skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sci-Fi Birthday Quotes
anyone have any sci-fi or nerdy birthday quotes? I can't think of any besides in Firefly when River tells Simon she didn't get him anything.
I don't see patents as critical to the masses. Look at Germany - they are trying to abolish software patents altogether (src: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/german-parliament-says...). I am worried that regular people will be the ones enslaving us all. Will Iceland become some kind of freedom haven? Will people migrate to seateds instead to create a waterworld of the future? I'm very disheartened by the present: I would like to do something, but can't figure out what to push towards.
Keeping track of who owns which to ensure each user can get their battery back seems like a bit of a mess. Presumably they give you money back if you keep a battery that's older than the one you dropped off? If so, I frankly can't see how it's worth bothering trying to reunite batteries with their owners - just do the accounting and be done with it.

Suppose I'm driving two thousand miles and I swap batteries once or twice every day along the route. If I don't take the same route back and stop at the exact same spots, I've moved a dozen batteries 200 miles away from where they were before. Whoever dropped off the batteries I picked up now can't plausibly get them back.

On the other hand, suppose I DO plan to take the same route back. Suppose I drive 2000 miles, spend a week at my destination, then drive back. All the batteries I moved will be out of place for that week, so my schedule prevents their owners from getting the batteries back on their preferred schedule.

I'm sure they'll work it out somehow. At least with the new system long driving trips are finally somewhat practical! (Or will be once the stations are in place, anyway.)
>The only way to provide some relief is for ALL drivers to travel in groups/packs with large gaps in between the groups/packs. The gaps can obsorb slow downs.

Whenever I'm stuck in Philadelphia traffic I try to do this and it seems to make a difference. I've even thought about getting a bunch of friends to all get on at different exits and do it simultaneously. The end goal being official "pace cars" coordinated by a central command center to alleviate stop & go traffic and keep everyone cruising at a constant speed. Needless to say, my mind wanders a lot when I'm stuck in traffic!
The Security Consulting Sugar High
Thanks for writing this, very informative. You say that adding to a channel's buffer to allow you to append to it while you're reading is code smell. Would you consider just spinning off a goroutine to do the append the same? It seems like it gets around the problem pretty well, though it's pretty much the same thing. Just wondering what you think because I've used this pattern before.
Fun with SMB on the Command Line
This really isn't a gotcha. This happens in every language with closures, except Java. People complain about Java's insistence on labeling every closed-over variable "final", but it sure does nip this problem in the bud.
I suppose this certifies the authenticity of the released claims, for those who have been continuing to deny it: If the documents weren't real he'd just be a liar and lying in the media isn't generally a crime in the US.
I've actually done something similar. When in bad traffic i purposely drive so that i leave a large gap between me and the car ahead of me. I basically drive so that i have to do minimal accelerating/braking. Likely just a coincidnce, but it does seem to improve flow.
I am reminded of this:

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425435/in-car-algorithm...
To spot a top performer one needs no elaborate testing or, god forbid, standardized interviews. It is the same as it is in sports or music or arts - there are cues that identify a top performer. What standardized tests you want to apply to, say, Beethoven, Orwell or Muhammad Ali, or, good forbid, Steve Jobs, or Igor Sysoev?)

It is not about testing, it is about having a gift (or not) and a character - willingness to become a master just for the sake of ones love/passion/enjoyment of the craft, not any stupid job or position.
I think lists of back-end development resources in specific languages could still be useful (and probably already exist in myriad forms).
At present, pqR is compatible with Rstudio only if you configure with the --disable-helper-threads option (ie, no automatic parallelization) along with the --enable-R-shlib option that's needed for Rstudio. This is a minor glitch in how pqR is linked that will be fixed soon.
Hilarious Funny Quotes By Popular Persons
Diesel stink stays on your hands and clothes a long time. It's far more annoying than gasoline in that regard. (it's unclear if you're speaking from diesel or gasoline experience)
The FBI limit is probably because the companies in question are domestic in nature. The FBI is not under the same prohibition as the NSA is; they are allowed to investigate crimes involving persons overseas, while the NSA is forbidden from data mining Americans. So it would help to compartmentalize the Verizon-style phone metadata searches away from NSA.

Of course FBI is still able to share with NSA and CIA, but they would have to do the work of obtaining warrants with specific information.

For the rest, IANAL so can't really help. For finding the laws the House of Representative website has an archive, or you could find the Gov't Printing Office website.
Thumbtack.com for Local Services
Stop stressing out against your startup competitors
You go to a peaceful protest. An agent records you or pulls fixed camera surveillance. Now you are a "person of interest".

We already know law enforcement is recording these events.

But wait, you might not even have attended the event. You might have been walking to your job, your home, going shopping, meeting a friend.

Tant pis pour toi...

Perhaps my comment sounds over the top. But when the TSA (or, the real three letter acronyms behind it) can't even effectively maintain its no-fly list, particularly with respect to ruling out and removing false positives, or even having a policy and public interface for addressing this... Well, for one, my confidence is not particularly inspired.
Contrary to one of the recommendations in the article, the Minnesota Department of Transportation recommends against merging early, and instead has made a large public-education effort (including signs at merge points) to encourage zipper merging:

http://www.dot.state.mn.us/zippermerge/

More discussion:

http://www.drmomentum.com/aces/archives/003800.html
While I agree with most of your comment, your statement that majority languish in poverty without even hope of a squared meal quite hyperbolic. Yes in India poverty level is high, but it is not that dire as your above statement sounds.
TACK (http://tack.io/), if widely implemented, would help a lot. As I understand it, if you visited a website regularly before it was compromised, then any future compromise along the lines described in the article (i.e., without stealing the server's private key) wouldn't affect you. I'm not sure if TACK is still alive or how on-board with it any browser developers are.
If you look at the "future directions" section of pqR's version of the "R Internals" manual, you'll see a brief mention of a plan to implement "call by name" parameter passing in the style of Algol 60, which should address this issue. Before that happens, however, pqR will improve the tracking of references to reduce the number of unnecessary copies made when parameters are passed by value, which may be more than you realize in past versions of R.
Perhaps after the Ministry of Privacy has finished with it.
I saw William Beaty's zen traffic warrior video years ago, and I don't know if it works, but it sure makes me more relaxed when I'm driving.
I think the problem is less one of incentive than it is one of awareness. If more people knew about — and actually understood — anti-traffic, more people would employ it. I don't know where the inflection point is, but I'd bet you don't even need all that many people engaging in anti-traffic behavior before it has an appreciable impact, either.
Mindfulness sells
"Man With ID," huh? More like "Illegal Immigrant With Fake ID." No wonder nobody knows him.
The Associated Press's Elizabeth White reports on a speech by Presidential hopeful Barack Obama, then a junior Illinois Senator, to a crowd in Texas. "We're going to close Guantanamo. And we're going to restore habeas corpus," Obama says. "We're going to lead by example—not just by word but by deed. That's our vision for the future." [0]

[0]: http://m.theatlanticwire.com/global/2013/01/obama-closing-gu...
Because some large percentage of candidates can't handle pointers. If you can't come up with a viable "delete a node from the middle of a linked list" during an interview where you are supposed to program in c then you don't get the job. No, you probably won't need to implement a linked list, but you will need to dereference pointers, and the linked list is an adequate proxy for your ability to understand the most fundamental of systems programming tasks.
The very nature of software is that you should only implement everything only once.

Clearly, this is not conducive to creating a repeatable test. Therefore any test must involve reproducing code that already exists.

If you are going to ask a candidate to reproduce code that already exists, it stands to reason that you would ask them to create something for which the definition is well understood in order to make the question fast to ask and require little explanation.

Therefore a linked list or hash table is a good example of a practical coding question. It's a good test to give you a negative result even if it's not a good test to get a positive result.
For example, one of the ways to implement order independent translucency involves a linked list of fragments in a render target. You cannot really use some external library in a HLSL/GLSL/Cg/whatever shader language you use. Even if you could - since all you need is the very basic list, any overhead from a library would be unacceptable.

Linked lists are ubiquitous in programming, hooking up a library every time you need a linked list is as same as using some library for loops. Sure, you can get some fancy loops with guards and Duff's device built-in, but in some fields of programming you will be laughed out of the job if you ever try to do this.
When I think about how to optimize the time of my day, it's certainly not the time I have to wait while the gas is filling up my tank.
3 minutes looks like a worse-case too. Not sure if that's 100 % honest.
There is a lot of truth to this. If internal combustion engines were being rolled out today, people would be discussing those downsides. But, ICEs have been with us for quite some time, so we've accepted the downsides and mitigated where possible. This happens with anything that is new but competes with something that is old.

Personally, I am strongly rooting for Tesla. Even is Tesla fails, they will have significantly changed the automobile landscape.
We can't talk about them freely. It requires a leak before we're even aware of them.
Whatever your antenna and power level allow. Meters to kilometers are common.
As others have said it's a nice interface. Good job!
Tom Mitchell working on new Machine Learning chapters
>I just don't understand people who would accelerate and the brake, and repeat this until they are out of the traffic. Not only you are causing yourself a lot of anguish, you are also not helping others, nor your car.

I don't either. I developed the same strategy as you describe accidently in an effort to conserve fuel. Braking is effectively converting your precious gasoline into heat/sound/wear-on-parts. It's best to never have to break. I realize in practice that's not achievable, but there are many cases where a little foresight can mean just not accelerating and expecting stops earlier, and can give you a ~3-5mpg increase.
The article mentioned that they found his old house in Mexico using his Mexican ID, and that the family had since moved away (likely to the US).

If it was a fake ID, that wouldn't make sense. (And why would an immigrant carry fake foreign ID anyway?)
San Francisco Bedbug Infestation
Are you located in/around Philly? If so, I'd be interested in coordinating something on 476 or 422 one afternoon.
I do this when stuck in a jam with a manual transmission car. I'll just leave it in first and idle along at ~5 mph... this is slower than the momentary maximum ~15 mph "rubber band" speed but certainly feels like it smooths things out in the long term, and is a lot easier on my clutch foot.
Their research is fundamentally flawed...and it is rooted in an fruitless desire to optimize something that is physically unoptimizable. There is no sand-arranging possibility that can cause the falling-rate of sand in an hourglass to change significantly.
No. If you want a test to accurately predict the candidate's job performance, it needs to be a work sample test that represents and is similar to the types of problems the candidate will be solving at that job.

In other words, unless the job is literally about finding creative ways to implement linked lists, then it is near worthless as an interview question. (I say "near worthless" because there is some value in seeing how candidates respond when given questions that are obviously nonsensical or just outright dumb.)
I'm no cryptographer, but doesn't ChannelID (and, to a lesser extent, certificate pinning) mitigate a lot of these concerns?

certificate pinning is already in Chrome, and I think ChannelID is coming soon (if not already).

ChannelID: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-balfanz-tls-channelid-00
Anger mounts after Facebook's 'shadow profiles' leak in bug
Implementing a linked list is a good test if the job is programming in C. If you can't do it there's a good chance you aren't really a C programmer. It's a weird question if the job doesn't require programming in C.
I've done this, too. Frankly I just feel better going a steady rate - even if it's 0.5 mph - rather than continuously stopping and starting. The cars behind me tend to disagree, and sometimes even honk ... even though the space ahead of me clearly only leads to a continued jam, and not open road.
+1

I think sometimes people confuse interoperability with some sort of codebase merge. It makes sense for each release of osx and ios to be more interoperable, and even take lessons learned from one back to the other. It doesn't make sense to merge them, because they are different platforms with different needs.
Yes, your analysis illustrates how amateur and silly the Tesla plan is. Did they not run this by a focus group, or even ask somebody who drives long distances maybe? Nothing about the announced plan stands the slightest scrutiny. There were no answers for the simplest questions that occur to anybody who heard the plan.
Film: High risk reporting along China's Great Firewall. High Tech, Low Life
Does Canada spy on US citizens? Because the US government does spy on me. In other words, it is not the case that the US government only spies on countries which spy back on the US.
>>I just don't understand people who would accelerate and the brake, and repeat this until they are out of the traffic. Not only you are causing yourself a lot of anguish, you are also not helping others, nor your car.

Accelerating and braking is also a fantastic way to waste gas.
How much do the Chinese know?

1) This could be old news

2) They could have a dozens like him in the NSA

3) He could no longer be useful
There's also http://pyvideo.org which you can search for security-related topics. I doubt they are as dense and comprehensive as the SecurityTube course, but they are free.
Wouldn't it be much better to repeal the Patriot Act and any laws & organizations that provide blanket search warrants?

I am deeply suspicious of any laws that take into account the type of investigation performed. Why would it matter?

All laws that are basically exceptions from normal conduct "because of terrorism" are bad laws. You know these are going to get abused; they're basically set up to be abused.
Is this something like Pinterest but for men? It looks cool, but its a bit confusing to navigate (for me).
Perhaps, but I imagine it will easily be a decade before >90% of deployments are on browser versions that support Cert Pinning and ChannelID... think of all those enterprise deployments, universities and banks.
I was at a New Year's Eve party one time when a bullet pierced the roof of an awning covering the back porch. The impact was loud enough that we heard it over the music and cheering ringing in the new year.

The roof was constructed of corrugated aluminum. Not the strongest stuff in the world, but the bullet passed through two sheets of this material on its way in. We estimated the entry angle at around 40-45° by looking upward through the holes, aligning the light that shined through them (the following day).

Having seen it first hand, I would dispute the assertion that shooting in to the air at a high angle isn't particularly dangerous.
something tells me the police shooting at drones are not going to care either way.
Silicon Valley's ties to the military/intelligence complex
Have you used windows 8?

I love developing in ubuntu, but ubuntu and windows seem to have gone crazy with their user interfaces lately. Ubuntu switched to unity, an interface designed for netbooks. Who has a netbook these days? And wants to run linux on it? Canonical should be targeting their main userbase, developers or advanced users. They should concentrate on making gnome as stable and simple as possible, and include vmware/virtualbox drivers out of the box. If developers have a simple, stable platform then the platform will grow organically.

Windows 8 can't make its mind up about if it should be used with a mouse or a touchscreen. Discoverability is hard, it's really hard to work out that you drag an app to the bottom of the screen to close it, because their are no visual clues. I like the look of metro, but it's really a polished turd.
It almost sounds like you want a CMS, like Drupal or Joomla.
Some concerns about CurveCP's performance. Development seems slow from what I've been able to glean from the site and list:

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.network.curvecp/65

http://i.imgur.com/VMDdTQ3.png
No way I use this... In french, PQ = toilet paper lol. :-/
So when a Chinese dissident tries to escape to the USA, all the Chinese have to do is charge them with espionage and ask the USA extradite them.

What a crazy, dangerous game.
I just looked at the Engineering Science degree from Dartmouth, from a brief glance it looks like you could make it out only taking 1 or 2 computer science classes.

I wouldn't expect someone who's taking one computer science class to be able to implement a hash table.
I did a rough estimate that the 16 x 4 GPU setup with the 54GB network could be had for around $150K.

Not pocket change but not out of reach either.

Power is a little bit of an issue (you need 6-7 20A circuits) but there are hosting facilities that charge per KW/hr rather than per-drop. In that environment, I estimated that you could do the problem they described for under $10 in energy costs.

I'd like to know if anyone else has a feel on capital costs.
really? what's wrong with:

for i := 0; i < 100; i++ { }

a little more going on... but not much.
Merging later encourages better utilization of road capacity and eliminates bottlenecks further away from the overloaded resource. It's quite simple really, in this case the polite behavior is wrong, and if everyone would just be greedy, the behavior would no longer be impolite and would be more optimal (source, I live in china, this really works better than the alternative, we have plenty of overloaded resources).
Ask HN: what are some companies with good employee development programs?
McKinsey, Bain and BCG uses employee development as one of the key criteria to attract good talent. What other companies are out there that are like these companies. What is employee development like at apple, google, Facebook and amazon for people with technical skills.
True that. Guy used to earn 200,000 grand a year (A little over 16 grand a month), not to mention a bunch of other goodies working for the NSA. I hardly doubt whether the 15 grand the campaign has already reached would help him.
It looks like ChannelID has been enabled since Chrome 24[1].

[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=136462#c...
Filmmakers’ group tries to reshape treaty that would benefit the blind
How to qualify as one of the million "engineers"? By having a diploma? Or by being a person who's engineering stuff?

I think if you are really "engineering stuff" in ICT on a daily basis that soon enough you can attract some employers attention. Only passing the tests for a school and having "core Java" next to "MS Word/Excel" on your resume does not land you a job. Is that a bad thing?

Final note: I found that in India many families (often fathers) choose the study direction for their children; this also grows engineers-on-paper that do not really love engineering so much. Companies I know avoid hiring these.

Just my .2 :)
Minnesota DOT probably recommends zipper merging because they are taking into account that it's likely a safer (and easier) method for drivers in denser traffic.
This one really has me scratching my head. I always assumed that Snapjoy would merge into Dropbox's photo system, but I also assumed that they would give users the explicit option to port over their accounts to Dropbox.

Customer acquisition has always been the name of the game for Dropbox, this seems like a missed opportunity to bring over a good chunk of committed users.
First Successful Surgery Performed While Wearing Google Glass
Michael -

I've read many of your posts and comments, and generally agree with a lot of what you write.

Regarding caring, there are two types in this industry that come to mind -- caring about the type of work you do and continually improving your skills; and caring about what the company you are working for is building and hoping it succeeds. I was referencing the first. I have also gone too far down the path of the second, to the detriment of my own quality of life.

Creativity and drive to better one's self is important. Expending unappreciated/unrewarded energy for a company that isn't investing back in you is a losing endeavor.
> Look at interviewing. There exists of a database of interview questions that you need to learn to game the interview.

That is part of the reason that I have become tired of the tech industry; its job application process is silly. There is enough correlation and causation issues. As an interviewer, you assume that a lifestyle, schools, ability to solve a bunch of textbook algo problems means that the person will be a good employee; as an interviewee, you assume that a company which asks such questions, talks about exotic languages, technologies, provides free lunches and other crap will be the good fit for you. I have decided I am going to ask companies if I can work for x time for them on a project; then we can figure out in practice whether we are both good fits and then decide on a final settlement. Of course, this will never become widespread because it fucks with the H1B system and a lot of people are still convinced that the way tech interviews happen is the right way.
I'm pretty sure the author means "companies can hire a programmer IN India or Russia for 1/3 the cost of a US worker"