skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't understand how you've concluded that the reward for writing code is lower than the reward for HN comments. I get paid lots and lots of money to write code. So far, I haven't seen much return on the time I've invested into HN comments, except in terms of the internet points you mentioned. The going conversion rate for those to dollars is around infinity:zero.
re: It can use that money in three general ways: Lower prices, raise pay or return it to shareholders.

Or, paid out to executives as bonus.
Good read. It also shows that interviewing can be a great learning tool. I've experienced that myself, while interviewing takes a lot of time investment on the part of the interviewer it's also often a source of new insights.
The problem with this is that it enables weak-willed managers to claim that everyone on their team is great, serving as a kind of grade inflation that makes true high-performers seem less impressive. As I understand it, the curve is only enforced at something like the VP level, so it's not like a team of 10 great engineers is going to be forced to have 2 people scored as underperforming. Are there 200-person groups at Microsoft where everyone's better than average?
There are a few ways this is advantageous. Modern camera sensors have a bayer filter in front of them - a RGB grid basically. This allows each pixel to see only one color of light.

The resulting image is "demosaiced" with an algorithm, where by each pixel determines the two colors it's missing by borrowing from nearby pixels.

This can cause some artifacts. By squeezing more pixels into the same space, effectively each resulting pixels in the ~8MP image has actual RGB data, not just data borrowed from neighbors.
Assuming he did write it in the first place.
Slick log aggregation with Kibana
The Guardian: How Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages
This is going to be a disaster. Managing teams that large (thousands) is near impossible. Microsoft needs to become more fragmented with lower level P&L accountability to really innovate. This is understandably difficult when everything revolves around Windows and you have a shared salesforce. However, imo this is the only way forward for Microsoft.
I'll take the actual hypothesis over a hand-wave.
I used SSL client certificates with a Lotus system from 2000 to ~2011. They're still in use today, I just no longer work there.

It's pretty easy maintenance once you set up systems for account managers to generate and issue new certificates for people.

Then again, this was small time. Few thousand active users. Niche bio/pharma web application.

Large scale it could very well be a bitch and/or unnecessary at this point in time.

The system was designed/created between '96 and '98 and has used certificates the entire time.
I don't ever post here but figured I'd add my two cents to this.
I got a Nokia Lumia 928 about 40 days ago (just passed time for insurance). This past weekend I went on a trip from Seattle to Yellowstone. We had four people in the car and in most of Idaho and most of Montana there was very sparse 3G or LTE connection. My phone was the only one capable of doing offline GPS navigation.
I've been quite surprised with how much I've enjoyed my Windows 8 phone and only become angry with the lack of games when I'm on the toilet.
>> Does it save RAW? If not, it's useless to me.

So is just about every other phone with a camera.
It's the studies that are profitable after transaction costs, hindsight bias, and cross-validation that are not published :)
I'm wondering what the author means with "new laptops locked to support only windows". Sounds more like a bug in a specific laptop / series (huge difference).
WHY are they keeping Lisa Brummel? MS' HR department is notoriously bad at recruitment and performance management. It's rotten at the core. I'm very disappointed that they didn't use this opportunity to nip the problem in the bud.
I think the $10k/year proposal was per person, not per household.
Although that begs the question, at what age should the benefit start?

$10k/year is $833/month. $500/month rent and $333/month (about $11/day) for food is pretty basic subsistence for a single person. Yes, you'd have to work if you wanted anything more than basic nutrition and shelter, or wanted to live in a high-cost urban center, but the idea here is just that you shouldn't face homelessness/starvation just because you can't find gainful employment.
Seriously? What tax rate do you pay on your regular 40h a weke job? What tax rate do you pay on investments? Most people are taxed roughly 36% (28% income tax, 2% medicare, 6% social security) on their labor, however investments are only taxed at a flat 15%. Hence, the US disproportionately taxes labor over investments.

Do you have other evidence that shows that investment income is in-fact taxed higher than labor income in the US?
Read NPR's beautiful article "UNFIT FOR WORK - The startling rise of disability in America" if you're not convinced on the costs of the current system and how people cheat it.
http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
I see this copy/paste a lot. And while MP doesn't mean better dynamic range, lower noise, faster shutter speeds, or higher ISO performance saying that it isn't "higher quality" is nonsense.

Higher megapixels literally mean more information about a scene stored by the sensor. Now that information might not be more accurate than a camera with lower MP, but even with that being the case it does better allow you to sub-divide the picture (crop it) and generate new scenes/images without noticeable pixelation.

I shoot with an SLR. I've read this "MP is meaningless" stuff a million and one times. But the people spouting it are almost wrong. Yes, there is FAR too much focus given on MP over more interesting things (e.g. dynamic range) but people take a basic truth too far.

After going from 10 MP to 16 MP, sorry, but it did make a difference. In particular the freedom it gave me in post.
The guys at CryoKey (https://www.cryokey.com/) are basically trying to do this. I haven't personally used it, though.
Seems very easy to just drop into your app. Although I'm worried about data usage. Doesn't streaming video use a lot of bandwidth?
The "Windows Phone lacks apps" meme is getting old very quickly. But then again there is a grain of truth there. Most applications that you use day in and day out are probably already there natively or as a very good clone. The part that might hurt you is when the next hot application comes along it is likely that a native or clone for Windows Phone may not exist right away and you might have to wait for a few weeks to get it. Android also has this problem to some extent. If you are always chasing the new hot apps on your iPhone then you might stick to iPhones a bit longer until app makers warm up to Windows ecosystem.
I think we should have a maximum wage for software engineers... say, $50,000 a year... and have startups in the Valley pay the difference into a fund to augment the wages of Walmart employees.

EDIT: Oh, no one here likes this idea? Imagine that!
An incremental change to an existing product perhaps gets us excited for a few weeks then it dies down. The real question is would you want to use this phone because merely for its camera? A smart phone is more than just a nice camera and a touch screen. IT'S EVERYTHING. If the user interface and experience are still sluggish, even a 100Megapixel camera phone wouldn't do you any good.
This might seem very petty, but I avoid python just because of the dichotomy between Python 2 and Python 3. For me, there are plenty of other scripting languages at my disposal, and for things like numpy, or twisted, I have better alternatives too.
That's the one part I don't like about it but that's because I go 5-15MPH over the speed limit at all times.
Live: Money in Politics Roundtable with Larry Lessig, Tim O'Reilly, Brad Burnham
That's disgusting. We should make sure people have the chance to suffer because suffering makes us better people? That's moralistic crap. If we have the resources to diminish suffering without causing harm, it is wrong not to do it. If all work could be automated, it would be wrong to have people who don't want to work working.

I think there is a reason for not having a mandatory comfortable wage; some people would simply not find jobs if we raised the minimum wage to a point were it becomes unprofitable to pay it. But that's the only reason for paying less. Not some BS sanctity of hard work thing.
Google’s Blink Rendering Engine Finally In Action
"doing this in the terminal requires a crazy number of steps"

"Switching contexts from your browser into your terminal."

"you can simply make the change right there without leaving your browser, saving you time and maintaining your zen-like frame of mind"

Sending a pull request for a typo in someone else's project is way faster using the github web editor, no question, but for everything else?

I'm in a terminal or, most likely, my editor way more often than I'm in the browser and for any non-trivial change it's way faster to use git in the terminal or fugitive (vim-git integration) than the web interface.

Once you have to use the proprietary pull request functionality to send that change it changes the balance a bit but that's just saying that Github's vendor lock-in strategy that forces you to use the Github site makes it faster to use the Github site than both the site and the git command. Not a bragging point, just a reminder that I should be nervous about Github having gotten as far as "embrace" and "extend" in the microsoft playbook even though I really like Github.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/torvalds_github...

http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2013/rant-about-github-pull-r...
Automation. Can you imagine the consequences of a driverless car on transportation industry for example? Or automated cashing machines on cashiers? Or cleaner robots for cleaners? You see, simple jobs are going to be replaced in the future. These people will go unemployed, because there will be no simple jobs for them. This is a trend, yes, and it won't happen overnight. But there's one crucial fact -- it doesn't just stop at replacing simple jobs. It will eventually replace even more demanding ones, such as knowledge workers. Infact, only human creativity seems to be the only thing which we can't automate YET, but perhaps eventually will be able to. What this means is that the current capitalistic system has to fail eventually because we lose jobs, and it seems very certain that automation is going to be the beginning of the end.

This has been happening in China too -- recently(late last year) there was news about Foxconn replacing over a million jobs with robots in China. What this means is cheaper products which are also accessible to those who don't work. It narrows the purchasing power gap between those who work and those who don't.
> I've always wondered why assumptions about transaction costs and execution speed never show up in these kinds of "studies". Anyone who has participated in markets understands they have a significant impact on results.

I would guess because transaction costs don't play any real part in the theory. If we only paid attention to papers that turned a profit after transaction costs, we might miss great theoretical ideas to build on.

That said, I'm neither an academic nor a competent investor, so feel free to ignore that thought.
The unscientific causes and cure to Burnout
41 megapixel camera, how big are those photos, and how much space will the phone come with?
The startling sense of smell found all over your body
Honestly, I'm someone who makes a decent amonut of money and I don't mind pitching in to help others especially if I enjoy their content time and time again.

People with a little money to burn ;)
I've posted something twice citing that book and it always gets down voted, on the other hand when I state some of the ideology of the book it gets up voted (strange). Just thought i'd share.

Also, I agree it's where the government is heading. People need to learn that life is what they make it, not what is handed to them.
You should check out Sugar, by far my favourite standard JS lib to use in any complex project: http://sugarjs.com/
The west coast stores and east coast stores must have different unions. When I worked at non-union Kmart I made more per hour than I could have made at union Safeway (east coast).
Fantasic! Now these potential Wal-Mart employees are back to making $0.00/hour. Oh, and they have to pay more for their groceries now, too.

Congratulations on a job well done, DC Council!
You can PLAY with crypto, discuss it try things out and have fun with it. After you have been doing that and hanging out in the right circles for a few years, reading lots and probably breaking other people's ideas and implementations not just yours then you will be some sort of position to judge whether your work may be safe to unleash on the public as anything more than a low security experiment.

One of the problems is with security and crypto is that the people who really understand it make fairly weak promises such as that it is "Pretty Good Privacy" but the incompetent, greedy or malicious make strong marketing claims about the security that they are offering. Emphasis on incompetent in the Cryptocat case.

Crypto is an area where the Dunning Kruger effect[1] seems both especially strong and especially dangerous.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Thanks for the feedback guys. I see how this could be a problem. We'll look into relaxing the terms and allowing you more control over your data.
Collaborators can have "Read", "Read/Write", or "Admin" privileges. You can choose after you add them.
And even that doesn't make sense as a complaint. Mac OS is somewhat hardware-locked (although, as you've mentioned, it's easily defeated), but the hardware is not restricted to running only Mac OS. So it's not at all analogous to the situation the author's encountering with his laptop refusing to run not-Windows.
How can I use encryption with Gmail?
Have you thought long and hard about how you will avoid contributing to the corporations that also stand in the way of complete liberty? Or is it just the government you're afraid of?
You can always turn that speed warning off if it bothers you.
Verizon backs Ubuntu smartphone
There have been a couple other good HackerNews threads on Burnout you can find here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630445
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2025655
To elaborate further, the point of this memo isn't to alert the shareholders of Microsoft's organizational changes, it's about easing this transition with a motivational message about innovation and what not.

Even if the corporation's main aim is to benefit its shareholders, that unnecessary line is going to come across as alienating to employees, who probably care very little about how these changes will affect wealthy shareholders.
Nokia's really screwing up the messaging on this, as people are fixating on the megapixel count

HTC has been trying to push the message you suggest with the camera on the HTC One, and while the One is a great device and (I think) doing well for HTC, no one is really talking about their camera -- even though it is a superior camera to most other phones. Megapixels are like Clock Speed was a decade ago: there are more important stats to look at, but consumers just see the one number.

I'm not making any judgement, I'm just saying the point of 41 megapixels isn't to give consumers a huge picture, it's to give them a reason to buy the phone.
One of the things that Surface, Xbox One, and Windows Phone 7/8 has shown is that MS is scared but not hungry. They're still arrogant. Much more so than if they were a bunch of separate companies rather than one huge empire.
Steam Summer Sale has Begun
Thankyou for this comment.

We have just this problem in the UK (minimum adult wage around £6.20/h and 'liveable' wage put at £8.55/h by a pressure group with wide support [1].

The difference is funded through the benefit system (we have no truck with food stamps).

[1] http://www.livingwage.org.uk/
It's becoming increasingly clear that some people can't work despite their willingness. Full-time job growth is at an all-time low while temporary job growth is at an all-time high. Most of the jobs gained since 2008 have been temporary jobs or jobs with too few hours.
Honest question. Outside of matlab and octave (both of which fall down in a bunch of other obvious areas), what scripting language offers anything close to an alternative to numpy/scipy?
> - You get the basic income whether or not you’re employed, any wages you earn are additional.
>
> - The welfare bureaucracy is largely dismantled. No means testing, no signing on, no bullying young people into stacking shelves for free, no separate state pension.

Self-contradiction.
Microsoft's June 7th statement:

"We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don’t participate in it."

One down, several to go. If I were Google/Facebook/Yahoo executives I would be very worried right now as to what soon-to-be-released revelations say about their NSA cooperation. Sure, they may have only done that which was compelled by FISC order, but that won't preclude them from being perceived as culpable.
Samsung wasn't the first mover for Android (HTC was the one), while Samsung was among the first movers with WP - the other ones were HTC, Dell, and LG. Nokia wasn't among them.
So much for the first-mover advantage...
Does anyone else find it concerning the US have had this guy in custody for about a decade, including torture, and he's never had a trial?

Innocent until proven guilty seems like a farce these days.
Isn't it kind of axiomatic that any question that provides for a concise and measurable solution will eventually be refactored into a library? It seems like kind of a weakness in these kinds of "programmer" questions, that they all regress to trivia. Why not an open-ended business problem and/or deliverables-type question? I'm sure that would speak more to the daily job, where I've never heard of someone being tasked with "OK, find the top 10 words by frequency in a random Wikipedia article."
You don't think there is any amount of money you could pay people to do those things for you? If so, I think you're mistaken.

This may mean that costs for getting people to do unpleasant things for you will rise. Consider it a correction to the fact that median real wages have been falling for years, if you'd like. If - even with your new basic income - you are having a hard time finding someone to work for you, you'll just have to offer more money. This is preferable to forcing people to work for you out of fear of them dying for want of food or healthcare, in my book.

I think you also have a narrow-minded conception of what people can view as fun. I would very much enjoy being a chef, but it doesn't pay as well as my current gig and that's a larger motivator for me in part because of the lack of social net.

Robots and automation will continue to do more and more of the total labor that humans need; this provides a constant check against labor prices rising too much. It seems like we would steer our robotics and AI R&D towards replacing jobs that humans really don't want to do [at the amount you're able to pay them]. What's wrong with that?
This is great. What tech are you using?
Increase in corporate taxes will be partially paid by consumers, but also it will reduce corporate profits. If they pass it completely to consumers, it will reduce demand -> reduce revenue -> reduce profits, so the increase will be paid by both parties. If anyone believes in market forces and the invisible hand (also if you took some basic economics courses) you should agree with this.

I don't understand the fuss over corporate taxes
Basic income is just that - basic income. Some people who want to have more than that will work. Janitors still want iPads or cable television - and they will be incentized to work for that on a competitive market for those products and services.

0 hours of janitoring = small comfortable house and enough food

5 hours of janitoring = small comfortable hosue and enough food and cable televsion

If people simply stopped working when they could live "comfortably" why would they buy iPads, cable television, new cars? Employment history and reputation aren't going out the window with this plan either. A janitor will be good at his job because he knows if he gets fired he won't get reccomended for other janitorial jobs - and his chance of getting an iPad in the future goes way down.

I know janitors who buy lottery tickets, eat out at restaurants and have cable television - according to you those wouldn't exist because they could "janitor" less and live without those.
Another problem is that it might devalue the currency. When most of it is given away, there's decreased competition for it, and thus its value in the market decreases.
Share to Evernote from your local network using Raspberry Pi - RaspiNote
3 ways to save your startup
There's no free lunch. The people who now won't be able to get a job will still need the food stamps to live, as well as additional government services to compensate.
Just wanted to point out that you misspelled "comprehensive" in the screenshot, in the header :)
What is a soul? Is it what guides a living object when it moves, like a human, dog, or worm?

If robots act autonomously, that is, without direct instruction from a living object, do they have souls?

What if the robot is merely a plastic frame, a motor attached to wheels, an Arduino with a motor shield, and an ultrasonic Ping distance sensor, but this assemblage can navigate a room without colliding with anything -- does it have a soul?

I say yes -- souls are the feedback loops which we have learned or been taught, and they motivate or dissuade us and robots alike. And programming is just teaching, providing instructions that will result in a desired outcome.
300,000,000 people in the US. You give them each 10,000 dollars. That's 3T dollars, or roughly the size of the existing federal budget (~3.5T). US GDP is ~16T. It's a lot, but that's not beyond the pale of possibility, and the poorest people will spend that money nearly instantly, reving the economy and making the world a little bit better for everyone.

"If corporations essentially pay their customers (via the government) to buy their goods the world would eventually collapse."

I feel like this betrays a misunderstanding of how money works. First of all, 10k per person isn't enough to create an extreme situation. Secondly, it is the circulation of money that drives progress. If companies didn't disperse the money they accumulate somehow, the economy would stall.

On a more noble level, giving people the option to not work is simply removing additional coercive elements from society. People should be free to choose what they wish to do with their lives. 10k isn't enough to remove the incentive to better yourself, but it is enough of a cushion so that you don't need to submit to awful situations simply to survive.

If janitorial tasks become in high demand, they will pay appropriately or design machines to do it - just like everything else.
> A program that you yourself benefit from tends to be less likely to get eroded by future politicians.

This could be bad. Very popular programs never get reconsidered, even if they have bad effects.
This does take into account commission, see here: https://www.quantopian.com/help#ide-commission

I wanted to use the longest time period possible, and this was the most info I could find about forecasted cloud coverage in NYC in the past 10 years or so. It's also worth noting that this is just an example, the paper it's based off of is more in-depth. Unfortunately they concluded that transaction costs made trading based off of this strategy almost not worth it, but the main point here is that it's interesting.