skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mz - the imagery-rich manner of some peoples thinking style does not preclude utterance as the main mode of thought; for example dyslexic people seem to have serious issues with "abstract" terms, such as "the", versus nouns/verbs and thus many say they are "visual thinkers": but verb/noun utterance could go a long way. You should ask your son if he has an "utterance style" while he thinks, and let us know.

Arun2009 - when you simulate speaking you should have utterance, one imagines, how about if you are thinking about something else. Code. Math. etc.

I expect that most thought is on several levels - emotional, "intuition" (e.g. nonconcsious thought processes), and then image/verbal(utterance) or other notation. For me I have lots of "low level" emotional/intuitive feelings/thoughts and then more precise focused notational thought (e.g. manipulation of symbols like pictures, words, etc.). For my deepest thoughts I need to explicitly work with notation on paper, in code, in drawing. I imagine animals are on the emotional/intuitive level as well as images and other sense representations, at least based on interactions with animals and on self reflection (e.g. "deep" response to smells, sounds).

On self reflection I think most of my "thinking" is pretty low level and sense based, with a thin veneer of notational symbolic thinking on top. Most of the "wow" stuff is low level, that is likely why it is wow, and since I assume this is what we share with animals the "wow" part of life seems to be shared.
No. Down the line, maybe a cap on the very top end (tens of millions of pageviews per month) -- if that becomes a problem (it hasn't yet).

But we have absolutely no problem serving high traffic sites (millions of pageviews per month) for free, it hardly costs us a thing.
"That's because XML does not guarantee order of elements."

It better, or else it's broken. In XML, element order matters. Attribute order does not.
We are 100% Indian product company - the product is Indian and built for the Indian market (although we have customers in 80 countries).

I would classify us as a "very good company" and we use python for our scripting needs though our major work is in C/C++. Does that make you feel a bit better? :-)
Xtranormal | Text-to-Movie
TonidoPlug ready to roll - What is in the box?
i'll give you two:

1. i can do local snapshots and go back and get mail that i've deleted etc. yes i actually like to delete rather than archive mail.

2. some people have actually had google lose their mail. i am one of those people, i had a gmail account 3 years ago that all the mail disappeared from. why? i don't know. maybe it was broken into and someone deleted it all. maybe google had an issue ( o lord forbid that would ever happen ) and my mail went poof. i contacted google and got nowhere.

so ya, maybe i'm paranoid. but i think of it as just being safe at this point.
It's worthwhile to note that the percentage of down-round financings goes up pretty steeply as the number of previous funding rounds increases, especially in the last few quarters.

My interpretation: get all the money you need to get to profitability as early as possible, then make it last.
I think supply chain management is less of a problem now that a single CnC machine can make a wide range of parts. The goal of any supply chain should be balancing the number of suppliers with the overhead costs. And I think that's been shifting to fewer suppliers for a while now.
Because of my ADD, I usually only barely manage to create an MVP and nothing else! hehe.
Because the content they publish creates value.

I'm not a big fan of front-loading ads, but the content they publish provides enough value that I don't mind clicking past that advert - that's how they pay the bills.
SIGGRAPH'09: Wright Talks Perception And 'Entertaining The Hive Mind'
I think that's awesome. How long have you been working full-time on Tarsnap?
To Answer the Phone, Scratch Your Jeans
The Design Mind Behind Twitter? He's 21.
Just be careful not to get stuck just making money, your company could easily turn into a consultancy or something alike because you are first trying to make money. This happened to my first startup, it's still going, but they just do custom software development. It was a big waste of talent.
OT: Funny meeting you here. Not that I have any reason to believe you know of me, but I think I know of you from your website. (At least it seems that way since the name in the email address, location and other details match up.)
I live in a place with a very good public health care system. I always go private so I can choose my doctors and get the best care. I pay medical insurance for this privilege by choice.
Hmm, that's weird, I get much higher speeds in vsftp what protocol and settings are you using?
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Falling Valuations: Poison for Venture Capital
I know you just have too much content for the time you're given in these talks (I doubt anybody in the audience really got the padding oracle thing, for instance), but I'm still surprised at how few questions you got at the end.

Maybe Hacker News will generate better questions.
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As a freelancer I've used ehealthinsurance.com to buy my own health insurance in the past. But this depends a LOT where you live: It used to cost me around $75/month for decent coverage in the Philadelphia suburbs vs around $300/month for bare bones coverage in the NYC suburbs (North Jersey).
Ghostwritten Medicine
Care to elaborate? I've never considered Python to be nearly as 'long-winded and painful' as Java.
I have this quite often, about once a month. Probably because I took disassociatives (DXM) more than an average person does in his life.
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I can't comment on lift since we use scala with WebWork/struts2.

Testing with specs and mockit has been much easier for us than in the bad ole Java days.

val m = mock[java.util.List[String]] // a concrete class would be mocked with: mock(new java.util.LinkedList[String])
// stub a method call with a return value
m.get(0) returns "one"

// call the method
m.get(0)

// verify that the call happened, this is an expectation which will throw a FailureException if that is not the case
m.get(0) was called

// we can also check that another call did not occur
m.get(1) wasnt called // or m.get(1) was notCalled

http://code.google.com/p/specs/wiki/UsingMockito

Being able to write a test like this seems like a pretty big win.

re: newcomer-unfriendly, the people I've spoken with all seem really excited about the language and want to share the love. shrug
Bjarne never admits failure in anything C++.

I don't know if he has ever used the word "failure," but he has admitted missteps and shortcomings in C++. "I think I know more about the problems with C++ than just about anyone." I think he is less negative about C++ than people expect because his definition of the problem to be solved is extremely broad. It includes all existing C and C++ code, experienced programmers, new learners, diverse implementations, many hardware and OS platforms, stakeholder politics, and standardization logistics. He would probably make the list two or three times as long. Even so, he hasn't always got his way when it comes to C++, so it hardly needs to be said that he thinks there were mistakes made along the way.
More "long-winded and painful" compared with Ruby, Perl, LISP, Haskell, among others.
Microsoft’s CEO: Sharepoint is next big operating system.
LightSail Energy is hiring Mechanical Engineers
My startup, LightSail Energy, Inc. is an exciting, well-funded startup in the $100 billion field of green tech energy storage. We are located
in the San Francisco Bay Area. We are seeking to fill several Mechanical Engineering positions. Applicants should have at least 5 years experience in product design of mechanical components.

Please be familiar with at least some of the following:

design of hydraulic and pneumatic systems,
heat transfer,
thermodynamics,
fluid power,
pistons and seals,
and multiphase phenomena.

Candidates should be comfortable with 100 kilowatt to multi-megawatt systems. Our needs range from mathematical modeling and design of experimental apparatus during the Research and Development phase, to designing for manufacturability and reliability. The ideal candidate will be a hands-on design engineer who possesses a high level of creativity and innovation required to be a valuable asset to the company.

Interested? Please send your resume to jobs@lightsailenergy.com.
Twitter Service Spotty as Attacks Continue
That certainly seems true, but how much of that is because by doing so you get to go to a school like Caltech, Harvard, or MIT? A more interesting question to me would be whether American IMO contestants have a better chance of doing good mathematical research than other math majors at their school. But it's hard to come to any definite conclusion, especially given the small sample size and the difficulty of classifying what is "good research."
if they could find a way to securely distribute information across plugs so that i could get my information even if my plug is down, i would be in hog heaven.
there are accounting tricks at work here. this is probably EBITDA profitable, which would means that amortization and depreciation is excluded (HUGE EXPENSES if you're building factories and buying machines)

so yes, you could borrow a ton of money and buy really expensive machinery and spend millions over the past 5 years on R&D and then be EBITDA profitable for a month because you sell 20 cars. but it doesn't really mean much.
Yeah, but only recently. Up until about the mid 00s, they've been running a healthy profit of about a billion a year. But, since it's supposed to be run revenue neutral (i.e., no profit) it gets absorbed back into the general fed budget.

Now that it's losing money, they have to cut back. No federal bailouts for a semi-federated body. Funny how that works.
Hi Thomas. Yeah, it was hard to get a read on the crowd. When I asked how many knew what RSA was, nearly everyone raised their hands. When I asked how many used PGP, it was about 4 people out of 100(?) attendees. I would have expected the inverse.

A few people got the CBC padding oracle attack, especially after I explained it in more detail at the end. Kudos to the QA guy who really got it, despite claiming he didn't have much crypto background.
Amazon, no matter how much you fiddled with the numbers, ran at an almost absurdist fiction level of loss for its first 5+ years of existence.

Some businesses take time. We can't all be groping around for that ycombinator brass ring and get gnarly, outsized profits ridiculously fast.
Andy Singleton on agile management practices
Why the Z boson had a different mass at different times of day.
His post reminded me of the discussion we had about Cory Doctorow's "When I'm dead, how will my loved ones break my password?" (link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=681753). The fact is we haven't thought about what happens to the online presence of the deceased since the web is still relatively young. This is indeed a complex situation that I'm sure will grab more and more of people's attention in the near future.
Hey, What Happened To Scribd? Traffic Down Over 48% Since June
In today's down environment, cash is king and any startup that has short-term capital intensive needs, and no way to meet them apart from VC funding, is going to get lousy terms - the first of which is a much lower valuation relative to what it would have been a couple of years ago. That means major dilution at best, assuming such a startup can get funding at all.

Even so, bootstrap startups are proliferating in Silicon Valley (and I assume elsewhere) and will be in line to approach VCs down the road if they deem it desirable, but on much better terms and with much higher valuations. For founders in today's environment, patience, perseverance, and frugality are the key. Opportunities abound but VCs are no longer the sole or even primary entry point toward realizing them.
Being recognized as a good programmer when you focus on the "bad programmers" around you is both unfortunate and counter-productive.

Being a good team member who improves the process of your team by working to everyone's strengths is ... excellent.

Oddly enough, I think that at least some managers are more likely to recognize the latter than the former and often rightfully so.
My mom died a few months ago, and I spent a fair amount of time on this kind of thing. Actually having her computer and access to her online banking made things a little easier for us.

I had a deadman switch for my blog once--a post postdated to a week from now, that I would keep going in and postdating. I learned two things. The first is that I should not be trusted with a deadman switch I have to remember every week, because it ended up posting. The second is that no one actually reads my blog, because no one actually thought I was dead, or called me, worried. (My cell phone number was in the post.)
I know next to nothing about crypto, but just a bit of Googling came up with:

"Mersenne Twister is not cryptographically secure. (MT is based on a linear recursion. Any pseudorandom number sequence generated by a linear recursion is insecure, since from sufficiently long subsequence of the outputs, one can predict the rest of the outputs.)

To make it secure, you need to use some Secure Hashing Algorithm with MT. For example, you may gather every eight words of outputs, and compress them into one word (thus the length of the output sequence is 1/8 of the original one)."

http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~m-mat/MT/efaq.html <-- And since that's the "Mersenne Twister Home Page", I'll take his word for it. :-)

So, looking at the PHP source code for mt_rand():

PHPAPI php_uint32 php_mt_rand(TSRMLS_D)
{
/* Pull a 32-bit integer from the generator state
Every other access function simply transforms the numbers extracted here */

register php_uint32 s1;

if (BG(left) == 0) {
php_mt_reload(TSRMLS_C);
}
--BG(left);

s1 = *BG(next)++;
s1 ^= (s1 >> 11);
s1 ^= (s1 << 7) & 0x9d2c5680U;
s1 ^= (s1 << 15) & 0xefc60000U;
return ( s1 ^ (s1 >> 18) );
}

Which doesn't seem like it qualifies as a cryptographically secure implementation; I don't see any Secure Hashing going on.
Ask HN: flaw with procrastination control
All I have to do is click the back button and logout and I would be able to view the news again. After that I would procrastinate even more by rebelling against the system. It seems really tempting, is it possible to block by ip address?
1. (Haskell) Propagating the myth that Haskell would do some automagic caching of function results.

(Haskell simply does call-by-need: square (x+1) evaluates to (x+1)*(x+1), but there's still only one (x+1) that gets evaluated.)
Off topic, I am an indie game dev who's checked out Unity,played with it, and -- after the initial euphoria wore off -- don't see much difference between it (with ~3% market share) and Shockwave (with ~30% market share). What are your thoughts?
Great, can't wait till it reaches 0%
That's true. Someone sitting with a wireless card in Monitor mode with Wireshark just sniffing passwords at the local cafe will probably have easier targets.
Wow. Not many people would willingly say "I hope your startup fails and all the employees (fellow HNers) become jobless." Keep it classy, man.
"The USPS operates under an insane number of constraints that private competitors don't"

And private companies are restricted by laws that grant, among other things, a First Class letter monopoly to the USPS. Let Fedex, UPS, and other delivery companies legally offer this service, and we can talk about how the USPS does a great job delivering bulk junk mail to every mailbox in America.
What Metric are you Designing to Improve Today?
HeavyMetal uses something similar that provides similar functionality, but maintains the explicit declarations to keep your codebase organized as well as directory portable:

uses('system.app.view');

This includes the View class from the /sys/app/view.php

Alternately, you can also do:

$obj=instance('sys.app.view');

either way the goal is to maintain clarity which php's autoload stuff makes a mess of.

Sorry typing on my iPhone is a bitch.
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I think it might be an SEO reason too. I remember they had a "people on this page searched for" box which was quite clever.
Why men in ads are dumb, goofy or completely inept
Arduino, open-source electronics prototyping platform
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I have this quite often.
There's enough people here who say that sort of stuff about non-YC, non-HN startups all the time. Why the double standard?
Alright, that was a bit harsh (rough friday)...
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Entering "When the tail wags the dog" makes it go in sort of an inifinite loop. But I guess there is a limit because I eventually get the message "It is doubtful that this phrase will ever reach equilibrium".

All fun
Sounds like good advice, but why does Blink have anything to do with this? Isn't it obvious that you only want to base your decisions on factors that actually have to do with the outcome?
Google Voice for iPhone to Reemerge as Web App
It's surprising watching the up/down votes for jcapote's comment. I assumed it'd be downvoted to -8 within minutes, but it's been swinging back and forth b/w -1 and +2 for the past 15 minutes. So there are others who also wish to see scribd get down to 0%?

For the record, I haven't voted either way.
I certainly don't wish ill on them, but I must admit I've never really gotten the point. Isn't "social publishing" just "the Web"?
They should incorporate the print ordering in the hardware: one click to put it in the next batch.
Who said anything about the gov't making money? They want the POWER from CONTROLLING it.
Actually, what he's technically saying is he hopes their traffic goes down 0%.
I am sorry you answered the wrong question. This is why politics stink. He is right, everyone has access to healthcare in America. And you are right not everyone has insurance.

These are two different things.
You can't just hash a cryptographically insecure RNG and turn it into a cryptographically secure RNG. =)

If you need secure random numbers in PHP, the best advice I have off the top of my head is to take it from /dev/urandom.
upped because I hate it when every time i try to search for something, there's a scribd link for something TOTALLY IRRELEVANT to what I'm looking for on the front page of google masquerading as real content. I don't like their SEO practices and I think the company should change its tactics.
There are many people who would rather not have to fuss with a flash player just to read a text document.

On the other hand, I love the pirated textbooks. If that's the only format that I can get them in, then I'll live with it.
He said he can't wait until their traffic is down 0%...
Here's my topo-view CSS, http://alicious.com/2009/topographical-web-page-view/ - the idea being it's a sort of reverse wireframe. Hardly ever used it.

/* =================================
CSS topological display stylesheet
author: pbhj
link: http://alicious.com/
license: (c) 2009, CC-BY-SA
================================= */

* { color:transparent!important; background-color:transparent!important; }

div > div { border:1px #000 solid!important; background:#111!important; color:#111!important; }
div > div > div { border:1px #222 solid!important; background:#333!important; color:#333!important; }
div > div > div > div { border:1px #444 solid!important; background:#555!important; color:#555!important; }

p, blockquote, pre, td {color:#303!important; background:#303!important; border-color:#636!important;}

span, dd, dt, li, strong, span, em { color:#000!important; background:#000!important; border-color:#AAA!important;}

a, a:hover { color:#33F!important; background:#33F!important; border-color:#66F!important; }

textarea, input, select, button { color:#0c0!important; background:#0c0!important; border-color:#030!important;}

h2,h3,h4,h5 { display:block!important; color:#A00!important; background:#A00!important; border-color:#600!important; }

h1 { display:block!important; color:#F00!important; background:#F00!important; border-color:#300!important; }

img { background:#EEE!important; color:#EEE!important; opacity:0.2!important; }
Wait, so do I misunderstand what Makoto Matsumoto is saying, or is he wrong?
except of course, a web app is never going to replace the phone's native dialer or hook into its address book.
Marketing does not raise the cost of Healthcare and medicine, but those lawyers you mention sure do.
In the past some of my search results took me to Scribd pages where the only relevant result was a previous search query of mine that they took and listed on the right as part of the related sarches section.

If they are moving away from this you've got to applaud their efforts--they take a big hit in traffic but improve the oveall quality and reputation of the site.

Thank you Scribd.
No. Not any more than social videos are just the web and not You Tube.
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Aesop Was Right: Birds Use Rocks to Raise Water Level
Why is health care so special then? Shouldn't food and water be just as free? Aren't they even more basic necessities?
I don't think he's wrong, but I think you may be following his logic and overshooting the right conclusion; he's saying it's possible to use MT as a component of a CSPRNG, not that MT itself can become a CSPRNG.

A good place to get your bearings on this is Kelsey et al's "Yarrow" paper. My (unqualified) opinion is that the Yarrow CPSRNG is awkward, but the paper is a good survey on what design tactics go into a modern CSPRNG --- in particular, entropy collection and refreshing, both of which PHP's MT lack.
Then just XOR your passwords against 0x41 in Javascript. Most attackers sitting the local cafe won't read this HN comment to learn your secret XOR key, your encryptor is a one-liner, and it's 95% as secure as Javascript RSA.
So it wasn't the ghost of Wolfgang Pauli flitting by after all?
Maybe I'm a really odd person, but one of the reasons I use XP and dislike OS X (and ambivalent about Win7) is that I really do like the taskbar and start menu implementations in XP, over and above the equivalent implementations in other OSes.

That, and Windows Explorer, are the main reasons I never moved to Vista.
FireShot Installed
I don't know Mr. Stroustrup, but I have exchanged emails with him. He's always very pleasant and professional in the emails (even when dealing with a nobody such as me). Just like in this interview... I believe he's a genuinely nice guy.

Personally, I get a lot of use out of C++ (with or without concepts to further firm-up the language). It will be a major language for many decades to come. It's not perfect (no language is) and it evolves slowly. Regardless of the ISO standard happenings, knowing C++ will help you become a better, more mature programmer.
Yes it's great - but what exactly is the news part?
It has been widely available for several years.
... Okay, you linked to Arduino.

(I like Arduino - I use Arduino when I want to start messing around with a new bit of hardware, because it's practically like programming from the console; dead simple and as 'rapid' as hardware prototyping gets. I got into AVR as well, mucking about and seeing what interesting stuff I could output to video.

Hardware prototyping is one of the most enjoyable ways to sandblast your free time that I know of. ;)

But, what's the story? Why did you submit this?
The zip+4 uniquely identifies every address in the US. We're probably nearing a billion addresses, though, I wonder what happens after that?
possibly you should blame Google if you don't like the search results, not Scribd...
From the article: "2) reducing the aggressiveness of our SEO, which reduces total traffic in the near term but increases the relevancy of Scribd links in search engine results"