skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> When everyone is in the same office except for one or two people things can fall apart. Hallway chats happen over coffee, decisions get made offline and things start to happen without keeping the remote people in the loop.

That is just bad practice even without remote workers. Chats are going to happen offline all the time, over coffee, over IM, or in the hallway. No matter what you should be reconnecting with the entire team about the choices. Whether that means a google hangout with your remote worker or talking to the guys you didn't go out to lunch with in the same office
I'm in the bay area and here's what I've worn with no known issues at tech companies (meaning I get an offer / continue the interview): jeans with no fading and a fitted shirt with a subdued color and pattern. For shoes, normally canvas shoes. If it's cold, I might wear an overcoat.

On the other side of the table, when I conduct engineering interviews, I will notice what you're wearing. But don't worry. After interviewing over 100 candidates in person I've never turned down anyone for their attire. At most you'll get a nice comment if you look good and the rest of the interview continues. Maybe we'll joke about how you're the best dressed person I've seen all day.

For suits, please don't wear them if you can't make it look right. Ask your loved one or friend for honest feedback. I'm not going to turn you down for a position for wearing a bad suit, but I do worry about how others perceive you if you wear that suit in other events.
Google announces you can now can now star Google Contacts
Super successful companies
Very true. I've ran into this problem as well. Fortunately for me the team was actually very good. I'm glad you brought this up though. Good points!
I'm to dumb to ever figure these things out, but I look forward to seeing the challenges :).
If this is about the early stages of polishing, I believe it (and I can do it myself).
Talebs problem is an intense narcissism, allied with strong intelligence, but not as strong as his narcissism would leave him to believe. So, we have to listen carefully to find his useful insights, while wading through the bombast.

Don't try to engage with him critically, but constructively, directly on the internets though, because he prefers acolytes to arguments!
Shorter social scientists: "Gaussian distribution sez wut?"
I will take your word for it that some systems make this "optimization" but any such systems is fundamentally broken at the design level.

I'm fairly sure some current systems (MD on Linux for example) have this sort of optimization. And that is because the designers assumed that the disk would be fine or just fail, and not be in some state in-between.

This assumption used to be more true that it is now. The MTBF for a read error has not been increasing as fast as hard drive capacity has been. In the old days, it was highly unlikely to get a silent read error. However, these days it is more common due to the massive increase in capacity.
Indeed. I have no children, why should I pay taxes to educate other people's kids? Just because they're our future laborers working on and within our common economy to keep things going after I've left the workforce.
>Your comment is a bit irritating. I don't know the author of this blog post but I think he has a couple of valid points. You seem to dislike him for some other reasons. Feel free to share them. The blog post is still perfectly reasonable.

Really ? You think call for substituting one of the most common use measures in science, finance, gambling etc. with some other measure which doesn't have the same crucial properties without giving any examples of one going wrong and the other being better is reasonable ?
He also threw some assertions about general confusion and scientist using it because of misunderstanding in 1893. Again without any example while giving condescending analogy of someone asking you to calculating average and realizing it's not standard deviation.
It's not reasonable by any standard.
The reason I have very low opinion about his writing and him are his books, especially Antifragile.

>I actually agree that standard deviation is a confusing name, why do you think that's a stupid comment?

He claimed that "the confusion", things he described in previous paragraphs about scientists, PhD's and statisticians is caused by misleading name.
I am not saying the name is good but implying that so many people are using it just because the name given to it in 1893 is insulting. It's basically Taleb telling scientists: "hey guys, you use this standard deviation thing because of randomish reason and not because you know what you are doing". It's very strong bold statement which undermines credibility of whole groups of scientists which he again didn't even begin to argue for. He just asserts it and continue.
It's worth noting that Microsoft provided the ability to do this stuff in a special mode for web browsers. I'm confused about the not syncing bookmarks though, that's cloud based - are you logged into the same Google account on both?
The last stripe CTF was amazing, I managed to be one of the first hundred or so to get to the last stage but got utterly stumped by it. The solution involved tracking the incrementing port numbers of a Linux server as a kind of side channel attack to bruteforce a password if I remember correctly - a very interesting puzzle.

The whole thing was very fun, I highly recommend anyone interested in security to give it a go. The XSS challenges were also cool: they ran a headless webkit browser to emulate a user so your XSS code actually did something.
When used like this, yes: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2008/04/emacs-lisp-as-a-scr...
I disagree. Completely. First of all, I object to your classification of a 4-year educational experience as a "commodity" that is offered on a "take-it-or-leave-it" basis. In fact, every student is guaranteed (and therefore, entitled to) the right to chose the classes that he takes. Yes, there are gen-ed requirements. Yes, there are majors. But, generally speaking, a STUDENT is responsible for tailoring his education.
The value of the "product" lies within the choices that it offers students (both in terms of courses/professors and in terms of post-grad prospects).

If Yale prescribed to your notion of higher education, each student would be handed a list of pre-determined courses that he would have to take each semester. Instead, Yale students are allowed to chose their own courses/majors, and in some cases are allowed to create their own majors. Why? Because "choice" is the underpinning of the liberal arts philosophy.

So, within this context, I believe that I should be able to use a well-designed course listing platform as I am considering what courses to take. Especially at 58k/yr.
Yes. I think the solution to this is to get rid of budgets, and go for an approach based around iteration, risk reduction, and a flow of delivered value.

That sounded insane to me at first, but the Lean folks really turned me around on this. Mary Poppendieck's books are great in this regard. One of her best examples is the Empire State Building: they started construction on the lower floors before the top floors were even designed. Nonetheless, the project was completed on schedule and budget. How? As with Agile projects, scope was treated as variable, and a lot of thought was put into maximizing efficiency of the system.

I've also read some great stuff from the Lean Manufacturing community on how shifting the approach to accounting is vital. Rather than having annual plans and budgets and then trying to hit them, you have rolling projections n months out and adjust allocation to achieve real-world effects.
Seems OP is a bit of a trend follower rather than someone who gives new products some time to be reviewed by others...
Hi Ivan, I (along with Finbarr) are the co-founders of http://giveit100.com. I left Exec back in August and had no idea of the Handybook merger/acquisition until now. I learned a lot at Exec and am really grateful to have the chance to work there.
'carbocation is too nice to say it, but I'm not nice at all, so I will: the point is that it's hard to diagnose MRSA even if you have expertise and a full lab, and so it's nearly certain that the commenter above didn't actually "self-diagnose MRSA".
Hello, runvnc from reddit here. What did you think of the idea of a fully distributed, fault-tolerant npm database based on a content/data-oriented network architecture? http://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/1v7ras/npm_is_down_aga...

Obviously since I said that I believe that the ideal npm registry would not depend on any particular company or funding but rather be fully distributed and free.

So that is what I think the ideal is. But the reality is that the world runs on money, and I think you deserve to be filthy rich for creating such a great system that so many people are relying on. So if you create a business and charge for npm somehow, certainly I will pay money to support it. And I will advocate that everyone else sign up for paid services related to npm as well. I mean, I doubt its going to break the bank for people. The difference between a million people paying $0 for something and even a very small fee like $10 would be huge in terms of funding.

I think the trick is to come up with a service that people need/really want so as avoid people doing an end-around with some alternate completely free system that doesn't support npm development at all.

Sorry if I complained too much by the way. Its just easier to dream about grand architectural changes on the internet than to do my actual job, which I believe I will go back to now.
Sorry, your attempt at condescending me does not work. I am a smart person with a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics.

While I am no Hawkins, I do have first hand of experience of these levels of genius. I have met three nobel prize winners. I have never met anyone as dysfunctional as Sheldon. From what I have read, even Erdos had a sense of humour.
I think theres a misunderstanding here. Nobody wants to buy the actual frequency spectrum or compete with carriers; we just want to control the software and processor that does the GSM, 3G and LTE communication, on whatever frequency.

(That is not to say carriers won't do everything in their power to stop actual open source software and hardware implementations; mobile only works because all the devices behave nicely according to the specification, an attacker could with very little power severely compromise the network. There is just a very large barrier to entry, and dumb, bruteforce solutions can be triangulated.)
Anything can be misleading, but in most cases a histogram conveys more information than a single number ever could.
Absolutely -- though experience will definitely help you if you want to compete, we've tried to make the levels educational too. There'll be plenty of pointers and hints, and there will be lots of people around IRC. There are also IRL meetups if you're around SF, Boston, or London.
Spying on terrorists is just a red herring to keep public calm about it. I don't think NSA really cares about it, there are far more valuable benefits of spying.
How did icons and stuff look, then? I thought vectors aren't the silver bullet they are made up to be especially for small/lowres graphics. Case in point, all the crazyness with fonts and hinting etc to make sure they look good in 12px.
I think that's my problem. By the time I've waded through the insufferable smugness, the anecdotes and the random and meaningless attention to things I've never encountered in practice, what is left is interesting, but not nearly worth the effort.
You're making too many gross generalisations here, as does Mr Taleb. He's right that in all fields there are statistically illiterate people making huge errors, and academic theorists have been making such - and more complete - criticisms for a while now. So, there's a real issue. However, there are a good number of competent social scientists too, beyond the mediocre morass, who understand just what variable construction and limitations to statistical operations are.
Thanks, I'm going to read up on this.
Maybe I'm the idiot, but I found the book's point to be pretty trivial. "Sometimes unexpected things happen, and people are bad at expecting the unexpected" seems pretty damn trivial to me.

Maybe it's because I think like a programmer rather than a finance guy, but a large portion of what I do on a daily basis is about mitigating risk from the unknown. A programmer who only guards against known risks is going to get his ass handed to him sooner rather than later (these are the sorts of people who use blacklists and regexes to sanitize SQL). A finance guy who only guards against known risks is just playing the averages. My experience with traders is that they tend to be pretty abstracted from reality and like to impose rules and patterns where there are none. I can see why those sorts of people would find Taleb's work groundbreaking.

Taleb's undoubtedly intelligent, but I feel like he woke up one day, decided that he wanted to be a philosopher who brings wisdom to the masses, and built his temple on a mind-searingly obvious principle, which he now proclaims to be his great gift to humanity, for which he should be praised, hallowed be his name. The impression I got off of him was that he considers himself a prophet, imparting a word to the masses that the rest of us are just too stupid to recognize. Gag me.
I've been a long time fan of Dr. Nassim Taleb. First book I've read was the one about his time as a day trader and how on the Black Friday market crash, he made a killing and cleared his desk and never had to work again.

There are those that dislike his ideas because it is threatening to their existing assumptions about probability and statistics. He argues that experts and majority of people do not account for the unpredictable but significant impact a single event can have which often shatters the commonly held belief. For example, swans were white until the discovery of black swans in Oceania, too big to fail multi-national corporations going bankrupt like Lehman's brothers and etc.

He's not anti-academic, but he is against teachings in the common academia that is based on naive assumptions that is specifically tailored to serve those that thrives most off the limited quantitative measures, such as market callers, hedge funds selling complicated quantitative algorithm trades, academics seeking fame and fortune by writing the most logical and quantitative paper without questioning any of the tools they are using, it is this hypocrisy and laziness that is apparent and those that try to deny to the point of making ad hominem remarks against a man, who simply observes these things and decides to write it in an entertaining manner (otherwise nobody would give a shit because the topic would be dry without lay man's linguo).

Keep an open mind, a lot of what he says I do find interesting ideas and it has influenced my thinking process quite a bit, however it's no way in anyway, grounds for cracking jokes or ridicule, in fact when I read some of the comments here, it's a bit shameful. We should be embracing new ideas in order to explore them, regardless of who the explosive nature of the claim, because the black swan event is very real and is not captured or understood completely by our current set of statistical tools and methodology based on questionable assumptions about how the real world operates. For example, 1/2500 chance is not what we really think it means in the real world because black swan events are more common than we think, a percentage probability do not fully reflect it's frequency and the magnitude of it's event.

Note the fall of crime rates in the United States following a decision to legalize abortion, economists and experts would come on television and bring up all sorts of random theories and ideas but little did they realize it was a chain effect from a court ruling passed decades ago until two economists came out with a paper that was ridiculed because it suggested that 'killing babies from poor neighbourhoods = lower crime rate' where most poor neighbourhoods is occupied by African Americans. Because such idea was earthshakingly controversial and still denied even to this day. Because Galileo claimed the earth was round instead of flat, he was executed. This is simply the nature of our world, almost all part of life, there exists a hierarchy that people simply do not ask questions either due to blind trust or the fear of reprisal.
Yes and no. On one hand, we want to specify that it's not vulnerable, on the other, it is important to discuss this thoroughly. Ensure that people can understand the ramifications of this discovery - short of doing nothing, nothing is less secure than using security software "badly", or "incorrectly" - that false visage of security can be deceptive and lead to other bad practices.

I just noticed that the author commented that he attempted to add some clarity to this effect.
> I believe that Node.js is waaay too immature to be used as a foundational technology, yet so many people (both folks who should know better and their naive followers) are trumpeting it as a great wonderful thing, pushing it hard as hell.
If you really need dynamic programming on your back-end server use Twisted. Twisted.

I fail to see how Twisted is a better choice than Node , but I agree on Node.js(and NPM) immaturity.

All async frameworks need async libraries. With Node async is the default.You cant use any python sync io lib with Twisted for instance. Or it defeats its purpose.

I dont think Javascript is an issue especially with ES6 coming.

But like Twisted , NodeJS is not for everything ,that's the main issue here,with people trying to be fullstack javascript, and claiming they will replace CMS X or MVC framework Y with NodeJS.
Cool, think you can get a lan based room going?

As others have said been keen to do something very similar. Glad someone got off their ass and did it.

I always envisioned it useful at parties and places where the internet may be too congested but the lan/wlan not so much: read conferences
Wikipedia articles tend to be written in a rather impenetrable style† that take a lot longer to convey the answer to a basic question like this than a good Stack Exchange answer would.

† Often they alternate between being completely cryptic until you have read 14 other articles and going into full-on infovomit mode.
Zendesk Hires Bankers for IPO
I didn't say that you were dense, I said that you were acting dense. I also didn't espouse any of the positions that you credited me with, rather I simply pointed out that this is a complex issue. You have acted throughout this thread as though this were black and white, and as though "stealing" music were the same as stealing bread or any other physical object. The specific post that I replied to was the most telling instance of this. I'm not arguing for a position on either side of this issue right now, I'm simply telling you that if you want to have a discussion about it, you have to at least come to the table with the recognition that there is a rational basis for the opposing point of view. You can disagree, sure, but the way that you are doing so is far from productive.
Thanks for the kind words! As a note, this CTF is going to be a different angle — rather than being about security, this will focus on distributed systems engineering.
It's pretty trivial to check that a write succeeded. Unless you mean getting corrupted before putting the data into the redundant/backup system, which can happen just as easily with ZFS or almost any setup.
Too much money and time.
The bit that's never made sense to me about that is that the attacker is equally aware of this feature of TrueCrypt. Once you've given the password for the outer volume, wouldn't the attacker just keep on with the rubber hose until you've also given the password for the inner volume? Obviously, she can't prove that there is an inner volume and she might just be wasting her time. On the other hand, you can't prove that there is NOT an inner volume, so it's in the attacker's best interest to just keep up the torture until either the attacker has enough keys that the encrypted data size equals that of the entire TrueCrypt volume or you've been killed by the rubber hose.

If we believe that torture would cause me to disclose the password of a file without a hidden volume, wouldn't it be just as effective at getting me to give the password to my hidden volume?
The have one billion hands to draw inspiration from, and talk about completely standard hands in mundane ways from WSOP.

The only value anonymised data has is to train a bot.
> raising camera phones in unison to capture the slides he presented...

ISSCC solved this a long time ago (when cameras weren't yet phones) by giving everyone a CD of every presenters' slides.
I'm well aware that there are intermediate states between perfect and no picture. My point is that the errors are always going to be obvious, not that they'll destroy everything. If any errors at all are happening on your HDMI cable, you'll see obvious errors in the picture. If errors are happening in a digital audio cable, you'll hear obvious errors in the sound. If you can't hear or see any errors, then there aren't any. Not every error will produce a discernible visual or audio artifact, but if they're happening with any regularity, then you'll occasionally get one in a high-order bit instead of a low-order bit that will make its presence obvious. It's not possible for the errors to only show up in the low-order bits.

Clock jitter is an interesting point, but I can't see how the effect could possibly be perceptible, given that the clock in question is running at an order of magnitude or two faster than the audio sample rate, and any jitter in the signal due to the physical cable will be orders of magnitude smaller than that. Those "low-amplitude unwanted signals" would surely be in the megahertz range, far beyond any possible human perception.
Is it possible to get the raw data?
Show HN: Minimal full-text index in Objective-C
I'm relieved to hear from others who didn't love his book, now I don't feel so left out. I checked out Black Swan from the library a while back. It seemed like Taleb's smug prose and mudslinging were writing a check his evidence couldn't cash, but I couldn't stand more then the first 50 pages, so I never got to find out. My girlfriend read it all of it and sort of gave me the cliff notes; she thought I wasn't missing much.

If I ever met anyone in real life who was as impressed by his book as as much as the inexplicably fawning blogs and reviews I have seen, I would give it another try, but I sorta feel like I've been had. At least it was a library book, so I didn't give him 12 bucks.

Anybody here love his stuff, wanna convince me to try again?
My O1 Visa Story And How It Almost Killed My Startup