skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Consumer Fin. Protection Bureau Releases Home Mortgage Data Visualization Tools
This is a well worn path. HN user creates a blog post with minimal substance that has a criticism of Microsoft in the title. Then self posts it to HN.

Click bait, glory hunting.
Exactly. If you're going to talk about 10x engineers, the first question has to be ten times what.
> It has been called "referential humor", but I don't think it should be classified as humor, although for some people it seems to be a completely satisfying humor surrogate.

I call them "tribal markers".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics
By "unpopular speech", do you mean the AT&T bit, or the harassment bit? If the latter, I disagree. A free and fair society can certainly draw a line between "unpopular speech" and "criminal harassment."

If I were to threaten to murder you, you wouldn't expect the police to say "Eh, nothing we can do, he's got a right to free speech. Call us back after he shoots you, you'll have a case then."
Got one yesterday from Anhui China. I'm definitely not using any VPN services there
Fairly typical of BBC News articles these days unfortunately - regardless of whether it's TV or online reporting.
It's quite clear that the Surface (formerly RT) was designed to compete with the iPad, and the Surface Pro (formerly just Surface) was designed to be a hybrid/laptop replacement.

Unfortunately, Microsoft managed to make both products look nearly identical and use the same name for both. The little I heard about the Surface was from people who bought an RT thinking it was a normal Windows computer and returned it.

I'm glad they're working to clear up the confusion with better naming and a slightly different look.
One of the things that most financial planners and guides will tell you is "save for yourself first." Worst case, your children can work, borrow, do a military enlistment, etc. to pay for college. There are a lot more ways and a lot more time to pay for college than there are to make up for insufficient retirement savings.
If you go to an ivy league, the answer is yes

I went to Princeton, and the degree paid for itself in 2 years
Simply Advanced: How To Get Started With SEO
And here's a bit from Kathy Sierra, one of Weev's actual victims, unlike you or me:

"His rise as a folk hero is a sign of how desensitized to the abuse of women online people have become. I get so angry at the tech press, the way they try to spin him as a trickster, a prankster. It’s like they feel they have to at least say he’s a jerk. Openly admitting you enjoy ‘ruining lives for lulz’ is way past being a ‘jerk’. And it wasn’t just my life. He included my kids in his work. I think he does belong in prison for crimes he has committed, but what he’s in for now is not one of those crimes. I hate supporting the Free Weev movement, but I do."
You're missing the point. The point is the government is charging him under the CFAA and that will set an extremely dangerous precedent.

If they want to charge him under any other numerous crimes (data theft, attempted extortion, being an asshat) then I wouldn't have a problem with it either because those are things he's guilty/might-be-guilty of.

Hacking and violating the CFAA is not one of his crimes.
As the original article shows, it has a long way to go. I mean, Google Sheets is nice for many things, but to even try to replace Excel it needs to increase functionality tenfold - even LibreOffice isn't really there yet after all these years. And packing it with everything would likely make it a worse product for the actually intended Google Sheets audience due to more complexity.

Of all the 100 excel features everybody needs 3-4 - but each needs a different one, so you have to cover all of it to be an acceptable replacement. The original post is one example of such feature that apparently is 'must have' for someone. Database/sql integration for someone else. Solver functionality for yet other people. And so on.
So, for anyone following this saga...

In researching this issue, I found recommendations that 2.5mbps is probably the most you should plan for in North America. I'm not sure how accurate or current that recommendation is, but since I was seeing problems at 2.8mbps, it seems reasonable. (It also might explain why I have such a large proportion of international subscribers.) That said, I'd really love to get my bitrate below 2.0mbps, because that's what my actual videos come in at.

I went into my video export settings and fiddled (and fiddled, and fiddled) and ended up finding a compromise that gave me 1.94mbps at the cost of slightly-visible artifacting during transitions. [1] Bingo! Uploaded, deployed, done.

Well, not entirely done. I'm still using my old settings for most videos, because it doesn't have any visible compression artifacts at all, at least not until you get out the magnifying glass. (I can get away with such high quality because, although my screencasts have more transitions and motion than average, they're still mostly unchanging text.) But I don't want to run into this problem again. It's embarrassing. And I like killing problems dead. DEAD!

So I modified my deploy script to run `ffprobe` and pull out the bitrate for each new video. If it exceeds 1750kbps, I get a warning. And if it exceeds 2000kbps, the script fails. [2] That'll do it.

Of course, the real root cause here is that I don't have visibility into client-side performance issues. Eventually, I'd like to modify the client-side code to report back playback experience. That would have detected this problem much sooner, and it will protect me against CDN/network issues as well, which are particularly hard for me to get visibility into.

Thanks again to tankbot and alecthomas for helping me find this problem.

[1] The settings I ended up with, in case you're curious:

Video encoding: H.264; 24 frames per second; 2250kbps max bit rate; "High" quality; Single-pass

Audio encoding: AAC; 44.1KHz audio (mono); "Normal" quality; 64kbps audio bit rate

[2] These thresholds are pretty conservative, and I'll increase them if necessary. I like starting with low thresholds because it gives me more visibility into what's going on, at the cost of requiring me to be a bit more hands-on until I get things dialed in.
>This was a PUBLIC website... you are supposed to be able to visit it. If you make a request to a server without providing authentication and it returns data, that is not your fault. That is what you are SUPPOSED to do to servers. If it asks for authentication and tells you you are unauthorized, but you brute force the password or find an exploit, then THAT is a crime. There was not authentication in this case.

Unfortunately none of these excuses are valid. He knew he was accessing something he shouldn't have been. If he did it once or twice and stopped that is one thing, intent is a major part of the law, and he intended to exploit something he knew he should not have been. That is why he is being found guilty.
Regarding the "hang out" test. Imagine you're a person who only likes to hang out with certain people, namely people already somewhat like you, by way of gender, race, age range, grew up like you in the USA watching sports and 80s sitcoms, and so on. Now your hiring process is probably not only unfair but illegal. But your company will act as a great echo chamber to reinforce your own preconceptions, so you have that going for you.
Any developer has an addressable market to target. I don't think we really care what the OS is (Win,Xbox,PS4,iOS,whatever). If there is a market opportunity, we pounce. There simply has not been a Linux market opportunity that has inspired any real business. Will SteamOS change that? Time will tell....
Surely you didn't mean to type "physical". Even if Amazon did nothing else, they'd still order, receive, unpack, assemble, rack, stack, power, cool, and network their servers with an economy of scale that I can't possibly match.

And who could ever claim that AWS requires no maintenance? It takes plenty; I should know. But the problem isn't that Amazon is necessarily less expensive, or more expensive, or more reliable, or less reliable. All of that depends on the context. The problem is that the context is rarely reported in this genre of blog post. These posts tend to fixate on the size of the hosting bill. This is the year 2013, and unless its business model is hopelessly flawed, the hosting bill is one of the smallest problems a new company will ever have.

But maybe I'm wrong about that, so I wish these writeups would provide more context to explain why I'm wrong in this or that particular case, and by how much. Yes, I see the hosting bill is down. But are the savings significant to the business? Did the migration take one engineer-day, or twelve, or thirty-eight? Did it reduce the size of the codebase or increase it, and which modules were affected? Is the time required for testing and reliable deployment up or down, and by how much? How has your planning for various disaster scenarios changed? Are you getting more or fewer alerts in the middle of the night?
long overdue, everytime i fly i probably see 50% of the people NOT turning off their phones. even more painful is seeing the flight attendant try to actually explain why people need to shut off their devices
Fanless Pico-ITX SBC runs Linux on Atom E6xx
> So Apple has the challenge of bringing their user-level of their OS offerings closer together (along with the hardware)

This is the assumption I don't agree with. Why do we need one OS to run all our devices? Ubuntu Unity is an interesting idea, but is that really where computing should head.

I don't see this as Apple "getting a pass", I think they mad e the right decision. It was certainly correct in '07 (for hardware reasons), and I think it still holds up as correct today.
I just had flashbacks of snow gif's on websites…
It varies. Some parents want to help their kids buy their first house. Some feel they should save for it on their own. Probably depends a lot on what their own parents did for them.
We are getting 31" 4K displays this year that come close (doesn't have to be 250 DPI at desktop viewing distance, but the high 100s would be nice). They are expensive ATM, but should come down in price pretty quickly. The only question I have is if Windows and its application ecosystem will be ready for it? There seems to be a lot of scrambling right now to prepare for a new high DPI status quo, so I'm very optimistic.
> Switching to Linode is always a terrible idea considering how disgraceful their security and business practices are.

Can you please elaborate on this? I just signed up, so I'm curious.
It looks like these guys are picking up ideas from the travis-ci.org project, which uses a ".travis.yml" file for configuration-

https://github.com/tedivm/Stash/blob/master/.travis.yml

This has huge advantages, especially in conjunction with things like git or github. With travis ci it's trivial for testing to be setup on new branches or even forks. We use Jenkins at work, and I'm excited to extend that level of functionality there.
NSA surveillance goes beyond Orwell's imagination
Oracle Announces an In-Memory Technology, At an Ungodly Speed And Cost
Good. These rules are ridiculous and not founded in reality. No consumer communication device is going to cause harmful interference with avionics or communications equipment, especially in modern planes with double redundancy and heavy shielding. These rules, just like many others, are rooted in nothing more than tradition and superstition.
Good ideas to make money are a dime a dozen -- just look at android forums.. there are a million ideas that could make money..

Seeing real examples can sometimes give a better idea of what an idea is really worth, with real numbers, not what a concept could be worth IF(and a BIG IF) people really want to buy it, or visit it, or download it..etc... 1 Real life case study is worth 100 ideas for apps/businesses.
he is a hacker? He must be doing computer sorcery - off with his head.
Well, playing Words with Friends is still not allowed. Of course, that becomes next to impossible to prevent. I'm not sure why the transmitters need to be disable because in reality many won't be.
Hmm, have the height limitations been removed? I know at one point Minecraft worlds were technically infinite horizontally but limited to...256? 512? meters vertically, from bedrock to skybox, which is obviously not enough for most real-world terrain. I haven't played in ages, though.

I saw a video from one modder who managed to, not remove, but rotate the height limitation, producing a cavern world that was 256 meters wide and infinitely long and deep. He tweaked the terrain generator to accomodate it, too; there was no surface, just uncountable miles of vast tunnels. It was creepy.
This is going to be great. I can't wait to have a steambox in the lounge room that has access to all my steam games and something like Plex
Yeah, I understand the logic behind "The FCC/FAA cannot test every single device for airplane use" but as far as I can tell so many people ignore this rule that if it really were a problem, airplanes would be dropping out of the sky like bricks every day. Many, if not most, people ignore the rule, so it probably isn't a big deal in reality.
That's the price the inhabitants pay for their NIMBY zoning rules.

With such rent prices, it would be a great, profitable business to build lots of dense residental highrises - and from what I know about SF, they're not allowed to build them, so that's the result.

In any market economy, if you seriously want to restrict number of residences of residents for whatever reason, then the result will be not less migration, but more migration as immigrants still move in but many local people are 'priced out' until they are forced to leave.
What's actually going on here is a lot less sensational than the title appears to suggest: as far as I can tell, Google is just deprecating an old plugin architecture to encourage developers to move to a newer one.
Thanks! There's an account page now. It still has room to improve—I handle most things manually—but as pg says, do things that don't scale. :-)
So does anyone know why exactly they weren't able to get Weev on criminal harassment? I wouldn't expect the gummint to fail to bring the charge unless they thought there was no hope of victory, but it seems like such a gimme.
Hey really cool videos thanks for sharing the link.

I've been extremely interested in starting a youtube channel and ones that are currently similar are somewhat similar to your youtube stats.

An example:

5,000 subscribers

1,000,000 views

Joined 2011

So my question is how did you monetize your channel? I have a few more months to go before I can get good equipment for recording and editing so I'm unfamiliar with youtube's monetization for niche channels. Thanks.
You're "sure" of something that's utterly false? Relatives are not responsible for the debts of a deceased person in the US.
Shameless self promotion. He is breathless that UTF-8 encoding was designed on the back of a napkin. Well it sure as h*ll should have been that simple and that quick. After all it merely applies an ancient principle that was used by Baudot encoding, BCD, ASCII, EBCDIC and even HDLC. Use special escape characters to change the meaning of the following codes for some number of bytes following.

Blehhh...
UTF-8 is important but it is the natural evolution of Unicode. As soon as folks decided to have one standard encoding to be used for all of the glyphs used in all human languages, UTF-8 was inevitable.

This reminds me of when I invented RLE in 1978. Later in 1986 someone else patented it, and GIF format ended up being encumbered by these sort of patents for many years. Was I a genius? NO! RLE was obvious and many others also invented it. I expect that the first inventor was a typist back in the 1930s or even earlier, who would have used RLE as a way to write down the encoding of an ASCII art piece without revealing the image itself.
This looks like one of the most well done a/b tests
there you go...
Simulation sets atoms shivering
That link is baffling, the first few paragraphs sound like bad things happening but they don't form any sort of coherent narrative and the link to the New York Times article is a story about someone else entirely.

It has the form of an outrage article without any actual content, as if someone fed Tumblr and Vice magazine into a Markov text generator.
already going on. practically no difference.
There is a system in place. It's called HTTP status codes.
I work with a '10x engineer'. He works from 8 AM to 11 PM, like clockwork, every weekday. He is great to work with but I do not envy him.
If I find a $50 bill on a sidewalk I can INTEND to steal it as much as I want. But no matter how badly I WANT to steal it I cannot because at that point it's not a thing that can be stolen. There is no way to trace it back to it's former owner and as such, the first person to find it is legitimately the new owner.

Weev might have said that he "stole" the information or that he "intented" to perform an unauthorized access but ultimately that doesn't matter. There was no access control to prevent the internet's default of "everything is visible" so that's precisely what happened. It's not a hack no matter how badly he or the government want it to be. Intent matters not one iota.
who are also $500-600/hr people

Did you sneak an extra zero in there? Even fully-realized, I'd $100-$200/hr tops in a prime market.
I'm curious - does anyone know if someone who doesn't qualify to be an accredited investor can use power of attorney for someone who does qualify to be an accredited investor to make 50/50 investments?
Your countdown timer is broken. Holloween is not -328 days away.
More studies will definitely help. I have a 10X engineer in my larger group and there's no question that he is one. Since I've seen this 'mythical' creature, I would not agree with the piece. Of course memetic transmission of the idea without critical evaluation can be harmful. However, color me paranoid but I see the sentiment behind this as being egalitarian and not meritocratic.
From the internet, Kathy is a very nice and decent person. What happened to her is awful, and I'm glad she's still around, albeit in her reduced online presence. Shame on us all.
The restrictions do have two benefits though as far as I'm aware: 1) your phone's battery doesn't drain as it's out of range and attempts to poll a tower every few sounds to no avail; and 2) if it does have service, it prevents the fairly large overhead associated with transferring between towers, decreasing network strain.
One thing people haven't mentioned in this thread is the Windows Store. Windows is already following OS X in creating a walled garden with signed software. Microsoft implementing more controls on the Windows software ecosystem could be catastrophic for companies like Valve.

Steam OS will ensure Valve has something to rely on, it will also force Windows to keep tabs on their software ecosystem.
SS has a surplus designed to keep it solvent for the reasonable future. The real issue is a low cap on contributions when most economic growth in the last 30 years has been in the top 5%. Coupled by an ever growing disability burden that has nothing to do with retirement and who's growth is linked to states trying to shift burdends to the federal level.
I have, uh, pretty convincing evidence that $750/day is in the ballpark for the fully-loaded cost of a devops engineer in Boston. It certainly doesn't buy two days of an engineer in Boston.

But Boston is Boston, and SV is SV, and this is estimation, so I'll happily concede a factor of two. Okay. Suppose $750 buys you two engineer-days per month. Same question: Is the $750 important?
Little things like this restore my faith in humanity :D
I've been told that Terradata runs $1M/TB. So Larry is kind of right about the cost relative to his peers.

The columnar store I use are in the $10K/TB range running on $10-25K servers.

I think Oracle is going to have trouble with this space.
The entire IRC conversation comes off as jest - nothing actionable from what I read (besides running the scripts). Even so, since when did it become a crime to talk about doing something [illegal]?

Also, Weev himself says that he is unwilling to short AT&T's stock - I think he understood the ramifications that would have.
Gold iPhone Just Sold On eBay For $10,100
The issue is when shit hits the fan then will you be able to depend on communications with air traffic control? Other people will be reaching for their phones at the same time, surely radio congestion is a real concern.

Or it used to be.
Constitute - The World's Constitutions to Read, Search and Compare
Why would someone use this instead of Weather Underground, Weather.com, WeatherSpark, Forecast.io, etc.? It doesn't seem very specific to climbing and there doesn't seem to be much room for growth since Mountain Project is already the go-to site for route and community information.
What on earth kind of tests are running that can whip the I/O of 3 SSDs?!

Maybe worth looking at something like a small fusion-io / other PCI memory card
The height limit is still 256, I believe. There is a mod that uses cubic chunk loading to avoid this.
I agree, they made Allan so pathetic. I also learned that Jon Cryer is an incredibly good comedy actor. Charlie wasn't really acting, he was just being himself but Allan was a real piece of depressing work.
Overcast: coming soon
That's pretty wacky. So from an accounting perspective, the money just disappears for a while? If the phone companies have to post the loss immediately but Apple posts the earnings over time....

Not saying you're wrong. The world of accounting is just odd sometimes.
For the record: I agree 100% with everything you said.
>Students invest in a program and later earn money in their chosen career

And also they invest in a suit and later earn money when they show up at work wearing it. There are definitely professions in which nobody will take them seriously without a nice business suit. Conversely, I think we can agree that many if not most classes taken in college have little bearing on the eventual job.
You totally nailed it. 100% right. Distilled it down to the essentials of how the internet works and the nature of a protocol as a contract. Bravo.
The thing that gets me about these rules is what an insane threat to national security it would be if they were actually necessary. If anyone really thought that mobile devices could significantly interfere with instruments on an airplane, they should 1) raise hell over fixing our obviously broken planes, and 2) demand that we put some effort into actually making sure that people are turning their cell phones off (for instance, by actually checking, rather than asking politely).
I was hoping maybe someone from ZipCar or Lyft would see the posting. I will take your advice and try to reach out to them directly. Believe it or not, the phone thing is a serious issue too. We had one family spending $169/mo on phone bill w/ 1200/mo in income.
Maybe the ultimate solution would be somewhat of a combination of zipcar and lyft, since we don't anticipate charging for the car. (i.e. if you have one of our cars, you are somewhat obligated to give others a lift on your way). Thanks for the suggestions!
This looks like it will change little. You'll still not be able to listen to music on your device (even if the music is local to the drive) during takeoff and landing.

The only change is that you can leave your phone in airplane mode instead of having to power it down.

I don't know anybody that actually listened to the flight attendants. Most people just put their phones in airplane mode anyway.

So basically nothing actually changes. It would be nice to be able to listen to my music without having to hide my headphones so I don't get yelled at.

At least on Virgin they don't bother you because they just assume you're using their entertainment system (which I'd imagine generates more interference then whatever your little device does). I guess on their system you have to watch advertising though - makes it worth it to them.