skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The unfortunate part about the abstract puzzle fad is almost no one is paid to solve abstract puzzles but no one is tested on real puzzles.

Once you're discussing real things, they aren't puzzles anymore. One of my favorite things to do in interviews is to just actually have a discussion, as peers, about a real-world technical problem with multiple potential tradeoffs and no one right answer.
There is No Such Thing as a “Lost Year for Tech”
Thumbs up for leanpub!
Highly detailed personal data are not only an asset, but a tremendous liability
No mention of Google's Calico or robotics division? I actually expect Calico to make some pretty major announcements by 2014's end.
Come join us in #mercurial in Freenode or in mercurial-devel@selenic.com if you're interested in solving this problem.
Single-payer systems have a track record for being much better at putting downward pressure on pricing. Not only can they secure drug discounts of ~50% due to their ability to bargain as a bloc against much smaller insurance companies in the US, but they lack perverse incentives to allow costs to rise. Insurance companies don't care about reducing costs, only reducing costs relative to competitors. Since their "cut" is a fraction of overall expenditures, they're quite happy to see costs rise, as long as they rise in tandem for their competitors.

Nobody who is familiar with the market is surprised that single-payer systems are so much cheaper.

Health Care costs by country:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_heal...

Scholarly Analysis:
http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single-payer-resources
They can make that statement and they did make that statement. You can go down the rabbit hole a very long way with "conspiracy theories" or you can believe Apple.
Not to jump on you in particular -- there are many posts in this thread alone conflating things -- but I've noticed that there exists a great confusion about National Security Letters here on HN, even amongst those who seem to think they're following these things very closely.

A NSL is not a catch-all. It can only compel disclosure of metadata, aka non-content data, aka pretty much what's covered under Smith v Maryland (third party doctrine and all that). That alone is damaging, of course: when the police were getting phone number records in 1976, technology was very different from say, the ability to track your every movement just from the IDs of the cell phone towers that your phone connects to as you move around your city.

However, a NSL cannot compel someone to write a backdoor into a program, or force you to hand over your private encryption keys, or even hand over the content of a single email. There are many other legal approaches to these other things (like a real court order from a judge), and there is a decent chance that a company is completely spineless and rolls over for the government without any need for the request to be legal (a la AT&T and room 641A), but those approaches have nothing to do with National Security Letters.

I wish people would learn a little bit about this before thinking they know a lot about this...
2013 DevOps Year in Review
And by a nice margin. IBM is quite far below, I'd never expect that.
AnandTech is often the only place that measures and reports anything about the screens of computers, tablets, and phones aside from how many pixels they have (color space, color accuracy, etc.). For this alone they are gold.
The core problem lies deeper than the reasons OP listed, though: Complex problems require tradeoffs, and tradeoffs require discussion. Stack overflows format is 100% incompatible with discussion. Thus, Stack overflow is largely incompatible with complex problems.

That's simply not fixable.
> Sure. Pretty much everything in the USA should be free-er and more market-based than other countries because that is one of, if not THE, bedrock founding basis of this country and what has led it to become the worlds only super-power.

Disagree; the US was settled on freedom of religion, exploitation of natural resources, and as a dumping ground for undesirables, and revolted over lack of political representation more than anything else. What made it a superpower was largely having the sense/fortune/irresponsibility to stay out of the world wars until the end (and avoid being attacked at home), and what made it the only one isn't what the US did so much as what it didn't do (specifically, the Soviet Union's grossly excessive military spending).

> Also, we should strive to have the best system and I don't think that's possible with single payer (eg Canada/uk vs France/Switzerland/Singapore/japan).

My friend in Japan flies back to the UK whenever he needs to see a doctor. What measures make you think non-single-payer is superior?
Bridge Boys - One of the Most Unique Seed Funds in Boston
Thanks! I was in a state of hopelessness for a week or so till I had that idea.
Ya, because I should go bankrupt due to a drunk driver slamming into me some random afternoon.
Lawsuit came before DMCA. Lawsuit was filled in 97 and 98 was when DMCA was passed.
MSR is very well-regarded, rather autonomous from Microsoft's product division, and likely larger than any university's CS department. It's not much easier to get a principal researcher there than a professorship at a great university.

They're not as broad as most universities, but they pretty reliably have the most papers in top systems conferences like OSDI and SOSP.
Why not the question "Is staying on Python 2.x a mistake?"

The whole survey is bunk. Too much misinformation and misbeliefs regarding Python 3. The only valid informed answers would be from those who've used (or used and failed) >= Py3.3 for something significant.
This trend of overlapping unrelated data sets into a single 2-axis graph is completely disingenuous. At least this graph doesn't mix logarithmic and linear scaling for values on the y axis.
"I will continue to monitor periodically their DNS entries and compare them with other public DNS servers."

This would make for a great watchdog site to provide visibility across different ISPs (and could also discourage other ISPs from pulling this crap).
> It's really annoying that any non-LGPL haskell project you release needs to be dynamically linked to libgmp instead of statically linked because of the LGPL restrictionss.

You should note that the FSF's opinion is that statically or dynamically linking does not alter the status of the result being derivative work or not.
> If I buy some socks on Amazon with my credit card info intended only for buying those socks and a hacker steals this info and then uses it to buy a plasma TV at Best Buy, this exactly meets the definition of double spending, and this is exactly what credit card thieves do (and what you can't do with bitcoins.)

That's not double spending. The same "dollar" isn't being spent twice. Credit card theft basically means using someone else's credentials (in this case, a credit card number) to purchase goods. If you get the private key for someone's wallet, you can do the same thing (although it should, in theory, be much harder to do this since there's never any need to share your private key, unlike with credit card numbers).
I'd also like to see the results. Curious, did you create this survey to see if there would be interest in a long-running Python 2.x fork?

IIRC the Python community was already expecting a fork to happen eventually (because 2.7 is the "final" 2.x release) so getting the community involved would be a good thing.

I would imagine that the purpose of maintaining 2.x would be for fixes, security, and back-porting of features that make it easier to have 2.x and 3.x-compatible code.
I know this topic has been done to death but it still blows my mind that most of those papers are not freely available. It would be nice if the freely available ones were marked as such in the list.
zero-indexed means that the axis of the graph starts at 0.
Image stabilization applied to utensils for people with Parkinson's
Gag orders aside, is there any evidence that a national security letter can be used to compel a company to create or help create a backdoor like that?

Everything I've seen about NSLs says that they allow the government to compel production of (some) information about an individual or group if they say it's part of a national security investigation. As I understand it, the big objection to NSLs from groups like the EFF and ACLU is that they're outside the normal system of court order and subpoenas, lack enough restrictions on when they can be used and have the gag order provision...not that they give the government power to ask companies to do whatever they want.
Be careful, free trial automatically dl's a .exe file. Not that it matters on my linux machine.
Gaming the system seems to be the secret to winning.
I coauthored a book on Radio Frequency Identification[1]

My Co-Author and I probably made about $10,000 each over the years. We would have made more working a minimum wage job during the time we spent writing, but the learning, friendships in the field, public attention and discussions were priceless career builders for each of us.

* Traditional publisher (online and in stores)
* O'Reilly created the Safari ebook edition
* A large number of graphics

1. Glover, Bill and Bhatt, Himanshu. RFID Essentials. O'Reilly Media 2006. Print, Safari Books online. http://rfidessenstials.com
The user base (market)that I will be catering to uses websites like Google and Craiglist and other pay for ads type classified websites (even though Craiglist is free). Just because we do not use the websites I mentioned does not mean we do not use the internet. This market has 1000 times more buying power then the teenagers using Facebook and the like. I think that a lot of businesses think like sheep and just do what ever everybody else is doing and forget to think outside the box.
Thank you for your reply!!!
The problem with bringing up local issues for a global product is all the people who live in local areas without those issues.

I'd be extremely hard pressed to lose wifi connectivity. I've been carrying around a republic wireless phone which offloads calls over voip for a couple years (got in on the beta) and I have excellent connectivity at home, work, library, kids school, every coffee shop I've ever entered, one fast food joint and two family dining restaurants within 2 miles of home, and believe it or not, our local grocery store. Oh and auntie's house, and about 20 of my kids friends houses all of which seem to have wifi either DSL, fiber, cablemodem, or who knows what (satellite?). My kids pediatricians office has a guest wifi, it helps the waiting room time a little.

I'd have to think for a second, other than in my car while driving, where I don't have wifi. The movie theater (probably just as well). The local fast food sub sandwich store. The Home Depot store. The local walgreens drug store. Um... that's all I can think of? There must be more. City hall, where I spend 5 minutes annually paying my property tax, OMG thats the end of the world having no wifi there.

If I was really hard pressed, I'd buy one of those wifi hotspot gadgets on a pay as you go and use that. They're cheap.

When it gets to the level of the ridiculous, like whatsoever shall I do after the solar flare wipes out all internet and the zombie apocalypse begins and I really want to see that kitten video on youtube, well, I'll have better things to do than watch youtube videos, so I'm STILL not worried.
Everyone needs to remember that TCP/IP is the original decentralized communication system. The raw CPU power, massive storage capabilities and physical infrastructure that we have today makes mass surveillance a trivial objective going forward. The rest of the world has just realized and accepted this and that's why the NSA has come under attack in 2013.

No expects to privately have sex on the 50 yard-line at half-time of the Super Bowl. Why not?

Everyone expects to privately sext-message, or whatever, on radio frequencies. Why?

Most people here probably understand encapsulation, so why is it so hard to grasp that private activities and private information needs to be restricted to private modes, mediums and forums for communication?

When the smartest people in this community turn the corner and approach the internet as an unprivate place and refocus their creative talents towards increasing the signal-to-noise ratio of the public information, it will be a landmark-shift for society.

The world absolutely needs a way to access timely public information that doesn't require running through bureaucracies prior to meaningful distribution. People learned how to read and people are now learning to question information sources.

BTC establishes trust through transparency, not privacy. The next big internet trend is transparency == Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?
Not sure if you're aware of this, but the technique of representing a chess board as a 64-bit bitmap is in fact the method used by pretty much all chess engines these days. These 64-bit unsigned long longs are known as "bitboards".

https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Bitboards
I think so too, though CDN's will mess with the results a bit. It would be nice if DNS had a way to sign/validate/somehow know the record you got was correct. Especially on the apex record as it can happen before ssl.
The product isn't bad. It's just not ready for anywhere without very very good connectivity.

Sadly lots of companies focus on "fast" internet, and very few focus on low speed but very reliable internet.

I have lousy internet but i could get a lot of use from a chromebook.
Destruction is not Profit - The Parable of the Broken Window
"find a good answer quickly" -- SO completely nailed this requirement. If I Google something and SO is in the results, I go to it like a moth to a flame. The very design of SO ensures quality answers. If anyone writes anything that is incorrect or not ideal, it will get downvoted/edited/discussed/deleted immediately, completely ensuring the subpar content is gone right away.
I haven't been to SO in months. I haven't contributed with a reply to a question in probably two years. I haven't posted a question in about as long. Same with ServerFault and other SE communities.

I've seen what's happening on SE before. It was called USENET back then. The best way I can describe it is that marauding hordes of extremists aggressively took over some groups mercilessly attacked anyone deviating from their vision of the world. I remember comp.lang.c becoming particularly problematic.

OK, a little over the top. Well, yes and no. One of the most frustrating things on SE and SF are the questions that are closed as off-topic when they very much are on topic. I haven't been on either of those for a while. Back a some time ago there seemed to be a war of sorts going on between the two communities's moderators as they would close topics in each and send them off to each other. For example, if I remember correctly, questions related to XAMPP was a hot-button item that almost guaranteed your question would end-up in digital limbo. In this sense, it very much started to feel like USENET when the inmates took over the asylum.

When I got started with SE I felt a responsibility to give back as much as I took. I remember devoting significant amounts of time to answering questions with well-tested clear explanations. As you clash into the reality of what these communities have become (both in terms of quality of content and quality of the people who pull the strings) the motivation to contribute at that level --or any level for that matter-- tends to go down.

Not sure what's in store for SE. It just isn't an important part of my daily routine in any way these days. I suspect this might be the case for a lot of professionals who have far better things to do with their time and skills than to play such games for points and badges.
Ask HN: Waterloo/Toronto tech scene?
Hello,

I'm a developer in Silicon Valley but I'm strongly considering moving back to the Waterloo area within the next half-year. Despite studying in Waterloo, I've done all my internships/work experience in the Valley so I have no idea about the Canadian tech scene. Does anyone here have experience with that kind of move? Obviously the number of startups and the number of big companies won't be the same, but what's been your experience regarding startup culture and opportunities? Was it much of a step down?
> It's important to note that [NY already forced insurance companies to cover sick people, so the provision in the ACA that forces everyone else to do the same didn't hit them as hard.]

Is insurance that vanishes when a patient becomes unprofitable really insurance? Social issues aside, it looks like the health care market used to have a defect permitting the sale of fraudulent plans. Now that the defect has been closed, only real plans remain. It should be both unsurprising and acceptable that the new plans are more expensive (acceptable in the "this is an improvement" sense, not the "we can't do better" sense).
> a new engineer, we'll call them Jerry, joined the startup I work at in a critical position.

No matter if he's the CEO, he should not be an asshole with their team.

> recently incredibly high demands and time constraints were imposed, and combined with failure for the company to meet revenue goals, have created a very stressful place to work.

So stress comes from not being able to make money. If you are just doing what your boss says, Jerry should not make it personal.

> My boss already knows how Jerry acts and hasn't done anything.

He's responsible of solve this issues, if he's doing nothing, you should leave ASAP.

Please, drop me a line at my personal email (look at my profile), I'd love to help you find a new job.
I think most of HN agrees with pg because it gives them ideological cover.

The tech world is meritocratic, politically concentrating on wealth disparity over wealth creation is nonsense, Silicon Valley's problems are minor look elsewhere, etc. etc.

It's a very Panglossian outlook meant to make you feel good about yourself, generally.
Yes I agree. Should have been "a moderate and/or a person that considers both sides."

But you're getting it backwards - I was unclear. You don't have to be a moderate to consider both sides, but if you consider both sides in my experience you tend to come out more moderate than if you didn't.
That's extremely rare (in fact, I couldn't find a single instance) and what drivers insurance is intended to alleviate. It would take a lack of insurance by the driver (and you, if you were driving), lack of medical insurance, a particularly expensive-to-treat injury, lack of savings and lack of community support before we get to bankruptcy.
Yea pretty much, that.
Yea--I spent an embarrassing amout of time trying to fix
a HP laptop. The Nvidia chip didn't touch the cooling bar--I think--long time ago. Customers eventually won a lawsuit, but I wasen't notified? HP really need to clean up their
image. If any Sonoma State Grads read this--forward to the
next CEO.
align your silicon choices to your workload

The MacOS market in general might be described niche, but it seems to have sustained itself over the years.
In CS, conference papers act much like journal papers (though often quite a bit shorter). Unlike journal papers, a talk or poster (by one of the authors) is also required to be presented at the conference in order to have the paper published. Though there are exceptions, the majority of these conferences are published in either ACM or IEEE libraries.

The Best Paper Award is typically some combination of a decision by the Program Committee, aggregated votes by attendees of the conference, and input from the paper reviewers who originally peer-reviewed the work.

There isn't a single metric for the award, and it can be quite subjective: sometimes it is an innovate topic, sometimes it is simply an interesting perspective, sometimes it is a well-executed presentation (even if the research itself wasn't all that interesting), sometimes it is because the authors used a difficult-to-acquire or real-world data set (internal Google or Microsoft data, game data directly from Blizzard), sometimes it is because of a challenging participant base (for example, interviewing minorities in elementary schools or a longitudinal study tracking participants over a decade), and sometimes it is simply excellent experimental design and statistical analysis.
A Brief Interview With Stephen Hawking
Never underestimate government bureaucracy. :)
It's not about negating his points or trusting the author.

I actually liked the piece. Until I reached the part of the article that started talking about how the free market failed. Characterizing the pre-ACA health insurance system as a free market is not a given and deserves much more discussion. I've already commented on the other issues I had with the end of the article, but at the end I felt that the real conclusion of the article (ACA! With exclamation points!) was at the end and that the points earlier served to support that conclusion.

As far as facts go, I don't have much factual issue with the piece except for the reliance on anecdote and his errors in omission.

As far as outside sources, the Atlantic article linked in these comments is good. I also like the coverage of the topic in the EconTalk podcast. For instance: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/11/cochrane_on_hea.htm...
companies like amazon, facebook, priceline, twitter, and google are essentially recession-proof and make great investments.

Would love to invest in snapchat at that 4 billion valuation
If you are a member of a public library in a metropolitan area, take a look at the available journals and journal databases there. You might be pleasantly surprised.

It's not "freely" available but it's not something that everyone has to pay publishers directly for.
Oh so the rpi will bridge cloudprint and printer through normal linux drivers ?
Apple needs to fix Mavericks before I ever buy anything
from them. They have so much cash, and so many bugs in
Mavericks?
It's interesting no one brought up DNSSEC[1]. Has anything happened there since 2010?

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System_Security_Ext...
Not top papers, but you can read many of the accepted papers by following the author links here: http://kesen.realtimerendering.com/sig2013.html
Hmm. Most that I clicked on were freely available. The links go to Google Scholar searches, and most of those indicate that a PDF is available.
CDNs will indeed mess with the results, but it would still likely be possible to tell the difference between a legitimate result and a forged one, especially if you know something about the CDN structures used by major site. And the more people run it, the more likely you can detect anomalies, much like Perspectives does for SSL.

SSL, incidentally, seems like a major help here: you could detect common DNS hijackings by accessing the site via SSL. If you access https://amazon.com/ , an ISP hijacking the site would produce either a certificate error or a connection failure (depending on whether they even attempt to listen for SSL traffic).
I agree.
Your suggeston of finding a "local" consulting shop is probably the direction I will take.
Thank you for your input!
.
"do they buy software/services?"

In my research for a potential purchase, its just chrome, so if it works on your desktop...

So right now, in my family, $200/yr for Ancestry, then there's Evernote, and Airdroid, video streaming services, this stuff adds up to a lot more than the typical 99 cent mobile app market... Probably a couple hundred dollars per year total.

I suspect most of the money snapped up by people providing services to chromebooks don't even know/care that they're providing service to a chromebook, from their perspective its just another chrome browser.