skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You make it sound as if there has always been a high threshold of "goodness" in search engines, and Google has always been above that. I think it was only 2-3 years ago when people were saying how bad Google search had become because of all the spammy sites popping up in search results. And years before that Google was even worse.

So how did people manage then? If they did it then, they can do it now, too, if there are other factors that are of higher priority to them, such as privacy. This feels like the "but Intel will always be more powerful than ARM" kind of argument (which hopefully, many have learned by now that it was a pointless and irrelevant argument when it came to the success of ARM).
In addition to being fast to deploy, cloud infrastructure lets you easily scale up and down to try things out. This is useful if you're still finding traction or distribution channels that work best.

>> Giving dell a CC# and giving them your hosting providers shipping address is not a complex or difficult task

Financially, cloud servers have properties that might make them attractive relative to this. Also -- buying and managing colo is a fairly specialized discipline. There are a ton of business reasons to not take on a risk in this part of your business when you can outsource it at nominal cost. A COGS of 14% is quite nominal.
My python is really rusty, but if you convert this sudocode to python, you will see that the answer is 50/50. I'll write this up in Javascript when I have time. If you do this in Python, please post.

girl = 0
boy = 0

do 10000 times {
child1Sex = randomSex;
child1Day = randomDay;
child2Sex = randomSex;
child2Day = randomDay;
if ( (child1Sex == "B" AND child1Day == "Tu") OR (child2Sex == "B" AND child2Day == "Tu") ) {
if (child1Sex == child2Sex){
boy++
} else {
girl++
}
}
}

print "Ratio of boys and girls is " + boy " : " + girl;
This stuck out to me as well. Her Wikipedia page reads like a vanity article.
Probably just maintenance issues https://twitter.com/alicetruong/status/421834839721922560
The problem is not the brightness, IMHO. The real problem is that, at least in the US, no one seems to care about keeping their headlights aimed properly, which in combination with the abundance of trucks with headlights mounted higher than a normal driver's head, leads to insane glare. As much as mandatory vehicle inspections are annoying, this would be my one reason to support them. (Not that it seems to matter, here in HI they have annual inspections, but the inspection facilities don't seem to give a damn.)

Of course, a brighter misaligned headlight is worse, but an old halogen headlight creates plenty of glare if misaligned, while a super bright headlight is fine as long as it's not aimed at your eyes.
How does this honor Aaron? Aaron wouldn't have done something like this.
It's about 4 hours worth of Google searches, according to this: http://www.statisticbrain.com/google-searches/
The biggest problem is how well are the other vehicle's headlights aimed. When i'm on the highway at night, i find that the Mercedes and Range Rovers with their HIDs are never an annoyance, because the lights shine at the ground rather than into my windows. GMC/Chevy SUVs and Pickups seem to be the worst offenders - they've got the xenon lights, but they're just a drop in replacement for the standard headlamps, so they shine straight out in front.
A UDP Policer doesn't help in a DDOS, because you need to block the traffic before it gets onto your circuit. By the time you start inspecting traffic, it's too late, you've already passed the traffic on your (presumably limited size) circuit.

The NTP DDOS doesn't require that the web server (or, indeed, any server) at the target be listening to UDP/123 in order to cripple them. You just need to use up their circuit capacity.

What I was trying (and failing) to suggest, is that when the Upstream starts scrubbing out the NTP DDOS, there is a reasonable chance, that during the event the downstream customers will start to see more NTP drops than they normally would. And that one way that customers who care about NTP greatly could mitigate that possibility, would be by having multiple stratum 0 sources locally - I.E. A GPS Antenna and Atomic Clock. I then took it a step further, and suggested that this would be a great service for the CoLo to provide, because they are downstream of any packet scrubbing, and would therefore be able to provide a reliable time source during a DDOS attack involving rogue NTP traffic, which might end up with some NTP packets being dropped by the upstream ISP who was scrubbing the DDOS off the circuit.
Audi is putting them on the 2014 LMP car.
If indeed the twitter spewings are correct and they've gained access to the database, I suppose now is the time to see how Dropbox secures passwords and user details.
I'm thankful there are so many folks out there still doing this sort of thing for "fun" or pure mischieviousness. Imagine how much worse it could be if they tried to be as stealthy as possible, got people downloading a hijacked dropbox service, etc.

Edit: which isn't to say this sort of thing is awesome, but it's a damn sight better than the alternative. These sorts of pranksters are like cow pox, and hopefully they encourage resistance to the real deal.
I've never heard of date limitation for Google searches, how does that work?
Yes. Startpage on the other hand is European, and so is Faroo.
I don't understand how self-leveling works. If you're on a down-slope, won't they level themselves relative to the horizontal and shine in everyone's eyes then?

Besides, there's no helping that everyone's screwed on convex roads. Coming over the top of a hill, your headlights will necessarily blind everyone coming from the other direction.
Well, this is interesting.

I toyed around with entropy encoding at one point based on a republished copy of an old Dr. Dobbs' Journal article I found, and I managed to cleanly reimplement the described algorithm in Python and reproduce the example mentioned in the article... but eventually I hit a problem I wasn't smart enough to debug. I'm eager to see whether this new algorithm is more approachable.
Unfortunately in this scenario, ADA is pretty much gutted.

A movie theater is not required to provide for someone with a disability in any way, shape, or form, if they cannot themselves physically (at least) arrive at the location - and I mean their actual body, not telepresence.

About the most they're required to do is ramps for access into / out of the building, disabled seating and bathroom access.
Ear of corn tells jokes (around 3:25)
> Not sure what the point would be…

"In God we trust, all others must bring data." Best practices should be grounded in data rather than opinions whenever possible, especially when they're based on claims about users' cognitive load like in the NN/g recommendations.

> Per parent, it gobbles RAM on mobile devices, and this leads other tabs to close prematurely. It also turns older devices into helicopters when the fan kicks in.

I don't find that to be true with mobile devices. I much prefer having my links on mobile opening in a new tab, because a) mobile internet connection can be unreliable (and often a much bigger problem than lack of RAM), so I may not still have reception when trying to reload the original page, b) slow page loads makes browsing not as enjoyable since transitions take time, so I'd rather have everything in separate tabs and c) being on the move means I often put my phone down to do something else, so I don't necessarily remember every tab's browsing history.

Besides, mobile browsers have gotten a lot better at managing RAM and most have been able to optimize background tabs for a long time, so I think the RAM issue is way overrated.

> Besides the offender's unwarranted sense of entitlement (by keeping you around against your will), the main issue is that it breaks the back button. 15 years later, it's still an unwarranted sense of entitlement, and it's still breaking the back button.

I can see several reasons except for "unwarranted sense of entitlement" for this practice. It's all about reasonable expectations on the users' end: if a user can reasonably expect the website will behave some way, then not doing it this way can be detrimental to him. For example, many people expect "help" links (like the one next to the HN comment box) to not make you leave the page and rely on the "back" function to restore your painfully typed comment once you realize it does. They may be wrong in expecting this, but this seems like a perfectly rational safeguard against accidental data loss, so going against this could very well "increase the user's cognitive load".

As for the breaking the back button, my previous point was that the back button is not as important anymore, in part because a) a lot of things break the back button because dynamic content has made it much easier to do so and b) multi-tabbed browsing is now widespread and users may not be as confused by the fact each window/tab has its own browsing history anymore.

There are plenty of contradicting effects (precisely the reason why you and I can legitimately feel different about this issue) and the point of doing an actual study is to be able to measure them so we can compare them and say which trade-offs are worth it and which aren't.

tl;dr: your snark is unwelcome
Dropbox Status Update: https://tech.dropbox.com/2014/01/dropbox-status-update/
That is the state of security at the moment, not only is it easy to hack into sites, but it is easy to cover you tracks and not be discovered.

Well if it’s an SQL injection attack, which is a very common way of hacking web sites, there is no way to even know it happened. Unless you keep a record of everything users input into text boxes you have no way of knowing. The intruder takes the data and he’s off and you have no indication that something went wrong. You’ll have a spike in your database usage if someone requested a SELECT * query but unless something odd happens chances are you won’t go looking for it.

I can't remember the industry ever being so imbalanced towards the black hats.

The industry was always imbalanced. If we go ten years back spam for example was a menace, today not so much. There are always fights won and lost. The problem nowadays is that e-commerce is exploding and a single hack can turn up to be huge. You hack into a site and you end-up with 150mm credit cards (aka the Target case). Ten years ago not even Amazon had such a big customer base.
Recentish Range Rovers are easily the worst. But most SUVs are generally pretty bad, with speed bumps, slight hills, or - yes - even a simple right-hand bend giving you an eyeful of piercing cold light. With the modern HID-/LED-/etc.-type bulbs, there's no falloff at the edge of the beam, so the moment your eyes are even slightly inside the light cone, they get zapped.

I drive a BMW 3 series, which I don't believe is an especially low-riding car, but I still notice this quite a lot! I'm 6'2" and have the seat basically bolt upright, so my eyes are pretty far off the ground.
Not really. Freedom to modify your software is a kind of freedom which cannot exist when you are exercising your freedom to use proprietary software. Like many things in our world, it's a tradeoff.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/01/11/dropbox-is-down-due...
There's an easy UI fix for this. Clicking back should close the tab.

Anyone want to build this Chrome add-on for me?
There is no other way to prevent a DDOS than to contact your upstream and say, "I'm getting 20 Gigabits of shit traffic that I'm not going to pay for. Make it go away."

Other than buying ports that are greater size than any potential DDOS, that is the only way you can defend against a flood of traffic.
Did this letter get a penalty? With 581 points, it's now off the front page.

EDIT: Interestingly enough, "Female Founders" plea to the public by PG is at 360 points, whooping 402 comments, and the 2nd place. Clearly, "sexism" drama is a lot more popular with the tech crowd :)
A bit tangential, but what do you think of KVM? That seems to be the option that the distros are backing most strongly.
I'm in a similar situation to yours. Although I did start programming at around 13 (BASIC and Z80 assembly on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum), I moved into product management and marketing (in the technology industry) around a decade ago. I've always been a programmer though. I have CS degrees both undergrad and at grad school and even as a marketer I would write code at home to explore technology and as means of recreation -- just not for work.

I recently quit my job to run my own business, and I returned to programming for a living once again.
Some observations on the differences between the 22 year old me in grad school and the 41 year old me as a programmer:

In terms of raw stamina to power though writing code, 22 year old me won hands down. I recall taking about 45-90 days to churn out a 35KLOC piece of Java code, One sprint during those 90 days was a 48-hour non-stop effort. I still have that code, and although it still works (with some changes) it's not the best code I've written. 41 year old me can barely manage 10 hours a day of coding before being too tired to continue. But I'm an order of magnitude more effective in getting the job done. And several orders of magnitude better at estimating how long a programming task will take. This happens because I've developed an intuition over the years for avoiding design and coding paths that are 'risky' -- no threads in my code, for example.

To address your point of perception of others that you are moving downwards, there certainly seems to be a perception of it. Early in my business endeavors, I'd pitch my services directly as a contract programmer, and I found that folks would be very reluctant to hire me - especially as the resume had several years of marketing and product management on it. I also suspect they may have inferred that I was expensive. Not true. But that was the perception.

I changed tactics a little later. I would pitch similar services as a firm (with me as founder), and sales process went swimmingly! Now the resume, with a decade of experience in management at large tech companies and the MBA, would open the door to the CEO/SVP level.

In addition, many of my early referrals came from folks in my network who knew me as a 22-year old and were in CEO/VP positions themselves, and were glad to refer me to their colleagues.

So, my advice to you, would be to not handicap yourself by competing on the same playing field as your younger competitors. Simply competing on pure programming prowess, even if you're good, would take away your strengths. Just change the game. Use the management experience you have to your advantage.
This is stupid. Leaking the database will compromise users, which may hurt the company a bit, but will hurt the common person more. Its a pointless hack that won't accomplish much more than just reporting the bug would.
This is actually a fairly clever idea, I really like it.

I spend a lot of my time at the office trying to explain calculations to various staff members, who typically remember about 60% of the explanation and can't reproduce the figures.

Well done.
I do not know why US education keeps getting more expensive.

What's killing the middle class in the US is the Satanic Trinity: housing, healthcare, and tuition. Healthcare is an obvious need, usually bought in crisis. With housing and tuition, it's the need for people to increasingly pull themselves closer to successful people and make connections as the middle class breaks apart and mostly falls into the ocean.

Tuition (and dark tuition, such as legacy-family donations, admissions counselors, elite high schools and grade schools and pre-schools, and test prep) is skyrocketing because of middle-class panic-- and non-dischargeable, federally-enabled debt fuels it. Nothing more.
Its important to note this is not merely their website. All data between dropbox folders/clients is not being synced.
VCs are probably skipping this small-scale opportunities because there are $100M / $B numbers too, and why go small, if they can go for the big show?

We need to give these lifestyle business more spotlight, so that people who are aiming for such won't get embarrassed that they are not aiming for $B.
Hypothetically, that could be completely accounted for by women being more realistic of their chances of success at starting a company. So those who wouldn't have succeeded never bothered in the first place, skewing those statistics.
I was skeptical but decided to actually give it a go as my main search engine. I love it, for most queries its sufficient but for some (programming specific ones mostly) I switch to Google.
> DDG doesn't have local results (search "Chinese" on Google and then on DDG). DDG doesn't have recent news (search "Earthquake" on Google and then on DDG)

That is completely on purpose.
Memory Ownership and Lifetime in Rust [video]
The reason why prices are high won't matter once the customer stops purchasing. I think there are enough metrics to suggest a peak in US higher education growth, probably around 2010. ( www.nytimes.com/2013/12/26/education/getting-out-of-discount-game-small-colleges-lower-the-price.html & http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-30/student-loan-defaul... for a few recent examples.)

The debate needs to encompass the entirety of the US higher education system rather than making generalizations based on specific pieces of it. State universities, private schools, not for profits, for profits, schools with massive endowments, and so on, each have their own piece of the story.

Secondly, given that the issue in question involve debt, some portion of the analysis here is future prediction -- both for the students borrowing and for schools which are borrowers. Borrowing a ton of money today seems rational if the future brings great inflation, and lunacy if deflation or stagnation.
IMO it is just an excuse because people are asking why hack them and sending a lot of hate instead of praise.
I blame NIMBYs. Landowners in rich cities stop anything that might bring down the value of their property, especially additional housing.
What are these non-mainstream feminist concerns that are being ignored here?
or plex, which i believe is ffmpeg based for real-time transcoding
By the way for people who really care about privacy, there's Epic Browser, which has some anti-tracking stuff built-in, and is based on Chromium:

http://www.epicbrowser.com/

I wish they'd allow people to change the Omnibox search engine, though, or offer DDG and Startpage as options, especially if they can partner up with them and take a cut of revenue, but I guess it's not a huge deal breaker.
My understanding has always been that lasers have a very low efficiency. I don't understand how it can possibly be more efficient to use a laser than an LED. But maybe my thinking dates back to the days of gas discharge lasers and solid state lasers are just that more efficient?
> ... entire lives in a period of unprecedented monetary stability. Money is so stable nowadays that it sort of looks like a store of wealth

In which country? The USD has lost around 90% of its commodity purchasing power since 1971.

> a small, steady, controlled inflation is really the ideal situation

I would agree up to the rate of population growth (1-2% or so). But US M2 expanded 8.4% last year, which is clearly far beyond what's needed to prevent the atrocious horrors of deflation.
The drive for ever-brighter lights also ignores the safety of the road users without lights, who become increasingly harder to spot. An example of road users without lights: people.

I know it's unfashionable to give a shit about people when you're driving a car, particularly people on foot, who if they were at all important enough to care about would surely be driving a car, but - well, what can I say? Bleeding heart, that's me.
What a pathetic excuse. Dropbox is loved and used by many people who depend on it. Their behaviour is disgusting nothing more than that.
> Google's biggest liability is that, no matter its best intentions, it cannot provide any guarantee against a government-size advanced persistent threat

Google is the government-sized persistent threat. The NSA didn't start demanding Google collect as much information as it can on you, Google did. The NSA just wanted a piece of that spying action after the fact.
Most use of the vibrate API will obviously be malicious if it's implemented without spam prevention; otherwise I won't be able to disable the feature fast enough.

The only way this could be workable is if there were something like an HTML meta tag for requesting vibrate support for scripts running from your domain, and that would prompt a one-time dialog to white-list that domain for vibrate support in JS.
Many companies have a "manage or be managed" environment, in the sense that you're either on a narrowly-defined team doing drone work, or you're a boss man.

The appeal of being a manager to an engineer is the ability to allocate projects and work on the interesting stuff. Of course, very few managers get to actually do that-- it might be the 5 percent who have managerial titles but few or no reports, all of whom are pretty self-motivated.
In their price categories, Ferraris are nothing to sneeze at for the driving experience. Comparing the 458, F40, Enzo, etc., to something like a Carrera GT or McLaren is at the least a draw.
I can confirm that you and others with this understanding are indeed mistaken.

Based on my extensive experience with all of them, I would shuffle your words around a bit and suggest a more accurate characterization is:

YC's female partners are great and make and participate in important decisions. Though it is not their main role at YC, two of them have chief responsibility for YC's own finance/accounting/legal needs.

In hiring Kirsty and Carolynn, YC did hire other women like Jessica, at least on the "great-ness" scale.

And I wholeheartedly agree that YC would do itself a lot of good to hire other women like all three of them. Just as it would do itself a lot of good to hire other men like pg, pb, Robert, Trevor, Kevin, Aaron, Geoff and Garry.
HP reportedly launching a low-cost smartphone next week
Ask HN: Dealing with customers that say I can do it cheaper or pay someone else.
I am looking to get some advice on dealing with customers that manages to say "I can code this myself for free" or "I can pay someone $20 to do the coding" so "if you want my business lower the price to match what I would theoretically pay", but then totally blow past the value you've established by removing technical debt from coding own solution or getting a commodity price.<p>

Is it best to ignore this niche and move on? Or is it something to pay attention to? When do you know if this is someone just trying to use your service who can't pay for it at all? I mean if they could do it themselves, why not do it instead of telling me?
This is not a TSA strip search guide, it's a video of prison strip search procedure training.

Nowhere is it alleged that the TSA is going to resort to random strip searches, not that I'd put it past them.
Polling can be done anonymously and posteriori.

Doing it a-priori is not needed and has serious implications.
RHEL specifically mentioned it in the FAQ:

http://community.redhat.com/centos-faq/#_what_this_means_for...

"The CentOS Project will expand its mission to provide additional open source technology-specific variant editions of the core operating system. Such editions will be capable of serving as a foundation for multiple, complementary cloud/virtualization projects. A current example is the Xen4CentOS project, which provides the components required to use CentOS 6 as a Xen host. Future examples will likely include variants to provide the virtualization component needs for OpenStack and oVirt, and variants providing hardware support and component updates for web hosters."

So they're publicly committing to continue to support that.
Eric Holder Criticized On Anniversary Of Aaron Swartz Death