skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I end up, "refactoring," by consequence of repetition I suppose. There are some days when I can't think of another way to write a fibonacci function (a trivial example... without including obfuscated methods, there are only so many effective ways to implement a function that computes the n-th number of the sequence). On those days I may end up calling to mind a previous solution and simply, "refactor it."

I have conflicting feelings about learning new languages. I do it every now and again but for a craftsperson I don't feel that it is the ideal approach. As some monks I've heard say so it is with programming: you can be fluent in many languages but master none. Real mastery requires dedication and focus over time. But that's not the whole story, is it?

I've met too many developers who will put C on their resume under the assumption that they are capable of writing C programs. More often than not it's a bold-faced lie, but when it isn't I find they are certainly capable of writing a C program and getting something to compile. However there are very few who understand what sequence points are, that still treat the linker like black magic, and don't fully grasp how array and array pointer parameters are changed by the compiler.

The point I'm getting at is that C is generally one of many languages on a programmer's resume. And it's usually an after-thought. However if you really grill someone on the soup-to-nuts of just one of these languages you can find holes in their knowledge. They learn enough to get something useful done but they don't know enough to do truly masterful things with the language. I think about it like being a musician: you can learn enough about an instrument to join a jam but to push the boundaries you need to master one. And mastery is something I find thats consistent, dedicated practice.

As to how to measure whether I could have improved more if I had done something else other than master one thing... I think there's a lack of bounds there that should be determined by your goals. If your goal is to join a jam and play along then you want to learn as little as possible up front and as much as you can as you go along. I think this is the par for modern programmers these days. But if your goal is to push what's possible with a particular instrument then generalizing your knowledge is not nearly as effective as studying music with that instrument alone. Both are valid approaches and it's a matter of limiting the scope of possibilities based on what you want to achieve.

Though mastery tends towards an asymptotic function reaching, but never achieving, perfection.
To go into the details, essentially, its the AHCI-driver(SATA) that handles 2 use-cases differently.

The more common being the case where there is an additional VFS driver between the app attempting sync-I/O and the AHCI driver which simply issues an asynchronous I/O command to the disk and returns immediately. The new data is guaranteed to be on the HDD but NOT guaranteed to be written to the non-volatile platter of the HDD. Data is often still in the HDD internal-cache, waiting to be written to the disk platter.

The 2nd case (very rare) is when the application attempting sync-I/O opens the HDD in raw mode i.e. opens the block device directly(without any VFS layer in between) with O_SYNC. Now following each disk-write, the AHCI driver issues a CMD_FLUSH to ensure that even the HDD cache is immediately flushed to the platter. As this eliminates any chance for NCQ to kick in, the performance drops by an order of magnitude but data-integrity is ensured.
I bought the same feeder in the hopes that this would occur, but it seems my cat just can never get enough. So I run into the trade off between health (my cat's) and sanity (my own). I would still suggest the feeder to everyone to try however, it really is a well made product that could easily fix bad habits in your animals feedings.
Avegant's Virtual Retinal Display
Both gcc and clang appear to lack any way to generate a warning in the first case. Something like splint (http://www.splint.org) does, which is a good argument for including that into a C developer's workflow.
Stop Facebook "pairing ads and friends"
Hopefully that leads to less annoyance / confusion...
I don't know why everyone glorifies silicon valley so much. I could never work in a place where people would stab their own grandmother in the back just to get up one rung.
I'm a person that has spent lots of money on low-latency digital audio interfaces and know from experience that every millisecond counts. It seems like this type of technology always suffers from latency issues. How are latency issue overcome by BandHub?
Also not in this area, but I get the sense that there are a few mindsets to it:

Future is smartphones and the like, let's integrate well with that (ie Kia/Hyundai)

Future is our own thing, but can accommodate some other tech on our systems using back end servers as a shim(ie VAG)

Future is what we chose, will accommodate some bluetooth and USB though (ie Ford)

Future is let us try to get into many OEMs and to make it more appealing offer a developer program (ie OnStar)
"What do you do for fun?"
I want to write about your startup
Hey,

I'm the new editor at SocialTimes.com. Before that I was handling PR for a lot of different startups, and I found getting coverage was kind of a crapshoot. Or. A game of "Who you know".

So, since taking over SocialTimes, I've wanted to fix that. If you're looking for some coverage, email me at STEditor@boun.cr and I'll connect you with our startup reporter.
The WAIS-III was multimodal when I took it. Most of it was as you described, but some of it was general knowledge testing as well.

Overall it was a fun experience since I like taking tests, but I felt it didn't accurately judge anything, regardless of my satisfaction with the result.
Tweets, traffic, shares, comments. Mainly traffic though. Others have email subscription for future posts. It can get quite complex.
Since our own tptacek hasn't shown up, I'm going to link to (the only copy I can find of) one of his great blog posts on this subject:

http://www.securityfocus.com/blogs/262

To quote, emphasis his: Using raw hash functions to authenticate passwords is as naive as using unsalted hash functions. Don’t.
I've always been surprised people thought any different, given the content of IQ tests. Is basically just puzzles and you usually get much better at puzzles if you do them all the time.
> What are the advantages of using this plugin over using git in the terminal directly?

Speaking generally to editor integrations and VCS GUI tools, the prime advantages vs. the CLI tools are:

1) Uninterrupted workflow for common tasks. Select files for commit, review the diffs, then commit all without leaving the editor.

2) Better visualization and interactive workflow. Examples include, good intra-line, side-by-side diff. Being able to `git blame` then trivially explore the associated commits and surrounding history for those commits. Yes, it's possible to do all of this from the command line, but it's often clunky compared to well-thought out tooling. With some VCS systems and projects, graphical display and navigation of history is helpful for understanding the relative state of branches, tracking down obscure bugs, etc.

That said, I'm not a fan of glossy GUI tools that hide the working model of the underlying VCS. For the most part, not using the CLI is a great way to never really "get" version control as a powerful workflow tool. Perforce's P4V GUI tool gets credit on this point. The last time I used it, there was a console that showed the command line run and results for every GUI action. This happened to be a nice learning tool, providing relevant, live examples of basic and advanced usage.
Favorite quotation from Kelly Johnson, former head of the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works:

> Voting on everything prevents anything very stupid from happening, but also anything very brilliant.

You can guess who called the shots in his aircraft design teams. He did, because he was truly fucking brilliant.
Online But Not Connected: The Challenge MOOCs Face
How a Startup made a $7M Series A (Scan Inc)
That's exactly what I imagined. Especially since the entire industry basically works with the government.

I was thinking of working for or at one of space startups: SpaceX, Blue Origin, Planetary Resources, Virgin Galactic, and the mars one foundation.

The truth is, my goal is to eventually start my own company.
>Who uses ColdFusion in 2013?

About 2/3 of the federal government.

Also, that isn't ColdFusion, it's Railo, an OS alternative.
> This has not been proven, otherwise, the article would be very different.

Even the UN's own subcommittee on Cholera agreed.

> Do you seriously think the UN workers went in to one of the poorest, most corrupt countries in the world after disease and sickness were rampant and deliberately introduced cholera?

I don't recall saying that. Let me check - nope never said that. So why are you asking me this?

What I said was they covered it up - which is bad enough. No need for you go make things up about the UN.
This article seems to be about Fortune 500s since the type of waste it demonstrates would not even allow a startup to get off the ground.
> Now is a 40 year old Syrian man looking at pictures of cats on imgur?. That's anomalous.

Hide in porn, watching porn is not suspicious.
Awesome story about Scan Inc. (http://Scan.me) and how the company closed a $7M Series A investment.

(Disclosure, I'm an employee of Scan Inc.)
ناروتو شيبودن 334
Why do people consider GCM difficult to implement in software?

(disclaimer: I worked for a company that sold a GCM implementation)
Bad Hires
Do bad hires happen because of
(a)lack of technical/functional skills or for
other reasons such as

(b)lack of the right cognitive abilities, personality, or the soft skills to get the job done or inability to fit with the team culture, the manager's working style, or organization culture?

My personal belief is that employers do a good job on (a) during pre-screening and interviews, but don't do a god job on (b).

What do you think?
Great points. For us, we want to compare channels, because at the start nothing is optimized. So it isn't all about comparing to incumbents. I'll only see them in effectively higher bids to get the same attention.
This may seem very good and useful at first sight but it actually doesn't mean anything. The classical stance is that intelligence it's something fixed and can't be improved, so the smart guy will outsmart the average guy. Now they say that intelligence can actually improve so it's possible for the average guy to outsmart the smart guy. Well, not at all. If intelligence can improve this means that the average guy can achieve an intelligence on par with that of the smart guy, but the smart guy can also, so the gap still remains. Maybe I'm missing the point but I don't really know what make of the whole article.
The article opens with a claim that (i) an individual's brain is wired in a way which makes change in IQ difficult for a set of healthy humans with IQ over a certain threshold which is basically orthogonal to the main thrust of the article (ii) that higher [potential] IQ has an evolutionary disadvantage
Sure, one can posit that (i) occurs because of (ii): i.e. (iii) to mitigate against the risk of people harming their reproductive ability by training up their IQ, the evolutionary process selects for immutable IQ

But that seems like a hypothesis with little to recommend it against the alternate hypothesis that mutability of IQ is neutral with respect to evolution but evolving brain structures whose performance in certain tasks can be radically improved in adulthood is difficult, period. Especially when one considers that high IQ at birth isn't eliminated from the gene pool, and marked increases in 1930-normalised IQ between generations doesn't appear to markedly disadvantage modern Westerners.

Similarly, it seems simpler to accept that the phenotype "potential 140 IQ" is the consequence of specific, rare combinations of certain genes which overall aren't correlated with survival, without positing side effects of IQ-linked genes. Ubermensch can't be bred because their kids aren't clones rather than because they're necessarily deficient in other ways.

I'd see the incidence of Tay Sachs disease as a counterexample to the theory that high performance in a specific brain function necessarily has evolutionary tradeoffs. Ashkenazi Jews on average test with higher verbal and mathematical intelligence and lower spatial intelligence than other ethnic groups, which could imply that human brains naturally-selected for optimal function in one area are punished in other areas. Ashkenazi Jews are also more likely to carry the recessive gene for the very rare and very debilitating Tay-Sachs disease. But since 26 out of 27 Ashkenazi Jews don't have that recessive gene, which afaik is uncorrelated with IQ amongst Ashkenazi Jews, it suggests the common factor between Askhenazi intelligence and Ashkenazi Tay-Sachs incidence is inbreeding. Reduced average spatial intelligence could, like Tay-Sachs, be the unfortunate effect of a restricted gene pool rather than an "tradeoff" which must inevitably be caused by higher scores in other tests.
> You seem overly concerned with adding your political feelings to the concept of anonymity.

What makes you think those are "political" "feelings"?

> While I do think the title lacks specificity to the topic, I don't think it's incorrect or misleading.

I just changed my mind and I think the same thing as you do.
Same reason accountants do, numbers like .1 aren't approximate repeating fractions in decimal representation.
Great site, but the generators are pretty CPU intensive. Is it the nature of Web audio API, or just heavy computation in your particular case? kmix is really overloaded in KDE when the generator is running (using PulseAudio).
Vendor prefixes? No thanks
Oh, I meant legal rights in the state of nature, the context rayiner was describing - he was the one that said they don't exist therein and I agreed. Natural and human rights function like morals though, they describe what should happen, as opposed to legal rights which describe what will happen, at least given a competent judicial system. Morals exist, right?
There's the famous "5 second boot" for Fedora on an EEE PC 701. That's a weak machine with a small, old, SSD. It's an "honest" boot time - from power on to desktop up with idle CPU and disk.

(https://lwn.net/Articles/299483/)

Here's an article trimming boot time of Fedora 17 to 3 seconds.

(http://www.harald-hoyer.de/personal/blog/fedora-17-boot-opti...)

There's some overlap between the two different approaches.

If you wanted some esoteric hardware you could make an always powered RAM disc.
True, but since virtually no one takes IQ tests on a daily basis, the IQ test is still a valid measure of one's intelligence (or potential, I don't really know what IQ is supposed to measure).
Perhaps that reinforces the point even more?
The unit that caused the biggest problem was listed on 2+ sites, so it is unclear which guests came from which platform. The person previously renting (an owner) ignored multiple requests to stop and only stopped when a fine was introduced. In the NYC market these situations can be very profitable so it is in the renter's/owner's interest to break the rules as much as they feel they can get away with until the equation no longer becomes profitable. This is how condo boards fight the situation -- the fines have to be heavy enough that it impacts the profitability of the entire concept. The condo board is in a position to put a lien on the unit for the money owed, so owners can not ignore the rules without potentially severe consequences.
ExoMars Rover Starts Autonomous Fields Trials in Chile
Strong Cryptography Using Linux's Random Number Generator
Is there any evidence that AirBNB rented rooms increase the spread of bed bugs, crime, and dangerous people?

As an interesting counterpoint here, it's legal to let someone crash on your couch, but the second you ask a dollar from them for the space, everything changes. That doesn't necessarily make sense to me.
Disclaimer: "they", now "the company", includes you, garretgee and cahlansharp.
pud's latest project is still on the homepage of HN and he wrote it in CFML: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6519743 Just because project X is not written in your language of choice, means absolutely nothing. Its all about execution and this project is pretty impressive.
The article kindly submitted here is from 2011. There is a new article, from today,

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/2013/10/...

that follows up on recent cognitive training research. The research conclusions are becoming more and more nuanced, and thus are better and better guides to practical things you can do for your own intelligence boosting.
> in the real world, the penalty for being wrong is HUGE

In some situations (committing an integrated circuit design to manufacture probably being one), the cost of being wrong is pretty big.

Other situations where there's a tight feedback loop and you can make/propagate changes quickly (say, most web app software development), it's less so.
SurgeryLink Helps Coordinate the Surgical Process
It means that effort becomes more of a factor. OK, if you hold effort constant, maybe the gap remains, but not everyone is equally hard-working.
Actually its just notes in my notebook and stuff clipped into an Evernote notebook but it I'll see about putting something up on my robotics page.
Awesome adventure for sure
TrueCrypt is an awesome product and the value-add from a thorough, independent audit would be immense. I use it in conjunction with Dropbox to add my own security layer. Dropbox only uploads the delta changes in a truecrypt container even though it's encrypted.
I don't have to worry about bugs like these : http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/20/dropbox-security-bug-made-p... which can exist with 2FA too.
I'd love to have a heightened sense of trust in TC if it's independently reviewed.

I'm curious why didn't this go up on kickstarter?
I agree I might be wrong, but let me try to do the math (so you can improve it with your knowledge.)

Let's say 10 million hospitalized patients a year, 100 data points entered by a nurse, another 300 from lab tests during the visit, 50 entered by a doctor, 50 entered by a pharmacist.

Let's postulate 8 bytes per data element (most are numeric or ordinal.) This leads to:

10,000,000x8x500=4E10 bytes=40GB

Compressed, this would fit on a DVD (8.5 GB)

(I agree the numbers are somewhat larger if unstructured text is added to the mix, but it still seems to fall short of the terabytes of data I would expect for a "big data" approach.)

Usually I thought the "big data" moniker is applied to web sites where every minuscule site interaction is audited from every user across 10mil+ users, leading to much larger data sets. Or, it is used in the context of crawling the entire web where many many petabytes of data become available.

You might have better knowledge of the numbers involved and can correct me, please do.
The adversary, Hezbollah, used access to the telephone company logs (they have those), and searched for atypical mobile phone usage patterns.

Very important observation for advocates of two-factor authentication: cellular network and SMS services in some parts of the world are not trustworthy. It's much better to use single strong password versus weak password + numeric codes delivered by SMS which can be monitored/changed on the fly by an adversary.
If they're not part of the online team :(.

The game is fantastic I'm very hooked!
In my opinion: Far from it, I find it hilariously easy.
I've done it some 20 times at least but I got into a Gnome environment flawlessly the first time around (following the Beginner's Guide.)

The majority of those installs have been on my main computer (a laptop) because I couldn't find the source of my issues with X not initializing. You could argue full re-installs are overkill, but I say no.

Fun-fact, Turned out to be a fault with GDM (I use Gnome Shell), and I finally fixed my pains with a total of three commands.
That was the second biggest reason I didn't pull the trigger on a Ford Fusion Energi a couple months ago (first one being Microsoft Software running critical car systems)
That's a great technique and one which I particularly like because it also tends to be more representative of the real job: you almost always want to work with the person who says “Slow down, let's make sure we understand this…” when handed a hasty spec and proposed solution
Are you suggesting that if both weak and strong people go to the gym regularly then the differences between them will remain?
For the whole response or just that part?
Sure, that way you could apply shake-reduction or framerate adjustments (like slow motion) after capture. Or, re-encode to send as MMS or something.
But will I get dumber by wasting my intellectual capacity?
People who score high on IQ tests do take IQ tests (or similar puzles on a daily basis).

> I don't really know what IQ is supposed to measure

Neither does anyone else.
Gwern has some very good essays; I don't think this is one of them, because it's about 'laws' created on less wrong rather than anything actionable.

It seems possible to dismiss this entire article with another less wrong catechism: "life isn't fair."
That looks really cool -- is there a way to get Google Glass from outside the US?
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 beta arrives
Generally if senior management is open to change you wouldn't be in the hellhole to begin with.
Then I don't understand your use of quotes.

Putting scare quotes only makes sense if you think he meant more likely than not, since otherwise he's just saying that whatever probability it is needs consideration (if you're in that situation). Which seems utterly reasonable.
I think this occurs to nearly everyone. It's commonly referred to as a "pepper"[1], and is generally considered not all that helpful in most scenarios, as well as being potential evidence that you're a witch^W^WDoing Your Own Crypto, which is bad.

[1] See towards the end of the very comprehensive first answer.
http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/211/how-to-secur...

Then go back, read the rest of it :)
How to Network Less For Geeks
Google Analytics with Indiegogo's New Campaigner Dashboard
great read. Bugs me that investors expect entrepreneurs to be so forthcoming and commital, when they are anything but.
Huuh, that sounds pretty shit, I'll have to increase the frequency of my backups... Do you have a link to that issue handy?
Interesting! If anyone wants to give it a go, I just made a quick Dual-N-back app a couple of days ago, after reading Gwern's (who else?) excellent FAQ on the subject.

My web app:
http://nnback.ukoki.com

Gwern's FAQ:
http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ
Very cool, I had been trying to get together my old band from back in South America but we had not been able to find a way for us to get it done. Looks great, will give it a try this weekend.
Citation needed, please. I don't know where nature is decimal.
How you can make a lot of money with a Bubble Startup
How Shotguns and Politics Prepared me for Startups
With secure shell, you can make it significantly more useful. Of course, you still need a box to SSH into.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec...
If drugs were legal, there would be no need to kill anyone for fear of being revealed or extorted.

Prohibition also created a significant amount of violence... which has all but mysteriously disappeared. I wonder why. Did people magically become less evil? I think not. I think a fundamental flaw in the system was addressed properly back then, and certain perverse incentives were eliminated.

Eliminate the illegality and you eliminate the incentive for "hits" to prevent jail time or extortion.
PandoDaily just released the story on how Scan secured the funding.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6523182
Mathematicians and Computer Scientists Shrug over the NSA Hacking