didn't even know there was a downvote threshold!
I find it interesting that the premise for this entire diatribe is that once some code was written, a pivot was made, and a number of tests then had to be thrown away (or reworked, or re-factored?).

Recently I had a code base where we decided that due to a new delightful feature our customers were going to be quite pleased with we would need to switch out our old queuing system for a new one. In doing so well more than half of our huge test suite turned red. This told us two important things 1) that the queuing system touched a lot of areas of code we needed to think about and 2) where in the code the queuing system had touch points.

Ultimately we were able to put in the new queuing system, fix the areas that were broken by the change, and have the confidence at the end of the process that we had not broken any of the areas of the code that were previously under test. (This does not mean that our code was bug free of course, only that the areas under test were still working in the prescribed way, but that is a discussion for a different article.)

I believe that this would have taken a team of people weeks to do previously. I was confident that the change was ready after only 3 days with 2 developers. I would not trade my tests. There is a cost associated with everything, but I believe tests are the least costly way to get highly confident software built.
Or, people get to use the web however they want without rigid "open everything" extremism. Netflix is the best business model on the internet right now: you pay them $X a month, get great content, everyone gets paid. DRM makes that possible. I find it far preferable to the advertising/spyware-based monetization model, which seems to be the only other viable business model for content on the internet. The internet standards should be flexible enough to accommodate both and let consumers choose.
They are blind to the fact that a small team...

Be careful with that. A lot of times, inefficiency is a cover for siphoning funds to upper management. You can get in huge trouble for pointing out "inefficiencies" that are really ways to get money out of a company.
Because if you park on the street outside of the apartment where you live (which is many people, btw - very few people have a dedicated parking spot), then chances are you will get ticketed if you are gone while there's street cleaning happening. To prevent that from happening, you would have to arrange with your friends to move it while you are gone, or you would have to pay someone to do it. In the first case this is an inconvenience, in the second case it's an expense, and the downsides of letting someone else behind the wheel of your car are the same as renting it out.
1. most devices are simply cell phones with the trigger hooked up to the vibrating motor wires on a cellphone

2. i don't think even suicide bombers are crazy enough to trust any american cellphone operator coverage claims.
I tried explaining this to someone earlier... apparently it's not a numbers game because of assumed risk. There is little to no risk to watching a marathon, whereas living in Iraq or speeding on the highway there is implied risk.

I'm not trying to discredit what you're saying, just pointing out why people (my friend and probably a lot of others) go into hyper sensitive reactionary mode.
Dissonance is powerful. In the book Mistakes were made, but not by me the authors describe several experiments like this.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_Were_Made_(But_Not_by...)

For example, a group of schoolboys are split into 2 random groups. There's a bit of handwavey explanation about the split. One group is called "under estimators" and the other group is called "over estimators". The groups quickly develop loyalty.

It's changed my behaviour.
More money. I enjoy the work I currently do (though it's starting to get a bit samey, a change wouldn't be bad) but I am paid woefully under what my salary should be, because I stem from a government organisation that's now gone privatised.

I am strongly considering jumping ship because it's essentially costing me at least $40k/year in opportunity cost to stay in this position. That's no small chunk of money.
I used to visit Newburgh a fair amount when I was younger. Do you think by chance the large number of historical buildings is actually whats creating part of the problem?
Try google translate. Input a word or phrase that describes your product and translate to Portuguese, Latin, etc. Just make sure google translate is accurate before you buy the .com :-) The biggest problem I always had was finding a domain name that wasn't taken by pirates.
That last one is a kicker.

If you don't mind me saying you are in the top 1% though - getting you to work for the company is a win - the rest of us still need to persuade a company they want to hire us.

I think I am saying I don't get enough recruiters calling me at all hours to think I can wait for ideal to come along
Vanishingly unlikely. Boston is full of Irish people, so for an Irish terrorist group to set off an explosion where they're more likely to injure Irish people than elsewhere makes no sense. If they were to set off a bomb in the US, which has never happened, the obvious target would be a courthouse or US attorney's office.

I'm Irish and intimately familiar with the politics of terrorism, FWIW.
Yes, in fact I hear that a company called OCP is running some interesting experiments in just that area: http://blog.khanneasuntzu.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/OCP...
Easy, equal or better pay/benefits and more interesting work. I think people have a sliding scale though. For me, excellent health insurance coverage would be a dealbreaker. I'd stay where I was if another company offered to pay me 50% more without health coverage but totally leave if they offered me 10% less with the same health coverage and more interesting work.
This has come up a few times for PyCon, but we get a very wide range of proposal qualities from a wide range of people that would make it hard to come up with the best schedule we can, which is the ultimate goal of the Program Committee. Some of the best speakers submit relatively poor proposals if you read them without their name and experience. Those things obviously aren't everything, but they do hold some weight in the review process.

Anyway, we ended up with 20% women on the schedule, up from 6% in 2012. We did it purely through outreach.
You mean the comprised image?
Site of the Boston Marathon Explosions
I've never watched Hannity so I really can't make an informed reply. There's no question that the Daily Show has a Liberal point of view, but there's a difference between having a point of view and intellectual dishonesty. Humor is a trap in portraying the truth because the funny thing may not be the true thing, but it's less of a trap than the Cable news cycle.
It's SMS-CB with some magic numbers to activate the Text To Speech and alarms https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/opt/tel...
Actual title: "Study: Many Searchers Choose Google Over Bing Even When Google’s Name Is On Bing’s Results"

In other words, people chose Google's results, even when they were labelled "Bing".
The AP has walked back that article -- headline now reads "Cellphone use heavy, but still operating in Boston". I don't see any note of a retraction or correction.

Anyone know of any good resources to explain when news organizations find it ethical to transparently change articles like this, and when it isn't?
Google's Person Finder is open source[1] and uses the People Finder Interchange Format[2], which was designed after Katrina specifically so that disaster relief organizations can quickly share this data so that data sources stay in sync and new ones can be quickly revved up (if traffic overwhelms some or, I don't know, a company decides to no longer host one).

Federation of this data is the most important aspect of it, because people use many different sources for news and information, and should not have to search for every possible database of missing persons to find the information they need. For example, after the 2010 Haitian Earthquake, CNN, the New York Times, the Miami Herald, and the Google Person Finder all shared data[3] so that if any one (or several) went down, all that information was still available from other sources.

In any case, I don't know if you were trying to score free internet points or just being snarky, but it's generally a good idea to do basic research before repeating non sequiturs.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/googlepersonfinder/

[2] http://zesty.ca/pfif/1.4/

[3] http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/100245/google...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxYzQtSxoKE
The Russians are in fact behind everything in Conrad's novel.
EFF and Partners Challenge Six 3D Printing Patent Applications
Indeed. I had originally left off the ending, but a few people who previewed the essay told me they showed it to others (who don't know me), and they said they weren't sure if I was joking or serious.
Likely we can reduce the incidence of destructive acts somewhat, but it seems improbable to eliminate them entirely... with billions upon billions of humans roaming the planet, a few minds are bound to go off the rails.
NBCNEWS:

"Boston police say there was no specific intelligence warning of any kind of attack, and federal officials tonight say there is no reason to think that this is part of any larger threat. At this point they believe it is confined to Boston, but a meeting tonight will decide whether any kind of national alert will be sent out. There is no suspect in custody, authorities say, but some people are being questioned, including some with injuries who were taken to Boston hospitals.

One of those, a person in whom there is some interest, is
a young person who was here on a student visa,"

NBC reports.

Source:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOcYcEkxzvg

Update:

7:30 P.M. EST

Pete Williams (NBC News):

"Has burns and seen running from the area"

"Being aggressively questioned now."
Emergency alert systems have been mandated by the federal government in one for or another (radio, TV, etc) for decades. With an increasing number of people no longer watching live TV or radio (due to DVRs and the Internet) it makes sense to mandate a new channel for emergency alerts in case of severe weather, etc., which is exactly what Congress does.

I don't think the objective is "perfect" targeting and delivery. The intent is to message as many people as possible within an affected area as quickly, as possible. IANAL, but I suspect it would be very difficult to hold companies liable if the service doesn't work properly - for one thing, it's not a service you're expressly paying them for, it's something they're doing as a public service.
Hiring front-end developers
Every single person making all those decisions (the encouragers, the skill builders, the aptitude developers, the educators, the inviters) are "people at the end". We're all the end of the line when they come across us. Your kindergarten teacher was the person at the end when you entered their classroom.

So I disagree with you. The blame does lie with "the people at the end".
And right now we got confirmed on IRC that data is out, we do not know how much, 4 last numbers of CCs are out but that doesn't mean that full CCs are out.

E-mails and logins are also out it seems.
OFTC has disabled Linode IRC channel:

* mode/#linode [+m] by tjfontaine

<tjfontaine> this is what I'm going to say, as a network representative

<tjfontaine> regardless of what has or has not happened with linode, OFTC cannot tolerate release of sensitive information with itself as that mechanism

<tjfontaine> this channel is moderated until staff determines otherwise
That patent is the sort of thing you're tasked with building in a mech-e class, or as an abstract problem in a physics class. If it's patentable, then one could say that the purpose of physics and engineering training is to build things, patent them, and live off of the royalties, rather than to create products people want to buy, competing in an open market.

The premise of your argument relies on the vague notion of what's a "practical" problem and what's not. I don't think that's any more tenable than any other defense of the current patent system I've ever seen. It's all vague, and exchanges like this are pushing me to a more extreme position that all patents are bogus, rather than granting that some "math" patents are connected to specific practical problems and thus patentable.
I'll take a crack at my own over-generalization, albeit one I think is more useful.

Adding strict types (Typescript!) to your code base gives you way more maintainability than testing. Do it first, then if you still needs tests, write them.
As i understand it, it's a standard API that the browser exposes to external processes. The browser doesn't have any DRM plugins, just EME. the decryption happens outside the browser, and any decryption modules installed on the system will be available to all browsers.
The politics are less subtle than that. I believe that you are correct in what the President wants vs what he can do. The assertion was that Congress, which is the only part of our Government that can appropriate funds, was unwilling to fund that effort.

In that stalemate, you negotiate. And the Congress certainly wants at least some of the prisoners to be tried in the US court system. So the President, in the absence of getting the funding to move them into the private court system, threatens to simply release them all back to their home countries.

The leadership here is that "we" as a nation don't deprive people of their liberty without due process on principle. And while we recognize the expedience of detaining people during war time, nearly everyone seems to be believe that the prisoner's at Guantanamo are not sanctioned "prisoners of war" per the Geneva Convention. Being neither duck nor fowl puts them in limbo.

The President promised to change that, he did not. He could have (not in a way that Congress approved) but the world in general would be much better off if you either shot these people in battle when they were shooting at you, or you charged them with a crime and tried them, or you let them go. When he left these people incarcerated, he removed another item where the US used to be 'different' from authoritarian regimes, and as a voter I've been working to change the regime through the institutions available to me to do so.
I don't see why it is inherently unsustainable. There is nothing in the very nature of disposability that precludes a robust recycling path to close the matter loop. And nothing that precludes including the cost of that recycling in the price of the items that will eventually be recycled and/or the next things made with the material.

Trees dispose of their leaves, those rot and feed a chain of creatures and the material is recycled to the trees. This is something of an existence proof that such a system is possible.

I would agree we currently do a terrible job of approximating any such ideal.
Or you could just improve the text rendering engine of a normal HTML browser to do better typesetting.
That'd make your HTML2.0 content look nice too!

It isn't like using TeX is any guarantee of niceness: http://www.ieee.org/documents/TRANS-JOUR.pdf
Controversy: Kaggle and GE FlightQuest
For me at the moment: not sure it's possible, but double my salary and I would listen to the pitch.

I am currently doing work on a political test that matches candidates to your views and shows you the closest match, both party and congressional candidate.

Every party that put forth a list had an invitation extended to send us a list of emails for their top 5 candidates to answer the same questions.

So far 45000 people out of an electorate of 220000 have gotten results from the test. 213 candidates out of 280 have responded.

I really feel that I have served democracy. I'm not sure any other job could have given as much job satisfaction.
A few hundred GB here, a few hundred GB there, pretty soon you're talking real bandwidth.
I'm not sure that there is a sure-fire way to quantify what tests are or are not necessary. In my opinion, this is something that comes with experience and is more of an art than a science. But I'm okay with that.

If all you got out of the article was that slavishly following a process (like TDD) can be bad, I'll consider that a win for my writing. Because my general feel of the community is that testing is some sacrosanct practice that must be adhered to without question. And I question that.

I write tests. I'm not anti-test. I just imagine I write far fewer tests than most. In my opinion we should constantly question whether a certain practice (in this case, writing a specific test) is worth it. I think that's a healthier approach to development than blind red/green light.
Android 4.2.2 installed to more devices via Cyanogenmod
If only such a library existed...
I also like the practicalness of the advice, but it feels rather crass coming from someone deeply involved in Watsi. Good intentions or not, using a horrible event to promote something else altogether while the event is still happening is in terribly bad taste.
Not sure how it seems professional. Compare it to the London bus bombings or Madrid, and it seems much more haphazard. For one thing, had it happened about two hours before, there was a much larger national / international audience when the winners were finishing.
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