skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is there any way to update Firefox on Linux without resorting to ugly methods like running it as root and using update UI, or downloading the mar file manually and running the updater CLI tool with that file (as sudo / root)?

The issue is that I use stock Mozilla build (I prefer it to Iceweasel on Debian), so I just placed it in /opt, but I don't want to give write permissions to the firefox directory to my primary user (it's kind of bad security wise). Because of no write permissions, updating UI can't update the browser naturally, unless I run it as root. And manual mar + updater method isn't nice either.

Potentially there can be some better ways for updating:

1. Firefox can work with policykit and request authorization for updating (if user has it - it can ask for password). That's much better than running as root.

2. updater CLI tool can detect all the settings, channels sources and etc. from Firefox local DBs, and instead of forcing the user to manually grab some mar file, it can go and perform all that automatically. updater can be run with sudo still, but avoid all the manual steps.

Both these methods would be much neater than what I usually do now.
C++ will, of course, win the moment you let 3rd party libraries in the door. Oh, sorry... that's just another vague generalisation.
Never underestimate the ability of human beings to go along with, and justify in their minds, a bad idea.

How does any tyrant do the things they do without enough people willing to go along with it?

Actually, your idea of rogue Air Force pilots shooting down an unscheduled launch of an ICBM is classic B-movie material. As long as there are three pilots and there's some love triangle sub-plot involved. Plus, one of them has to die in some meaningless and tragic way.
It feels like there's a game in here. The Sims meets Uplink.
Is there a good formula for figuring out taking a lower salary in exchange for options? For example:

.

Current Salary On Open Market = X

Startup Salary = Y

Option Value Today = Z

.

4(X) = 4(Y)+Z(2)

this is obviously the big IF, if people are saying think of it as windfall, maybe 1.5??
Ok awesome, thanks for laying that out for me.
Not being from the states I've only seen this through documentaries and expose shows... but to me its just seems to be the police are starting to treat everybody the way minorities have said they have been treated for decades.
Java's Insecure Parallelism [pdf] [1999]
SEEKING WEB DESIGNER / GRAPHIC DESIGNER / FRONT-END DEVELOPER

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Note that there are a few alternatives to this. Fred Wilson, from Union Square Ventures (who pg wrote about it here[1]), gave a 1 hour class on the subject[2]. He covered tax and mechanisms to avoid taking unecessary invetment gains tax.

Another great post on this subject (which may be a bit dated nowadays) was this one[3]. Hacker News startup lawyer had also some great comments on its corresponding HN thread[4]. Note that it embeds the Introduction to Stock Options[5] that also had an amazing discussion on HN a few years ago[6]

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/airbnb.html

[2] http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/04/mba-mondays-live-employee-eq...

[3] http://gigaom.com/2011/06/05/5-mistakes-you-cant-afford-to-m...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2623182

[5] http://www.scribd.com/doc/55945011/An-Introduction-to-Stock-...

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3252290
All projects on tip4commit, conveniently sorted by tipjar size desc: http://tip4commit.com/projects

Only 15 projects with a nonzero tipjar at the moment.
quote more Foucault's Discipline & Punishment

Foucault's style is (possibly deliberately) obtuse, and his knowledge of history dubious at best, per Keith Windschuttle's book The Killing of History: http://www.amazon.com/The-Killing-History-Theorists-Murderin... .

It's the question of why we all let this happen without any resistance

Because it's easy, because most of the time it doesn't affect us, and because it's hard for one voter to fix the problem. Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter is very good on this subject. Most people (and voters) don't even know how many Senators their state has, or their terms, let alone why complex subjects like privacy are important. Based on Caplan's book, I think ignorance is a more reasonable explanation than a fear of being anti-authoritarian or an institutionalized mindset.
If he has some justification for the formula to be as it is, why hasn't he shared it with us?
Silicon Valley startups might not think it's a big deal, but being able to run entirely on a private network (either "behind a firewall", or an entirely disconnected network) is pretty huge. Without AeroFS, your choices today kind of suck, especially for 10-500 person companies (or bigger companies where your corporate option sucks or isn't available). Dropbox doesn't work if you care about security. You're left with various forms of SMB crap, more backend-type things like iSCSI, or either blasts from the past (nfs, afs) or science projects (zfs).
Yeah, that's a good point. It certainly gets hairy real quick.
There's some valuable information here, but a lot of detail is lacking. For instance, the post does not distinguish between incentive stock options (ISOs) and non-qualified stock options. The tax treatment is quite different.

More importantly, technical details aside, I think it's important for a prospective employee to make some strategic decisions about equity up front.

The author writes:

> If the company seems reluctant to answer these questions, keep pressing and don’t take ‘no’ for an answer. If you’re going to factor in your options into any compensation considerations, you deserve to know what percentage of the company you’re getting, and its value.

And in the next paragraph he writes:

> I’d be wary of compromising on salary for shares, unless you’re one of the first few employees or founders. It’s often a red flag if the founders are willing to give up a large percentage of their company when they could otherwise afford to pay you. Sometimes you can negotiate a tiered offer, and decide what ratio of salary to equity is right for you.

You can't have it both ways. If you focus on equity (by demanding that the company divulge detailed information about its share structure), you are sending the signal that equity is just as important or more important than salary, and thus opening the door to a negotiation that contemplates a trade of equity for salary. Precisely the thing that you want to avoid!

Unless equity is expected to be liquid in the near future (i.e. you're at a company expected to go public in the near future), an equity-focused negotiation is more likely to benefit the prospective employer than employee.
Mars Curiosity rover finds life-supporting chemicals
While the article has some good points, I also have a number of issues with it.

- Don't worry about proper password storage until you are at 4-10 employees and have a prototype out the door? No, proper password storage is one of those things you deal with at the very beginning.

- Not worrying about a password safe until 11-30 employees? Using something like keepass, lastpass, etc, is trivial and should be started from day one as well. Your developers should already be in the habit of using one anyway.

- There should be decent password-locking screensavers on all computers. That way a smash-and-grab computer theft only amounts to a $1,500 asset loss, no critical data loss. There is nothing here about hard drive encryption, so a password locking screensaver is going to do nothing to prevent loss of sensitive data in a smash and grab.

I also dislike this attitude, mentioned in the 1-3 employees stage:

And from a security standpoint, you shouldn’t be doing very much.

In our industry, we keep on complaining about horribly poor security practices all over the internet. Attitudes like that just persist the poor state of affairs.
Time and energy. I'm fortunate to have a day job that is challenging and engaging, and by the time I'm done with that for the day I usually just want to recharge for the next day. If I'm feeling particularly energized I often end up staying later instead of going home to work on things.

Plus, I have a list of non-coding projects competing for my time as well. Often if I do work on anything its one of those, because the context switch is easier for me and the problems are different than what I was just dealing with in the office.
Bitcoin is about to break 1 Billion difficulty.

The leap in difficulty must mean all the 500-600Ghash/sec 28nm ASICs are coming online.
Then you don't know the Swiss.
> The experience of hunting wildly varies. I've had one or two gut-wrenching bad shots, hitting the animal in the leg then having to track it down and end it.

So far I've been involved in 4 moose, 3 bison and a few sheep. Because the animals are so large, and we're often in extremely remote places making recovery a challenge, we won't take a shot unless we know it's a good one. So far I've never seen an animal take more than 1 step after the first shot, though we usually unload on it to kill it as quickly as possible. I only shoot a 30/.06 180grain which is the minimum legal for bison, so unloading quickly is a good idea.

> Regardless of the experience, you reflect on what you've just done far more than when you buy meat on a shelf.

Absolutely, which I think is the most important part. Every time I unwrap some meat from the freezer I can't stop the memories flooding into my mind of how it looked standing up, how we butchered it, how back breaking the work was, and how hard it was to canoe/hike/whatever out of there with it. Amazing.
Monocultures
I found a similar project that fits also your definition of "clone". The guy coded it in C++ and created a cross platform framework with render path for OpenGL and DirectX. He even compiled it to JavaScript and WebGL via Emscripten. And it has some initial multiplayer support and he also wrote his own GUI framework. Interesting read:

http://sea-of-memes.com/
You can checkout our Tonido FileCloud (http://getfilecloud.com) product. It will allows you to host your own Box.net or Dropbox like solution behind your company firewall.
If it's too expensive or inner-city or a money pit or ugly or cheaply-built it's off my radar. That includes Capitol Hill and Queen Anne-type areas, or anything built prior to 1950 and most stuff built after 1990. Given my criteria, in Denver a 1960s+ small house would likely still have a big lot. If not a big lot it tends to have parking for only 1 car. Albuquerque has the best type of higher-density housing I've seen with quality townhouses, having small private yards and 2-car garages in the suburbs.
I enjoyed this book SO MUCH. I've actually begun learning C++ because of it. The world of programming is just fascinating. I know I'll never be the next Carmack, but I really want to turn some of my ideas for fun games into a reality.
Maybe blog posts aren't the target of serious optimization for any of dozens of good reasons a smart person like you could guess?
I have to think that putting it into a formula is difficult. It all depends on risk, obviously: how certain is a person that the company will be worth something? On top of that, you have ability to get by at a given salary. If you have enough saved to live for 5 years with $1/yr salary, then you can afford more of a risk than if you can live for 6 months without a salary. Or if you can afford to live at half your salary, but without saving for retirement, where does that leave you?

It entirely depends on the person and how risk-averse (or not) they are.
It's an arbitrary number that the media likes to tout. There's no real number. 10km / day is about right. If you break it up into pieces (walk to the subway, walk around the office, walk home), it really isn't that big a deal.
Actually, Windows and Macintosh already do that, at least for image, audio and video files. You install a codec, and then all properly-written applications can read and write files in that format.
Nice work. I skimmed too quick and thought your app was going to provide me with 25 headlines when I paste a youtube link. Talk about a challenge.

You've got a really neat interface, I like it. I also read on Quora about upworthy's headline generation process, it's fascinating.
I, personally, have that belief from having been a CS101 tutor in college. I majored in EE and had lots of EE classmates who found programming to be extremely mentally taxing and absolutely hated it.

I worked with otherwise very bright students who could not grasp the concept of taking a problem and decomposing it into discrete steps. Some people's brains simply don't want to work that way. They can solve the problem just fine, but not in a way that a computer could process.
MapReduce: Beyond Word Count
Thanks! You may try increasing the broadcasting power of each beacon to get better accuracy. Also, we're working on our Android SDK so please stay tuned.
It never renders anything as well as external viewers for me. Often missing things, more aliasing, etc
In page 3, section B. Using elementary matrices: To remember what matrix correspond to a row operation just apply that operation to the identity matrix and you obtain the elementary associated matrix.
Arriving At Simplicity
Voting is the evaluation I'm talking about. Of course it's biased :) .

Systems and results are surely quite important but we still have individuals in the picture, so we want to pay attention to them as well.
And modest too.
http://xkcd.com/386/

If you have corrections, post them, which you did up above. My post is being upvoted because it makes people think about considerations that they didn't think about before, which is a good thing. Further details are also a good thing, but I've found - through numerous engineering projects - that if you think you've found the "right" solution and someone is just "wrong", there's usually a trade-off you missed somewhere and a concern they're considering that you're not.

Anyway, I don't think that your conclusion ("Security has nothing to do with using STDIO and everything to do with how you code your program") and my conclusion ("You can do this, but you better consider the attack surface you're opening your program up to first") are all that incompatible. My point is that most programs with an interface on STDIN are not designed out of the box to be run on untrusted, potentially malicious input, and so you will have to spend time hardening yours that far exceeds the time you spend hooking up the network protocol to STDIN.
Yes, I checked too, but all the misattribution links appeared to be related to neo-nazi sites, so I'm not sure.
I'm pretty sure many(most?) of us started that process within school.

>Isn't that the best way?

Best for what? Best for being a good programmer? In my experience, no. You can't avoid spending 1000s of hours outside of school programming and reading about programming, but having fantastic teachers to help guide you through that journey is awesome when you can get it.

>School is there to show kids how to teach themselves anything they want to learn.

Not any school that I want my kids in. I want my kids in the school that teaches them how to read, add, and understand the science of the world around them - including how their stupid cellphone works. They've got the rest of their day and the rest of their lives (with a bit of latitude starting in the last half of high school, and college) to learn whatever they want, at least until all the libraries are closed and everything is behind a paywall.
Two observations:

1. There are far, far more differences between Midtown and Mabelton than urban planning (Midtown is a young, liberal, much higher than average percentage of gay residents, close proximity to Georgia Tech) and Mabelton is pretty much in the opposite direction in every way possible. It is an apples to oranges comparison.

2. A huge advantage of cul-de sacs is that people don't speed down them like they do on residential connective streets, which is a huge plus when you have children of a certain age.
Industry Group Tries to Improve Internet of Things
six degrees of sabotage (http://dukope.com/play.php?g=six), made for a gaming hackathon, feels a bit like what this would be.
I have a fit bit. I agree, the more you do it, the easier it gets. It's just one of those things. I try to walk to work every day if possible - it's about 3 mi each way. Walking is a much nicer way to start the day compared to mass transit.
ZMQ still relies on a message passing model, which is orthogonal to the threaded shared memory model all our hardware actually presents to us. The advantage is more being able to go from threads to processes, then to the network, easily. That advantage is just as useless to most applications as threading is to achieve concurrency (rather than parallelism).
>Wow, talk about putting words in his mouth.

You're right, he should have said "racism" and tackled potatolicious's bullshit head on and not been so polite.
What you're talking about is usually called early exercise.

I don't see any reference to "pre-exercise" in the article.
Good point, so I guess 2* would actually be some sort of factor of your willingness to take risk.
Which sounds like a pretty nice environment, really!
Yes, but I suspect the NSA has had the foresight to backdoor most major brands of lava lamp. Same problem as before, you can't easily verify the hardware.
Extensive personal experience with a fitbit indicates that:

1) Its downright difficult to get thru even the laziest day without 4000 or so steps

2) 10K means you "exercised" perhaps an hour. I'm not talking about sprint training but went out for a walk, hiking, etc. Half hour at lunchtime won't quite do it (maybe if you speedwalk?)

3) Its really easy to leave the GD thing in your pocket and wash it. Although running thru a dryer cycle immediately will fix it.

4) low power BT is kind of like NFC. There's apple products, and a couple android devices claim to half A support it but in reality it doesn't work. So in real world practice its apple or nothing for NFC and low power BT aka BT 4.0. And its been that way for some years.
Dropbox is a huge one. I mean heck, they even hired the creator.
I did some research on cul-de-sacs using my own neighborhood using Google satellite images: It's gotten so out of control that you have to drive upwards of 4 miles just to see your neighbors when they're only a few yards away on a neighboring street: http://www.chrisnorstrom.com/2011/10/the-great-cul-de-sac-pr...

I can understand the allure of cul-de-sacs but perhaps a regular "street grid" system with "pipe sprouts" would be better for everyone. Overall, our American lifestyle is the culprit here. Just compare any small American town with a small Italian town: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fedesk8/7880293850/ and you'll notice what the cause of bad public transit and over-use of cars is. We seem to have a passion for living far apart and having our space.
In my case, everytime I open a new tab, the mem usage goes up. But when I close a tab, it does not necessarily go down, or just goes down a little. So the overall trend is it goes up, until it can no longer function (freezed up on my old 4G computer). Then I have to kill and restart it.

I use OSX's Activity Monitor to see the mem usage.
I didn't get the feeling that school is there to teach kids how to teach themselves. That is very much a skill that I had to learn outside of school. School, even in a very nice area with excellent schools, felt like a long exercise in checking boxes.

There are things that did teach me "how to learn" but they only arose outside of school and after high school. There are things that have given me a fearless desire to learn, and the confidence to know that there's nothing I can't come to understand if I am willing to apply myself. However, none of those things happened inside of the traditional school system.
Very cool, I like title of the associated book "No Bullshit Guide To Linear Algebra" too.

Does anyone know of a nice, short summary of discrete mathematics to go along with this?
It really is amazing how much urbanites hate the happiness of others.
Why is it then all the worthy developers I've seen are super-smart?
I don't know where you get the idea that there are not good choices for on-premise, file share and sync solutions. There are products like filecloud (http://www.getfilecloud.com) which have been solving this pain very nicely.
Confluence of both? Sometimes disparate goals make for good symbiosis.

BTW: MREs ("meals ready to eat") are likewise restricted, marked with warnings about resale.
It's too slow, needs to constantly download that huge blockchain, and it's too unstable, so probably no.
Americans really should learn more about the Soviet KGB and its predecessor, the NKVD, and how they ran a campaign of terror against citizens who did little more than have a different opinion of how the country should be run. Because now that America no longer compares itself to the Soviet Union, this is the kind of police state that is being constructed in the USA.

Meanwhile, in Russia, the place where the Soviet system used to be, they have moved in the opposite direction and dismantled most of the police state. In Russia people have more personal freedoms with respect to the state than they do in the USA. Of course one unfortunate side effect of so much freedom is that there was a great increase in corruption and the growth of the oligarchs after the fall of the Soviet Union. But Russia is dealing with this step by step, reducing corruption and reigning in the oligarchs. Their ideal seems to be the USA of the 1960s or 70s, but not the USA of today.
Here is a growth hack for you, Put $100 towards AdWords and bid cheap(shoot for less than a quarter per click) and send users to a free trial landing page. Little tweaks here and there obviously help, but at some point you just need more traffic.
Can you expand on or point to a write up on reverse engineering patches?

Do you mean that reversers' try to locate the, say, buffer overflow that was fixed and try to find another way to exploit it? Why would major companies want to do this?
Pathetic & self serving. There would be a cessation of federal/State/Muni funds if any agency's focal issue(s) were eradicated, hence the popularity of "War On..." ideologies with unattainable objectives. What starts as a legitimate(sic) cause all too often morphs into a personal job security issue. Imagine all the ICE, DHS, NSA, FBI, CIA, state, county and local LEOs that would have to look elsewhere for jobs if the "War on..."s didn't raise their budgets every fiscal quarter.
What if the merger were able to modify the tip amount?

A project could have a standard of, say, 0.5% for typo fixes, 1% for documentation, 2% for refactoring which improves Code Climate or coverage statistics...
EFF has 2x matching donations until Dec 17th
It actually was already available in 25, it was just off by default.
So was Jack arrested or not?
Montreal's Photoreal 3D Rendering Startup Lagoa Gets $5.3 Million Series A
IMO if this commit is useful - accept it. It will reduce the next reward by only 1%. Sooner or later all the simple ways to get tips will exhaust. The project will be a bit closer to perfection. And maybe you will have one more happy developer.
Animal Cruelty Is the Price We Pay for Cheap Meat
Hey, that's not what the Palantir UI looks like!