skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The thing that interests me, though, is the idea of modifying your hard drive firmware for better performance.

My understanding is that the effective width of the write head is 10x the width of the read head... E.g. with the right firmware, it should be possible, if you are okay with a write-once medium, to write the outermost track, move the write head in 1/10th what you'd normally move it, then write the next track, etc... and get 10x the space out of the drive you normally would. In theory, the read head wouldn't have trouble. (of course, this would be write once storage, as the effective width of your write head is still pretty huge; but for a bunch of things? I can totally work with that... if more than X% of a drive was garbage data, I copy the good data to a new drive and reformat the old one. Done.)

I hear rumors that both the major drive manufacturers are actually shipping drives with this technology, but are only selling those drives to really big players, for some reason.

Here's a reasonable reference to the 'shingle' technology, and he roadmap for the rest of us:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/25/wd_shingles_hamr_roa...

but that's the thing, with the datasheets (and, well, a lot more skill than I personally have) we should be able to setup something like shingling on the cheap disks we have today.

Of course, from reading the article, I'm not sure I'm any closer to that particular dream.
Why “follow your passion” is bad advice
Hey Clifton,

Matt here, co-founder of DeveloperAuction.

Great insights in your comments above.

I generally agree that the "Talent War" is largely self-imposed: unwillingness to interview candidates outside of a 25 mile radius or relocate Engineers, being slow, disorganized or indecisive in the hiring process, trying to get Engineers to take massive paycuts from what they are earning at LinkedIn/SalesForce/Google/VmWare/Facebook, or simply requiring Engineers to work 80-hour weeks...

Some of the biggest & most successful companies also achieve major talent lock-in by compensating people really well, making it difficult for cash-strapped seed stage start-ups to compete with a lower budget.

Interestingly enough, RE: GitHub, we've seen zero positive correlation that having a GitHub account increases the number of interview requests that Engineers get on our marketplace when we analyzed our data.
Stock options and warrants can be useful, though if done poorly they can muddy up your prospects for later rounds of financing in case you change your mind about investors. Not ideal, but cheap.

Perks like telecommuting, flexible schedules, and PTO are often very underused by companies, and they have no direct costs to your bottom line (indirect costs can be massive if done wrong). Offering better-than-industry perks like these go a long way to decrease turnover, and can be as or more effective as pay increases.

Sometimes you can defer salaries, but outright bonuses give you some wiggle room in case of a future downturn.

Depending on the nature of your startup (is most of it software?) you'll also get far more motivated and loyal employees per dollar spent by locating your offices outside of the startup capitals.
AOL Lays Off Members Of AIM, Video Production, And HR Teams
As Rust mentioned you'll probably want look at More Types for creating Custom Post Types:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Types

Here are 2 more plugins for creating and managing Custom Post Types:

http://wordpress.org/plugins/custom-post-type-ui/

http://wordpress.org/plugins/custom-content-type-manager/ (I like this one)

As for creating custom fields, Advanced Custom Fields is a good one, but Custom Field Suite is an earlier port of their code that we've been using lately and it's great:

http://wordpress.org/plugins/custom-field-suite/
True, but they would have to deal with increased competition and market diversity due to anyone being able to fork their vision and putting their own spin on it.

This is (arguably) great for the consumer, but as a fellow creator I understand their reluctance to open source their baby.
That was one of the taglines for SimCity 2000: "If this game were any more realistic, it'd be illegal to turn it off." (http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/198648-simcity-2000/images/box-11...)
at least now society in general has taken the red pill (by force?), if im allowed to use the matrix metaphor..

do we now will make the right choice? or we will continue to pretend that nothing happens?
at least now we are more awake.. as you beatifully quoted someone who were awake and conscious before anyone else does..

Did´nt follow much of Marcuse myself, but Adorno are one of my favorite philosophers, thank you for sharing :)
Seeking Bay Area Colo Space
I don't think it's about making a "great game", I think it's about making "their game", flaws and all.
What's the problem? There are no female engineers. Maybe females with an engineering degree, maybe.
This is not new in the US sadly. Just different tools.

Back then the FBI spied on many people using HUMINT. Filled out reams of paper detailing the activities of the people they spied on. All because they were 'different'.

I never believed that your typical American really cares about freedom, liberty and all that. For them what's important are 1) money and 2) have a home and watch tv.

Just me.
That's because being the dominant competitor is not illegal. Price fixing and colluding to drive competitors out of the market by extending a powerful position in one market into another market is illegal.
Thanks for the citation. Excerpt from the article:

"That is 1681 per day. 84% of this tapping concerned mobile phones. Compare this with the news that there were 2208 taps in the United States in the whole of 2007."

It's comparing like to like. Neither numbers include intelligence-related surveillance, only domestic criminal law enforcement. The Dutch are wiretap-happy and the U.S., thanks to Title III, is relatively restrained.
What in the world? I love that you and mindcrime took "don't be rude to cops" and turned it into grovelling subservience to the police state. Let me guess, "don't be a dick" reads to you as "be fake and politically correct at all times"? Yes, we all know your type.

You shouldn't be rude to cops for the same reason that you don't talk to cops: because if you catch one on a bad day who decides to charge you and then add a "resisting arrest" to the charge for fun (let alone shoot you...watch out in Oakland), you're going to have a bad time. The romance of civil disobedience might warm your heart, but the vast majority of false arrest incidents end with no compensation and no administrative action against the officer. You might get them out for a week on paid leave. Meanwhile you spent time in jail, you get your face on those mugshot sites, and all it takes is a DA waiting to make a name for themselves and suddenly you're being bankrupted in legal fees or praying to god the public defender isn't a complete moron. All because the cop asked you if he could search your car and you decided that a simple "no" would be "cowering to the gun" because you're fucking Robin Hood. Congratulations.

You sound like you're not in the US, but if you'd like to learn more, watch the don't talk to police[1] video. For people that are in the US (and aren't merely engaging in the intellectually laziest of solipsisms like the above), remember to always refuse a search and ask if you're being detained. If not, leave immediately. If so, tell them that you won't be speaking again until an attorney is present. If you think "informing" the cop of your rights is a good idea in that moment, watch the video again. Don't talk to the police.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
> Apple has clearly overreached, but this kind of remedy is not about restoring competition.

This is about Apple using its retail outlet to advance and profit from a conspiracy among publishers to jointly set the terms on which they sold to retailers, including retail price fixing as the key focus. Insofar as it is about "restoring competition", its about restoring the need for publishers to each seek separately to make the best deals with retailers, rather than unilaterally imposing common terms. (This affects retail prices, but its not about retail competition.)

The remedies which benefit other retailers aren't about restoring competition, per se, they are about remedying the harms done by Apple's unlawful activity to other market participants. In Amazon's case, that also happens to reward the incumbent major player, but then, Amazon was the primary target of the illegal conspiracy. So this is not inappropriate.

As to your allegations against Amazon, if one assumes they are true, they might be a basis for anti-trust action against Amazon, but they aren't an argument for limiting the remedies imposed on Apple for conspiring with publishers in a price-fixing scheme.
A lot of employers are not sane by this definition. I work at a bank and can't release anything, nor do we contribute back our patches to open source projects, because the management/approval/review cost is just so large and everybody's far too busy to do this kind of stuff. Company policy forbids us from posting on forums during working hours anyway.

Unfortunately, I think this is common in finance, and perhaps to a lesser extent in embedded and a lot of other fields.
I think the key is to have the humility to realize that we haven't had another Euclid or Archimedes in modern times. Possibly Decartes or Tesla compare, but it's arguable. We've come so far and have such promise, and yet we have so much to lose. I would argue that far from being being doomed to repeating history because we forget, we have the possibility of being the first to wipe out our own race, either through inaction or brazenness.
These issues are completely orthogonal to how the currency is implemented. You still have to pay taxes even if you use Bitcoin.
Technically EDS still exist - they were bought out by HP and are now HP's Enterprise Services division. Their reputation was also entirely deserved.
Thanks for the feedback. Price transparency is one of our main goals. Pricing for items is actually posted on the site as long as the seller added it. Currently, we do not require seller's to include a price because they have no basis to do so (no KBB in this market). We are currently aggregating price information, on and off our site, and will be offering our version of KBB once we have a meaningful data set.

Great deals can always be found at auctions but they only represent a small portion of all the available equipment. Most of these items are sitting in warehouses all over the world gathering dust. Their owners don't see the value and have more important things to worry about, manufacturing a product. The solution is a product that compliments their main business focus, manufacturing.

For buyers this means we're going to provide them a complete price for a transaction, equipment price, deinstallation, rigging, crating, installation, etc. I would love to speak more with you about our roadmap, please send me a PM.
You could always do that..
> This doesn't exactly seem fair to all the other companies who would still have to give up 30% commission over to Apple but can't raise their price (e.g. Netflix, Dropbox, etc).

The term at issue is a remedy for harms done by Apple's role in the ebook publisher price fixing scheme, which isn't relevant to Netflix, Dropbox, etc.

Insofar as the kind of thing Apple did here would be relevant to app makers in markets other than the ebook market, those app makers are beneficiaries of the provisions of the propsed remedy that exist to prevent Apple from engaging in schemes that are similar to the ebook scheme in other markets.
Closed source games are rarely very good.
This. We're talking about the fifth most popular site on the Web, operating on a budget smaller than my department at work.
In my experience

1. Put all the code into the database

2. Everything is or should be xml
If they open source it they can still control things and follow their vision for their own main branch. But they can accept patches that have improvements for things that (i) are needed and (ii) do not necessarily go against their vision.

There are several great weaknesses of DF that are not the result of the maker's vision but of their limited time and resources.

For example, it is not Toady's vision for the game to get very slow even on powerful hardware when you have a big fortress. This is perhaps a negative blowback of Toady's very laudable vision to have each dwarf be independently simulated. However, an expert in parallel programming should be able to improve this a great deal. AFAIK, DF currently runs as a single thread, and many of its processes can be split off. This is, however, not easy and probably not something Toady is able to or wants to do.

It is also not Toady's vision for the game to be controlled by a mindblowing number of complex menus and obscure key combinations. It was probably not his vision for about half the game controls to be mouse enabled and half of them not. He has admitted himself that the interface needs a lot of work. But he is obviously not working on it, but adding new features like vampires, and Indiana Jones style careening mine carts (last time I checked). I am not saying he should not add those things -- it is a free game and he should work on what is more fun for him. But if he opensourced it perhaps someone else would fix the interface for him.

It is obvious the game needs outside help. People are hacking the game in memory in order to add functionality. Last time I played, you needed to run another program called "dwarf therapist" while playing in order to be able to manage your dwarf's skills and professions. Dwarf therapist would work by directly reading and manipulating dwarf fortress data in memory. Sorry but if the game worked well, nobody would take the time to hack DF just so he can write a helper program.

If they opensourced the game, the people that wrote dwarf therapist could just add that functionality directly into the game.

I say this as someone who loves DF, but has suffered plenty from its frustrations.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6146770

But it's always very interesting to compare how different news outlets/countries sell the story differently.
FBI Can Remotely Activate Android Smartphone And Laptop Mics
http://kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page

and

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kiwix.kiwi...
How do you pronounce acqhire? ack-HIRE?
Why no VMware, Xen or Qemu? We can help you if you have any issues with making thus work you know :)
There are two parts to getting good employees: finding them and getting them to work for you. Many startup employees, by themselves, will not work for Yahoo for $200K/year. Many startup employees will work for Yahoo for $150K/year if all their favorite coworkers are working for Yahoo and they get to work on a product they're familiar with. The only way to bring them over is to bring them over as a block.

Many people in the startup world don't understand this, but the vast majority of people in the labor force are not primarily motivated by money. You need to pay them enough to feel like they're not being taken advantage of, but beyond that, they go for work environment, interesting coworkers, challenging projects, and other intangibles. To have any chance at all of hiring them, you need to provide those and not just money.

(Google understands this very well - they explicitly state with their offer that most people who work for Google do not do so for financial gain. They do it because they want to be a part of something great, and have really intelligent coworkers, and be given a flexible and creative work environment. Yahoo has a big challenge matching this, given their current lackluster stable of products, and Marissa's trying to jump-start the virtuous cycle and bring in folks that people would want to work with.)
Interactive Visualization of 20+ years of Bay Area Employment Data
I pronounce it "Acqui-hire", and I've sometimes seen it spelled that way, but "acquihire" looks wrong to me in print.
Pads differ from conventional portable computers in one crucial way. Whereas portable computers go everywhere with their owners, the pad that must be carried from place to place is a failure. Pads are intended to be "scrap computers" (analogous to scrap paper) that can be grabbed and used anywhere; they have no individualized identity or importance.

That sounds eerily appealing. It speaks to my preference for a multi-device lifestyle where portable devices are but terminals to my network of applications running on my singular compute host. And yet, that's nothing quite like that today. Today, despite my desire to buy what I call a "subservient tablet," [1] I have no such option. Instead, tablets are first-order computers on their own right, adding to the number of devices in my life that want constant attention.

I find it a shame that in the real present-day, we're off on this curious tangent where every device has to stand on its own as a silo of computing.

In fact, it's a shame many of the concepts described in this article from 1991 still don't exist. Most notably, I am especially interested in large form-factor displays.

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/microsoft
>I've never been clear why people think "guns" will protect them from a government that has massive technological and economic resources at their disposal.

Those economic resource, of course, were taken from the population. Cutting off the oxygen in this area, so to speak, might be far more effective than guns. Guns, as it happens, are what implicitly lay behind the government's ability to take your money.
CityGenerator is looking for Contributors
I wish there was a Google Authenticator app for the desktop, so I could at least have a backup in case my phone gets lost/stolen.
Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is an open source game (and not open source in the sense of "you can look at our code but don't expect us to value your input", open source in the sense of "make pull requests!") and it's probably the best game I've ever played. I don't think I disagree with you, though: the reason it works so well for Stone Soup is because the game lends itself to personal extension (it's a roguelike, so you're dealing almost exclusively with game logic).
How about a chewed oreo?
I have passwords in my bash history - namely mysql passwords.
Not a bad idea, but also nearly everything we interact with, technology-wise, has microcontrollers of some form or another. The AVRs so adored by the arduino community actually exist in large volumes in automobiles, and even crappy USB keyboards and mice which we might throw out have microcontrollers in them.

So I'm all for scavenging compute bits for future projects, but it is by no means unique to HDDs.
Indeed. You could do what CRIME does to TLS (I just discovered these attacks).

You could also add a random amount of random padding. It would slow down the attack linearly if the random amount is taken from a uniform distribution.

I wonder if it would be possible to make it slower by taking another distribution.
Steve Reich + coding = profit
Interesting logo, looks like they'll be hearing from Rockwell at some point.
My friend has had this work when his laptop was stolen, in Australia. He had a program that allowed him to interact with the system, find the MAC address of the wireless router, and use google's database to get an address. After handing the information to the police, they went there, and retrieved his laptop. He wasn't told any details about what happened to the person, probably due to privacy concerns.
Twitch.tv is down
I'm biased, back in the BeOS -> Haiku days, I was wanting some sort of configuration textfile that would neatly be able to be parsed into a BArchive object (and presumably transmitted into a BMessage). XML was all the rage at the time, so I wrote for myself a sort of XML-ish format, but I never contributed it to the tree. I learned the problems with XMLs (should it be an attribute or an innerText?). I wanted something with a bracket notation, but JSON had not been discovered by crockford yet, if it had been I would have gotten more involved and tried to have it be adopted.
The ability to intercept the communications of anyone on the internet without a warrant is relatively restrained?

Do you even have a source for your claims? How exactly are you comparing the two?
Woman tricked into buying 2 actual apples she thought were iPhones for $1,200
well considering Yahoo doesn't power their own search engine, maybe they're okay with teams who are adept at creating great UI and UX wrappers around 3rd party licensed technology.
To where?

As far as I know, the current version of HN isn't open source.
It isn't specific to osx is it?
Simply knowing that citizens are armed will curtail the most egregious of police behavior. The 2nd amendment isn't about going to war on a national scale, its about the last line of defense against petty local thugs with badges.
alias news='lynx http://news.ycombinator.com'
The blog post, as promised:

http://coffeepowered.net/2013/08/02/ruby-prof-for-rails/
Nitpick: "serial production", not "serious production".
Seven telcos named as providing fiber optic cable access to UK spies
Very good and simple explanation though I'd add Linux and Windows in there too.
http://Di.fm
responding to sibling:

Another Euclid? Euclid is famous for compiling other people's research into an accessible textbook.

It's true I've seen complaints that universities don't consider compilation and explication of math important enough to count towards tenure anymore, but we're not exactly short on the personality type or the actual project.
Instrumenting Rails applications with ruby-prof
As laid out in the article:

It turns out that any device you connect with an iOS via the USB port can obtain your device's Universal Device ID (UDID), as long as the device isn't passcode-locked. It just takes a second, so if you plug in your device while it's unlocked, or unlock it while plugged in, or just don't have a passcode, Mactans can attack.
Since you've got an N900, you can do even better than that:

- Different filesystems (unlikely this would work with anything but FAT based).

- Encrypted filesystems.

- Simply disabling the capability (I can't remember the last time I used USB data transfer on mine).

Of course, it's easy to do the above on a phone you actually have control over. Sorry, iPhone users.
Shingled writes require a special asymmetrical write head, you can't do it with current drives. Actual shingled write drives are not yet shipping AFAIK.
http://www.di.fm
>intended to target enterprise companies that were essentially selling software for next to nothing and then charging like mad for the "installation and configuration" to avoid sales tax.

Such is what happens you impose high tax rates: people relabel transactions so they fall outside the tax. The. You have to issue new rules that try to make the relabeling not work. Then, the regulation books start to explode in length to cover the all the blooming techniques, and with it, he regulatory agencies...

And then the process starts over.
Well, spies should and do hide in the shadows. We will have to wait 10 years to see if this is the truth.

And then we still can't be sure, NSA/CIA/Stasi/KGB/FSB/BFST/PST ( the whole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies list ) can have been better at preventing whistleblowers like Snowden so we never can know 100%.

Better make the necessary preparation today.
Maybe. But since the law isn't written that way, that's a straw man.