skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The cheating statistics really don't surprise me. In fact, I think they are underestimated, understandable considering some students may fear that their answers could be held against them despite being assured it won't.

"Why is this on HN?" Well I think the cheating part has a some transferrable takeaways, the main one being online education. Online education is much like Harvard's honor system in that every assignment, quiz, and test can be completed on your own time (at least that's what I hear Harvard's policies are) and just have to be turned in by a certain date. But what you do to finish in that time is totally unknown to the administrators. Personally, I think it is the biggest obstacle for online education and this so-called Honor system. When there are people who want to succeed, and in class succeeding is generally represented by high grades, they will do whatever it takes and if using external resources is the way, why wouldn't they if no one is going to stop them? Not saying this is everyones mentality, but it obviously exists in many intelligent brains.

The problem is outlined and has been for a while...the solution will have to be amazing.
This is not Secure Boot. Secure Boot is only one feature of EFI. You are describing EFI.
Andrew Mason pitching to investors during IPO roadshow [video]
Not sure if that was punishing the crime or punishing the crime because the story broke and the world knows. How many stories are there that never got out, and no one was punished? Good find, I wasn't aware of that part of the story.
I noticed that as well when I watched the Vegas timelapse. I wish there was an overlaying scale showing how much of the water receded, it looked like a significant amount.
I don't see why this comment is being downvoted. Certainly, agreeing clicking through the EULA isn't ideal, but is it anything other than a theoretical nuisance?

I'm genuinely curious - does there exist some relevant and concerning precedent here?

If this turns out to actually become an issue, it would probably harm Microsoft more than anyone - and would be a boon to manufacturers willing to bundle Linux on pre-built machines (such as the Alienware x51 or "developer" x13). However, I sincerely can't see anything coming of this threat.
Geophile: A spatial join framework
Heh, I didn't even notice that.
It's easy for the original author to make changes to the PR, but not easy for the maintainer or a third party to make changes. The micro-pedantry associated with spelling errors, tweaking commit messages, and trivial spacing/formatting issues can be more work for everyone when communicated through comments on PRs with the original author expected to apply and re-roll.
> finance is increasingly bound up by legislation.

The health care industry is also bound up by legislation. The difference is that the legislation is in the favor of those who pursue a career in the industry.
cron is used on almost every production linux/BSD box on my team, and I'm sure there are many others who are similar.
What would be interesting to see would be merged vs. open vs. closed (as in rejected), and also the typical delay between the opening of the PR and the merging/closing.

Some projects are fast to close PRs if they don't fit their goals, some don't attend to the PRs at all and you have PRs lingering in the queue forever.

Two projects could have a similar acceptance rate with very different attitude: one could be on top of things but picky about what they merge in, while another is just not attending to the list except for the odd PR now and then. It seems that a project like the former would still be more interesting to participate in just because you could expect more feedback on what is wrong.

Regarding the presented data, I'm also surprised that it's that high for some project. With the way GitHub works, it's easy to create a pull-request without consulting anybody in the original project, so it's surprising that so many would match the projects' intentions.
I have a couple other suggestions:

1. Put your dotfiles in GitHub

2. Consider using zsh -- the completion is great, and it's easy to build a great prompt. I know prompts are personal taste, but I'm enjoying mine: https://github.com/hoov/dotfiles/blob/master/zsh/prompts/pro...
San Jose - pre Highway 85 & 87. I've always wanted to see maps of the area before they were built. This is great!
Regular emails with questions would certainly be possible with snail mail. But the fundamental problem with all of those suggestions is that only reviewers who really wanted to take a lot of time and care with reviewing would take advantage of them, and since there number of reviewers like that is vanishingly small, it wouldn't be worth the effort to establish the necessary systems.
Theoretically, secure boot could help prevent bootkits (e.g. the "evil maid" attack). Although I have no idea whether this works in practice.
For anybody who's interested in free books, you can find a treasure trove of good stuff at one or more of:

http://csbooks.reddit.com

http://mathbooks.reddit.com

http://physicsbooks.reddit.com

http://econbooks.reddit.com

http://eebooks.reddit.com

http://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.ht...
meQuanics: The Quantum Computing Game
If this turns out to actually become an issue, it would probably harm Microsoft more than anyone . . .

It would probably harm Microsoft eventually. It would harm whoever gets turned into a legal test case immediately - which is the sort of thing you avoid by not electronically signing randomly selected legal documents.
Given a 4 year vesting cycle it is the end of the fourth year that is of the most interest :-) Although I've noticed things are a bit more 'shares every year' kind of thing these days to maximize retention.
Err, not things like that.

Say you shoot portraits of a family and give them the originals. They do a lousy crop of the kids, chopping off the parents' heads and send that out to their friends/family saying that they got the pictures done at Smith & Sons and look at the kids!

Some people will look at that picture and say "Wow, Smith & Sons did an absolutely terrible job, why would they cut off the parents' heads?"

That kind of mis-representation.
I know there are many red-ranked TopCoders and ICPC winners working on big companies like FB, in your experience does this ability translate well into "real world" programming?
This is another area where your intuition might say A but in reality the law is !A.

Under federal law an email provider may not "knowingly divulge" the contents of email "to any governmental entity" without a court order or emergency situation involving "serious physical injury." Violations are punishable by "imprisonment for not more than 1 year" and civil liability.

It's true that there's an exception to the law. That says providers may share the contents of customers' communications only "with the lawful consent" of the user. A federal appeals court in 2003 narrowed that, saying consent exists only when the "party knew about and consented to the interception." And the FTC has said that it's unlawful for a company not "to adequately disclose" it's sharing information.

Translation: if Comcast buried a we-will-disclose-all-your-email-to-the-FBI in the fine print of its terms of service, its executives risk felony charges (and mass defections). In the real world, Comcast doesn't do that -- and it is illegal to hand over your emails without a warrant.
FYI, you replied from the wrong user account. I recommend deleting the comment.

Options not vested seems to me to be a red flag. That's a sign that you want another job, there are just too many ways that can go wrong. Such as, "Shortly before payout, the CEO fires everyone he doesn't like." And given that you weren't given the second round at the first opportunity, do you think you'll be on that list? Or, alternately, "We can't make the sale unless we reduce options, we're firing anyone who doesn't voluntarily give up half their options."

Let me give a real story. I know someone who worked for a small company that was bought by AOL. Part of the purchase was a large options grant with a 1 year cliff. They worked hard for that year. 1 week before the cliff, AOL fired everyone, including the former CEO.

Turns out that AOL had planned the episode from the beginning as a way to spend less but let the company think that they were getting paid more. Any time you get something that is entirely dependent upon another's good will, it is only worth as much as that other's good will when the time comes to pay out. Is that a position you want to be in?
Couple typos:

"In the git-completion.bash file" should be "In the .git-completion.bash file"

"In the git-prompt.sh file" should be "In the .git-prompt.sh file"

Updating the permissions is not necessary.

Step 4 should also include adding

source ~/.git-completion.bash
source ~/.git-prompt.sh

Step 5 you can add "Run . ~/.bash_profile" or "close and re-launch your terminal"

Thanks for the tips!
This is retarded.

People talk about programming instead of doing it. Best advice is to do it and do it more. You learn.

I hate all the gurus. They want to explain how to take a shit.

Why don't you tell your boss to make the problem simpler so you can use one or two arguments.

----

God says...

2:25 The children of Kirjatharim, Chephirah, and Beeroth, seven
hundred and forty and three.

2:26 The children of Ramah and Gaba, six hundred twenty and one.

2:27 The men of Michmas, an hundred twenty and two.

2:28 The men of Bethel and Ai, two hundred twenty and three.

2:29 The children of Nebo, fifty and two.

2:30 The children of Magbish, an hundred fifty and six.

2:31 The children of the other Elam, a thousand two hundred fifty and
four.
Take the Unix system call open(). It accepts multiple flags, to open the file read-only, write-only, read-write, append (only meaningful if writing), truncate (only meaningful on a write-only open), create (again, only really meaningful on a write-only open) along with about half a dozen other flags that can be looked up.

The sheer number of flags can lead to weird issues (what does it mean to open a file for read-only and truncate it? The man page I'm reading leads me to believe it does something other than return an error) and hard to test (I count fifteen flags, which gives 32,768 paths through the code).
...for example, Filipino. Asian, but colonized by Spain the 16th century.
Oh, OK. I thought the "chuckle" was something about the fact that they had a CLA at all, or the content of the CLA. :-)
People don't want to pay for the backward compatibility, there is no publisher pressure or other conspiracy.

PS2 had it for free from the design that used the PSX-on-chip as I/O processor. Later consoles had been more integrated and the BC hardware had been additional cost. This is why BC has been removed from PS3 and Wii during cost reducing revisions.
Specifications and prices Galaxy Ace 3 and Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 leaked
This is basically malware-safe

The malware only needs to monitor your session until you enter whatever credentials were prompted of you by the real-live site, upon which it captures the connection, prevents your post, and does an automatic drive-by withdrawl from your account.

Phishing is a different discussion. For users who don't know better (which is 99% of them) they will just ask you for whatever they want, with a carbon copy of the content of the real site, and once provided with it, will do whatever one-time transaction you would have done on the real site. The only difference is they don't need malware to do this.

Combine the two (perhaps with some slight-of-hand using your own browser's UI) and they can challenge and authorize a payment to an account you don't realize is incorrect. If you double-checked the account number you might realize the switch.

For most American banks none of what you described is offered to the consumer or business owner. In Europe there's just an extra step in the way for the fraud. (Swiss bank accounts would, I assume, require more stringent security procedures than most other banks)
What Should Marissa Mayer / Yahoo Do Next?
Employers can share email messages without any consent. IT operators do not face felony charges for establishing that term. Where is the line drawn? Where do companies cease to have the freedom to establish their own contracts with their users?

Also, what's the felony statute to which you're referring?
I find it interesting how many roofs turn white.
Isn't that the reason most unions formed in the first place?

I wonder how many generations it will take to fix the current approach to human capital. The current pessimism around employee training and development will rub off on the next generation, like a downward spiral, but without some of the reasoning or perspective.
Because the impact is difficult to appreciate at a personal level over the short (years to decades) timeframe. As a result, individual humans struggle to realise it in their daily interactions. Nevertheless, the damage accumulates and causes significant negative results for future generations.

Your logic assumes a feedback loop that shows the person the results of their actions. Like the Crypto article yesterday [1] touched on, if you lack that feedback loop you won't know the negative consequences of your actions.

We owe it to our offspring that we leave them with an environment that's not beyond recovery from the actions we take by the time they're in a position to affect change. Anything else is purely selfish.

To put it in the Hacker News analogy, if I corrupt one bit of your system's RAM, you'll rarely notice the effects and will probably use your PC for its functional life without realising your RAM even has a fault. If I corrupt a significant percentage of it, you'll be crying murder when you get hourly system crashes.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5775165
I was wondering, did anyone hear about Jolla before? No offense but can Nokia come up with a decent OS that can take Android?

I really want to believe, but I just can't. I'd love to see Yahoo coming up with a competing OS, but they have to pick wisely.
http://www.openculture.com/

Open Culture has many ebooks and online courses available for free.
If you read the indictment itself it's fairly clear that they were knowingly building a system to work around money laundering laws (including the Patriot Act) and went to great difficulty to do so.

An indictment is not a reliable source of objective fact or unbiased interpretation of fact. It's an accusation, written to make the accused sound as deplorable as possible.
Ivy league students, on average, come from wealthier families than those attending other universities. Even ivy league students from poor backgrounds are likely under higher pressure to succeed than similar students going to other universities. The result is a stronger than average motivation to cheat and a stronger ability to cheat (e.g. Ghost writers do cost money). Couple this with a higher probability of litigation when students are punished/expelled, which causes Harvard to typically go easy on cheaters, and it's no surprise that cheating is more common at Harvard.

The question for HN employers is whether or not this should impact the value of an Ivy League degree.
It means you can have a crazy BIOS screen heavy with customised images that looks all 3li7e and stuff for the gamer crowd.

My PC has one such thing, and it's garbage. I managed to find out how to put it into some sort of 'information' mode with less graphics and more info... but isn't a BIOS screen supposed to be a wholly info thing anyway?
Why is it disappointing? There's plenty of people here who address the original point. Knowing more about the author and his motives is useful information.
I did a masters degree. It was strange going back to school after being out in the working world for a number of years.
Everest GlacierWorks
This is a fallacious comment of the No True Scotsman type.
Crowdfunding the Cheapest Robots in Silicon Valley: A VC’s View
If you agree to the EULA, then you can't get a refund for the Windows license that comes with the computer.
especially in fields dominated by overabundant cohorts like political science and english majors

Actually, according to Louis Menand's book The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in American Universities, the absolute number of English majors has declined over the last 40 or so years:

"Between 1945 and 1975, the number of American undergraduates increased 500 percent, but the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900 percent. On the one hand, a doctorate was harder to get; on the other, it became less valuable because the market began to be flooded with PhDs.

This fact registered after 1970, when the rapid expansion of American higher education abruptly slowed to a crawl, depositing on generational shores a huge tenured faculty and too many doctoral programs churning out PhDs. The year 1970 is also the point from which we can trace the decline in the proportion of students majoring in liberal arts fields, and, within the decline, a proportionally larger decline in undergraduates majoring in the humanities. In 1970–71, English departments awarded 64,342 bachelor's degrees; that represented 7.6 percent of all bachelor's degrees, including those awarded in non-liberal arts fields, such as business. The only liberal arts category that awarded more degrees than English was history and social science, a category that combines several disciplines. Thirty years later, in 2000–01, the number of bachelor's degrees awarded in all fields was 50 percent higher than in 1970–71, but the number of degrees in English was down both in absolute numbers—from 64,342 to 51,419—and as a percentage of all bachelor's degrees, from 7.6 percent to around 4 percent.

What field has taken its place? Business, which now accounts for about a quarter of all degrees awarded.

Moreover, according to the research done by Arum and Roska in Academically Adrift, undergrads in the hard sciences and humanities (including English) tend to show substantial increases in their reading comprehension skills, writing skills, and math skills over their first two years of college and over their college careers.
Don't pass NULL (but do collect $200).

For modules I write in C, I only have one function that can return NULL---the function that creates a new structure. All other functions that work with that structure assume (backed by an assert()) that the passed in pointer will not be NULL. For the code I write, there is no reason for functions to accept a NULL pointer. And it's less painful that it sounds. I got the idea from _Writing Solid Code_, one of only two books that fundamentally changed how I write code (the other being _Thinking Forth_).
MS was the creator of the license that was 'activated' by opening the box in which the license resided. No way to even view the license without 'activating' it.
Have people considered that "credentials and connections" are actually a valuable signaling mechanism? Connections (in the broadest sense of the word) indicate that a candidate is able to form strong personal relationships. People are not robots, and this ability goes a long way in the workforce. If you are hiring someone, you know you're going to spend the majority of your waking time with that person for the foreseeable future. So any kind of signal that this will prove a positive use of your time is a valuable one. This is not to say that other schools don't offer this mechanism. I'm simply observing that the idea of "connections" does not carry nearly as much negative weight as its connotations often imply.

Similarly, credentials indicate that a candidate has conaistently passed more screening processes over a long duration of time than a company could practically present to the candidate. Consider that nobody is born into Yale (contrary to popular belief, and any exceptions to this are in the minority). To get to Yale, you effectively must pass through a fifteen year funnel. No company can match that kind of screening rigor, so why not leverage it? From a company's point of view, it would be dumb not to. (Also, think about it this way -- if you are a high school senior with a choice of any school, and therefore one of the smartest in your class, will you choose Yale or a state school? I parenthesized this because it's a straw man argument, but do consider that financial barriers to the Ivy League are basically non-existent nowadays.) Yes, you can get qualified candidates from other schools. But your chances of getting a "lemon" candidate from Yale are, I presume, much lower than getting one from another school. You know that at the very least the candidate is capable of learning quickly on the job. In many industries, especially those where most domain knowledge comes from real world experience, like finance and consulting, the ability to learn quickly is a candidates most valuable asset. If every candidate will arrive at the company with a "blank slate"of knowledge and experience, why not recruit the ones who can fill up their slate the best? This is why finance companies recruit history majors, for instance. They know that success in a liberal arts education demonstrates an ability to learn quickly (not to mention strong writing skills).

I know many people on here are anti-liberal arts or anti-Ivy favoritism. Those arguments, especially the latter, have obvious validity. But I hope this post will cause you to consider the other side of the argument.

Disclaimer: I go to Yale. I realize we are extremely spoiled in the job market, but I also do not necessarily think it's undeserved. It's unfortunate that other people suffer, but I do not feel like we are disproportionately favored. I think a VERY high majority of Yale students are top 1% job candidates. Everybody gets in here for a reason.
I find it kind of odd and off putting that Adobe makes you sign something to contribute to the project.

That's pretty common in larger projects, and/or projects that have a commercial entity backing them. And there are some very good reasons for it. It helps keep the provenance and legality of the code in more of a known state, and could be important in a SCO v. IBM type case. Also, if re-licensing ever becomes desirable down the road, it's a hell of a lot easier if at least one entity or person has permission to release the entire code base under an arbitrary license. Take the Linux kernel, where it would be effectively impossible to relicense even if Linus wanted to, since the copyright ownership is spread out among gosh knows how many people, some of who nobody knows how to contact, and some of whom might not even be alive for all we know.

The FSF, ASF and other big open source organizations also typically require a CLA or a copyright assignment of some sort as well. So at least this isn't Adobe just being evil or anything. That's not to say whether they are or aren't evil, just saying that the CLA thing, in and of itself, isn't necessarily a bad thing.
That has absolutely nothing to do with Secure Boot.

If anything, what you're talking about has more to do with EFI