skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read an article on HN a while ago, about a guy who escaped from a North Korean prison camp. That shed light on something that we don't know much about. Now that was some escape. He is the only person to have ever escaped a North Korean prison camp.

Again, as I said, the author did go through a lot of difficulties in her childhood. But in my opinion, this article is on the front page of HN, only because its about North Korea. Thousands of other people "escape" poverty and inhumane living conditions to reach US/Western countries from all over the world every year.
My instinct says the same thing on Bitcoin acting as surrogate for gold in the near term (Say the next 4-5 years or so). I also think that the way it is structured could help it fulfill its currency aspirations in the long term by its ability to be broken apart into tiny little pieces.

Our brains (and economy) are not really used to working in decimals of something on a day to day basis, but if Bitcoin eventually settles around 1,000 or so you could see people start using it this way.
I think Zappos' and Ecomom's stories are way different. Are you referring to the info in the Zappos' book, delivering Happiness?
Sure it is. Get it from someone you don't know for cash at localbitcoins.com and spend it at a public computer. (To do that safely, you probably need to use a client like The Armory which would free you from needing to load your wallet onto a public computer.)
One of the great ideas in Erlang.
"The reason you want to go to those schools is not their top-notch academics"

I assume you didn't go to an Ivy League school. Most of the people who are there by academic merit genuinely are at the top of their academic year/class. If you can handle it, you can take math classes with IMO medalists, chemistry classes with IChO medalists, etc. And this holds true for most departments.
"...Bad things don't happen to good people..."

I HAVE to say this after what I've seen in my life. (I've spent a significant portion of it researching cancer.)

Bad things DO HAPPEN to good people.
Farmed carnivorous fish (e.g. tuna)? I've started getting farmed bluefin at the Japanese fishmarket in Berkeley (confusingly called Tokyo Fish Market); it's essentially as good as wild bluefin, and I'll eat it, but is even more inefficient and expensive to produce than beef.
"There is a reason why we do not charge Soldiers with murder when we tell them to go fight for us."

Usually the winner gets to decide how strong a defense following orders is.
Not to speak for the GP but in addition to the Delaware Division of Corporations[1] in which February Won, Inc -- like many startups -- was registered (and where you have to pay a fee), there are quite a few public sites which attempt to aggregate this information, albeit with varying levels of accuracy. For instance, Bloomberg Businessweek [2].

[1] https://delecorp.delaware.gov/tin/GINameSearch.jsp

[2] http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/pe...
Introducing "data science for Facebook" in 2013 is ... odd.

All the more so because Jeff Hammerbacher is often credited with coining the term "data science", and he started doing it at -- that's right -- Facebook.
Hi k3n, I would love your feedback on a project of mine. It's not a FOSS project, but is related to them. You'll see more about it in my profile. If you're willing to help me out a little, please contact me (my email address is in my profile).
I don't know about that. He was reacting against the mythology of the idea and ignorance of execution. It still might be (and I would argue in some cases it was with him) that there exist "great men" such that if you remove them, the product is wildly shittier, whereas if you remove almost anybody else in the process, the product is not necessarily that much worse.
Having been in a couple of countries in Africa and India, I agree.
However the plight of starvation should continue to be raised (not saying you are minimizing the story) and stories like this add a human element to it beyond the statistics. It helps me to take a step back from the tech lifestyle during my day.
The Mad Men writers are working on a show about Nasa in the 60's
I'm inclined to agree with this view. Regardless of how he died, I think there would have been a bit of idolization, but I have trouble imagining someone making this documentary had he died in a car accident.
Yup, angels and VCs operate quite differently. Same experience here.
The so-called "hoarding problem" was debunked decades ago:

http://mises.org/money/2s9.asp

It's still orthodoxy among academic economists, but there isn't any historical evidence that it's actually true.

More recently, this article in Forbes explains the issue more succinctly:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/04/11/bitcoin-do...
North Korea isn't interesting because of its poverty, but because of its grindingly oppressive government.
So the story is not good enough because it doesn't involve prison and violence? So she should just keep her story to herself because it isn't as action-packed?

I can't say how much I disagree with this. People should share their stories, even if they are totally mundane. I also feel like you totally disregarded the content of her Q&A which gave many people the opportunity to get insight on the conditions inside of North Korea's closed society.
You Voted: The Best Fast Food In America
Two weeks ago I took a look at a company in distress. Three years of figures: 2010, profitable, 2011, still profitable but substantially lower, 2012, huge loss. Every year their turnover grew but their margins decreased (because they had to bid lower (more competitive) on contracts in order to grow their revenues). The CEO had no idea why they were in trouble, he'd attributed it to his co-director making off with money (which in fact he did, but only relatively small sums). They've filed for bankruptcy last week and to this day I'm not sure if I've been able to adequately explain to him that if you lose more money on every subsequent project that you contract that you can grow your revenues only until your cash reserves run out. Even with the figures laid out pretty clearly I think he still does not really get it. Puzzling.

I think they thought that as long as they were winning the contracts from their competitors that they were doing well but if you don't accurately track your purchasing you will never know whether you are making money or losing money on a contract.
I think the name is a bit misleading. It is only useful for people that have already switched and need to "port" everything over. This is not in itself going to get more people to switch. If the app installed on the Android phone just presented a side-by-side list of replacement apps, that might actually get more people to switch. Although, if MS is scared they don't have enough solid replacements, that type of app might actually scare people away more.
False dichotomy. This paper is primarily focused on programming models, and the truth that single scale-up machines grossly exceed all but the rarest of edge cases (what people call "big data" is often very little data). If you have a virtualization cluster of course you need redundancy for all components, and that is just basic fundamentals.
Rise of the Maple Syrup Mafia
this is obviously not going to happen and this broken link proves it
> If everyone in the world decided tomorrow to stop investing in gold, you could still sell any gold you had for an amount based on its utility.

The worth of that guarantee depends on what that amount is. If the utility-based price is 1% of the price I paid for the gold, then I'm still ruined; it might as well be 0%.
> "Prosecutors disputed this and maintained that chat logs recovered from Gonzalez’s computer described illegal carding activity that Gonzalez conducted and showed that Watt at least had broad knowledge of what Gonzalez was doing, if not the details.

The lesson here to take away from this is to encrypt your stuff and if you're doing some kind of criminal activity to make (or force) your associates do the same.
Fifth Amendment shields child porn suspect from decrypting hard drives
Breakthrough Technologies of 2013
Turning Vim into a Modern Python IDE
I went to Penn, my sister went to Yale, and our mother went to Columbia and we all had very different experiences from what you describe here. None of us went for the "old-boys network" nor have we really seen that there is that much of one. Yes, there are a lot of monied alumni but I really dont believe that is what many of the students who want to go to top schools are thinking about.

We went for the academics and the reputation. I wanted to work in finance and so Wharton was a good place to go. My sister went to Yale I think solely based on the fact that she liked the campus. Our mother only applied to NYU and Columbia back in her day and that was a pretty easy decision to make at the time.
Study: There may not be a shortage of American STEM graduates after all
That idea is a non-starter. Consider the cost of transportation, the cost of connecting all those ridiculously slow CPUs and incompatible CPUs together, powering them, programming for them. Building a supercomputer using standard x86_64 CPUs will probably be cheaper.
"First and foremost,the VP of Sales was compensated according to sales before discounts, not according to margin or profit"

what could possibly go wrong?
this is true for medical schools too
It is interesting how SAT scores are unconsciously used as an indicator of low iQ in the black population while simultaneously being used to show that high asian scores in the test is an indicator of hardwork,not brilliance.
Honest question: How well do good academic scores in high school correlate with success in non-scientific majors? I go to a top-tier engineering university, and I know of multiple individuals who had perfect SAT scores and GPAs in high school that have been utter disappointments, and I've known people who by no reasonable metric should have gotten in that break curves in nearly every class. Hell, I was the first of 3 boys to get accepted here through normal means, but both of my older brothers ended up transferring in and subsequently graduated with GPAs of 3.96 and 4.0, with one now working on a PhD in physics under a Nobel Laureate and the other working in investment banking. I've honestly started to question how much predictive power these tradition metrics actually have among the subsets of students who think they have a good enough chance of getting in to a school to apply in the first place. If anyone knows of any good studies on the subject or perhaps has a data set that could be used for such analysis, please let me know.
The hardest part of getting an Ivy League education is getting into an Ivy League school. The coursework at those schools isn't really much harder than their less prestigious counterparts.
Depending on your tolerance for false positives, space and time requirements, size of the array and data type, either a bitmap or a bloom filter or other hash-based structure may be a much better option than sorting. I would expect a candidate to offer that suggestion.
I don't get it. If you agree with me that admissions could be racially biased, then what makes you think "That ratio cannot possibly be > 1"?
As much as I loathe Larry Summers' economics (he's a Goldman grad, after all), I have to defend him against the casual slur implied above.

He didn't "make controversial statements about women," he simply asked a question about a fact, which is why men are far and away the (high end) outliers in math and science, and whether there might be something based on nature (vs nurture). For asking this un-PC question, he was basically driven out of the presidency at Harvard.

When you can't even ask questions about reality without getting pilloried, you know things are rotten in academia.

(Summers was a year ahead of me at school, though I didn't know him then.)
I'd like to propose an alternate interpretation:

There is some desired heterogeneity of intellect. Elite Colleges aren't just looking for sharp mathematicians. They want to attract sharp physicists, sharp philosophers, sharp linguists, sharp artists, sharp musicians, sharp poets etc.

Now, in my experience there is a set of areas in which asians excel, but that doesn't comprise 100% of all areas. There are many areas where predominantly white people dominate.

If you weight the distribution of ethnic origin along those lines, I suspect asians will be underrepresented relative to the distribution measured by SAT scores.
Because it isn't worth the effort to bilaterally negotiate every little detail with tiny Switzerland.

The EU has accommodated Switzerland's extreme go-it-alone ethos by offering membership in all but name. They did so out of a sense of shared history, affection, and mutual benefit. If the Switzerland is no longer interested they can truly go it alone.

As for totalitarian, it's pretty rich to argue against free movement and in favor of rank nationalism and accuse your interlocutors of totalitarian tendencies.
What's with people taking what accused computer criminals say at face value?

"Watt says he didn’t know the code would be used to intercept credit card data. 'I assumed it would have something to do with web traffic or instant messaging conversations or logins of some other protocol not related to the credit card information,' he told Wired in 2010.

Prosecutors disputed this and maintained that chat logs recovered from Gonzalez’s computer described illegal carding activity that Gonzalez conducted and showed that Watt at least had broad knowledge of what Gonzalez was doing, if not the details. As Gonzalez and his gang hacked target after target, he sent Watt links to news stories describing the breaches, though he didn’t acknowledge in the correspondence that he was behind the attacks.

Watt’s attorney told Wired in 2010 that his client accepted 'responsibility for aiding people that he knew would commit wrongdoing. However, he is very disturbed by the government’s aggressive attempt to make him into more than what he is.'"

It sounds like the jury didn't believe his story, particularly given the IRC logs and the links from Gonzalez describing the hacks. I can't say it's an unreasonable conclusion on their part.
Hehe. Hi John ;) I don't intend to take revenge on you and in case I go first feel free to call me anything you want. I don't think I'm at risk of people making movies or writing books about me either :)
I think you vastly overestimate the effectiveness of earplugs. You might not hear a cat's scampering on the floor, but you are not going to miss anything like someone speaking at a normal volume in the room, much less a fire alarm. As one data point, I have never missed my smartphone alarm clock in five years of sleeping with earplugs.
Balance sheet isn't about making money. It's about assets, liabilities, and equity.

Everyone should have and understand a balance sheet for their personal finances. You should know that your house is an asset, and the mortgage against it a liability.
Yeah, no. Did you go to an Ivy or any elite university? My guess would be no, because you're wrong.
I'm a Swiss citizen living in San Francisco, and while I don't necessarily agree with restrictive immigration policies (I'm in the process on getting a US green card – don't get me started on how stressful that is), I also don't see anything particularly wrong with it either.

Immigration in Switzerland is a big issue. Switzerland is tiny and is getting a little over-crowded. We don't have mega-cities, real estate prices are through the roof, and new building permits are very restricted due to regulation meant to preserve Switzerland's beautiful old cities.

When I grew up, Switzerland's population was 7 million. Now it's 8. That almost 9% growth. The country hasn't gotten any bigger, though. While there benefits to diversifying our culture, and bringing in skilled workers to contribute to the economy; the average immigrant is probably a net detriment to the country, because an influx of people puts a strain on Switzerland's public services and its real estate market (Y'all think San Francisco rents are bad? Try renting an apartment in Zurich!).

If you believe in the principle behind countries (a group of people coming together to form a society that, like Capitalism, does what is in its best interest), then you should understand the decision. If not, well, that's an entirely different argument.

Personally, I'd like immigration to be merit based. Ie., immigrants would have to demonstrate that they'd be a net asset to the country, in some fashion.
Yeah, the Mac SDK will build on Linux with some hacking. We did it once before, but there wasn’t demand. I don’t have access to the code at the moment but I can see about it for you.
At a minimum, you have to consider how long the arrays are and whether the items in the array are sortable.
"Grave error" implies something that a non-fool might blunder into. Fools don't blunder, per se, they simply exist.

One of the first jokes I ever heard at a startup was "We'll give the product away and make it up on volume!" Changing the joke to "We'll pay people to take the product and make it up on volume!" doesn't make it less obviously ridiculous.

I'm amazed they were able to hire employees, let alone find investors. Doesn't make the guy's death any less tragic though.
No. Make a good living writing code as a remote programmer.
I do so from an unlikely place.
Breakthrough Technologies 2013
> I'm completely against the policy, but it's not a violation of the agreement.

That is not clear. EU officials say that it is indeed a violation of the agreement: “The measures adopted today by the Swiss government are contrary to the agreement on the Free Movement of Persons, since they differentiate between groups of member states.”

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9f70bc54-ad0c-11e2-9454-00144feabd...
> That's much smaller than the universe of folks running portscans against globally routable addresses.

You do realize just how many IPv6 addresses there are? The good old days of randomly scanning the interwebs in the hopes of finding an IP are gone, at least, for IPv6.

The minimum assignment form RIPE/ARIN etc to an ISP is a /32. Meaning Verizon on it's own has at least the same number of /64's as the entire IPv4 internet has IPs..

That's 4,294,967,296 /64's.

A single /64 is 4 billion times the entire IPv4 address space.
> What was he thinking...

To be fair to the man, he was quite apparently mentally ill towards the end.
i disagree. fundamentally the point of these checklists is to standardize the sorts of things you evaluate during the code review. if feedback is inconsistent, you end up seeing different standards applied to several parts of the codebase which can (and does) manifest itself as an inconsistent product.

the overall appearance of the checklist does make it seem like it would be problematic, but i think the author makes a good point of showing that they act as a template for the reviewer rather than as strict set of guidelines.

in a situation where "we're all consenting adults here," having a set of things to evaluate features or code style makes it easy for anyone to know what to expect when checking in a change or when reviewing one for the first time. it may not work for you, but it certainly adds consistency when they're used non-dogmatically.
>As touching as the story may be, it is not that different from billions of other children who are starving right now, all over India, China and African continent. I find it amusing that how we Americans love to bash North Korea and Iran.

Well, North Korea is "communist" and Iran has oil resources and threatens some of our allies in the area.

If it was a starving population, with a regime that's just as oppressive or even more, but are US allies and offer their natural resources for a pittance, then not only would the US would like them, but they would also get guns and support.

Like all those dictatorships in Latin America. Or Saudi Arabia. Etc...
Have you ever considered that immigration to Switzerland may also be harming the countries where these people are coming from?

Many countries, especially third-world countries, are in desperate need of well-educated, talented people. We're talking about doctors, engineers, and even educators. These are the kind of people who are essential to providing or creating the infrastructure of a modern society.

As long as these people keep leaving their native countries, and as long as more prosperous western nations keep accepting them, it will become more and more difficult for the situation to improve in the countries they emigrated from.
New battery design could help solar and wind power the grid
so link baity. "I MUST NEVER GET THIS QUESTION WRONG"
Tim O'Reilly: A couple of comments on Google Glass
There's a study that concluded that Ivy League schools don't really add value (in terms of lifetime earnings) to non-black, non-latino, non-poor students.

Here's a summary: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/revisiting-the-...

Here's the paper: http://www.nber.org/papers/w17159

The study worked by looking at students that got in to a more- and less-prestigious school and chose the less-prestigious one.

In short, being good enough to get in to Harvard is what matters, not actually attending.
I can’t read the article. This URL ends up showing me “All the paths to immigration” or something. Does anyone have a copy of the actual content I can read?
If your code is using OpenMP, and this library is faster than your current OpenMP runtime, then using it might speed your code up a bit.
Sorry, commenting on the go. non-jewish white % in ivy league is about 30%, in general pop it is about 65% for a ratio of about 0.5x. asian % in ivy league is about 15% and general pop about 5% for a ratio of 3.0x.

Asian ivy league pop % / merit scholar % given by Unz is about 70%. Same for non-jewish whites is about 35%

Asians are getting the short end of the stick, but non-jewish white kids are getting it worse.
Open Home Control, home automation framework w/ hardware schematics
Can't speak for Harvard, but I'm at a pretty good public engineering school and I'm quite confident that we aren't discriminating against Asian students. If anything, they are sought after to help keep the lights on (they are the only ones paying full tuition).
I'm going to generalise a little bit from your statement about sports: it is dangerous to disregard the body (Sports) and focus mostly on the mind (Where things that would allow someone to excel in CS are). You don't need to be a sports star. Even just someone who exercises casually or plays sports socially.

Someone's physicality (Let's move on from just thinking about sports only) can/does have relevance to someone's aptitude for CS, or, their ability to do well.
The next Xbox will be revealed on May 21st
I think a different way to ask this question will help you learn more about the candidate. After the trivial answer has been given - ask whether the solution would change if you knew the query will be done several times for the same array, or could it be done more efficiently.
>I don't understand either of the prior two comments. The article clearly wasn't written to garner sympathy, rather, to retell a personal experience that is likely foreign to most people, given the cloistered nature of North Korean society.

It's not about the article. It's about the curation.

That is, the way whole clusters of articles on similar topics (for a few select countries etc) are selected, printed, submitted, promoted by the media, etc, as opposed to tons of others about different countries.
"but the more they study, the proportionally less time they have to do other activities that make students 'well-rounded,' which is one of the qualities that top-tier universities value."

"Well rounded" is code for "like the WASPs we used to admit in years past." Look at the kinds of things colleges value: community service, sports, etc. These are the things that used to in years past set people of good breeding apart from the regular people who were too busy keeping a roof over their head.