skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wonderful item, although the web pages are actually better than the simple youtube video. Here are some previous submissions - the comments have links to similar projects, executed by equally amazing/bizarre/impressive people:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4708642 (youtube.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3452778 (pdx.edu)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3116921 (pdx.edu)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150788 (pdx.edu)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=125816 (pdx.edu)

Wonderful stuff.

If you've been inspired by this, you might want to see "From NAND to Tetris" - a project/course to get your teeth into understanding how these things work from the ground up. Submission here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963338 (added in edit)
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● Merry Santa Clause Home Invasion Day!

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OK, sure, a Thorium reactor project would be worth funding, surely. But a /home/ thorium reactor? That's not exactly an HOA friendly endeavour, is it?
Nice, On a Side note Rubinius 2.2.1 was out and i didn't notice they had a 2.2 release at all. Wasn't even a announcement from Rubinius Twitter or any news on HN either.

Now i am waiting for someone doing some benchmarks with the two ( & JRuby ).
So if I put "A-Player" on my linked-in page I will get hired faster? Such an imbecilic way to divide up programmers. This definition is so open to multiple definitions it's totally useless. Everyone's idea of a good/bad programmer is radically different and likely a continuum. What matters in the end is the team you have doing what you need them to do. Calling people A, B or C is like trying to digitize an analog signal made up of multiple frequencies with 2 bits.
'Small typo' casts big doubt on teacher evaluation
Right. making the use-mention distinction reliably is probably an AI-complete problem.
I said "c-style", not ML style.
Perhaps higher level officials in the North Korean government can avail themselves of uncensored Internet access? It's possible.
Its on vimeo if you cant access the original http://vimeo.com/82666985
That is probably how her supporters communicate normally. The land line phone is probably still regarded as witchcraft. Not to mention that her party has allowed the postal service to self destruct, so that they can sell it off cheap to their friends.

The worry for me as a Brit is that this current government claim to be supporters for personal freedom and responsibility.... Go figure.
Official Announcement: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2013/12/25/ruby-2-1-0-is-re...
I can imagine what the author feels - "I did all this work and people are complaining about the colors!" :)

The comments about the colors are valid.

I once worked on a fairly complicated hardware (video encoder) that took over a year to develop, and during an important demo, the most comments I got was something about color of one of the LEDs. It was annoying to hear those comments back then, but it has made me wiser about looks being an important aspect of a product. Aesthetics are important (at least for others :)).
Not only did they add that after the fact, when they saw people were coming to their site to see it, but it seems they've also asked Google to flag all Youtube videos with it.

Wow. How can they claim copyright on that? Wasn't the video made by Snowden himself? It certainly seemed like a video taken with a phone (480p recording, too).
Using a bad definition of "A-level performance" obviously makes the idea of only keeping A players sound like a bad plan. Individual performance evaluations should create incentives that are aligned to company incentives.

- Evaluating performance based on effort fails to incentivize output totally; a high performer who works 9-5 is foolishly ranked underneath a mediocre performer who stays overtime: the mediocre performer will be around forever--the high performer will find a better job.

- Evaluating performance based on high quantity of output without regard to long-term viability (quality) of the output incentivizes reactionary behavior and leads to technical debt: over time, even your high performers won't be able to produce good output in a timely fashion because there is nothing sound to build upon.

If the incentives are aligned, "performance" at an individual level means increasing performance of the team and company, and involves the quantity of high-quality output (ignoring low-quality output) and the degree to which an individual enables the rest of the team to produce high-quality output.

I think the Slashdot comment totally misses the mark on how Netflix defines performance.
Show HN: Jekyll Pygments/Redcarpet Global Configs
From NAND to Tetris: The Elements of Computing Systems [repost]
eh, no need to apologise. i think we're used to you here and there's a level of tolerance given the contributions you make.

also, did you see http://www.jakoblell.com/blog/2013/12/22/practical-malleabil... which i think could be added to an early crypto challenge? (but maybe you already cover the idea).
Even if this link wasn't blogspam, I really, really don't want to see titles like that on hackernews.
Then why do nearly all of the "A-player" organizations still require X years of language/framework-specific experience in their job postings?
Thanks patio11 (you're one of my favorite HN commenters, BTW :D).
I found out that Japanese and Italian, as languages, have a lot in common in terms of pronunciation, and IT and JP speaking people have similar issues when trying to learn English.
I will definitively tell my wife to look into this.
Depression in Command
For those inspired by Harry Porter's Relay Computer, here's a link to a suitable project/course to get your teeth into understanding how these things work from the ground up.
Transcript from http://gretawire.foxnewsinsider.com/2013/12/24/click-to-read... (attributed to FNC's Hava Pasha):

Alternative Christmas Message 2013

Hi and Merry Christmas. I’m honoured to have a chance to speak with you and your family this year.

Recently we learned that our governments, working in concert, have created a system of world-wide mass surveillance – watching everything we do.

Great Britain’s George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information. The types of collection in the book – microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us are nothing compared to what we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go. Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person. A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalysed thought. And that’s a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.

The conversation occurring today will determine the amount of trust we can place both in the technology that surrounds us and the government that regulates it. Together we can find a better balance, end mass surveillance and remind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel asking is always cheaper than spying.

For everyone out there listening – Thank you and Merry Christmas.
I dunno, can you build a special kind of CharSequence which works like the old String did?
Death in service benefits are not exactly new and are very common in large UK companies.
We will always keep "some" Italian accent, don't worry :)
Thanks tokenadult!
Make this as a jetbrains plugin also :)
We just bought it a few weeks ago! We'll use it more often :)
> why would an A player want to learn a new skill

Netflix is not giving those people a choice. They're firing them with no notice.
The laser printer patent developed at PARC supposedly paid for PARC a hundred times over.
Attach anything to anything with sugru and magnets
Previous reports:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6955861 (gizmodo.com) (3 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6957735 (marketwatch.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6958705 (bloomberg.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6959403 (businessinsider.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6961294 (rawstory.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6962090 (rt.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6962782 (reddit.com)
Windows only? How deep in bed with the NSA are these guys?
I had no problem watching it with Firefox or Chromium in Ubuntu. Try the torrent file from another comment here, or check my profile to email me & I'm sure we can sort out a way for you to view it.

For anyone else wanting to try 4od u=c3289976@drdrb.com / p=password - for however long that keeps working.
Yeah, ok, I see what you are getting at with the macros not being the same as a function that can be passed. I used the wrong word when I said special forms, I was referring to "unusul syntax" stuff like #(), [], {}, anything that isn't just a list. You are right though, while I found the clojure special forms much more regular than Java's keywords and therefore much easier to learn, since they sometimes defer evaluation, they should probably be treated as a separate case.
If you do that she will accuse you are being a bully and a troll, and you become her reason for censorship. This "person" is beyond reason and logic.

Make no mistake, she and her ilk are not about saving the children. She wants to make adults have her values and force it on them if she thinks its necessary.

Look, we all know that all that needs to happen is that all UK ISPs put an on off tick box on all their routers in people's homes. Parents could easily decide this for themselves, in private, with out humiliation and interference. But no. It has to be the hard way, it has to be the way that coerces adult to her way of thinking. What does that tell you?
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Cheers! Merry Non-Christmas to you too :)
Ruby Docs - Fast and searchable Ruby and Rails docs
This modify headers hack may work - http://brokensecrets.com/2010/09/27/how-to-watch-blocked-int...

It usually works for watching Colbert from the UK.
Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes
Your idea would make it easy to add an unacceptable amount of overhead to GC. Since GC is already the biggest performance killer on the JVM, I don't think it makes sense to give developers this particular loaded gun to shoot themselves in the foot with.
Government Lab Reveals It Has Operated Quantum Internet for Over Two Years
You allow HTTP outgoing in your "secure" app? Of location information, that can lead to someone's safety or life to be put in danger if they really buy all your marketing? Why allow outside requests at all in the first place from your app? What if DNS is compromised and someone is tapping into google.com from a local tower/wifi DNS override and sending all Google Maps traffic to their server instead? Shouldn't you be using a proxied call to these outside services through your internal domain as API calls, with a way to verify that someone didn't hijack that connection and imitating it as well? This is all very much security 101 stuff and would have expected much better from an app labeling it as a simple, secure crypto solution.
Back in the days where I used to work in low latency FX trading, we identified this "feature" as we noticed the memory footprint of our process just kept growing and growing but couldn't quite pin down the root cause.

A bit of profiling and then code-digging helped find this oddity. That was probably an optimization where the side effects were not carefully considered. Even the Javadoc is vague (http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/lang/String.ht...):

Returns a new string that is a substring of this string. The substring begins with the character at the specified index and extends to the end of this string.

Now I see the benefit of the optimization so I am almost against removing it (we coded our own substring at the time). How about Oracle provide a static method to return a substring in 0(1) ?

I believe most Java devs don't even know about the current substring implementation and most programs are not adversely impacted by it either.
My friend interviewed at government contractor/think tank and wore a suit. After the interview he called a person he knew at the company to hear how things went. The insider reported that most of the interview post-mortem was discussing how unprofessional it was for my friend to remove his suit jacket when doing a bunch of higher math on the whiteboard.

We had a good laugh over that.
Sony drops music streaming service Gracenote
I see the answers given, and have to wonder if they know we are talking people and not slabs of warm meat.
To add more context from the Harvard Business Review article:

> "Laura, our bookkeeper, was bright, hardworking, and
> creative. She’d been very important to our early growth,
> having devised a system for accurately tracking movie
> rentals so that we could pay the correct royalties. But
> now, as a public company, we needed CPAs and other fully
> credentialed, deeply experienced accounting professionals
> —and Laura had only an associate’s degree from a
> community college. Despite her work ethic, her track
> record, and the fact that we all really liked her, her
> skills were no longer adequate. Some of us talked about
> jury-rigging a new role for her, but we decided that
> wouldn’t be right."

(edit: To point out the obvious, in this scenario there was no argument that Laura was an "A Player", just that for her to become an experienced CPA would be a multi-year process, and the company needed a CPA immediately. The options the company has are thus:

A: Put Laura into a job that doesn't add any value to the company, and encourage Laura to retrain as a CPA. It's possible that Laura might be perfectly happy as a bookkeeper, and might not want to retrain. Also since the company needs a CPA immediately, the CPA job isn't guaranteed to be open if Laura finally does retrain, so the company would be asking for a big commitment from Laura with no promised reward at the end.

B: Give Laura a generous severance and a great reference, and help her find a job that is a reasonable "next step" for her in her career.)
Yes! (more detail: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/MLbook/pml-toc-22may12.pdf )
That can apply to other apps and products, but much less so to crypto tools. It's basically one of the reasons why new crypto algorithms only start being used after 5 years of being in the wild, and many more in pre-release research.
I thought HN's algo drove controversial stories off the front page. This is generating a bunch of arguments and yet it's still here. There are other stories I've commented on that get knocked off the front page with less drama than I'm seeing here.
GC is probably the biggest performance killer of most if not all managed languages (i.e. where you can't explicitly free memory).

And Java probably has the best GC algos out there.
I've never heard the use-mention distinction, but its interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction

However, the distinction doesn't seem to be relevant here. When Claire Perry is discussing "porn" on her site, she'd be using it, unless she's referring to the word itself. Example: http://www.claireperry.org.uk/my-news/previous-stories/clair...

>Given that 83 per cent of people say that the easy availability of internet porn is damaging to children, shouldn't this be rolled out more quickly?

Unless there is a different meaining of use-mention not described on wikipedia.
An atheist at Christmas: Oh come all ye faithless
The enum is a bad abstraction because when I play GoFish, the computer asks, "Do you have any 13's?" and when I ask, "Do you have any Jacks?", I am always told to GoFish. It's an abstraction that sometimes returns a meaningful value, and other times doesn't, and the abstraction is built to optimize exactly the cases that are easy for me to reason about when writing a program and returns something that only looks correct in all the difficult cases, such as the Ace and so I wind up having to do all the heavy lifting myself anyway but only after having been misled to the wrong assumption that the abstraction was robust and well thought out.

There's no value to a warning that's irrelevant and perhaps even negative value if it encourages the idea of adding a wildcard last case just so I don't have it interrupting my thoughts each and every time I build my program since doing so opens the door to very run time errors it was supposed to prevent or conversely creates the habit of ignoring the compiler warnings in the very worst situation - when I think I know what I am doing.

If enums were good enough and I wanted to ignore compiler warnings, I could have used C.
If you have such callback that means your code can block a GC thread, which then affects the GC pacing params. I think it will be quite difficult to design such feature in a robust manner. You will definitely need some new internal flags on objects that are pending the callback and possibly extra locks around them. New threadpool just for that callback, blocking timeouts, lock coordination with all GC algorithms.
> The UK has decided that all ISPs must deploy opt-in pornography filters

Wait, wasn't the big problem being that this filter is opt-out? Then why is everyone being so upset about it? Such filters existed for years after all.
This is really cool.

But why type 'in php' if you're editing a .php file? I'd think Sublime could fill that bit in for you.
Is there any reason to believe he is more productive than I am already?

(He is spot on about multitasking being a productivity killer though).
This is a good writeup, thanks
They are not the same process at all. Releasing a secure messaging application that leaks data is really not okay.
Donate your browser to a cause of your choice without spending a penny
Addonate enables you to donate without spending a penny. Through the technology, your browser from now on acts as a fundraiser for your favorite social causes. Addonate incorporates two words Ads and donations. We block the Ads on your computer like any other Ad-Blocker, but also insert new adds that actually generate money for your cause. Thus, our aim is that the ads we display will add to the donations of your chosen NGO.
It is true that the donations gathered from each surfer may seem small. However, on a large scale, when many support a certain Ngo, we can generate substantial donations for your cause.
For more info: Addonate enables you to donate without spending a penny. Through the technology, your browser from now on acts as a fundraiser for your favorite social causes. Addonate incorporates two words Ads and donations. We block the Ads on your computer like any other Ad-Blocker, but also insert new adds that actually generate money for your cause. Thus, our aim is that the ads we display will add to the donations of your chosen NGO.
It is true that the donations gathered from each surfer may seem small. However, on a large scale, when many support a certain Ngo, we can generate substantial donations for your cause.
For more info: www.addonate.org
Requesting feedback when the app is released to the masses and they actually believe that it's secure and doesn't send out their location data in clear text can have huge consequences, much larger than a small visual bug in an app. It is a core flaw in what they're promising, and you can't iterate over that. How about if a bank did that with their login system? Iterating over fatal bugs and exposing all of their customers to attack? The loss of credibility and fines would quickly put them out of business.
I love this article. It takes a pro-active, how to proceed attitude at the same time laying out the classic pitfalls that exist. This is the tone I wish to have at all times instead of the cynical one that I undoubtedly adopt.
I'm not entirely sure what you're driving at. It seems you're equating having a routine with being a psychopath. While narcissism like in your extract can be considered part of the dark triad, it seems like you've decided the OP is also a narcissist with little to no evidence to back it up. Then again, I can only guess at what you're getting at when your only statement (argument?) is a quote from a piece of fiction.

Working out regularly does not make you a narcissist. In fact, he doesn't even specify the exercises he does. For all we know, he goes jogging to help boost his cardiovascular health, rather than pumping iron. And even if he did pump iron, let him. It's what he wants to do, and it doesn't make him a psycho.
How to generate a random snowflake
We're actively following the work of Trevor, Moxie, and all the great folks at Open WhisperSystems. Some of their work is cited and analyzed in the paper that's on the site. Of course I'd love to use and keep up with the best ideas, whatever they happen to be, and so one of the design goals of okTurtles is to be somewhat protocol-agnostic, so that it's easy to incorporate better ideas as they come along, while maintaining backwards compatibility. At the moment, TextSecure's example of async-OTR, with their modifications to make the protocol simpler (3 DHE, and the ratcheting you cite), seem quite appealing, and unless we find something better, we'll probably use that (with the exception that we won't be relying on a single centralized server).
good point, thanks - will change that
Some workplaces suck.

I worked in a place where the reward for having "good communication skills" was that they did everything the way the guy who had temper tantrums bad enough we had to call the ambulance once wanted.

Some places go from crisis to crisis; yeah, hypothetically you can take a vacation if the project is on track but it was two years late when you joined.

There are places where it makes sense to improve your current job, but it's not realistic. Remember that things like the Obamacare screwup and the Target data breach aren't exceptions, they're business as usual, and if you're part of that kind of culture you are doomed no matter what you do.
Perhaps not everyone feels this way, but I think that there are a large amount of employees that feel like they've failed by not being completely self-sufficient(i.e. contract or own their own business). They can still be easy to work with, productive, etc., but they may view their job trying to feed them and do their laundry as an encroachment on their personal life and perhaps even a vie for more of their time by 'no longer having an excuse'. Of course, this goes unsaid because 'they're just providing services you're too good to do yourself.'

In addition, expecting someone with administrative aspirations to play in a ball pit could be considered downright offensive, thanks to its perceived condescension and lack of any real interest.