skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Proficient vs. perfect? One summer. Then another one to round it all out. Which sucked, because I spent the next few years having the life beaten out of me by others that were jealous or thought what I did was impossible. The backward point of view of most people and their attitude of negativity and jealousy toward anyone that's good at what they do is maddening. I'm sick of being around idiots.

Now, it's likely I'm behind and forgetting. Any potential, or world-changing talent is now wasted away and I'm closer to being decidedly average. I can't believe it.

Whatever.
I don't understand why we emphasize this article when many women deal with stalking daily. Why is this particular teachers story different? Just last week I had to tell a female co-worker that unfortunately I don't know how to stop someone from following her on Spotify.

It's a daily occurance, to so many women. And it's very uncomfortable.
I like the idea of Meteor Components; looking forward to what comes out of this.

The forms work referred to: http://forms.meteor.com/
Judging by her looks and her name, she is Chinese (there is a large Chinese minority in Malaysia). Also, for Westeners in Malaysia its far more likely to get involved with a Chinese than with a Malay girl, because they Malays are Muslims and are usually looking for Muslim boyfriends.

"Westener with crazy Chinese girlfriend" is something very common, judging by what I witnessed in many years living in China.
My main concern is my extreme paranoia for having 'something like that' walk on me/in the bed while sleeping, Uhh...Brrr!
If they request I spell out the naive solution, I certainly oblige. But if it's clear to both the interviewer and me that they are looking for that particular solution, then I won't spend time writing it out. So far, this approach of assuming they want the best solution—while acknowledging the simple solution exists along with a brief sketch of it—seems to be agreeable.
Those interaction methods users can play with
Wow, I can't believe how many people are against this.

I think it's a great move and will benefit independent designers and creators hugely.

First: the price keeps coming down. Now you can get Photoshop or Premiere for $10/month. That is much cheaper than buying a copy every two years.

Next: I know indie film-makers who have pirated Premiere. They simply don't have any money to pay for it, but have sworn to buy a copy if they ever make any money from it. This complete ends this argument - even those working short bar shifts can afford a copy. So they contribute in the short-term, and we all get a fuzzy warm feeling knowing that programmers at Adobe are getting some of our cash.

The educational discounts are huge. I've always wanted to use Premiere and Photoshop, but have never been able to afford the capital outlay (being a lowly post-doc), and am not a big fan of pirating things. I'm going to sign up today for CC.

I think this business model is a lot more sustainable. It gives Adobe a solid stream of revenue and we all get to use the latest versions.

The only improvement I'd like to see now is perhaps one more drop in price, and then a condition whereby those who have been subscribed for a certain amount of time (say, 18 months or 2 years) and cancel their subscription can keep the suite - perhaps with some limitations, e.g. they're limited to the version that was available when they first subscribed, or only a subset of tools are available...
This couldn't be more relevant: http://xkcd.com/1172/
Software engineering practices all grad students should adopt
If I understand correctly, you are marked active if data is sent in without logging in, say if you are replying to the emails or using Gmail Zero [0] or TagTime [1]. So logging in is neither necessary nor sufficicent to be considered active.

If automatic data entry is enough to be considered active, maybe you should warn people that the data points entered automatically will make them count as active.

[0]: https://www.beeminder.com/gmailzero

[1]: http://messymatters.com/tagtime/
Having someone actively trying to ruin your life might be a little more uncomfortable than being followed on Spotify? Just a thought.
>>No keeping money out of a bank in India is Indian law.

And for a very good reason.

Tax evasion is very common in India. In fact the most generally know thing is, if taxes are not deducted at the source of the transaction they won't be paid ever. Big money people are a little different, they are small in number to monitor and their transactions can be traced out easily.

But small to medium scale traders and business hardly pay taxes. Some even pride in doing so. The best case I've seen among these guys is paying some thing like paying 5% of the taxes they are supposed to pay. I've asked a few people why they don't pay, and the answer comes simple. If they pay the right taxes once, given the business growth they have to pay a little more next year. So they use every trick in the book to pay as little or nothing at all.

Now if they are allowed to freely park money in places where it can't be traced easily(like these) they will have a field day.

May be if citizens show a little responsibility and do what they are honestly supposed they will get laws that trust each other. Until then if the government has policies to curb fraud you shouldn't look too surprised. After all, laws are optimized for the common case.
Hack Blindness
Very interesting and inspiring reading. =)
I am the author and yes RBI and PayPal both are to be blamed here. I would like to hold balance in My PayPal account only because of a possibility of a chargeback or a dispute. I lament RBI for not allowing me to do that.

I lament PayPal because when they take $200 from me, they should return me $200 and NOT $180. I have not said anything about the chargeback charges. I did not pay anything for chargeback because I refunded the transaction. I DO understand that chargebacks are a part of business.

My grouse is with the ridiculous pretense under which PayPal duped me out of $24.99 (over two cancellations) in the name of currency conversion charges.

Take a look at this - http://i.imgur.com/GIaP5O2.png

Does it look like a fair deal from any angle?

//he's still using PayPal, and yet he hates it that much?//

Yes because I don't have any other options - at least for now. Indian Payment gateways won't allow me to charge in USD, and I can't use Stripe/Dwolla or any half decent system because I am not in the US or Europe.
Surely, pay-as-you-go is much more preferable when you don't have a stable income?

It's also cheaper, so just keep the cash in the bank and pay per month.
Background services work just fine on Android. It's very handy to know that my shared to-do list syncs automatically (thus it's up to date when I actually open the app, even if I don't have signal at the time), or that my photos get synced to Dropbox without me having to open Dropbox.
How to Charge Retainer Fees for your Marketing Agency
> I guess it's more of a perception thing than anything.

Yes, I think this must just be a backlash against the renting model. But people renting cloud servers don't seem too bothered that they don't own the physical machines... perhaps just a cultural shift is required? We fear change.
> The encrypted file – if The Register understands the paper correctly – embeds actions that are permitted on that file (for example, the ability to read and write to parts or all of the file. The Evaluate function is able to use the combination of the public key and permitted actions (described as circuits) to operate on the file without decrypting it.

I'm pretty sure that this has nothing to do with permissions. Homomorphic encryption maintains certain properties of the plaintext (through some isomorphism) to allow pre-defined operations (operations that the isomorphism are designed for).

Also, why theregister? Why not link to the actual article (http://eprint.iacr.org/2011/277) or the github project (https://github.com/shaih/HElib) They're much, much more informative.
The Five Laws of Stratospheric Success
How about patents? I remember having read that IBM holds patents for homomorphic encryption. Does the open sourcing also include a royalty free license to IBMs patents?

EDIT: Just saw GPL2 or later, so choosing GPL3 would mean patent license included, right?
It's probably the same "system menu" that's been in all later versions of Windows (though increasingly hidden). It's the thing that gives you a menu with choices to maximize, restore, minimize, move, resize and close the window. Pops up with Alt+Space. Very useful when you've got a window that has ended up off the screen somewhere (so you can't move it back with the mouse), or if you're forced to use the keyboard alone.
Thanks - this is a really nice approach as it doesn't interfere with customer usage, plus you don't end up with runaway costs.
The whole interviewing process is ass-backwards for smart people.

I have little interest in working for a company where I'm going to struggle to do the job. I'm not going to apply for a job where I'd be out of my depth for any more than a month or so, because that sort of "if I don't get better at this soon I'm going to be fired" sort of stress is horrible. I want to find a job where I can succeed right off the bat, learn new things and get better over time, and where I can see myself staying for several years at least. No one wants to be a job hopper; it's a symptom of poor interviewing on the interviewee's part.

From my point of view then, I know before I even get to the interview that I'm perfectly well suited for the company and can do the job - if I wasn't, I wouldn't have applied. So I approach interviews in reverse: I'm going to grill you, your team, the baristas in the nearest coffee shop, and anyone I can find on LinkedIn who's recently left. If you ask me stupid puzzle questions that have little to do with what I've come to understand the job entails, I'm going to take that as a sign that your company is less than functional in the interviewing arena, and I know from experience that that extends to the actual engineering too.

Interviewers seem to treat these types of questions as shit filters. I do exactly the same. If you ask them, that's a smell.
Ever noticed how Linux appspace tends to be a horrible mishmash of different GUI styles? That's why Mac users are nazis when it comes to obeying the Apple Human Interface Guidelines - the alternative is every developer does whatever he thinks looks good, and there's no consistency to your desktop. OS and UI consistency is a problem if not done well.
Gotta upgrade my sarcasm-o-meter.
Yes, and the car you rent is continuously upgraded to the newest model, and for one price you get a whole range of cars, and the total cost of ownership over a few years is cheaper than buying them.
It’s Time to Reinvent the Personal Computer
A Question of Conversion: An Interview With Peep Laja of ConversionXL
"What sucks, of course, is that the user got double-whammied on the currency conversion, but I really hesitate to blame PayPal for this... if anything, I blame the Indian banking system, which has decided to put in place the laws that state you aren't allowed to hold balances with your credit card processor"

This is clear, but does the law also force PayPal to do the conversion themselves (and charge the vendor for both conversions in case of chargebacks?) It looks like they saw the law as an opportunity to screw vendors.
The LLVM moving-parts, yes, but you need to write code to use them too, and it's not a give that there are more moving parts in generating C output that those.

> Your moving parts in your own solution, you'd have to write yourself.

That's not always a bad thing for error rates, if the alternative is figuring out to use a massive library correctly.
Microsoft prepares U-turn on Windows 8
Scary as hell when you're taking a shower and happen to look up and oh, hey, look, there's a fully grown grey huntsman up there!

OK just don't you move, I'll finish up my shower and get out of here ASAP...
Normally, I would take these stories as feedback on me, but that's a stretch. Someone might be saying I'm a monster or responsible for monsters.

Kill it with far!

God says...

a rock.

27:6 And now shall mine head be lifted up above mine enemies round
about me: therefore will I offer in his tabernacle sacrifices of joy;
I will sing, yea, I will sing praises unto the LORD.

27:7 Hear, O LORD, when I cry with my voice: have mercy also upon me,
and answer me.

27:8 When thou saidst, Seek ye my face; my heart said unto thee, Thy
face, LORD, will I seek.

27:9 Hide not thy face far from me; put not thy servant away in anger:
thou hast been my help; leave me not, neither forsake me, O God of my
salvation.

27:10 When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take
me up.

27:11 Teach me thy way, O LORD, and lead me in a plain path, because
of mine enemies.
> By refusing to testify on the basis of the right to avoid self-incrimination, they effectively admitted on the court record that they'd committed a crime

I'm not a US lawyer, or even from the US. But surely, if courts can draw adverse inferences from someone 'taking the fifth', that makes it a pretty pointless right, no? It's not much of a right to avoid self-incrimination if exercising it incriminates yourself. Can someone from the US clarify whether that's really how it's interpreted?
Well then you are not a hacker. And I hope FBI can not cause trouble for them, they did not do anything unethical in my POV.
The server is not a house. Black hat hacking is a mixture of art and politics (I never support hackers who hack for stealing money), and if you want the analogy, they just spotted a fancy lock on the door of some institution (not a private house), lock-picked it and looked what's behind the doors. This may be illegal, but this is the way they can confront the forces they don't like and outline their position. They did not brake or delete anything (no vandalism).
> For this to go down entirely unnoticed is extraordinarily difficult. I won't say impossible, but damned close without a copy of the zone in hand and with Linode running AXFR disabled (you should be too). There are subzones of linode.com; they wouldn't have gotten them all, and it would have been noticed within minutes.

what's stopping the bad guys from just proxying dns queries they don't care about to the original NS?

with this sort of trickery you could get a "domain control validated" https certificate too!
The problem with the podcasts app wasn't the reel to reel nonsense; it was that the damn thing didn't work. Ditching the skeuomorphism happened in the same release as serious upgrades to a working functionality.
I've long since abandoned trying to do programming tests when interviewing coders. Instead, I work through a problem with them in a sort of socratic method; I play devil's advocate to them while they flesh out how they'd approach the problem.

It's far more illuminating, and a far better reflection of their worth as a candidate, than their ability to go off into a room somewhere and work through a problem alone. I'm much more interested in someone who thinks well than who codes well (since the latter can easily be trained).
No, I've been off-and-on, toying with writing a "as static as possible" Ruby compiler (see http://www.hokstad.com/compiler) - it's been about two years since I last posted an update, but I have one new part complete and another one mostly complete. Just holding off posting for a bit longer because I want to have a bit of a buffer (3-4 complete parts) before I get peoples hope of regular posts up again...

What is there uses vtable's exclusively - I effective punted on the slow path (and so on adding methods at runtime) completely, but keep track of how much of the vtable allocations is wasted space. If/when I get there, the goal is to use various mechanisms like this to determine when to fall back on a slow path, and couple both with polymorphic inline caching when suitable.

EDIT:

I don't see MRI as very interesting to work on, largely because interpreters aren't much fun, and ironically given the amount of time I spend using Ruby, I prefer compilers to be as static as possible. I also prefer my compilers to be bootstrapped in their target language. Hence my "ideal" Ruby compiler would be written in pure Ruby, do a ton of static analysis, with minimal fallback to JIT when users user features that are too dynamic to analyse fully ahead of time

E.g. there's a ton of annoying uses of eval() in Ruby code where a more complete meta-programming API would make it trivial for a compiler to do full ahead of time static analysis, so one big thing an AOT Ruby compiler really need to do is to provide a library of compiler specific meta-programming facilities with a fallback that uses eval() as needed, and either convince people to use it, or provide monkey-patches for a number of popular projects. Some of these uses don't even need eval() in the first places, but uses it just as a quick shortcut because it's simpler...

Just to make clear, I'm not sure when or even if my compiler project will ever get to a state where it's even remotely useable to compile Ruby. I started it out without even having decided to compiler Ruby, mostly to write about various parts of the process of writing a compiler that I find interesting. I find compiling Ruby as incredibly fascinating from a theoretical point of view because of the complexity involved, but unfortunately working on it takes a lot more time and effort than thinking about the problems.
How do you people survive to adulthood?
There is no new features here, it's just issues being fixed and closed, mostly weird and harcore ones.
Speaking as a severe arachnophobe and a committed city dweller: great. Just great.
Great username for somebody making such a comment.

Also, "being followed on Spotily" != "having your private and professional life destroyed"

Just saying.
Very good previous discussion about HELib from last week for reference:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630917
I agree with you that a lot of SE interviews are frustratingly pointless, but I disagree that coding challenges alone are adequate. A very important aspect of being on a team of engineers is collaboration, which often comes down to solving tough problems as a team at the whiteboard. I spend maybe 5% of my work time doing this, yet it's some of the most efficient use of my time - the hour I spend fleshing through an idea with a coworker often saves me 10 hours meandering through a problem on my own.
Working with RubyMine
I think I was not clear enough: I too believe that registering the term as a trademark does no good to the developer community. But I don't think that the reasons behind this have to be some kind of extortion scheme, or that the reasoning for the trademark (http://www.young-targets.com/free-licences/) have to be completely made up. I would like to see the trademark go away, I just don't like how quickly accusations came up.

>Are you by any chance working for them or an affiliate company?

No.
And you're much more likely to be aware of the intrusion.
If you've redelegated a domain which you don't have a full copy of to your own servers, couldn't you just proxy all the requests that you don't want to hijack to the original name servers?
John Doerr's Plan To Reclaim The Venture Capital Throne
> The access that HTP obtained does not, full stop, lead to root on Linode instances without at least one shutdown job or change of root password job showing up in your Linode's history that you did not ask for.

If they had access to the database, it may have been possible to delete malicious jobs from people's histories. Even if the user had email notifications turned on, an attacker with full access to the database could have turned it off temporarily (just flip a boolean flag).
New Website Live
I actually just watched those back episodes of Top Gear two days ago. I thought they conveyed most of the things said by your parent fairly well.
They expressed extreme disgust with the gearbox, demonstrating clearly how non-functional it was, and showed comparisons with cars in the same price range in which it had much more body roll and braking distance.
it's very easy to get your own https cert once you control the dns for a domain, you just set up own nameserver that proxies requests to the original NS (except very specific ones, say those from Verisign), request your "domain control validation" https cert, and bam! valid https cert!
It doesn't say her age anywhere. He's 35, she looks like she could be rather young. It also says "after they split up" which strikes me as saying nothing; who broke up with whom, how and why? Oh, and "dated for several months", does that mean "had sex with, while she was under the impression it was serious when he knew all along it wasn't for him"?

Mind you, even IF any of those speculations hold any truth, that still wouldn't excuse her way of dealing with that (though it would excuse kicking him in the nuts with gusto though, in my books). But still, that this story is one-sided can't be helped, that it has missing pieces I consider vital makes me suspicious enough to not really care either way.
A review with references to the ease of fear learning in primates.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/cd/12_1/ohman.c...
I suspect Adobe will hurt themselves in two ways here — first, their apps are becoming increasingly dispensable, and this will push users to less capable but far cheaper and often more nimble alternatives (perhaps renting CC apps when occasionally needed) and second it will eliminate over-licensing (e.g. In some workplaces Adobe CS was pretty much site-licensed).

It may help with piracy, but I suspect that's a two-edged sword as well.

Personally, I was an "upgrade every two or three versions" user, which let me use CS for significantly less money, so this will probably just cause me to wait Adobe out.
Hence why I hedged impossibility, and while I can think of a way that would work, it'd be tricky. You could probably hack BIND to do this (in resolver mode) fairly trivially, but I'll defer to the actual security experts here of which there are many to shed light on whether such an attack is commonly observed in the wild.

My usual suspicion is that in general, the volume of DNS traffic should give you pause before you start putting custom code in the path of answering a query. Clearly it's possible -- Route 53 is built upon that very notion -- and I suppose in this scenario it's feasible.

Don't forget every Linode has a hostname under linode.com. I think splicing yourself in and running a conditional on every query would overwhelm whatever you point the firehose at and you'd have to plan accordingly. All it would take would be to add a couple hundred milliseconds of latency to the average DNS query (even before the inevitable carpetbombing of p99 latency) and a competent high-traffic administrator is going to start looking around.
Wow! That is very interesting.

In the US there are pretty comprehensive "pest-control" measures taken in urban apartment complexes to ensure that there are absolutely no insects, spiders or geckos indoors. I probably see a really tiny "house spider" (which is probably a centimeter across in size) once or twice a year inside my apartment.

So my question is it common to not have pest control in OZ or is your house the exception (since you are nature lover maybe)?
No way is the RBI ever going to allow parking funds in a non-banking institution in a country where tax evasions are so high.

By the way they are not be blamed here, the fraud prevention policy is in place because fraud happens.
See also: hourly happiness averages, using a dedicated research app: http://blog.mappiness.org.uk/2011/11/17/project-update/#more...
Can't read without registering.
Chocolate can be good for you
PayPal's fault is not returning me the money I had before the withdrawal took place.

http://i.imgur.com/GIaP5O2.png

THIS is entirely PayPal's fault. They can avoid it easily if they want to but NO. They have an opportunity to fleece some extra $$ from a merchant so they do.