skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At the time of that letter, how much of their software being sold was developed at Harvard? And did they specifically sell any software they developed while at Harvard (and on Harvard's dime)?

Gates of course has given Harvard tens of millions of dollars. Harvard got an amazing return on its computing bills.
As cannabis is widely legalised, China cashes in on an unprecedented boom
We have heaps of people where I work that do exactly that. CSS all day long without any code (or maybe the occasional bit of jQuery). I couldn't think farthing would rather do less, but whatever ;)
I do that all the time, even for small amounts of text, but only when using a mouse and not, say, a touchpad. I know other people who do it too.
OK, so suppose you could re-enable child-like neuroplasticity and use it to help learn something that is harder to learn as an adult than as a child. What would you try to learn?

I would go for chess. The age when you start playing chess seriously seems to have a big effect on how strong you can get. If you want to reach world class strength, it seems you have to start when you are 8 or under. Wait until you are 10 or so, and your potential seems limited to strong GM. Wait until mid teens, and strong IM seems all you can shoot for. Later than that, and maybe you will be able to make national master with a hell of a lot of work. (I may have the ages wrong here...I'm going for weak memory)

This doesn't appear to be just one of those 10000 hours types of thing. If it were just that, the early starts would not reach higher peaks--they would just reach the peaks while younger. It seems that age of starting sets your upper limit, and THEN it is a 10000 hours type of thing to reach that limit.

A foreign language would be tempting, but adults can already learn foreign languages effectively. Yes, young enough children become bilingual effortlessly, but that is if they are largely immersed in the second language for years. Arranging to be immersed in a second language for years would be hard.
Am I the only one who's afraid of one-man theories applied to workplaces? I'm no bureaucracy advocate, of course, but this kind of social experimentation lead by a top consultant would be somehow scary if I was an employee of the company.
Are you implying that to be related to Fukushima in some way?
Many of the terms used in the psychological self-diagnosis are inconsistent with current clinical standards under DSM-V.

If there are specific areas of concern or behaviors or thought patterns which affect daily life or long term well being, talking to a qualified therapist, such as a psychologist or experienced clinical social worker, might help.
A simple comment to share Jitsi[1]. It uses XMPP but also many other protocols. It encrypt text/audio/video and even have a share and control screen feature.

I discovered it Friday. Our team will certainly use it as a secure replacement for Hangouts and Skype. My only complain is that it doesn't use my already existing gpg keys.

[1]: https://jitsi.org
good read. thanks for posting
"Wink, wink, nudge nudge; I'm not telling you you to spy on this list of people, but it sure would be convenient..."
Ask HN: Where to begin when learning hardware hacking?
For someone having a decade of experience in software application development(mostly web applications) but not so much knowledge about hardware, what is the best approach to get into hardware hacking?

C was the first programming language I learned and while I was in college I did some fun projects like developing a graphics & GUI library from scratch using just BIOS interrupt calls to set video mode, read/write pixel on screen and mouse handling. Since I left college I code mostly using python, php & javascript.

What would be the best approach for a person like me to get into hardware hacking?
I have used Bing for years as my primary search engine simply because of Bing rewards. MS essentially pays me to do search (I get about $10 in Amazon gift cards a month from Bing Rewards Gold). At first I found myself first searching on Bing and then going back to Google. Over time however as I have made tens of thousands of searchs, Bing pretty much nails what I want everytime. It took like a year but the gap is pretty much closed. Now I feel like Google's are a little worse because they have way less data and Bing has way more.
One thing that keeps you out of the grave is your immune system, and guess what, it needs practice. So while we're sharing anecdotes: I tend to wash my hands after eating, not before, I don't mind eating food that fell on the floor either, and I've been known to do stuff like lick a door handle to gross out others when I was younger haha.. and I hardly even get mild stuff like a cold, when I do it never lasts long, and I haven't had a serious sickness in my life ever (apart from skin cancer, which hardly counts). I can see how washing your hands after pooping makes sense, from all I read that is the smart thing to do, but other than that I'm with George Carlin: let's swim in some sewers, our immune systems will thank us for it. I'm not going to literally pay money to turn my immune system into a sitting duck, that's for sure.
That article is horrible.

That's because if you carry too much you automatically get charged with distribution, not possession. That despite the fact you never sold it to anyone else. I knew someone in my college economics class who had his life ruined over just that. He was just a smoker, not a dealer, but he carried a bit over the weight limit. Goodbye to his future.
And better tooling. I'm unspeakably biased here, but I can't imagine doing kernel development without DTrace. (Actually, that's not true, because I did kernel development for many years without DTrace; it sucked.) So I would start with the BSDs or one of the illumos variants (e.g., OmniOS or SmartOS), and ask about small yet interesting open problems -- of which there are plenty...
"Daft Punk (and many other electronic artists) are mainly producers, and it's normal for producers of all kinds of music to hire sessions musicians and record them in the studio. Sampling is just another version of that."

This statement assumes they are not sampling other peoples music illegally. The law is based on the argument that if I sample so much as hiss from a record without consent that it is illegal. Why? The reasoning is that said hiss was recorded within a specific set of variables that can never be reproduced ever again in the exact same manner any time 'within the known universe'. Hence if you sample some hiss off a record its because you want that hiss and this is why sampling of other peoples recordings is illegal without consent.
Plain text loses much of the most important data that people store in notes. If I imagine my notes minus formatting... not pretty.
Jimmy Heights - Skinny Dippin' With Naked B*tches
Feedback appreciated.
Arduino. You are writing in C but there are plenty of examples you can use to start with. The community support around Arduino is fantastic, and is a great way to get into hardware.

Although somewhat overpriced, the Arduino starter kits that you can get are a pretty good first step. I bought one a few years ago for about $90. The premium you pay is worth it, in my opinion, for the components, instructions, and sample projects that come with it. Starting with projects from a kit like this lets you get your feet wet, while picking up bits and pieces along the way. From there, you can branch out, make modifications to the code, buy new components, and start building your own projects.

More information about what kinds of things you are interested in would help in guiding you also, although I think Arduino is probably the best starting point in any case.
> "When you're making websites for big clients, you have to deal with things like browser compatibility on every version of IE back to 7 (and yes, it is expected that those rounded borders work on IE7 and render the same as in chrome). You need an HTML star to pull that off."

Or a diligent resetter of expectations. And HTML star should be able to effectively argue against that sort of requirement. Otherwise, what are you paying him for? Markup monkeys are dime a dozen, and there's an A List Apart Sliding Doors article those code monkeys can just follow.

I'd expect more from an HTML star than just knowing how we did rounded corners before border-radius. I'd expect leadership, and standing for correctness.

In both Yahoo and Amazon we succeeded in pushing back against rounded corners in browsers that don't support border-radius. Because that's the pragmatic thing to do.

Browser compatibility doesn't mean pixel-exact layouts, it means that the core objectives of the site are functioning in a customer-supportive way.

Rarely do customers bring up the site in two browsers side-by-side and decide not to buy because the website wasn't identical in both.
So basically investors want to know that you are not taking investment because "doing a startup" pays better than your market-rate job. It's a motivation filter.

Below market salaries motivate founders to generate profit. Since investors know they have legally little control over the founders, any motivation increases investment value.
> Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all US persons.

In other words: almost none to zero.
> appears to use Moxie's certificate pinning for cert chains

Marlinspike and Perrin actually proposed TACK ( http://tack.io/draft.html ) which requires changes to TLS.

Certificate pinning is different ( simpler and less flexible ) and does not require protocol changes, the logic is held at the application level.
While it is often used as a mood stabilizer, it's actual pharmacological class is an anticonvulsant (i.e. an antiepileptic).
Shameless spam: my app push the limit in the opposite direction, I hope Apple acquires it too. http://www.alfonsobozzelli.com/thomas/
Adieu Location History Dashboard
The American people. Isn't this kind of thing the reason why your constitution gives you guys guns? If a tyrant took over, if all else failed you could always just shoot them.
This aaron guy likes to talk a lot of shit so it seems
I think you are confused. The earthquake and reactor accident happened.

That the reactors are not contained, is not a separate event. It is cleanup that has not yet occurred.

You wouldn't say, "Well, I fell off my bike at 25mph on pavement, landing precisely on both kneecaps, which was highly improbable" and then say "the probability that my knee is bleeding is therefore lessened", would you?
> In the world of music, there is no more remarkable gift than having perfect pitch. As the story goes, Ella Fitzgerald's band would use her perfect pitch to tune their instruments.

Pff. Playing drums like Buddy Rich or showing off while the band tunes their instruments - not really a tough choice (might have been really useful back then but today it seems kind of parlor trickery).

I'm much more interested in (perfect) relative pitch. Thankfully one can get better at that skill.
Wow, you got it wrong: it must be my mistake, I was a bit too assuming on the context.

- For me being "foolish", in the mouth of Steve Jobs, means not caring at all about what other people will say or think. I see a link with the peculiar "bad taste" of shanzhai: they do not care what "good taste" people think of pink Teddy bear shaped phones.

- I am living in China since 10 years, my wife is Chinese, my kids are half-Chinese, all my colleagues and many of my friends are Chinese. My comment was not "subtly racial", it was (trying to be) ironically emphasising the fact that in some people's disdain of shanzhai cheap gadgets, there is also the fact that those who build them are Chinese.

Just like 30 years ago saying a car was Japanese meant something cheap, copied, second-grade, right now the same applies to Chinese manufacturing.

And, in fact, often justifiably so! There are three kind of products quality made in China:

1) The very cheap that is sold in developping countries (have you ever seen those electric plugs with a single hair of copper inside for conductivity? cost nothing, burns after 10mn use).

2) The high quality sold to developed countries with Western brands. E.g. the Apple usb dongle in question here.

3) The medium quality sold internally and in developed countries as cheap alternatives to 2) above.

By the way, this 3) class is the most interesting because as the Chinese middle class raise its income level, it will have to become better and better, until a Chinese brand will do better than what is imitated currently (just as Japan did with cars, hifi, etc.).

I hear often that Chinese people cannot produce quality because of some of their "cultural atavism", and I think this is very wrong. In the past, they were manufacturing the best of breed in many domains, and in all their region of influence having "北京" (Beijing) stamped on goods was enough to triple its price.
You are the only guy that does HTML and CSS (with an implicit: to a sufficiently high quality).

What does your career path look like at that company? Do you actually have a future at that company?

Or have you reached the point where you are perfectly happy doing HTML and CSS until you retire (assuming that's even possible)?
No, FQA only mentions Smalltalk once in passing: "Lisp, Smalltalk and Forth are examples of languages with almost no syntax."

FQA mostly bitches about how C++ sucks, and comparisons to C are quite frequent.
As head of the IAEA, I bluntly refute your assumptions about my competence.
There are a lot of awesome things that can be added to a language. Python is nice because it's simple and intuitive and you don't really need to read the docs to figure out how to do things and use libraries.

Now it's becoming more like C++, where each hotshot developer want to add his language extension to do some obscure thing nobody really uses except from them and their friends. It will be the demise of Python.

What about this instead: make it faster.
Did you intentionally work on developing this, or did it come naturally?

I've had the ability to name the key of a song by ear for a few years...probably since my freshman year of undergrad. At that point I had been playing guitar for about 7 years, and had somehow internalized key signature.

For me, it feels very calculated, although I didn't begin doing it intentionally. I essentially compare a new song against an internal database of known songs. For instance, my reference song in B minor is "Comfortably Numb". If I hear a new song that sounds like it's in the same key, it must also be B minor. After I built up an internal collection for each key and practiced enough, it went from being a mechanical process to an intuitive one. It's not perfect, though; most of the "boring" keys sound similar. That is, I have a lot of trouble distinguishing between C, G, and F - fewer accidentals means less "color". In addition, keys within a fifth of each other can sound really similar since they're only one accidental apart. I'll often misidentify something in Bb minor as being in F minor, or something in E as being in B. Surprisingly though, half-step differences end up sounding very different. My wife and I watched Pitch Perfect recently, and during a scene where two women were singing "Titanium", the fact that they were singing it in B minor rather than C minor was extremely apparent.
The solution is to stop shipping with batteries included and let people install via pip. Python could have an official opinion on what the best libraries are (might not be such a bad idea, actually), but they shouldn't bundle them unless they're very, very stable, tested and almost unchanging.

Requests might make a good addition to the standard library at some point. PyQT definitely shouldn't though.
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

Thomas Jefferson

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/thomasjeff109180....
Chris Hayes of MSNBC Caught Bringing Weed into 2000 Republican Convention
You could have written this about car manufacturers in the 70s or miners in the 80s or dotcoms in the 90s or property in the 00s.
When he writes about AI, he's writing about "good old-fashioned AI" -- the kind that was supposed to be advanced by clever representations, recursive data structures, and layers of abstraction.

Contrast "good old-fashioned AI" with "machine learning", where the representations are as minimalistic and low-level as possible, because the only important thing is that when you update them a few billion times the right results emerge statistically.

I don't see it as a problem that this part of GEB is "dated", though, because I find GOFAI to be an interesting topic. It involves trying to think about how you think and formalize it, which rarely happens in modern AI.

Imagine a world where brute-force alpha-beta search was just not good enough to beat humans at chess; a world where advances in chess-playing computers would require chessmasters to encode their expertise in interesting data structures. This is the world that might have been, and it's the world GEB describes when it talks about AI. It's dated, but it's interesting.
Apple Strikes Back at NSA's "Malicious Hackers"
Out of curiosity, what do you use for mail?
As a long time HWH and SWH I actually get asked that often. The answer I always give is to find a project that interests you, and go do it. That is the best way to learn, dig in. There are a ton of resources online so just start reading up and researching your project and keep going.
The Charlotte & Rosie Show
I knew things were going south with Evernote when they added a store that sells fucking socks and backpacks while the Mac client still couldn't edit existing tables in documents. The table editing limitation was eventually fixed but much more serious problems have since cropped up.

Sync issues and the unusably slow iOS client caused me to drop it for personal use a few months ago, now it's relegated to only work notes with the desktop client. For this really basic purpose it's alright, it has a few major annoyances and the interface has gotten much worse over the years but it'd be too much effort to migrate to something else and keep my tags/notebooks.

This is not a healthy relationship I have with Evernote Corporation. I committed to their product but they didn't commit to me.
Is there a smell of corruption? Because it is in favor of power, connections instead of user voting, just like in favor of dictation over democracy. Isn't it?
Jesus, these people look like security rookies. I guess I'm not gonna be trusting this to be a secure alternative to Dropbox.
nice TED video on this topic by Jon Ronson: Strange answers to the psychopath test : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYemnKEKx0c
Why is this on hacker news ? What's the value add ?
Outrage over commercialisation plans for BBC World Service
We've Open-Sourced Everything
Disrupting the banking industry
Hacker News down, unwisely returning HTTP 200 for outage message
Soccer Balls that Generate Electricity
HTTP 200 = "Cloudflare, please cache this status message instead of passing through a million requests to our dead server while it's busy restoring a backup".

PG doesn't care about HN's search listings, so there's no drawbacks to doing that.
Python code to solve xkcd 1313 by Peter Norvig
Ask PG: Postmortem of the outage?
Clarification: This is not meant with any ill-will towards PG or any of the other individuals who help run HN. It is a simple request for a postmortem eventually. Perhaps it's an unneeded request, but I think a lot of HNers echo the sentiment.
Welcome back, HN - I had an unusually productive (yet unstimulating) day at the office.
Introducing the Open Automotive Alliance
Bitcoin Tops $1,000 Again as Zynga Accepts Virtual Money
Ask PG: What caused the prolonged HN downtime?
I am wondering if anyone has any information about the outage.
Hartmann Pipeline
Show HN: Call Congress Now
Seems like a fair point in principle, except in this case HN is one of the few sites I don't need Google to get to and don't care about any other tools that might rely on returned status codes.
Riml, a relaxed Vim script
Ask HN: How Did the Outage Affect You Personally?
Go’s Type System Is An Embarrassment
Are Your Windows Error Reports Leaking Data? - Security Labs
Holy crap. They opened-up their entire stack! You can literally spin up a clone of the site.
Sociological Science, An Open Access Journal with Transparent Submission Stats
Open Automotive Alliance
Ask HN: How was your day without Hacker News?
Saw it was down on sunday evening, "oh it will be back after I wake up tomrrow".

I rely on Hacker News as it's my only connection with the outside world and interesting reads.

Needless to say, I got some work done that I otherwise wouldn't have with hacker news always buried within one of my chrome tabs.
CyberPowerPC Announces Their Steam Machine Starting At $499 | Word Tech Reviews
Alex Gaynor -- Why Travis CI is great for the Python community
Hacker News Back Up
Ask HN: New UI/UX you want to see for Mobile Emails?
Is there any new way to view emails better and better?

Any publications on re-imagining emails?
Replace PagerDuty w/ Cabot self-hosted, ez2deploy monitoring & alerts svc
Prim Laundry Startup Throws In The Towel
Pebble Steel
It seems all activity from the past two days has disappeared -- backup storage is something you never regret paying for.

You've probably all seen it by now, but from @HNStatus: [1]

Server back up and seemingly stable. Now restoring our latest backup to recover from limited filesystem corruption.

[1] https://twitter.com/HNStatus/status/420179162138021888
Sociability is Better Than Profitability
Don't take this the wrong way, but after seeing hundreds of identical HN-outage productivity jokes/references on Twitter today, I really hope this is the last one I'll see in a while.
I think I speak for everyone when I say significantly more work got done!
Kalzumeus Software Year In Review 2013
Here are all of Valve's Steam Machines from CES 2014, in specs
GRITTY MARIO WORLD - real life film
Designing a holiday app (2013 post-portem)
I just realized I've addicted to HN, have been kept refreshing the page millions time :) thanks HN
Lamernews.com
Hacker News alternative, for next time.
Why Netflix walked away from personalization
Dan Rodney's List of Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts & Keystrokes
Life in general was better. :)
I went outside. It's bright out there. There were strange creatures walking and making noises.
Were they not using raid or performing multiple database writes? A mechanical hard drive failure is pretty common and can be mitigated fairly easily.
Scaling HipChat Using ElasticSearch And Redis
The Real Iron Man
I felt something I do daily is missing out and I kept refreshing the site.
I wondered if HN had been NSLed.
I got work done yadda yadda, but I was also pretty bored when I needed a break. In the long term, if HN disappears, I'll probably find something else. So get your shit together HN and don't die on us again.
Because it's not good enough that the site is back, we need to pile on and complain too...
Intel announces Edison, a computer the size of an SD card.
Several comment threads that I was following when it went down are gone ("No such item."), although their original links are still valid.
I am not a news junky, but I realized how dependent my newsfeed is from Hacker News. Seeing about 6-8 times the outage message reminded me on why I keep coming back and reading the quality entries of these forums.
THAT PAGE HAS TOO MUCH UPPERCASE COPY

Seriously, though, it's kind of tiring to read.
Footsteps into electricty: Triboelectric generators capture world’s wasted power
Digital Ocean said it would shut down my blog if I didn’t edit a blog post.
It was awful, don't let it happen again.
A New Generation of User Input Devices
Corvette getting built-in camera, performance computer
Would like to read it too. And it looks like right now is a good time to get just about anything in the front page. Front pretty much == new.