skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I definitely agree with this. With all these multi-featured & difficult to secure smartphones out there, we definitely have an untapped market in enterprise-secure smartphones in the same way box.com is the enterprise-version[1] of dropbox.com.

1. Note I'm avoiding the argument about what makes dropbox less secure than box.com. I have no idea, but somehow box.com is making money. The company I work for mandated box.com over dropbox citing "security concerns". Whatever the reason/mindset exists that concludes dropbox is less secure than https://www.box.com/enterprise/ , is the same mindset that would buy "enterprise-secure" smartphone over whatever trendy iOS/Android phone is available.
Crap. I was hoping for an investor that actually had some kind of real plan, some technical synergy they could offer... Facebook or Sony or Canonical or something.
Literally, WTF!

The first thing you see is a large picture of molten human remains. That's just horrific.
Hear what they want?

Apple made a huge deal about how secure it was an how much of an improvement and how very sophisticated it was. It turns out, it wasn't really.

Now people are saying "well, they never really said it was all that good, or meant to keep you secure", blah blah blah.

Let's start with the basic press release:

"and introducing Touch ID™, an innovative way to simply and securely unlock your phone with just the touch of a finger."

" “iPhone 5s sets a new standard for smartphones, packed into its beautiful and refined design are breakthrough features that really matter to people, like Touch ID, a simple and secure way to unlock your phone with just a touch of your finger.""

From http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/09/10Apple-Announces-iP...

"“There’s so much personal stuff on these devices; our email, our photos, our contacts. We have to protect them. The most common way is to set up a passcode. A simple 4-digit passcode, or a more complex one if you want. Unfortunately, some people find it’s too cumbersome and dont set it up. In our research as much as half of people don’t ever set it up.”"

"We’ve set up a new technology that makes this super easy to do. We call it: Touch ID."

"“Your fingerprint is one of the best passwords in the world.”"

This was said by Apple at the iphone 5s press conference.

This says it is meant to replace the passcodes, and it was "one of the best passwords in the world", and supposed to be able to protect personal data.

Here's a cite: http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/10/live-blog-from-apples-iphon...

You can verify from other transcripts as well.
I avoided the slides they had explaining how very sophisticated the sensor technology was.

So what i'm getting at is that most of the comments in this thread smack of "Apple never really meant it to do X, or Apple didn't say it would be all that secure". They did, on both counts.
They said it would replace passwords, and they said it was quite secure.

The claims otherwise are ridiculous.
That announcement at least tells me something is going on, but i am not seeing a disruption. I have a total outage. I cannot even get to the login page.
It should be fine.
At the very least they should have some TF2 hats for code contributors!
You need a 10x environment to be a 10x engineer. Any 10x engineer can be held back by months or years of legacy and bad code cleanup to start getting to his 10x productivity level.
That is slightly incorrect, at least if one takes "slightly" to mean "widly". Actually, as the blog points out, he invests 25K while the invited investors can pitch in up to a totla of 250K. He gets 20% of any profit off this 250k, which is 10 times his own investment. So for every point of profit on his own investment, he gets two additional point back (250K/25k x 20% = 200%). That's a nice scheme were there is no increase in risk yet there is 3x the return on investment he'd normally get. So, for a corral of startup that would net 5% on average, he'd get 15% average instead. No additional cash nor risk involved. Meanwhile, the invited get 4% instead of 5%. Would you invest in a scheme were the risk are the same but the return 20% less? Yet again, the riches get richer.
The term is "death march" [1]. Entirely appropriate for this story.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_march_(project_management...
I understand that the flexibility of FPGA has a great cost, but with them we might have a better chance to ensure what the processor is actually doing.

I like your idea.
As long as they can squeeze more than $4.7B out of RIM, it doesn't matter if it's a dying brand (which it is).
Today I Deleted My LinkedIn Account; You Probably Should Too
Thanks! Completely agree.

It is definitely an early MVP :).

Lots more to do filling out the features, improving the UI, and stability improvements, but we hit the point where there are so many things we could do next we want to make sure we focus first on what people urgently need.

If you have any needs this could fill and want to see us prioritize any tools would love to hear them.
The differences in licensing between the BSD license and GPL are designed to prevent them from doing all of what Apple did with FreeBSD.
I assume the drop was in search referral traffic - did specific keywords get hit more so than others? If you're whole site has been penalized, you should see the affect across all your keywords. Also check out webmaster tools for more insight - https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en
Who is the government to say that a particular review isn't authentic? Reviews are subjective. While it is in fact a difficult argument to say that a review for the fake business used in this entrapment operation is authentic, perhaps I love or don't love the name or location of the business, and give it a rating based upon that. Maybe I own a yogurt shop, and automatically hate all of my competitors. No one can tell me that I can't like or dislike any business for any reason, whether I have visited them or not.

There is a reason that 100% of these cases were settled....these cases would have been laughed out of a courtroom on constitutional grounds. Personally, I would have forced them to take it to court, but most businesses don't want the headache.
From the article kindly submitted here: "The data comes from an analysis by Payscale, a salary data and software company for individuals and businesses."

In other words, the data is correlational, and not based on random assignment to an experimental condition and control condition. So we have no idea what the causation is here. By my observation, the kind of young people who get into private engineering colleges are different already, at high school age, from the kind of young people who don't go to college at all, so it's by no means clear that attending college causes any part of their difference in earnings in adult life.

For someone going to college with someone else's money (whether the someone else is a parent, a government agency, or a fee waiver by the college), sure, go to as much college as you can eat. Being paid to be a student is a very happy condition of life. But for someone who is paying for college out of pocket, the economic calculations become different, because college has to be paid for with present dollars, but its claimed economic return comes in future dollars, if at all. Economists, of course, have finance calculations for figuring out the approximate present value of a future income stream, and quite a few economists think (if only we could resolve that issue of causation) that what colleges charge for tuition is a bargain compared to the economic value of gaining a college degree.

A young person of college-applying age will, according to research,[1] be very strongly dissuaded from applying to college if poor, even if also smart. But dumb high school students from rich families go to college in large numbers. Only some of the Ivy Plus research universities and liberal arts colleges make much of an effort at all to identify high-ability students from low-income families and recruit those. Right now college mostly advantages the economically advantaged.

[1] Partial list of links to commentary and research on low-income, high-ability students:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/business/economy/25leonhar...

http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/18586.html

http://siepr.stanford.edu/publicationsprofile/2555

https://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/magazine/issues/2011sum...

http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap....
Canada's Fairfax offers to acquire BlackBerry in $4.7B deal
BlackBerry's Ridiculously Fast Demise in 3 Charts
Just proves heroism is stupid. His death threw Soviet space program back for several years. Postponing the mission would undeniably cause much less harm if any at all.

But it's in Russian nature to take stupid risks that are clearly not worth it. Авось.
Thanks! It was my first attempt writing a vim function, so wasn't exactly sure. This looks much better.
TechShop Seeks Big Bucks Using JOBS Act
Does anyone have a list of the names of the companies?
Almost every major engine out there (ie: IdTech, Unreal Engine, Unity, Frostbite) is cross platform off the shelf.
Very happy to see this. These companies are shameless, and there needs to be a deterrent against businesses trying to deceive consumers doing research. This has nothing to do with free speech.
This is alot closer to an xbox than a pc. Value just doing it via slightly different (and smarter) process. This is still aimed squarely at the gaming market it's just a bigger pass at it.
I run a Facebook fan page for a TV show, and use Teespring (http://www.teespring.com) to monetize the page.

Every few months I do a sale, which nets around $4,000 USD.
Worse than spam, maybe, but I hope the defense would be able to make a compelling case that using the specification as designed doesn't constitute wire fraud...

This wouldn't be terribly different from (not that I know an example) me sending a letter to friend A and putting friend B as the return address, sending a letter by proxy. Of course in that case, there isn't even a method to see who actually sent the letter, whereas the information on who sent the email is still contained in the email.
When doing tech interviews, I always prefer to interview experienced people. I find that digging into a project that they did before was all I need to figure out if the candidate is worth going forwards with. My big red flag is when the candidates have "leading project X generating Y revenue or Z customer engagement" in their resumes, but are not able to articulate the system/product architecture, or tell me what the biggest technical challenge encountered.
A somewhat more formal argument is the first and/or second derivatives are probably significantly large negative numbers so numerically integrating the past implies very little about the future.

Or if you like an analogy, gravity makes a negative 2nd deriv of height. So if you toss an apple into the air, you can numerically integrate the "foot seconds" underneath the graph of height for the first two seconds. That doesn't mean the number of "foot seconds" area of the graph for time interval 20 seconds to 22 seconds will be identical or even have a linear relationship with "foot seconds" time interval 0 to 2 seconds.

(edited to remove the asterisks in foot seconds which makes the HN software somewhat unhappy)
The Biggest Bitcoin Win in Gambling History
Auditioning sounds great, atleast from a college graduate's perspective. Make the new graduates work on problems. A percentage of new generation of coders end up learning that whiteboard tests work perfectly fine and are the de facto standard.
emails started to pour in here... some with roughly 4hrs delay.
For me the issue is coming up with the tasks to farm out. Do most companies have lots of discrete tasks that don't require domain knowledge?

Everyone says it takes 3 months to a year before a developer is really up to speed and hits their peak contribution levels. How does that square with this new philosophy of interviewing-by-contracting?
Your words are extremely accurate to me. There ARE 10x engineers but it takes a lot of experience to even have a chance at becoming one. A new grad ( even out of somewhere lik e Stanford ) has no chance to be a 10x engineer especially in a startup landscape (assuming a small startup with few extremely experienced engineers) without proper mentorship. The only people that i would say are 10x have worked at larger companies and have had multiple great mentors across many technologies ( once again the breadth and depth thing )
Lying about a business in a public forum with the sole motivation of harming the business... that's fraud.

"fraud is intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual;" Not a legal definition, but a good enough definition for now.

I think it's a decent use of taxpayer money to help combat the defrauding of businesses in the area.

If they were printing these fake derogatory reviews in local newspapers or on local TV, would your opinion of the fraud change?
Dutch Students Break Electric Car Acceleration Record
Alexis Ohanian: Making Something People Love (Video)
Apache Drill
Because they already ported Steam to Linux and have about 200 titles native on Linux. That fits quite well with "Hundreds of great games are already running natively on SteamOS." statement. I do not see why they would force game developers to do the work again.
Although I wrote a competing tool I have to admit I do like fabric.

Many of my own web-applications use it for deployment, and for that purpose it works wonderfully:

* Login via SSH to upload a tarball, generated via git.

* Deploy on remote machine, with a versioned path.

* Reload services.

Just as simple as it needs to be.
To me this whole discussion boils down to Murphy's law. We know the DoD is pro-military and has a huge budget for PR. We know making a movie requires a lot of cash (and for most non-scifi movies: props.)

There is need; there is opportunity; there is will on both sides. What can happen, will happen, and has happened.

To what extent I have no idea, but while I haven't yet seen an American-made movie that is wholly critical of the US military and the politics governing it, I wouldn't shout conspiracy. In my opinion, Hollywood is the least nationalistic of all countries' film-community, because it doesn't have to answer to their main audience's constant need for re-affirmation. The rest of the western world may have lost respect for the US the last decade or two, but we still envy the hell out of you, no denying that.
Surface RT owner here (freebie). LOVE the interface. Love the hardware (nice solid feel and excellent touch recognition). Wish kickstand would have 2 positions.. It's slower than a pro but I can deal with that. Crappy cameras, but not a show stopper.

My main beef why I can't recommend it is compatibility. If that was addressed, the number of apps would skyrocket and I'd be a huge fan.

You would think since MSFT is late to this market, putting in a low-medium cost, highly functional tablet to reverse the trend to apple and google would allow them to catch up quickly. The pro price is currently on par to an Ipad. Hopefully CEO #3 will do that.
I think this is a bit more complicated than normal.

You can read the RFCs if you want to, but normally what happens if an email cannot be delivered is that it will sit in the queue on the SMTP server trying to relay it with status: deferred.

What's different this time around is that gmail is actually reporting that emails ARE being delivered, even though they may not be.

Earlier this morning, I did a manual SMTP transaction[1] with aspmx.l.google.com and got an OK status when I sent the email.

This means that a server relaying mail to gmail would NOT leave a message in its own queue (to retry delivery later), because the server would "think" that it had been delivered.

The problem here is that my "delivered" message did not show up in my inbox until quite a bit later.

SO! Instead of the SMTP system being able to take care of its own outages, the responsibility is upon google to have properly queued messages for delivery internally, and then to deliver them when the system goes back to normal.

It sounds like what is happening is that google is accepting the messages, but then they aren't getting delivered to a mailbox. They're being queued somewhere along the way (at google).

--

Your emails will probably be fine, but unfortunately you probably can't call your mail administrator and ask what is up (unless you work at google). Normally, you'd be able to look in your smtp logs and see a message status (delivered, deferred, etc.)
Isn't that illegal, making money off someone elses product? How many subs do you have?
In my naive young western view, Gagarin (and possibly Komarov) would be one of the most likely people to get away with it. These guys were national heroes. They had statues built of them.

Shifting to a different dictatorship, the case has been made in Burma that the only reason Aung San Suu Kyi was kept alive the whole time was that her father was very well regarded even by the military.

But then I've also read 1984 and remember the memory holes.
Such anecdotes are very difficult to evaluate. Suppose I told you I met 10X engineers. But that doesn't mean these individuals are really 10X engineers, merely that I believe they are. (Do you believe everything I believe? If you learned my politics, you may very well believe I'm a lunatic. So why believe any other observations I make of people?)

What would help is a reasonable study of them. Upon identifying these 10X'ers, does anyone analyze/interview them, their coworkers and managers? Dissect their team dynamics, like we analyze sports teams?

Can we empower people to become 10X'ers? Maybe it's not the 10X'ers themselves, but the happy co-incidence of person and institution? Do these 10X'ers merely thrive where others are miserable, like they enjoy boss-subordination or talk so much that others get bored, so they look great in relative terms? Does their job mandate Java, and they secretly use a high-level compiler which outputs readable Java? (I know someone who did this; seemed anal about indentation.) Do they initiate projects, and others basically maintain their quick 'n dirty designs?

This article isn't denying the possibility of isolating 10X engineers. Merely that the usual mental framework, which includes the "10X engineer" concept, has problems. Consider pre-Galilean frameworks which said everything comes to rest. Galileo's framework of frictionless surfaces seems absurd; when's the last time you touched a frictionless surface? In this sense, the old explanations seem more applicable to reality. Yet counter-intuitively, denying reality helped us discover more useful models. Do we necessarily want models which focus so much on 10X individuals, when that's not an ultimate goal?
Remember Apollo-1.
Well, building a secure, well-ventilated, extensible, vault with reliable power sources, internet backbones, etc, is mainly an infrastructure cost that won't change year-to-year.

But servers are definitely a loss, that's for sure.
Anytime your reasoning is "we shouldn't do it because it will make them attractive to other companies" you're probably wrong.

You want a company full of super-stars that everyone wants to poach. Otherwise you're just like the companies that prohibit employees from have linkedin profiles or don't give employees training because that makes them more poachable. Crazy.
Can you explain how the reviewers are committing fraud? If anything, it's the businesses falsely advertising.
Fantastic link, thank you!
minify it
Meaning they randomly lock up the system about once every three days?
I started working at an insurance company (my second real job) 6 mos ago. Insurance companies are banks but instead of getting money to invest from depositors, it comes from businesses and individuals who hold policies.

A population of policy holders is predictable most of the time. You take the money that you know you won't have to pay out and you invest it.

Warren Buffet's money comes from Geico etc. That's why they advertise so much. The operations of Geico do not return fast enough to justify that marketing spend. Warren Buffet's portfolio of businesses, on the other hand, return handsomely.

A good sized fraction of the money of the people who see all those commercials gets funneled directly into GEICO's float and increases Buffet's leverage.
How is "Windows 8" NOT found on this discussion???

It is very unlikely, had Microsoft not decided to go nuts and release a dead-end train wreck of an OS that thew it's passengers/users into the ravine in the name of chasing MacOS and touchscreens that everyone wanted with the same enthusiasm as to 3DTV, that Valve would be so scared of the future on Windows that they would need their own Linux-based platform. Not to mention Mac support.

I am a huge Linux advocate, but this is much more about Valve being scared and running away from Microsoft Windows than it was the greatness of GNU/Linux.

I wonder how Steve Ballmer being fired will change the direction of Microsoft and it's products. What will be the future of Windows?

If they keep trying to actively throw their users off the train with wildly backwards-incompatible user experiences, you can expect even Microsoft Office to start supporting GNU/Linux for fear of the future of Windows.
> PHP - seems like it has passed peak relevance

You're joking, right? If you hang around HN and /r/php for too long then maybe you might not be joking.

PHP is becoming better and better for each release.

VentureBeats says PHP powers 75% of the web[0], although they don't give an exact source for that number.

Python is extremely simple to learn. Heck, there's a book for 8 year old children to learn it[1].

If you're a pure front-end guy that doesn't have much experience with server-side languages, why not learn something that utilizes Javascript? I've heard good things about Node, for example.

Go and Java may be a little too different to what you know to serve well as a starting point, imho.

[0] http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/17/google-app-engine-finally-...

[1] http://briggs.net.nz/snake-wrangling-for-kids.html
Because fraud means to be deceptive towards someone else for personal gain.

I guess you could argue like a racketeering effect-- who is guilty of murder, the man who pulls the trigger or the mafia boss who orders the hit? (Spoiler: both).

In fact, I'd love to see a State Attorney General use RICO to target not just a group of reviewers who are defrauding businesses, but the entire supply chain by which they get their targets and get paid for their illegal behavior.
The release of Steam on Ubuntu was a precursor to this. Valve encouraged developers to port their games to Ubuntu and ported their own games. It is unlikely that they would do that again. This will likely be a linux system with gnu userspace for now, even though they would have a custom UI.
> This article, like nearly all on the topic, ignores the distinction between correlation and causality

It's sort of interesting that if you look at race breakdowns in the United States, Asians have the highest median income and also highest likelihood in attending college. White Americans are second.

Then if you look at interracial marriage in the United States, the highest median household income combinations are Asian Male - White Female followed closely by White Male - Asian Female. Furthermore, a white marrying an Asian notably has a higher likelihood of possessing a college degree than a white marrying within or Black or Hispanic.

I'm only mentioning these because stats show correlation between income and education levels.
Yet another article on hiring without empirical data. And as everyone knows, "gut feeling" doesn't actually turn out to be correct that often in recruiting (otherwise we would have solved the problem already).
It's so awesome. I'm gonna use it for my next impress.js presentation this Thursday. Thanks, Marek! :)