skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
North American high-school programming classes were not known for quality. Programming was not generally a high priority item for the school boards so teachers were often completely left on their own for curriculum, and often were amateur programmers at best (if programmers at all).

The end result is that university CS programs are run with the assumption that highschool students had zero prior experience with programming.

There's a reason that so many software geeks are hardcore libertarians and Bill Gates was fighting to reform teaching into a meritocracy - the educational system basically ignored their core skill-set and so the students were often self-taught. Obviously schools are playing catch-up now, but you can't change the past experiences of two generations of programmers.
Dynos already run in different availability zones: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/production-check

You can take that a step further by running dynos in the European (eu-west-1) region: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/regions
Not sure if it's the entire AZ. We have some Internet-reachable instances and Internet unreachable instances in the same AZ.
> Implementing Apple product charging is somewhat convoluted, for example, and has changed over time.

If that and other things you claim are real issues then, every dumb usb power brick, every old computer/old charger, every non-apple charger, and others would all have problems.
I think Vol. 1 is really masterful. I read somewhere Feynman was most pleased with Vol. 1, and less so with Vol. 2. The material in the second volume is certainly more difficult, and I did not quite finish it myself. I've been busy with other things, and the relatively thin Vol. 3 still sits on the shelf.
A lot of airports are adding charging stations that have USB and power plugs for charging.
Why does this never happen to AWS West? I should really get to migrating over with 3 outages in the past 2 years on US East.
2002 Total Vehicle sold - 6,973,000 [1]

- Ford/Lincoln/Mercury - 5,892,000

2002 Net loss $980M

Now it is only Ford and Lincoln brands

2012 Total Vehicle sold - 5,668,000 [2]

2012 Net Income $5,665M

Are you sure about your data?

[1] http://corporate.ford.com/doc/2002_full.pdf

[2] http://corporate.ford.com/doc/ar2012-2012%20Annual%20Report....
An excerpt from a course I recently attended: http://i.imgur.com/6VW4X3o.png

The noise floor of the Goldstone Observatory is truly incredible.
Oh so like Objective-C?
Sure, but it can blow up faster than you think. Say you have 100k URL strings, up to 128 chars each, with 64 allowed characters in alphabet.

- storing this at byte per char = 12.8MB

- storing this in a basic trie = 12.8 * 64 = 820MB

- storing this in the TST = 12.8 * 3 = 38MB
Hell, even spelling mistakes! I've known people who don't care (they are bad spellers themselves).

Well... but it's never bad advice to try to submit perfect spelling. And it can be bad advice to not care about spelling. It's like the spelling version of Pascal's Wager.
The trigger is just grounding the two inner data pins together. This is ok since the data pins are loose pull up so even if the device tries to send data on something with those shorted no damage will occur.
You are the sole person responsible for the security of your communications. You simply cannot trust any third party to keep your communications secure. Public-key crypto goes a long way here.
This doesn't work for people with suffixes very well, or with the "last name" not being at the end. Back when I was into genealogy a lot, about ten years ago, the "family name" was typically indicated by slashes. So in that format I am "Christopher Mark /Gore/". Your example would be "Ann Beth /Smith Jones/". It also works for people like "James Michael /Smith/ Jr." or "/Kim/ Jong-il" or "/Kim/ Il-Sung".
There are 4 statuses.

Green checkmark (status 0)

Green checkmark with "info" badge (status 1)

Yellow triangle (status 2)

Red "do not enter" rectangle (status 3)

I suspect that status 0 indicates that they are investigating a problem with the server, and it switches to status 1 once the problem has been confirmed.

This is also a good example of poor icon design...they aren't self-explanatory, and so they should not be used.
On being helplessly suspended in the cloud
That's still in Beta though.
"How to Squeeze a Lexicon" by Ciura and Deorowicz [1] is a good and practical introduction to DAWGs.

[1]: http://sun.aei.polsl.pl/~mciura/publikacje/lexicon.pdf
Did you need full prefix and/or suffix string matching?
> Some firefox add-ons to help defend against mitm:

In theory yes, but not more than 10 minutes ago Cert Patrol noticed that Amazon have changed the CA for the SSL cert for an image server.

What am I supposed to do? It is interesting info, but if I reject the cert then I can't be sure my connection is secure. If I accept it... I can't be sure my connection isn't MiTMed.

The human factor is always the weak link.
The Role of a Startup CEO
Yes, I really think that the article "Programming Without Variables" does not deserve the first page of HN, but I do not have enough karma to mod it down. The title refers to an interesting subject, but the content is almost only about technicalities in converting a loop into a recursive, then into a tail recursive function. The level is so poor, it is really deceptive.
First, isn't the article about higher education, most professors are male.

Second, is that really a problem? Honestly so much of the world is becoming if you can't physically see someone similar to you doing something you are disadvantaged. Do you really need to see a male teaching a subject for you to press yourself to do your best?

I had primarily women teachers too, probably everyone did. It didn't do anything positive or negative to me. If you can not drive yourself, you are going to be at a significant disadvantage when you move on to the working world.
There are a few stories, which I will not recount here, but the main take-home messages are these:

1. Small business fads exist -- everybody seems to try to run the same business at the same time. Somebody gets the idea of importing cars -- and suddenly you have hundreds of copycat businesses -- all importing the exact same make and model of car. A relatively small steer towards e-commerce (If the pioneers are seen to be making money) could trigger a large avalanche of interest. The problem then will be persuading enough people to find distinct and profitable niches so that a sufficient number "stick" and are successful.

2. Technology start-ups require quite a lot more time and energy to be invested before you see returns. Certainly more so than a typical import/export business. Many will be discouraged by this, so the gentle encouragement may be required to help people stick the course. There are a lot of social groups and cooperative savings societies that already exist -- these could probably be used to help reach potential entrepreneurs.

3. A surprising amount of entrepreneurship is driven by middle aged women. These individuals are tremendously busy, and may already be running up to 2 or 3 small businesses (in addition to day jobs) so they may not be able to take on anything as time-intensive as a technology start-up ... but they are definitely movers and shakers in the Kenyan small business sector.

Finally, a caveat: I am also an outsider; my view of the Kenyan economy is filtered through a fairly narrow lens -- (My wife and her family).
I think it's silly to try to subscribe to a set of rules that just aims to get rid of all the bad stuff. It makes more sense to me to simply balance the consumption of these "drugs" (narcotics, alcohol, food, games, children, sports, etc). In fact, don't even call them "drugs"; call them "desire satisfiers". Satisfying any given desire has a cost and a benefit, and we all exist in this huge, messy web of conflicting desires that have varying and dynamic costs/benefits. The challenge of living is trying to balance the satisfaction of all our various desires.
What happened to status 2?
Agreed. The folks who sell corn flakes could refer to either a) Grocery and general merchandise stores or b) Consumer packaged goods companies.
Going Mobile In Diapers
My understanding was DigiNotar was pretty strongly linked to an Iranian government affiliated hacker. Indeed, the breach was caught because someone man in the middled gmail in Iran and Chrome's certificate fingerprinting caught it.

Although the NSA certainly has reason to spy on Iran, why risk discovery this way? They can legally compel Google to give them the email of foreigners in a foreign country.

So maybe NSA had DigiNotar's key, but the hack that shut it down was done by someone else.
Ingram Micro buys Toronto’s SoftCom
Didn't the slides show that it was the Diginotar compromise?

> We cannot have untrustworthy CAs in a system based on trust. That's simply not an option.

The entire CA trust model is broken. In the trust model, any CA can issue certs for any domain; so a Chinese CA could issue Google certs, or a US CA could issue certs for the Dutch government.

Self-signed certs with certificate pinning are indeed more likely to be secure than CA certs. Of course, you can do both; CA signed certs (which does add a small amount of trustworthiness, as the CA is at least supposed to do a little work to verify a real-world identity), and use certificate pinning to avoid this kind of attack.
I have sent you an email to your "smile" address.
Lots of people seem to develop on Macs, so Linux is a VM to them. And if it runs on a Mac it probably runs on FreeBSD. Joyent seems to be managing with non-Linux containers too.
Sure, I was thinking on the order of <100 strings around 5-10 characters each at most. I agree that the TST is much better suited for large sets of strings. Also I think more developers should actually do the calculations even if they only have an estimate of how large the inputs will be.
Ask HN: Which cloud/hosting companies are currently using LXC when selling vps?
I was wondering which companies are fully using LXC containers as VPS offering and what are the security implications in terms of doing that.
That's right, its really just a library. Also, Finagle already has an idiomatic Java API so using it from Clojure would not require use of any mangled names.
You seem to be suggesting an initial addiction caused an addictive personality, but are you sure your relative wasn't prone to addictive behavior to begin with?
All three are parts of big asian holdings now. So it hard to tell how good are they on their own.

- Volvo is losing money

- Jaguar lost 60% of unit sales in last 10 years.

- Land Rover actually improved, up 30%
And yet many times when savvy people notice that they are being lied to they discount the entire message and can end up engaging in more destructive behavior than they would have otherwise. Public health messaging should never contain exagerations or lies even of ommision.
I don't know how much "(White or Good) and (Black or Bad)" being psychologically-ingrained categories has to do with race, though.

Some things early homo sapiens knew about, that are white: rice, fatty tissue, soap, and safe sunny environments.

Some things they knew about that are black: mold spots, dried blood, charred flesh, and dangerous moonlit environments.

(Same for red with "sweet berries, fresh blood, flushed skin, and fire"; green with "medicinal plants, unsafe still water, vomit"; etc.)

I bet there wouldn't be nearly as clear an association if the colors were "vaguely dark beige" and "vaguely light brown".
I think it pin's google's certificates. The article claims The goal of the attack was to "impersonate Google security certificates."

I'm not saying NSA doesn't have the ability, just the implication that it was used against Brazil is likely wrong.
We are able to reach some servers but not all in our us-east AZ and notice it seems to be random.
I used to design these things. Yes they are difficult to design in the sense of RF engineering to pump that much data on a data line, but the power end of it is a very simplest design. It has a current cap to prevent damage to the regulator circuit and USB regular spec is 0.5A. Which isn't very much if you've ever tried to charge a phone off of that. Without the inner pins it'll default to the low spec (on a well design USB Host) but no damage or risk to having those inner pins float since they have internal pull up resistors. If the device decides to provide more all the better for you as your device is what regulates how much current it wants when an infinite amount is available.
The point is you're supposed to use truly random word combinations since those are at least memorable.

$ wc -l /usr/share/dict/words
119095
$ python -c 'print(119095 ** 4)'
201175048646341950625
$ python -c 'print(85 ** 10)'
19687440434072265625

So, even if your target is known to be using this scheme in pure form, this has more entropy than a completely random 10-digit password (assuming ~85 characters) -- and who would actually be using such a thing, except someone using a password management program - who could just as easily be using a 20-character random password?

So even if it becomes known, it's an improvement on what users are doing now.
I would say the title is an indication of how bad the article actually is. It is a shame they wrote such an information free article.

Cargill is a fairly interesting company and like all big and small grain companies, they hedge their inventory. Grain is a very low margin business and it is very important to protect both the company and the farmer from market volatility. This does tend to put these companies in the financial instruments business and they do tend to expand past agriculture.

disclaimer: worked for Cargill at one time and will not go into any depth other than to say the article is a bit information lite and the title is horrible, ill-informed dreck that I expect.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uriZZ3Slz74
All of mine just started magically working
I'm definitely seeing issues in multiple AZs. It seems to be partly firewall-related, however: I've seen cases where it's hard to get an initial SYN through, but once a TCP connection is established it stays established.
Is having bloom filters of sizes 1024, 2048, and 4096 more dependable than one bloom filter of 8192?

That is surprising to me.
Show HN : A WebRTC based Voice CRM solution.
Hey All ,<p>2 Years back when I had the idea of developing a Voice CRM solution , the only option for me was to use a flash widget and as I dont want to use Flash , i was waiting for 2 years to get WebRTC default on the browsers .<p>After such waiting time , We are launching our in-house developed voice crm solution www.voz.io.<p>Please leave us your feedback .<p>Thanks
Voz.io Team .
Your keyboard is probably used to produce new value for yourself and others, and represents a very small fraction of the economy. A yacht (to continue the example) is a much larger chunk of economic output frozen in the control of a single owner.

I'm not saying nobody should have yachts, just that the argument that the yacht builders were paid only addresses part of the economic effect of concentrated wealth.
I'm asking why the prevailing pattern in North American couples is for the mother to give up years of career advancement to provide direct child care while the father continues to work, earning more money and a higher income.
They aren't taken away. You can still experience those great things, but don't make those experiences the purpose. The result is emotional balance and fulfillment.
If they want wider adoption they will need to document extensions. There are tons of extensions out there and I would say most non trivial installation use at least a few of them.
There are probably more blogs about Obama stealing your guns than blogs about women in tech being discriminated, does that mean we are about to enter the Obamacalypse? People blog either about awesome stuff or awful stuff and people behaving normally like expected is nothing to write about.

I fail to see why programmers are of a special fascist pig breed of men that are somehow way more discriminating towards woman than for example lawyers are. Yet there are way more female lawyers out there than programmers.

Modern life is full of hazards for women. I choose to not be one of them but they're everywhere and I'm not denying in any way the impact they can have on women. Yet somehow programmers seem to be able to scare women away where in other areas they don't feel intimidated.

I had a female boss once and a female programmer colleague and I never ever felt a single bit disrespect towards them because of their gender. Should I start a blog about that? "Today I accepted a suggestion about how to refactor my code from my female coworker and it totally felt like the most normal thing in the world".
Ah, in that case it goes straight to set<string> for me :-) I think that in practice you want to do that but then drop in a few asserts to check whether things are not getting out of control once you forgot about this decision.
> MainGenericRunner will look at the file and determine if it's a script (.scala) or class file (.class). A class will be passed straight through to the JVM (+/- some classloader trickery) while the script is passed into the interpreter first. It is I think just a dispatcher.
this has taken openredis offline: https://twitter.com/openredis

heroku is also reporting issues:

https://status.heroku.com/incidents/554
I'm skeptical about the ban on insider trading in general. Now this author wants to extend it to a new sphere.

Basically, an oil company, which knows a lot about the oil market, shouldn't be allowed to speculate in oil.

Isn't this the mandated destruction of valuable market signals?

Should we also ban car mechanics from buying and selling used cars, because their special knowledge gives them an unfair advantage?
This, in addition to the increase in traffic we detected directly before, smells of DOS. Also, it is Friday the 13th.
Munich distributes Linux CDs
I'm getting external monitoring failures that are firing on and off, but have no problem reaching the servers or the site.

Interestingly newrelic is reporting the site down at the same time it is reporting a normal level of load on it.
1. Croup is a disease. The name is DOA.
2. Good idea to integrate with Smarterer rather than trying to roll your own skills verification platform. However, I think the whole badges angle distracts & detracts from your core story. I'd drop it and go for the "better résumé" angle, at least until Smarterer is widely accepted by hiring companies.
3. Get a native English speaker to give your site & app a once-over. An hour of copy editing by a competent writer will go a long way toward helping establish professionalism.
Ask HN: Reusing code across several clients' projects
Hi HN!

I've been a freelance web developer for 6 years. I have an issue that's bothering me and I'd like some advice. (Do note: I want advice from experienced freelance developers, or people who have been in these situations before and can speak from experience, not people who are just guessing...)

I've worked for a few years for Client A, and developed web app for them. Now I have a new client, Client B, and I'm developing a web app for them.

Over the years, I've developed many general-purpose tools that I've used for Client A. Thankfully, most of them are in a separate open-source repo, and I've developed them on my own time. But, some tools are on Client A's repo and legally are the IP of Client A. They're not specific to that client's app, but are generic (like tools for handling times and date, url manipulating tools, etc.)

Now, as I've started work on Client B's code, I copied all the tools and I've been using them for Client B's project. I know it's illegal since they belong to Client A, but I'm wondering whether it's a big deal. I'm asking not for the sake of these 2 clients, who are small non-technology companies who are unlikely to care or even know, but for similar situation in the future of my consulting career.

I considered asking Client A to open-source the tools, but I rather not. I'm the company's only developer, and a request like that might seem suspicious to the CEO. From the CEO's point-of-view, he has (1) little understanding of the situation and (2) something to lose and (3) nothing to gain and (4) a lot of important things to work on that are critical to the company.

I'd like your advice, especially hearing what you did in such situations and whether it turned into a problem in practice.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6369530
Non-snarky answer: They want to post that they are investigating an issue, but do not want to comment on the scope of the problem when it is still not fully understood.
All I needed to do was match prefixes, and now that I think about it, what I actually did was closer to a ternary search tree. The problem was to match operators after matching an identifier, e.g. say the language has these operators ['+', '++', '%'], and you want to be very permissive with what's allowed to be a normal identifier, so "$$#3" is matched as an identifier, but say you have "b++45", then you want to be able to match ++ correctly. There are lots of ways I could've done it, but a trie-like data structure seemed like the easiest way to allow adding more operators easily.
Something similar used to be common with the english too. My great-great-great-great grandfather was "Thomas Tindall Gore", and Tindall was his mother's maiden name. This sort of thing was quite common all throughout the 1700's and 1800's, but seems to have went out of style in the last hundred years or so.
GTA V's twice the size of Manhattan - or 1.4 billion PS3s laid in rows
Interesting point. Just to clarify, in the original study you were to sort actual images of faces. So when I say white and black, I don't mean they were sorting things such as "rice" to the "white" bin.
Report: Lakers don't believe they can land LeBron
There are definitely issues with network connectivity between AZs as well as public internet connectivity.
See also: HAT-trie by Askitis and Sinha.

Tries are the fastest tree-based data structures for managing strings in-memory, but are space-intensive. The burst-trie is almost as fast but reduces space by collapsing trie-chains into buckets. This is not however, a cache-conscious approach and can lead to poor performance on current processors. In this paper, we introduce the HAT-trie, a cache-conscious trie-based data structure that is formed by carefully combining existing components.
Ha! That's funny. But seriously, we're talking about using tech to solve education, distribution and financial problems.
Can you people critique the concept more than the grammar?
A primer on fingerprint identification
Or perhaps the Iran link was a misdirection. They were worried that people would notice the MITMed certs, so they MITMed a lot of Iranian customers to make it look like the attack came from there.

> They can legally compel Google to give them the email of foreigners in a foreign country.

They can, but they may wish to be more subtle than that. For example, if they were engaged in economic espionage, they might not want that story to break, and would be worried that someone at Google may leak the story. If they had to ask Google, there would be more people who would know about what's going on.
great observation; it leads to a possible new feature for home wifi routers such as "guest" passwords or temporary passwords that expire (yes, I see that's redundant).
Bitcoin, Tor and Gates Foundation join task force to prevent child exploitation