skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
OR is a discipline that studies systems and processes, then optimizes them based on statistical and mathematical modeling. At least from a high level, that's the key. In industry, it's used for routing (see UPS, any big box store, Amazon) of goods, in airlines for management of passengers and routes. In industrial processes they take the various factors involved (material costs, personnel costs, time, safety, whatever) and develop models to enable better decision making. Many applications of it are, essentially, applied statistics and math modeling. EDIT: In a factory setting OR/IE types are heavily involved in layout of the environment, often modeled as a network. Workstations might be nodes, transit between them are edges. Various costs would be involved. Node A generates widget A at a rate of T_A, node B requires node A and item B - externally sourced - to produce widget B. Node B is the bottleneck, break it out into 3 worker processes... If this sounds like how we design distributed processes in software, it's because it's the same problem, fundamentally.

As to the puzzle, I guess it's about modeling the problem in a manner similar to other business processes. Consider the game as a business process model of handling a software CR. Each chute is a potential setback (crap, found an error during QA, send it back to testing for analysis) and the ladders could be things that advance a process unusually quickly (we got the data from the customer on the error, turned out it isn't with our code but documentation on how to use the program, update the manual and bypass testing/SQA). Collect data over time, optimize away inefficiencies or deficiencies that induce extra work or rework.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research

EDIT 2: Not sure if tired or autocorrect, but manor and manner are not the same thing.
Certainly. --hard should only be used if you actually want what --hard provides.
I will certainly do that.
What's with the sudden outpouring of Google-hate of late?

I totally get that Google is changing, and has been doing so for a while. But I don't see that as "evil," and I'm struggling to see why anybody would.

Google around maybe five or six years ago was a wasteland of shoddy, broken, unintegrated products, many with half-assed, confusing interfaces. That's been tightened up - many of their products are now substantially better; there's a coherent account and profile system in place; the weak products have been culled. Their focus is a lot better.

I'm probably using Google resources less than I used to - GMail's interface pisses me off, the new Maps layout is infuriating, and search is broadly speaking totally broken for me in places. I'm also acutely aware that Google's audience has changed - it's no longer tech-savvy early adopters, but almost everybody who has an Internet connection. Unfortunately, the interests of the minority groups of users are going to fall by the wayside as the business evolves.

To some extent, that's great - it opens up gaps in the market where other products can get a look-in. If Google's search sucks, I'm sure a competitor will pop up. Same with Gmail, or Docs, or Hangouts… etc.

There are unsurprisingly some areas in which Google's record is not 100% clean - they stopped supporting RSS, removed XMPP federation, require profile verification (apparently) - but in most cases, I can certainly see how the business or technical case for these could legitimately be made. These are not evil actions - they're just ones that you (and I) don't agree with. Fair enough - we're under no obligation to use Google's services. In the meantime, they continue to develop a huge diversity of open-source software and protocols, and I hear it's still a great place to work.

I guess at the end of the day you could be right - Google has declined from your perspective. But I doubt that's true from the perspective of their wider user base.
To be fair, the banana peel is edible, too. Have seen video where a monkey will happily eat the peel with the banana, whereas another monkey will properly peel it off with the expert ease of a human.
Will I consider eating the peel of a banana? No.
WIll I consider drying the peel out and trying to smoke it - let's not go there.
I recently moved to South Africa from the US for 10 months and had to be very judicious about what to take with me. My model M keyboard made the list even though it weighs a ton and takes up much valuable space. I was willing to "downsize" from two large monitors to a single laptop monitor, but there is no way I'm going to spend all all typing on a laptop keyboard!

I'll travel to the ends of the earth with mine!
20% time is the idea that it's OK to put "only" 32 hours (or, in practice, 25-30) on your assigned project, but there is certainly not an 8-hour maximum on the side project.

If you want a promotion, you'll have to put in more time than 25-32 hpw; but you won't get in trouble at that effort level. Of course, this is true in most companies-- a 25-hour effort on your assigned work is not low enough to get you fired, almost anywhere; it means that you're not outrunning the bear but you're outrunning someone-- but the difference is that you don't have to hide side projects. That makes a pretty substantial difference.

It's a good idea, not because the number means anything, but because it means that (under most managers, although there are exceptions) you don't have to deny or hide working on other things ("skunk works") that might prove useful. You can talk about them openly. In companies without 20%T projects, people still do those types of projects, but are afraid to share their work, which means those projects go nowhere. Google doesn't seem to have that problem. If you build a demo and share it, that's encouraged.

Google is still better than many companies (yes, I'll say it; it is, if you land in the right place, a great place to work) but an incredible amount depends on your manager. The biggest moral failing of Google probably is how easily a manager can become a SPOF for your career. That's not different from most companies, but any firm that wants to call itself progressive ought to solve that problem. You'd think it would be a first order of business.
I also bought a PS3 late in the PS3 cycle. My point is that a lot of the games that came out on PS3 that I would have played, I didn't because at the time I didn't have one.
Only reason to be disappointed is if you expected something else out of capitalists....
No, and I have a feeling in a few more years they will be worth as much as they were then.
Agreed about the camera module, with the important caveat that, like most of the rest of the Pi, the guts are proprietary Broadcom stuff. In particular, there are really basic camera settings (the light meter, white balance) that aren't accessible to the user.

Want to maintain a consistent white balance or exposure between shots? Sorry, no can do. And since it's a proprietary blob, it's not something you can fix.
"from the standpoint of someone who has to review and integrate lots of branches from a large distributed team"

I think this is a very telling point. I found git infuriating and inconsistent to an irresponsible degree, until I realized it wasn't built for me as a producer of code. It was built for people who have to integrate lots of code from lots of disparate producers. Once that lightbulb clicked a lot of things started to make more sense.

I still find git infuriating as part of my daily development workflow, but at least I get it now. I still have a hard time recommending it for small teams that are doing on the fly integration, but for the big distributed team model, I could see it being the best choice.
Getting Seed Capital to Turn an Idea Into a Startup
Taking your logic a bit further: the final product is what we (should be) interested in. Python or C++ or LaTeX or whatever are just to help us make it. Everything else, whether it be Python or git or C++ or Mecurial or vim or Windows or an ergonomical mouse, is just there to help us make the final product in an easy and quality manner.

I don't see a problem with worrying about git any more than I see one with worrying about Python. Change for the sake of change is bad, but change for the sake of an improved workflow is good.
I think what it boils down to is that Google, for its users, used to be all about giving the Internet neat things. But now they're all "more wood behind fewer arrows" and shutting down things (Google Reader, real estate search, whatever) and are little more than an advertising company.

The magic is gone, and that's a special kind of disappointment.
Wouldn't the example with the if/elif be the same as the above TypeError one? I suppose a ValueError would actually be more appropriate.

Proper design by contract support would be great too.
> used to be reserved only for PCs

Used to be something only PCs were capable of doing.
the societal move to destigmatize obesity is the culprit. It's now okay to be big and beautiful.
their card looks better (chip access), but the whole case thing doesn't make sense, It looks massive in the picture. My initial reaction with coin was that its counter intuitive, NFC or just mobile (square/paypal) are clearly the future. However, the coin card seems like a brilliant move now, they're entering the market through the path where everyone is familiar with the form factor and the technology isn't overwhelming.
I guess this is yet another reminder that the first example sticks (waterfall model).
I read the damn thing three times and can't find a point to any of it. What I see is a bunch of rambling doom and gloom statements: "and then it all came tumbling down". What exactly has tumbled here? The fact they jacked with the YouTube comment system?
Opposite of viral? - users too scared to use app
10 articles a month isn't exactly frequently. At the low end, you are suggesting that people throw more than a dollar per article at them. You shouldn't find it surprising that many people will baulk at that.
20 terabits/second

http://hawaikicable.co.nz/index.php/network
Yeah, this is too much for me. It's creating a problem out of something that I would never consider to be a problem otherwise. I'm typing here on my Dell laptop keyboard with zero problems. As a matter of fact, mechanical key sounds would probably make my computing experience incredibly annoying.
Not the whole presentation, but some slides and better notes: http://gigaom.com/2013/11/15/how-amazon-is-building-substati...
I can see your point but the fundamental problem is that unless you have a simple linear history a DVCS can't possibly know how to merge and apply patches without some heuristics. At best the DVCS can be a tool to assist you.

There is of course a lot of simple tasks which DVCS can and do apply near perfectly but I suppose managing a complex project you're at some point going to have to have a basic understanding of how the system works.

I've used IBM's RTC which is an excellent GUI VCS tool that I believe internally works similar to git/hg but it attempts to hide how its internals works so on a large merge 500+ changesets and then remerging more commits it refused to push despite saying no incoming changesets. We ended up fixing it by pulling to a different repository based of the branch we were trying to merge from based of advice from support. But I'd prefer a deterministic cli interface over a gui interface anyday.
Migrating to AWS
Python  FOSDEM 2014 - Call For Proposals
I found a 68K SGI Iris 2400 machine up and running in college in about 2004. It had a sticker with the hostname on it. Later on that week, I went to the department homepage, got the staff roster and tried to guess the usernames.

I telnetted to port 25 and tried RCPT TO hypothesized names, like so

$ telnet host 25
MAIL FROM: a@a.com
250 Sender OK
RCPT TO: afranks
550 Recipient not found
RCPT TO: arty.franks
250 Recipient OK

...

With this list of usernames I logged into the FTP to try to guess trivial passwords:

$ telnet host 21
USER arty.franks
User OK
PASS 1234
Login failed
PASS password

...

Eventually I got a valid username/password combo.

Now I can just telnet <host> and log in. I got a line like this:

Last login April 12, 1992.
$

It had this ancient version of IRIX on it, a hard drive under 100 MB, no X, a version of egcs, some ancient version of perl, no bash, and I think 12MB of RAM?

It was fun, but I didn't know what I wanted to do with it. We executed this attack from the school library. Putz'd around a bit, in amazement of how old it was, and that it was still online, and then logged out - never to return.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EEY87HAHzk - a video of the machine
If your OS is shit, your environment is shit, at least your language doesn't have to be shit.
I loved the early Google. A lot. But it's dead now. What's left is just the name and a dusty plaque in the corner that reads: don't be evil.

It will still attract smart people, but they will be of other kind to match the new company culture. The kind that joins Microsoft and Oracle. Those who follow the protocol, happy in their bubble, with the prime goal of maximization of profit. At all costs.
> The only proven way to reduce alcohol harms is to limit consumption through increased pricing and limiting availability. Most governments have shied away from this...

This article lost me pretty early with these words. Here in British Columbia, Canada, minimum pricing is also in effect. I can tell you full well it does nothing to control consumption and, as with most prohibitions, only increases the amount of social problems. I've looked into the research proving it is effective and haven't managed to find any. I question where the author gets his facts.
I'm buying a Galaxy Note 3 just because this was such an awesome move!
Beautiful Google India ad
Ask HN: Advice to a college student working on a startup?
Where does being a student fit into the equation? Tips? Suggestions? Stories?
Still, a certain mental makeup is necessary to be able to switch between projects like that. When I work on a project that interests me, I go to bed thinking about it, and in the morning I want to continue where I left it. Often I'll see things clearer after such a sleep break, and then I cannot just switch to another project instead of trying out an idea I had.
That's not correct, you can get back to any ref in the reflog, including those that you moved away from with git-reset --hard. Those commits are just dangling but are easy to get back to. I've got a presentation [1] that goes into how to use the reflog and how the various flags in reset work (among other things) that could explain more.

[1]: http://tednaleid.github.io/showoff-git-core-concepts/
Introducing the new SocialDrv fare calculator
The paragraph involving Steve Jobs is a misquote at best or a completely wrong at worst. If you read the article that paragraph links, it doesn't mention "maximizing profit" or money at all.

I think this paragraphs reflects badly on the entire article – it makes the article appear to be a struggle to create a connect-the-dots conspiracy behind Google's actions (evil Steve Jobs told Larry Page to be evil and now Google is evil).

Steve Jobs told Larry Page to gave a strong focus on key products. You could certainly argue that Google are too strongly focussed on AdWords and Google+ but that's not the point that McClure argues.
It used to be more or less pegged, but at least over the past several months it's not quite that simple: http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/period-charts.php?period=al...

It's hard to make a profit with litecoin, but a single 7950 can still make you around USD $1/day right now after electricity costs. I have a friend who started mining with 4 of them when summer began, they (and the motherboard, power supply, etc. he used for his setup) ROI'd a while ago. I don't know if it makes sense to buy new GPUs anymore... But at least if it does become unprofitable for all but those who have the best GPUs on the market in the cheapest electricity areas (or even for everyone in the event that litecoin dies completely), you still have very excellent gaming GPUs you can resell at a good price to people on Craigslist/ebay. With the "next gen" of consoles that have just come out being so under-powered, a gamer can expect a 7950 or better to handle any PC ports that come out of this gen...
There is also ifconfig.me
Check out http://ipinfo.io too, which has both an uncluttered website and a simple API, eg:

$ curl ipinfo.io
{
"ip": "67.188.232.131",
"hostname": "c-67-188-232-131.hsd1.ca.comcast.net",
"city": "Mountain View",
"region": "California",
"country": "US",
"loc": "37.385999999999996,-122.0838",
"org": "AS7922 Comcast Cable Communications, Inc.",
"phone": 650
}

$ curl ipinfo.io/geo
{
"ip": "67.188.232.131",
"city": "Mountain View",
"region": "California",
"country": "US",
"loc": "37.385999999999996,-122.0838",
"phone": 650
}

$ curl ipinfo.io/org
AS7922 Comcast Cable Communications, Inc.

$ curl ipinfo.io/8.8.8.8/org
AS15169 Google Inc.

More details available at http://ipinfo.io/developers
60 years old. Some PDP-11 code found from 1977 (36 years ago). http://pdp-10.trailing-edge.com/decuslib10-07/01/43,50446/gi...

Those were the days!
The suckless.org people (creators of dwm) are working on a fully static Linux distro[1]. I'm quite interested to see how it turns out, but at this point it's starting to look like vaporware.

[1]: http://sta.li
I had a similar experience around the same age and year, except it was with FreeBSD. I got it to boot once, then tried to change the bootloader setup to allow dual booting with the existing MS-DOS 5.x installation. You can imagine how well that went, as a 10 or 11 year old with no previous FreeBSD/Linux experience. My parents were not quite so understanding about why I had broken their $3000+ computer and lost all their files. It took a few days, but I eventually managed to fix the MBR by reinstalling MS-DOS. Imagine my surprise when I booted into MS-DOS and found out that the files were still there!
America's Next Decade Infographic
"loc": "37.385999999999996,-122.0838",

Did a float creep into the storage system at some point?
Here is an analysis of the risk factors: http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/www.dh.gov.uk/en...

This report from the British government says that virus hepatitis and alcohol are the biggest risk factors and that a strategy needs to be devised against these to fight chronic liver disease.
This looks interesting, but my knowledge of networking acronyms is lacking. While I know what RBL is, I'm not sure what AS is. Since I'm having trouble coming up with a search string to give me the answer, I'm asking for some help. Thanks
Ask HN: How secure is SELinux really?
Given today's news items (specifically http://falkvinge.net/2013/11/17/nsa-asked-linus-torvalds-to-install-backdoors-into-gnulinux/), how secure does HN think SELinux (based on NSA work - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux) really is?
> you're assuming that those that created the system consider known identity to be a misfeature

No, I'm just speaking from the perspective of system design, for what it would take to actually hide your location data - to put boundaries on the problem we're talking about.

> trusted ... means that you have given the entity your private information

Yes, which is why I used "trustable", which I'll admit isn't necessarily the best word either as I'm currently trusting my phone with call/text data, even knowing how broken it is. On the other hand, I personally don't have my phone setup to access my general files, because I simply don't feel that the thing in my pocket is actually my agent.

> physical audit would tell you if the MEMS sensor in your device has been repurposed for audio pickup

Well the point is that a Mifi (with untrusted baseband) shouldn't have these sensors.

> Intel CPUs have features that actively work against you, such as with vPRO.

And probably other ones ones that don't show up in marketing materials. Which is why I made an explicit parallel to trusting Intel CPUs to generally run the code we tell them, even if this isn't necessarily true. We have to define a boundary so that we can solve the problem we're talking about with a platonic ideal of a trustable CPU, while separately solving the problem of not having trustable CPUs.
The mechanical efficiency of the the mass killings, for one, is fairly unique. Also, the stories of the Holocaust are more widely heard because many of the people that were alive when it happened are still alive today. Genocide is genocide, but if the victims are alive to tell their stories it gives a particular event more focus. And finally, the fact that we were inundated with propaganda prior to entering in conflict against the Germans solidified the war in out collective conscience as "the US coming in to save the persecuted Jews."

I mean, one could make the same arguments about other genocidal leaders. Why isn't Mao in out textbooks? What about Pol Pot? Well, we didn't have the same level of propaganda regarding those leaders, and there aren't as many survivors that tell their stories in the U.S.

EDIT: added extra reason and examples
This is not worth getting "bugged" about. I say this as one who made that exact mistake. It's really traumatic to see those who are supposed to be leading fail, but it's an ahistorical truth not worth getting emotional about.

I don't care to speak about Google, but more generally, here's something everyone needs to know. Regarding the way we assess companies, it's probably the truest thing in the world. Here it is: reputation is positively correlated with past moral decency and negatively correlated with future* moral decency.*

That might seem strange, but keep in mind that organizations change and, within 5 years, it will be a different set of people. Doing the right thing begets a good reputation (such as that held by Microsoft in 1997, Google in 2013, Silicon Valley until recently) but that reputation also admits complacency. If the same people were in charge, they'd possibly continue doing the right thing. But a new set of people inherit that favorable standing and use it as an excuse to get away with bad behavior. This is as old as dirt. It's why there is a centuries-old hatred of inherited wealth and position in all modernized cultures.

The same applies to "Silicon Valley". It's easy to look at its fall from grace with hatred and disgust; but the fact is that the people now on top are 50 years separated from the ones who built it; so why, exactly, is it a surprise that the ones on top now are so shitty? It shouldn't be. They inherited the reputations of their forebears (which is why they have favorable tax laws, a "cool" image not shared by more traditional companies, and their pick of top young talent) but not the values.

Preventing this kind of moral decay requires growing slowly: very slowly. Look at Valve, weighing in around 330 people after 17 years. If they'd had VCs breathing down their necks to reach 2000 people at 5 years, there's no way they could have maintained that open allocation culture.

If something grows organically and sanely, then there is a chance for there to be enough stability that reputation carries a positive signal (because past good behavior is a likely sign of the future) but if it grows at a venture-capital pace, reputation almost always predicts low moral decency in the future (especially since that reputation is usually bought from the tech press, not established organically over years).
I agree. Especially, with devices like the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, there is little reason not to carry one single device.