skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not even a simple question of the average speeds of internet connections in America. It's a question of whether there is ever a legitimate reason for the XB1 to be disconnected from the internet. I have an okay connection speed most of the time, but a month ago, over a course of a couple days, my connection started to get really erratic and eventually died. My cable modem had died. I went over a week dealing with terrible Comcast customer service. All I wanted was for them to send a repair person to replace the modem as soon as possible.

But for Comcast, it was all about the up-sell. You see, they didn't want to just replace my old modem, they wanted to use the "opportunity" to push me to a more expensive plan (as I later found out) with useless "features" like IP-based voice call service. I had no interest in these features but the customer service rep assured me that my bill wouldn't increase and my connection speeds would be higher. What's not to like in this deal?

Of course, I find out when my bill comes that the new plan is $20+ higher due to the useless voice calling. People complain about NSA wiretapping but I would love to have access to the recording of that conversation to prove that Comcast lied to me.

Now imagine what would have happened if I had to be connected to the internet once every 24 hours to play games. It was bad enough that I had no internet for 7+ days but now I wouldn't even be able to entertain myself with single player games. I know it's beating a dead horse but the fact is that I should not be hindered in any way from playing Angry Birds on my console just because Anonymous is DDOSing Microsoft's servers or I just moved to a new apartment and don't have internet service or my internet took a dump because the cable modem kicked the bucket or because I'm just lazy and don't want to enter my WPA key into the console.
16 384 columns and 1 048 576 rows actually
I just got tired of the street noise and the neighbor's rooster
Provoking National Boundaries on the Internet? A chilling thought...
> It's not really pretentious

> I would take 'read' as a pretentious term.

I'm confused...
I find the use of the term "Big Data" there bullshit. Even for the largest company like Walmart with 2 million employees - having some data about every one is hardly "big". Collect a whole deluge of data about each and you hardly fill a USB drive.

I realize that reporters like to throw buzzwords into anything to cater to the "simpler" readers. But come one, this is outright silly.
This gov.uk work is good, real good. Consistent layout, and good search which is most important.

Thoroughly good digital service, especially like the API for sharing content.
The Manchester site's still pretty decent though. Unlike http://cardiff.gov.uk.
I'm expecting social networks to be used 'voluntarily' for insurance soon. Likely the no social network quote will be higher, because it's higher risk because it's based on less information.

So you get a quote through their app, which uses your likes, your social network, and maybe some NLP on your posts to decide if you qualify for a lower quote.

Insurance people in the UK tell me this would be very useful, but probably isn't possible from a legal perspective, but there will be other countries where it is.

An effect of this would be to penalize people who don't use social networks.
Current limit is 1,000,000 pr worksheet. However there is a tool called PowerPivot which lets you get around that limit and do analysis on larger data sets.
It's useful for lots of things, I implemented something similar as array_pluck recently and immediately noticed lots of places where it could have been used.
It's a shame Maverics only supports 128GB RAM.
Show HN: A wrapper around datetime, pytz and tzlocal for Python 3.2+
Misleading. The real story is that someone wants to be a citizen without being willing to defend the land. That's cowardly, antithetical to the history of our nation, and plain stupid. If you seriously wouldn't grab a pitchfork when someone isn't actively trying to invade our land, than become a citizen of a country that won't be invaded. Sorry, but I don't want a pacifist for a neighbor if some idiots come over and invade us; I want the dude with a bunker and the machine guns.
I'm seriously put off by any talk of topgrading and 'a/b/c player' ranking.

Have you gathered much data on the success of this book's approach in your firm? I'd love to hear a positive take on it.
Best resource for learning about coroutines in (PHP|general)?
Uh, and while your at it, help Hungary, Romania, Ukraine,...
The most progressive? Really?

Yes, we're better than China, but pretty far from the leader.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index

The U.S. is the most important nation in terms of it's historical importance to freedom in the world, but it's been decades since it's been considered an example to emulate, in terms of either the electoral and political process, or rule of law based in natural rights.
Google still sends and accepts SMTP over TLS (using RC4) if your server is configured to handle it and has a snakeoil-CA-signed certificate. I just looked at our mail.log to confirm this.
I can understand your frustration and we've been there. Sure, it can still be harder to make great apps with HTML5 than native code. I'm the first to admit that. But, that is due to a lack of tools and frameworks not due to issues in the technology itself.

I'm happy that you like our app, but I admit it isn't perfect. On the other hand, how many native apps are far from perfect? We have set our mission to create the tools needed to create amazing apps with web technologies and we hope to prove that it is possible. Again, I admit that the tools aren't widely available, yet. But the underlying technology is ready in my opinion.

Consider this: How hard would it be to ship iOS 7 UI with a native app now? Why did no native developer do that, yet? Isn't it kind of telling that we were able to do it, despite the fact that a lot of people still say that HTML5 is far inferior to native programming? I'm not saying I have the only truth, I just hoping that people reconsider their prejudices and give the web a chance.
I once tested positive for HIV with the basic antibody test you mention - a pretty stunning result in view of my lifestyle. A followup Western blot test with higher accuracy confirmed I was not positive. The basic test is fast and cheap but if there are no more accurate tests to detect false positives, it's a dangerous thing to rely on.

Same logic applies in other situations.
Or the inherent moral view of legislation.

I know. A shocking concept: law has underlying moral values like "it's bad to kill people" and "stealing people's cars is wrong" and so on.
Jesus wept!
PHP 5.5 released in the GitHub repository.
العاب سبونج بوب 2013
العاب سبونج بوب 2013

العاب ,سبونج, بوب ,2013

http://www.dlu3a.com/Game-472.html
Along with this, everyone praising the supposed benefits of digital lending forget that they had no actual idea of how it would work. There are no details. Microsoft never defined what "family" meant, and nobody has any idea of how the system would be implemented. People were praising a feature that literally didn't exist.

[Phil] Spencer: We don't have a lending solution today.

Kotaku: You might have one?

Spencer: We don't have a path... I don't want to make a commitment to somebody without a plan of record on how that lands. I could over-promise, under-deliver on the features. I don't want to do that. I want to make sure. I understand how gifting is going to work. I understand how the secondary market is going to work.
So you would reinstate the draft?
DuckDuckGo......oops, here is my new iOS App, Pure, a minimal flickr client
Get request path in PHP for routing
Bullshit. If Microsoft had any guts, they woulda done this but only for non-physical copies. Then the consumer would have a choice on whether they liked the direction things were going or not and there would have actually been some benefit from the status quo for the consumer.

You know what the difference between the console based DRM schemes and Steam is? A worse situation was already emerging on PC. Publishers were starting to employ draconian DRM policies that eliminated any chance of resale or sharing, but also didn't work properly and made pirated games a significantly better choice than buying a game from a store.

Steam gave you a better experience with the same limitations as the sell-side of the market was starting to demand and enforce.

If you think Microsoft made a bad move, you are plainly ignoring the history of PC gaming and trying to imagine that the status quo was how it always existed.

Oh, hey, you know what else MS could have done if they had guts? They could have made it an option to add a disc game to your permanent library, allowing a consumer to voluntarily give up their right of resale for permanent digital access.

Of course they're cowards, smart cowards, but cowards.
Discussion from 3 months ago when the news first broke.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5403733

"Amazon and CIA ink cloud deal"
The Slow and Focused Startup vs. The Fast and Furious
Can you give us more details on the business analyst option? What would be involved in that?
"The true Bulgarians, the educated working Bulgarians are different.", yes, much like the true Scotsmen. Seriously though, does anyone know of a more objective analysis of what is happening in Bulgaria?
Yes, that would be good to change it to "http" to be clear about the protocol you are talking about. :-)
> Consider this: How hard would it be to ship iOS 7 UI with a native app now?

Why would you want to ship iOS7 UI now specially on the devices that don't have iOS7 yet? It just wouldn't look good. Btw, I don't think that would be impossible to do, but it would be stupid.
Another option to consider might be a sales/pre-sales engineer.
This isn't about my opinion or preferences. This is about looking at the reality of the situation.

Java (the language) is quite heavily used, but this is more a factor of it merely being around for years, and the huge amount of hype it received during its first decade of existence. However, it is now widely accepted that it is significantly deficient in many ways, which is part of the reason that people are seriously looking to alternatives.

Clojure may be a major player within the context of modern Lisp-like languages, but beyond that it's extremely obscure, and it is not widely used at all. At least part of this obscurity is due to its syntax and semantics. Time and time again we've seen this approach rejected by the software development community as a whole, regardless of whether we're talking about Lisp, Scheme, Common Lisp, and now Clojure. It's just not what people want.

So Scala ends up being the one with the fewest drawbacks, and the most positive aspects. It has a far more familiar syntax and semantics, it is seeing actual real-world use, and it does have features and functionality that attract people toward using it. From an objective viewpoint, it is the best of the given options.
I just had my ego smacked in another algorithmic interview with a large, fancy software company a few days ago (took too long to get too rough an answer). I like to think I'm not stupid - my current day to day developing gig is heavy on thinking & mathematics and I do OK with it - it's more than just "organization". It just seems like if I spent a few hours a week entering TopCoder competitions, in 6 months I could ace these things - but what end result skill is the interviewer really selecting for?
Two Sides: Putting Industry Professionals in the Classroom
I know the area, and their used to be a building that was pretty much known to be some kind of CIA building. They made it 'fit in' by covering the building with fake windows, although I did see them doing some renovations on it so I'm not sure if that's still the case.
Precisely so. I consider myself to be a pretty good coder because I'm good at keeping track of many things going on at once (I used to be a chip designer in a prior life), but I'm 100% sure I'd flunk the puzzles that companies interviewing for coders throw out in their interviews.

Good to see a realization by Google that those puzzles aren't all that useful: http://qz.com/96206/google-admits-those-infamous-brainteaser...

Google might be one company where algorithmic wizardry might be expected to be more important than most, so that's saying something...
It's a crutch. Nobody knows how to interview. Interviewing properly is a lot of work. There are two people who can do interviews--people who have knowledge of the job and people who have time to interview--and they are so infrequently the same people. These sorts of things were appealing because they were easy, a way to not spend a lot of time on interviewing, or a way to not need a lot of knowledge about the job.

And these things are important, because job candidates are not people, they are OEM replacement parts being order from Pep Boys. Call up the recruiter and requisition a J6-252: Programmer, seasoned 5 years, with degree from MIT. Oh, those ones are too expensive. Guess I'll take the knock-off version, but I refuse to pay full price!

Hopefully, because it's Google saying it, everyone will cargo-cult on this bandwagon too.
[...]using a two-light-beam method, with different
colours [...]

The two beams were then overlapped. As the second
beam cancelled out the first in its donut ring, the
recording process was tightly confined to the centre
of the writing beam.

How to they get the two beams (of different frequency) to cancel out each other?
I loved the last two gifs. That's an office! Makes the typical startup place look like an infantile playground :)
Not since 2007 where it got bumped to over 1 million.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/excel-specifica...
The launch of Nusii - SaaS application for creating client proposals
An Angel in New York: Christina Bechhold
I always wonder how Google manages to have so many vanilla Engineers given how high their standards are. I don't think their standards are high in the "needs to be smart" sense, but in regards to all the other BS. Or they must only ask basic data structure (and puzzle) questions that any studious person can memorize the answers to. I don't think knowing the answer to these interview questions correlates with knowing how to do your job well. It only correlates with knowing the answer to these questions.

Then again, they also have some of the best Engineers. But I don't think that's a testament to a great hiring process, as that could be the result of great marketing. The "we allow you the freedom to actually do stuff and to work with the best" type marketing. From what I read/saw, the great Engineers didn't seem that happy, so maybe those marketing claims aren't really true, but perhaps things have changed since then.
>Sorry, but you obviously have not been taking notice over the past year or two.

I'll admit, I haven't really, because I'll turn it round, why would I?

We've seen Erlang start to be used quite a lot, Scala is becoming very interesting, and F# is appearing suitably mainstreme.

What features would make me think "hmm, I should check out what they are doing in PHP"?

Looking now I still see a cluttered array of APIs, some pretending they are C from the 80s, others hinting that they at least knew of objects in their design.

A quick look for static analysis rule systems for say our CI system:
http://mark-story.com/posts/view/static-analysis-tools-for-p...

Wow, that's pretty poor.

What I do again see, are PHP developers who are not fluent in any other language. I always find that odd. For instance I've been doing mostly C# since version 2. But I would probably pass most Java or CamL interview questions anyone had. I am happy in C# knowing what I am missing from other languages (well, not happy, just its the right choice for the things I've been doing).

In short, PHP has an image problem with plenty of people. I am one of them. They can't easily solve it, without breaking a whole bunch of existing code, as most of my complaints are inherent languages features and core API design (or lack there off). I don't nock languages that eschew OO, but I do nock ones that implement it, just very, very badly.
Forgot to track Churn? Let's dig it up from the DB
Sure you can put 1,000TB on it but whats the read speed?

There is a reason both PS4 and XboxOne will require to install the game even if the Bluray can hold all that data and more. High density optical formats are slow to read.

At 16x Bluray only reads at 72MB/s.
Totally agree with this. The essential skill of a software engineer regardless of position is to be able to approach any problem no matter how unfamiliar or intractable and formulate a means of attacking it and verifying the solution. The right type of brainteaser can be a great way to demonstrate this provided: A) The interviewee hasn't heard it before B) It's meaty and not relying on some flash of insight (the manhole cover question is absolute garbage) C) you are able to capture the thought process in sufficient detail, either through verbally talking it out or writing down or whatever.

This has the potential to reveal a certain high level problem solving ability which the lack thereof will not necessarily be revealed by more concrete "write pseudocode for X" type of interview questions. What I mean by that is that there is a continuum of skills ranging from rote copying of solutions all the way through synthesizing solutions to business problems and designing architectures to fulfill a malleable list of requirements. A mediocre engineer can inch their way up the continuum through raw pattern matching ability (which humans excel at) without ever attaining mastery of the high level abstraction that are driving the implementation detail. Such engineers can appear tremendously productive at the ground level, but they are dangerous for an technical organization to have many of them because they tend not to see where technical debt is piling up and can often paint themselves into corners because they're not considering the bigger picture. Knowing someone has strong reasoning skills from very high level human tasks down is a good hedge against this.
$3.3M for hipster fashion
The best defense is a good offense. I say: strike reality first. :P
> Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship.

Can we see the study?

Also note that performance on the job is a noisy measurement, because people who get to work on impactful projects (through luck or people skills) get rated higher than others. I wouldn't be surprised if interview scores were a better measurement of "true" skills.
UI Developer Essential Links
That's a good point, but it's not Schneier's point. He's referring to recent attempts by countries like Russia to make some major changes in the way the internet works - changes that the US and some other countries successfully opposed. The recent revelations undermine the US's position.
This was posted at least twice yesterday.
Show HN: jobstat.us - our email first / email only startup
What happens if the "terrorist" is a normal person who loves his family and his country, and believes his sacrifice is honorable?

"Even bad men love their mommas." - Ben Wade (Russell Crowe), 3:10 to Yuma.
> If certain games require it, then it is something forced by those games, not by the service itself.

So you don't buy games that require XBox One?

You had a choice before. Now that choice has been removed.
What I wonder is at what point words like stasi become reasonable or acceptable.

OK, I don't like what is happening, and almost day by day thing happen that I feel are pushing the west, led by the US, more and more towards something highly controlled and not in any way free. Liberty is slowly being eroded, and I genuinely feel that is a true statement objectively. Right now, words like stasi, fascist, etc are an exaggeration, but used by people who see it going that way. They use such words to warn, but we all know those words do not really stand up objectively.

So, what is the tipping point, what has to happen for such words to actually apply? Or is it merely a case of presentation? If society, superficially, doesn't look like old Nazi Germany, is that enough for a majority to be content, even if underling that is something deeply nasty?
I've got an answer for all the people who say, "I've got nothing to hide".

That might be true but you would have to be naive to think that the information that could be gathered from these NSA activities would not be misused by people.

Imagine an up and coming politician. Squeaky clean but was friends with a few people who got prosecuted for drug dealing. Those useful NSA phone records could easily lead to the press asking the young idealist if he often hung around with drug users. Irrelevant and potentially career ending.

Civil rights campaigners who could be accused of having an affair because of call records.

A journalist investigating a corrupt politician... is he a terrorist sympathizer... comb through the records.

You may have nothing to hide but often the people trying to improve your country for the better and root out corruption and crime will be more vulnerable to this. Because the corrupt individuals in positions of power will not respect the laws and procedures and will use this information for evil.

Thoughts?
Actually is more physics than math, and some geometry for drawing.
IIRC E_DEPRECATED notices are triggered when deprecated stuff is referenced.

http://php.net/manual/en/errorfunc.constants.php

E_DEPRECATED - Run-time notices. Enable this to receive warnings about code that will not work in future versions. (Since PHP 5.3.0)
Well, in discourse it's more convention than anything. But the first category created, is a `meta` category. But this explains it better: http://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-meta/5249/2
That was my first thought... But remember, this is in the console arena where everything seems to lag behind PCs.
At prices this low, the NSA can’t afford to not spy on us
Check out Lua Coroutines, here's a starter link:
http://lua-users.org/wiki/CoroutinesTutorial
A red herring, my friend. From your link:

"The questionnaire asks questions about pluralism, media independence, environment and self-censorship, legislative framework, transparency, and infrastructure. The questionnaire takes account of the legal framework for the media (including penalties for press offences, the existence of a state monopoly for certain kinds of media and how the media are regulated) and the level of independence of the public media. It also reflects violations of the free flow of information on the Internet. Violence against journalists, netizens, and media assistants, including abuses attributable to the state, armed militias, clandestine organizations, and pressure groups, are monitored by RSF staff during the year and are also part of the final score."

So, a whole bunch of other things are rolled into that--least of which is some ill-defined internet component.

I know that it is very popular to bash on the US--often with very good reason!--for its press. Fact is, we did this to ourselves. Fact is, we stopped paying for newspapers that did good reporting. Fact is, we promoted and supported the rise of media moguls and conglomerates that helped stifle solid journalism. That was us, not some secret government cabal.

The US is pretty hands-off with regards to the 'net, especially with regards to free speech that others may find offensive: contrast us with the way many European nations seem to feel about hate speech or libel.

The only things I'd actively hold that we do incorrectly about the 'net is the ICE domain seizures and massive data-mining of communications.

Then again, we again see that the private sector is more than happy to vacuum up personal details. Thanks Google! Thanks Facebook! Thanks marketing firms!

Yet again, we do the worst of this to ourselves.