skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really wish this would rattle Android market share (I know it won't), because I would never in a hundred years have guessed that the camera in my Nexus 4 is as terrible as it is. My Samsung Focus had a better camera =(

I always mock my GF for having an iPhone (she buys stuff for looks), but if we need to take a picture, hand me that baby because I chose Nexus 4 over the Lumia 928.
Balsamiq Mockups - Rapid Wireframing Tool
If you're actually on the DoD network that's only necessary in the rarest of cases. Retirees have to drive awhile sometimes, that's true, but they are not getting CAC anyways, they're getting old-style ID cards.
Congratulations Rick! Great news.
It is prominently mentioned near the bottom.
I really tried to (audio book version). I got 3/4 of the way through and then skipped.
Why, exactly, would we compare to KGB interrogations when "KGB interrogations" is not involved in the definition of the word "torture"?
The question is: how many people currently working would stop working if they didn't need to? (particularly in the areas vital for the basic functioning of society) That question is so impossibly difficult to answer that I don't think any system we come up with won't have potentially disastrous consequences.

I don't think it's all that difficult to answer. When I leave the office building I work at the end of my day, the janitors are just showing up. They probably already only get paid the basic livable wage (probably less), so why would they show up to work if they were getting the paycheck anyways? I can think of 100s of other jobs that someone wouldn't show up for because they aren't worth the time, they aren't fun, or even remotely interesting.
Please don't use "GPL = noncommerical" shortcut. It furthers the damaging meme that opensource and GPL is not for businesses and is only for hobbyists and is a 'toy licence'.
> Why would anyone do anything if they had no incentive to work?

Since jobs will still pay, why would having a small stream of unconditional income equate to "no incentive to work"?
I think this is a very neat project and am looking forward to seeing how it turns out. One thing I would like is the ability to have a software only solution. I already have a NAS and have no desire to buy another USB. I get why for simplicity reasons they are going with the hardware but I would love a software version.
A better strategy for Microsoft today would be to become to tech what Disney is to family entertainment.

For their mission statement to be: "We want to be a significant part of everyone's technology experience".

Now that would be audacious... to re-gain some of what they've lost to Apple and Android, to be there within entertainment, automotive, health and government.

They already are in a lot of those places, but this statement would be a strong signal that they are going to fight every front.
Why is copying and pasting to be discouraged?
I wrote something similar for Gambit: https://github.com/bitwize/valkyree

I shamefacedly say that this version is way out of date; I've hacked on it quite a bit more than is in the public repo, and have added things like OpenAL support (yay!).
I've never used Symbian, but if it's worse than Windows Mobile 5, then it's got to be really bad.

If you didn't quit the camera app on WM5, it would stay running in the background and kill the battery without you knowing it. I also had lots of hangs that prevented me from answering calls.
>We don't tolerate the "you're too stupid to use that" attitude in any other part of software development, and we shouldn't tolerate it in cryptography.

We shouldn't, but we should provide tools that allow software engineers to securely design applications without having to be crypto experts, in much the same way I can write python code without being a kernel hacker. Two examples spring to mind: Authenticated https api calls and bcrypt. These both work securely without requiring deep knowledge and they are so easy to setup it is unlikely someone will roll their own.
This video makes a good job demonstrating how the 41 MPs work
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUMNm9-dgJ0

My only complaint is that it is a bit slower than my compact..
> Actually, the studies show that corporate taxes are essentially a proxy for the taxing the ultra-wealthy - a cut in the corporate tax rate is very similar to cutting the highest marginal income tax rate.

So why tax by proxy and not wealth directly?
Are companies going to stop paying employees? No, so there's still going to be an incentive to work. Like, say, having more than bare subsistence.

I don't know what you're arguing against, but its not what people mean by an unconditional basic income. Maybe you're arguing against pure communism, but that's not what this article is about at all.
Think most of us did this as the address was uttered during Google IO. Annoyingly the wrong URL was given, but a bit of trial and error got the real one pretty soon!
Yes, that's why there's plenty of reasons you would still want to "do things" even if you didn't need to work.
Hey programmers, we need to talk
> Sweet! None of us have to work anymore! Party at my place every night for life!

Given that a typical developer could earn a basic income in a month or two and then take the rest of the year off, yet almost nobody does, I think we can conclude that it is not as sweet as you think it might be. It might be fun for a week or two, but then it is time to get back to doing something productive.
For someone who knows LISP, your parentheses are curiously unbalanced.
I'd love to hear more about how this works on iOS. How does the Plug app have access to files in the local filesystem outside of the Plug app's sandbox?
Nothing about this would work.

Significantly fewer corporations with a drastically smaller workforce paying greatly increased tax rates with a substantially weaker dollar to benefit an unthinkably higher quantity of citizens? I assume we still want to keep our military, education, and surveillance programs funded, too.

It simply does not math.
Yep, same issue over here.
How would a system like this scale to different regions? I can see this working in a smaller country, not the US. I would need a much larger subsistence wage to survive in the SF bay area than I would in most other places in the country. And if certain (already overcrowded) regions are allowed larger wages, you'd probably see people flocking there for the increased wages. I can also see this placing strain on the system for the first few decades if people decide to have more children, since both parents don't need to work anymore.
>"Are you bigger than I am?"

I'm your height, 60+ pounds heavier and no stranger to the gym. I've been in IT for going on 16 years.

I've had many people admit they were initially intimidated after we've gotten to know each other - women a bit more than men. I've had several problems arise from superficial assumptions/accusations by people who'd never fully interacted with me.

About your situation, there are a couple things I think can help/hurt:

* Build. I can remember being 220. I'm definitely perceived differently now, more "big" than "tall" or "slim" previously.

* I'm pretty quiet. I get the impression that people assume negatives before positives when they can't read a person.

* Jobs. I've done a lot of work in the public sector where things always seem to be contentious. In a place with less infighting and political maneuvering I'd hope for less assumption and undermining as well.
1st time entrepreneurs, what part of the process are people often blind to?
Why stop at living wage? Everyone deserves to be comfortable, no? They should pass a 'comfortable wage' bill. Heck, it should be illegal to work for anything less than $50 an hour. What we need is politicians with the leadership necessary to outlaw poverty.
We use these at work, and once set up they're a breeze. But that's a big "once".

It also makes life needlessly difficult if you want to log in to something from a new/borrowed/etc PC and don't have the keys handy. Where needlessly = near-impossible.
Actually, let me add that I would like to see another development which is something like a compromise on the unconditional income:

Sabatticals.

Sabatticals or semi-sabbaticals should be mandatory. Just imagine what a powerful motivation it would be for anybody, knowing that working hard for a few years will earn you a year off. Then imagine, what one could do during the sabbatical, learn, explore, re-think one's live ... And finally, imagine yourself at the end of your life, looking back saying "yes, maybe I got a bad a job, but I did so many great things during my sabbaticals, so non, je ne regrette rien ..."
No more than taxing labor income (which the US does disproportionately)

If you have a point to make, please try doing it without blatantly lying. It's common knowledge that the US has substantially higher corporate tax rates than almost anywhere else:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/feb/21/corporat...
https://status.github.com/ - looks like they're having asset loading issues - the pages are loading for me, but without any styling, in their full, naked, HTML glory...
First, my statement had to do with the 1/1.2" sensor that Nokia is using. Close in size to the RX100 and Nikon 1, but we can't assume that means the same level of image quality- there's a pretty big gap between the RX100 and Nikon 1 IQ scores, for instance.

To your point, I agree. I've seen comparable (and sometimes higher) IQ from my RX100 than I do from various MFT and APS-C DSLR/MILC cams with their kit lenses including the Canon T3i and T4i, GX1, a few NEXes, and Nikon D3000-D3200. The RX100 fares well against those cameras at the wide end of the zoom range when it comes to low light performance and thin DOF as well. Of course, you could spend more and get better lenses for those cameras and beat the RX100 in low light.

I do hope that the new sensor in the 70D provides an actual improvement in ISO score if not IQ and isn't just the older sensor with OSPDAF added.
Using weather as a trading signal
I find it interesting that the author mentions BitCoin early on, but then never addresses how an Unconditional Basic Income would work if corporations switched to BitCoin or other anonymous, decentralized monetary system.

In concept, I'm a firm proponent of a Unconditional Basic Income/Guaranteed Minimum Income/Negative Income Tax, but I think BitCoin is going to be a prohibitive cog in the financial wheel.
No, it's not just crypto primitives, it's crypto protocols, too. It's even designing other protocols that run on top of crypto protocols (see CRIME). Even implementing existing crypto primitives is hazardous: D.J. Bernstein's work on cache timing attacks against AES are proof of that.

The problem with crypto is that it's a specialist profession that generalists think they can do. In reality, crypto is more like law than software engineering: You can't just reason it from first principles, and you can't write any tests that will tell you that it's working. You have to know the specific attacks that people are capable of, and come up with a strategy that will avoid not only the current attacks that you know about, but future attacks that haven't been discovered yet. You're tasked with building a system of obstacles that nobody will be able to find any clever workarounds for, and your adversaries are smarter than you, more numerous than you, more well-funded than you, they're experts in breaking crypto, and they're all from the future.

That's not something a handful of engineers working in isolation can do. It takes the whole community years to even come close.

Saying that software engineers can design crypto protocols is like saying that software engineers can be their own lawyers. A few can, but almost all engineers who think they know the law are wrong. Even lawyers routinely lose cases. The best we can do is to try to give them better tools to handle the common cases (e.g. Creative Commons, SSH, better APIs), and remind them to talk to the specialists before getting too creative.
isn't .ToList() part of linq too. technically the first solution is also using Linq. would be interesting to make them implement sort algorithm too.
How do you do remote desktop? I've used WP8 for a while and haven't found one that's even decent.
Functional languages use the concepts you're criticizing even more extensively than LINQ does.
"When Plug is installed on your computer, our application intercepts all the input/output operations performed on your files, using several patent pending technologies. When Mac OS X, Windows or Linux want to store or access data, they ask our application instead of manipulating the hard drive."

They've patented FUSE now? Or is that NFS?
You can be sure that they will, if WP will get traction thanks to Nokia.
If they want to start to "be cool" again, they definitely need to start to opensource at least the "client" stuff.. and could remain with the "cloud ones" closed. (including office here)

i think that if microsoft opens up some of its own software it would be a good sign .. things they dont monetize on.. like IE and the windows NT kernel (at least).. and with a bonus.. people would start to contribut to those projects..

This is a part of the strategy that has maded google cool.. and for the old timers to become cool too.. they need to learn some moves from the new boys in town.. just saying..
The analogy to mechanical keys doesn't hold up under closer scrutiny, though, right? House keys don't serve as an identity, just an access mechanism. You don't lose all future access to your house if you lose your keys; a locksmith can independently verify (with reasonable certainty) that it's okay for you to obtain a new set of keys which give access to the same house.

I feel like the human predisposition to risk aversion is even more of a factor preventing adoption among average users than poor UX (not to mention lack of awareness). What do I tell my parents when they ask "What if my computer crashes? Would I not be able to log in to the website and see my stuff? What good is using a website if I can't access it from any computer?"

Until something as securely portable and loss-resistant as one's own memory is achieved, I don't see passwords being less popular than any other access mechanism for the average user, no matter how significant the other downsides.
This is why open source projects often require a "contributor agreement" when submitting patches.

Often "contributor agreements" are only desired by (large) projects so that the large project owns the copyright on your contributions. This will allow them to change the licence at a later date (if they want). Without copyright assignment to them, they have a much harder time changing licence.

There are some cases where relicencing is good (OpenStreetMap had to change it's licence, and had to delete old contributions), and sometimes when it's bad.
> Ctrl-F
> "PRISM"
0 results
Being a waiter, cook, barista, janitor, retail floor worker, or cashier are all 'working for the man' that few people really enjoy. So restaurants, coffee shops and basically all stores disappear in your proposed only "do things they enjoy" world.

Which is good, because no one would work construction, or do plumbing, or review building permits for safety in a basement office in city hall for fun either, so there wouldn't be places for these establishments to exist soon anyway.

Society can't function with people only doing things they enjoy.
Go to work as an inner city teacher? Here's an extra 20% in your BI.

So ... politicians would suddenly start to pay people to teach in the inner city? Those scoundrels! I can see why you're opposed to this concept.
I strongly suspect that the Basic Income Guarantee would receive increases in excess of the rate of inflation, as politicians use it to buy votes.

I think the $10k/yr figure that was quoted is unrealistic - that would cover food expenses with not much left over for housing costs. Even in a low-cost part of the nation, they'd have to perform work of some kind to earn more.
collections.Counter.most_common() uses heapq.nlargest() which is slightly more efficient than a full n*log n sort.
But implementing a heap correctly from scratch is I guess outside the scope the OP intends for the interview question.

I would expect a good candidate to:

1. know that a heap is optimal here (remembering whether Counter uses it is optional)

2. express reluctance to implement it from scratch because surely the stdlib can do it better.

So IMHO using libraries like this ruins the question only in the sense of showing its not a challenge for the candidate. Something so simple should not take a page of code.
Among us highly motivated and educated people who read HN regularly, it seems somewhat foreign that large swaths of the population will revert to just drinking beer, smoking legal weed, playing video games, watching tv, eating McDonalds and living in their RV or subsided apartment and not use birth control. But large swaths of the population already do this.
Google Maps can download maps beforehand, but for some reason it won't let you plan a route without an internet connection. Probably because their route-finding algorithm would crush a phone or something :)
Yup definitely. Good catch!
I have said this before, but what we really need is the equivalent of SQL for cryptography. We need a language that can be used to describe what kind of security is needed from a cryptosystem and a compiler to turn that into code. It is not just that cryptography is hard to implement; it is also easy to use it incorrectly, compose it poorly with other systems (see the Skype attack), etc.
Last time I tried Nokia Maps (on a WP7 device probably a year ago, admittedly) I tried searching for a nearby location by entering a partial address. It failed. I tried searching for a cross street without using name suffixes. It failed.

Point is, everyone has different needs from a Maps app. I don't drive, so don't need navigation. I just need to enter an address quickly and find out where it is, so offline downloads don't really do anything for me.
"‘First Looker’ ... ‘Dirty Looker’ ... We’re egalitarian." You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
> So why tax by proxy and not wealth directly?

If by "wealth" you mean "net worth", then because that is even harder to administer than income taxes.

If by "wealth" you mean "income", we do that, but earning income through an entity with separate legal entity whose income is not taxed and retaining it in that entity becomes an effective tax dodge if it is permitted. Which is why corporate "income" tax (which is effectively a tax on retained profits) is included as part of the income tax system.
Reddit: A Pre-Facebook Community in a Post-Facebook World
Obviously people would mow lawns but the price would be higher because they don't have to. If you wanted someone to mow your lawn, you would probably need extra income. Or, since you have more free time, you can now mow it yourself and enjoy it instead of feeling like it's cutting into your only spare 48 hours.
not only that, but only some employers have to pay their workers this wage. We get to pick and choose which ones must comply.
And why is forking encouraged? its one of my largest pet peeves with github, I cant just clone someones repo, make a patch in a branch and email / send it off, I need to fork the repo and make a pull request.

I dont like having to go to the effort and litter my repository list with repos I want to send a couple of line fixes too.

* Obviously I can, but its more hassle for the owner and less likely to be accepted
Hmm, true. Probably something to keep an eye on, then.
It is Microsoft, so the letters are Letter 1.0, Letter 2013 and LetterX 3.0 Ultimate Edition.
If I'm not mistaken, starfish are capable of this.
I think that the best microwave UI is just two analog knobs. One for power level (although it would be nice to get rid of this as well, but some packaged foods ask to be cooked at 50% power for part of the time), and one for cooking time which also starts the cooking if the door is closed. Turn the nob to whatever time you want and it starts cooking. If you want to stop cooking before time is up, you can either turn it back to 0 or just open the door.
Isn't the default "all rights reserved"?

(Note: GitHub ToS says if you put copyright code on it, then you are by default allowing others to fork & download it, so the default licence is looser than the legal default)
> The narrower point being, of course, if you're involved in work that supports Constitutional violations, you should think about what you're doing. Hard.

Well, even things like PRISM have valid Constitutional and national security usages. Things like metadata collection have been allowed for decades as well, under the auspices of valid law enforcement investigations.

Holding all Internet traffic in a buffer for 5 years? Collecting all email metadata that passes by? Now that's getting risky, but how many people do you think are actually involved in that? And why is that less dangerous than CALEA (something which DEFCON didn't kick out the Feds for...)?

If you flip the concept to instead be "could what I'm working on possibly be used for oppression" then there are a lot more government workers than you might think that would have to be introspective.

It has the worse effect of muddying lines of responsibility ("I couldn't have done this bad thing if $FOO hadn't build it!"), which is another path we don't want to go down... the same logic that blames the analyst for creating a process with valid purpose and bad effect could be used to blame the HR rep for hiring the analyst, or the janitor for keeping his workspace clean. And all the while we should be pointing our fingers at the person who actually did something wrong!
However, the software elegance is the primary differentiating factor.
Rust nanoparticles generate hydrogen from dirty water when exposed to sunlight
http://stps.co/accounts/legal/terms/

Under the heading "Intellectual Property Ownership"
Python Web Development: Understanding Django for Beginners
Don't Fhotoroom http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/fhotoroom/acad1e... or Metrogram http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/metrogram/5dec28... let you share photos on Instagram already? Disclaimer: I've never used them.
focus on creating a family of devices and services

It is interesting in that the focus has moved away from software of any kind to devices and services. It is a bold move towards a post OS, Office, post COTS software Microsoft. But you are right it is about as generic as it gets, change two or three words and it could equally be describing a car company.
But then, other worm should be able to follow it?
(his name is Jon Skeet)

(sorry)
>> large swaths of the population already do this.

They do indeed. And why not let them?

Most of what they could do with their time is being automated away, and the front-line service industries (restaurants, coffee houses) can only take on so many.

Does there not ever come a point when we can say we're rich enough as a society to support those who can't meaningfully contribute? That even without their effort we have wealth in excess and can afford to carry them?
The flashlight is the one item I want to add. I keep holding out for one more bump in brightness/size ratio. If I am going to EDC the extra size of a flashlight I want it to be bright enough that i could temporarily blind/disorient an assailant long enough that I have 10-15 seconds to get away. With Af-Pak winding down I am hoping that companies like surefire turn their attention to the civilian market.
curious. what industry are you in?
Looks like the link is working now...
I think your memory is a bit off. Seems to me that nearly everyone in the US had a Nokia phone at one point.