skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked in a Fortune 500 company that designed mechanical product. Every single one of the 3,000 CAD operators in the company had a 3D mouse on their desk. You too can have one for $350 minimum. This stuff is not the future in that field, it's routine.

Does it translate out to most people surfing the internet and jockeying Excel all day? No. But in the field of designing 3D mechanical things, 2D mice are not the norm right now.
This isn't just a C++ issue, in nearly every language strings will be immutable, that is if you add strings together it needs to create a new string somewhere with the new length of the string. So if you adding multiple strings together it does this each time. The better way (and how stringbuilder and it's elk do it) is to put the strings into an array and then concat (or even better output/send that to the thing that is needing the concatted string).
Sweden 'a close partner' in NSA surveillance
I agree, but this doesn't eliminate middle click. I just like this because I use a trackpad on my laptop, so middle clicking is hard(ish).
Strictly speaking, the EU changes is to create a common market, not a free market. There is a big difference between those two poles.
The article doesn't go in to much detail about why that class is really necessary. Couldn't you just loop the vector of strings, work out the total memory, then `reserve()` exactly the right amount? Then all the concatenations should be fast.

Alternatively `std::ostringstream` is specially designed for this type of task as well... how does it compare? Is it better/worse? Looks like reinventing the wheel to me.
This is completely the wrong direction for us to take. We cannot and should not be living in digital fortresses any more than we are living in physical fortresses at home. Our homes are safe from thieves and from government not because they couldn’t get in if they wanted to but because the law and its enforcement prevents them from doing so. All we have to do is minimal physical security (lock the doors when you are out).

Perhaps as a result of growing up in places where locking doors is usually unnecessary, I've never quite understood this argument. If the basis for security is societal norm and legal enforcement, what's the significance of the locked versus unlocked door?

I feel like this attitude is usually an excuse to blame the victim, and disguises the fact that most people are more reliant on the lock than they wish to admit. When your locked car is broken into or stolen, the argument often quickly changes to point out your additional responsibility to use an alarm, a physical theft deterrent device, keep anything that might look valuable out of sight, carry appropriate insurance, and if possible avoid parking on the street.

I worry that the analogy between locked doors and encryption doesn't yield the conclusion the author draws. While in theory privacy can be maintained through change of law, in practice it may need to be guarded with measures appropriate to the level of security desired.
I agree in principle, but since mobile spectrum is in itself a government-granted monopoly (oligopoly), some regulation might be acceptable or even necessary, to prevent against exploitative business practises (I consider the absurdly high roaming charges before they were regulated as a prime example for this - there is no way 2 Euros per minute reflect the real cost for the provider).

That having said, regulation should be as minimal as possible, to avoid unwanted side effects, therefore I'm not convinced that regulating away roaming charges completely is the best approach - IMHO it would be better to just allow everyone to get local rates without having to change the SIM card (see my other post for details).
As someone using that app, I would love the option to keep the old interface.

Having web-apps trying to mimick a platform I don't use just feels wrong. In much the same way as those fake Windows-UI images ("Scan complete. 3 viruses found!") used all over the internet trying to trick noobs into installing malware.
Screw all you haters, this is badass.
init(60) works fairly well for me, MBP 13" - I do have a crapload of tabs open however.
0AD is the most polished, beautiful open source game I have ever played. This campaign is not about building a new game: the game already exists as shown in the video and is even in an enjoyable-to-play state. Definitely check it out if you haven't already (and it's cross-platform!): http://play0ad.com/
The writer's remark:

'''...after prototyping in the notebook, I usually refactor some of my code into individual Python files so that I can edit more comfortably using my preferred text editor. I then import those modules [back] in the...notebook.'''

I found this to be quite a headache myself, going between the iPython notebook and vim, until I discovered this great Firefox addon called "It's all text" [not affiliated] -- for those unaware, it lets you pop open a gui editor of your choice, whereupon you can send the text entered from that back down into the iPython notebook. Doing it this way you get the best of both worlds.
Sysadmins have lots of access into systems. Governments routinely favor security theater over actual mechanisms to secure things. The US government has a strong cultural bias towards having outside contractors rather tha employees on the government payroll (partly due to the ideological bent of the major political parties and partly due to lobbying by contractors). These things make it more than plausible that contract sysadmins had far too highly elevated access into far too wide-ranging sets of systems. No spying needed.
Singing and Boozing on Stage at the New York Tech Meetup
The notebook format looks similar to Mathematica. Using Mathematica, I found it did indeed solve the problems mentioned in the article (e.g., having to choose names for graphs), but led to its own problems (e.g., I would organize graphs by idea, but then lose track of the chronology). Still, used the right way, it was an improvement. (And of course Mathematica is proprietary and not free.)
I almost forced the team to choose Markdown, and then had to change my advice and say "Let's go with LaTex" because there are so many features MS Word users want to use... I don't remember exactly the one that prompted the switch - maybe footnotes, tables or referencing.
Can I make the obvious comment: it's not how fast you read text, but what text you choose to read.

Reading super fast over the National Inquirer is not likely to be an overall win.
Yeah, the iOS 7 'frosted glass translucency is impossible to achieve with CSS. Everyone points to filter: blur(), but that only blurs the element, and not items behind it.

The only thing I could come up with was using something like HTML2Canvas[1] to render a portion of the DOM in a canvas/image, position that exactly on top, and then blur that. But all that seems quite convoluted and heavy, so decided not to invest any energy into it.

[1]: https://github.com/niklasvh/html2canvas
Ahh ok. I thought you meant at the OS level.
A fresh and unique set of approaches to Yahoo logo design
This doesn't really belong on HN. It is a good article, but not tech related in any way.
> While some of his reporting on the crisis was OK, he has a habit of treating equivalently shortsighted or foolish behavior differently if he has predetermined you to be victim or a perpetrator.

That's a really wonderful way to put it.
It says they are to be written to a file. That's like the textbook case for buffered I/O writes. Get rid of that silly concatenation, it's just increasing the amount of data copying.
He was not reading it for the historical / religious insight - he just liked to read English prose written as best it can be.
This would make sense if elite education was actually costly, but it's not. Run http://npc.fas.harvard.edu/ for a middle-class family.
I believe most internet users would like to be anonymous in real life as well.
Qt has had a compile-time string builder since about 4.6 or so, for those wanting to take advantage in real-life code.

Just grep the QString API docs for "QStringBuilder".
I'm quite ignorant of the specifics of European and American telecom ecosystems. But I clearly remember the time when the network was owned and run solely by the Indian government. It was horrible. In the 80s, when we applied for a telephone line, we typically had to wait for about three years for it to be installed. To call someone in a different city, we'd have to place a "trunk call": call an operator, and request a line. The operator would call back when the line became available, typically an hour later. With private industry, even those who live each week hand-to-mouth can afford to carry around cell phones.

> Thus the network might as well be owned and run by the government...

Given a choice, I'd rather not live in such an ecosystem. Again.
Day trading and HFT are not for the common man. But regular long term investing is.

Getting a part time job is only a good idea if you have very few assets. Suppose you have 50k in salary and 50k in assets, then it's much easier to earn an extra 5k per year than it is to get an extra 10% return on your investment.

However, if you have 50k in salary and 500k in assets the story is the other way around. Investing 500k for 10 years with 6% interest instead of 3% interest leads to gains of 395k and 172k respectively. In this case making an effort in investing your money sensibly will lead to an extra 22k every year. A substantial difference. And as your assets increase your investment strategy only becomes more important.

Then there's the issue that not investing your money simply isn't a viable option. Inflation will chip away at your money at 3% per year, so you lose 25% of your money every 10 years if you stick your money in a checking account. Then there's the issue of employer-based 401k matching. You pretty much have to invest here, otherwise you lose out on free money. And if you just pick some investment funds at random you're going to do very poorly indeed (because many 401k funds are basically scams)[1].

[1] See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/retirement-gamble/
Zero. There's nothing illegal about it, because the information isn't insider information about the companies being traded, but rather information compiled by a third party (U of M) that just happens to have a lot of market-moving power.
No, because some users share computers, or use school, library, store, etc. computers. Just check it by default. Problem solved.
The difference is that one is illegal and unethical and the other isn't. There is no promise in the markets that everyone will have all relevant information at the same time and at the same quality. Why should that promise exist? If I spend my time and energy doing more research than you, why should you get the same advantage?

What we do have is a promise (cynical folks might say promise is too strong here) that if you are my broker, you can't use my non published order desires to take market positions.

We also have a promise that certain covered individuals working for a publicly traded company, cannot release certain material pieces of information about that traded company to anyone early, nor can they trade on that information before it is released.

The problem is not private knowledge, there is tons of that in the market, and that is what makes people take different market positions, thus enabling the market to exist. What is problematic is for people to take advantage of information that no one else could conceivably get.
Misleading title. A program written by a Russian isn't necessarily "Russian Software".
Absolutely stunning. No browser comes close to what you offer. Great work.

Your tagline should be - The Most Privacy-Conscious Browser On the Earth.
> Remember the demographic that Yahoo survived upon - women

interesting - can you tell me more? Whats the source of this (not challenging you, just want to quote it in the future :-)

edit: reminds me of Whistler / Wilde reparte:

Wilde: James, that was hilarious, I wish I had said it.
Whistler: You will dear boy, you will.
Pledge drive antidote: Swell. It's your own personal NPR station.
Friend of mine lives 400m from a border. He has to call his cell provider monthly to contest the roaming charges he gets charged every month for using his phone at home. So far they've removed them every time.
What makes you think it's not usable? He said it's hooked up to the software they use to design the rocket, and demoed a couple of actual parts. If rocket designers are using this stuff to visualize the rockets they're designing, how is that just a glitzy demo?

At the end, he makes the statement that this will revolutionize design and manufacturing, but I don't think that's pretty reasonable, given that Space X is in the business of design and manufacturing, not VR research.
Me too, maybe it is the color (blue / red contrast), I know that ~black background with ~white text is an instant trigger for me, always immediately close the tab when I visit such website. Do you see the words kind of "vibrating" when it triggered your migraine?
Do you have a mechanism to stop malicious clients sitting on the site and injecting backdoored scripts and whatnot?
Avdi Grimm open sources Quarto after self-publishing Confident Ruby
There's nothing wrong with a general argument being applied correctly. Taking your lemonade example, i see nothing wrong in removing subsidies because that is removing the disease. (the disease being subsidies that skewed competition).

The reason it is wrong in the case of roaming is because you are imposing yet another regulation (not removing any). That means the actors doesn't have to shift focus towards acting in a freer market, but rather in a more restricted one.

If a ban on roaming prices was enacted worldwide do you think that would make for a more free market?
> err, isn't Front-running knowing what your customers are going to do as a trade and getting in first

HFTs don't have customers. They are trading on their own books.
I worked on some of the interface graphics for Paycheck, but not this particular scene. Fun work.
Exactly, seems like he's just reimplemented std::stringstream in a worse manner.
Starting Analysis and Visualisation of Spatial Data with R
> 1) It's not a market – there are not enough competing companies. (Which is the case of network operators.)

Due to other unnecessary government regulation. Regulations always have a snowball effect.

> 2) Customers don't make optimal market decisions.

That's the customer's problem, not the government's. It benefits customers who do make optimal decisions.
I think the close-up of the mouse is to illustrate his point about 2D interaction via mouse.
You make the lives of people revealing secrets pretty unpleasant, and do so publicly. This acts as a deterrent to others. (This phenomena is well known and probably has a name.)

See Peter Wright, David Shaylor[1], or Katharine Gunn.

The other edge of that sword is to use the loyalty of your workers, and keep reminding them of the good work that they're doing.

Don't forget that GCHQ keeps secrets, even if those are known to the world at large - they kept Diffie-Hellman style key exchange secret for many years, and they kept RSA style public key encryption secret for many years, even though both became very well known and used. GCHQ had these for a few years before DH and RSA developed them.

> Or is there such strong commitment to secrecy that not one former NSA cryptographer would try to follow that route?

Imagine a bunch of people working together in a secret institution. One of them says something, which causes another of them to develop an algorithm. The group tries to attack this, and it feels good. As a group they've done some work. Then one of the group leaves and publishes this algo. Well, what's the benefit to that person? What do they get out of it? Because it seems they'd be generating a bunch of bad feeling.

> So anyone working in this field at NSA could (if true) become professor

GCHQ / NSA employ professor grade mathematicians already. Those mathematicians might not publish much publicly, and they might not have the formal title, but they do have the skills.

It is an interesting question: How do we make sure our staff keep secrets, for as long as we need secrets to be kept?

Especially when we take into account the apparent rise in dementia-type illnesses. I wonder if we're going to see an equal rise in secrecy-vetted nursing homes?
I thought it was already passed law, to come into effect July 2014. Guess I was wrong. In any case, it'd be nice not to have roaming data charges.
Except that C++ already has the interface with "the right thing", the author of the post was just unaware of it.

It is a very complex language, and that is definitely a mark against it, but the exact same thing could happen in Java or C# if people didn't know to use StringBuilder instead of relying on concatenating strings.
Open source software is not same as free software. One needs free software (which is open source, as well as give users complete freedom) to ensure their privacy.
Parents should be allowed to opt-in for experimental treatment with this. What could be learned from just a few real human tests could outweigh years and years of purely academic study and potentially lead to real treatments decades sooner.
Because you're like that dude from The Sixth Sense.
Ask HN: What is your favourite algorithm?
String concatenation? Are we living in the 1980's? What about string trees? These problems can be solved simply using a proper data structure. Concatenation, insertion, deletion etc. should be almost constant-time operations.
Even a year ago, not so much. Likely not even two years ago.

The market is jammed full of Android phones. Some of them even have differentiating features. Adding another one to the mix - whether now or a year ago - is not a way to make a sustainable business. As nearly every vendor other than Samsung is learning.
the R community has recently & rapidly been building a notebook environment similar to that of the iPython notebook.
Why even bother with terms like insider trading and front running? Lets just call all of it "bad stuff", what's the difference?
Pretty cool. I know this is more of a demonstration of simulating the iOS 7 UI, but I'm assuming to use this for something you'd want the URLs to update as you move through an app?

I may have missed references to this limitation, again, if it even matters for the purpose of the post.
Infinite scrolling is all the rage - here's how you do it
Data structures like ropes are really more for editing than concatenation.
>for the common man the effort necessary to make an extra 15% on your yearly income in the stock market, is more than if you did overtime or even went out and got a part time second job to earn that extra 15%

You're right. And why should it be any other way?

People often forget that underneath the glitz, glamour and dazzling array of numbers of the stock market and Wall Street, the purpose of "the game" is moving real capital to real businesses in need. And there are real risks associated with that.

The last 20 years have been seemingly "easy" for investors, or at least the years (prior to 2008) have been portrayed that way. But in no way should people believe he or she should be able to throw darts at the stock page and earn a 15% return. Aiming for the maintenance of the purchasing power of your savings, while generating those savings through work at which you're actually adept, is a far more reasonable and sensible goal.
Escape from Taliban author shot dead after returning to Afghanistan
I'll be honest, I was pretty disappointed by this. Elon is my hero so I was excited to see what he might have come up with, but this doesn't seem like anything that your average hacker couldn't build with the tools he used.

I will say this, despite my disappointment, I'm very happy that Elon continues to push our imaginations and encourage us to believe that fantasy and sci-fi can become reality. As others have said, there are enough schmucks working on more apps (myself included) that it's refreshing to witness someone building something greater.
Find out interesting facts about your name (fixed)
A Better Taxonomy for Introverts and Extroverts
Please help support this Starcraft 2 Kickstarter Campaign
I want to start off by saying that I sm not affiliated in any way to the success and the creators of this project at all.

I am just a passive geek and a massive fan.

If you cant donate then please please share as there are a lot of people that want this to succeed but its just not getting the coverage.

Its a great MMO add on to the arcade section of Starcraft 2. ITs great. Visit the link and just check it out and please please share.
Read it a few years ago... can't find the link anymore. Article said that the things that kept Yahoo alive were finance, women, and sports, and I bet they lost that finance thing since then.

edit: best I can find is this article pointing out Yahoo mail's 63% female userbase, but it's pretty thin.

http://blog.hunch.com/?p=34824
I'm wanting to find work in PHP and backend code what should I study?
Heylo HN

As the title says I want to work in PHP development, currently I'm studying at Birckbeck, a higher certificate in web design and the modules I'm taking next are generally PHP and MySQL related.

I'm considering doing an open university degree afterwards as I can only study part time due to having a small business and a small family, but it seems a computer science degree would be.. beneficial, due largely to the teaching of Java that goes on in them. I'm not at all adverse to learning Java, would be fun, but all the jobs I see advertised demand a degree.

Would an open university degree in computer sciences be worth it with regard especially to finding work in London?
Show HN: What do you stand to make?
We have to all become outraged and start a big and public online and offline campaign to take back the law into the hands of the people and their representatives and away from secret organizations “overseen” by secret courts in a system that goes beyond Kafka’s worst nightmares.

This is not politics. This is wishful thinking. Only a headline from the Onion would read "Politicians change laws to conform with the wishes of a small protest group"

The actual political solution is in bucking the system that's betrayed us.
Modern Python is usually smart enough to optimize:

s += "..."

Though I'm not sure if it similarly optimizes:

s = s + "..."

But old habits die hard so I still use a list of strings and join them at the end.
but isn't what's being asked? If the box is checked by default, then public computers will have a whole list of email address and logins to steal
Honest question: Which parts of their coverage of the leaks do you think were covered well and which were covered poorly?

(E.g. do you think yesterday's encryption article was "tabloidesque"? Do you like when newspapers post source documents?)
Median senator age is 62. Most Senators are highly educated (many from highly-paid professions such as legal before they became highly-paid senators) and married.

Thirty years of high income (100-150K family income in today's dollars) with 10-15% saving and investing in the market can easily result in a net worth in the low millions, not including inherited investments, long-term real estate property appreciation, etc. People in their 60s have seen an incredible appreciation over the past 30 years in most sectors (Just the S&P Index itself is over 9% annualized over that time frame).

Long story, short, $2.5M is not by any means exorbitant for retirement age people with an educated and successful life.

It would be a bizarro world where we would want idiot paupers to be Senators, or even a socio-economically equivalent demographic.

I think most government workers, elected or not, would find the idea that you work in government for the money amusing to say the least.