skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a current model Macbook Air 13" w/ 4 Gb of ram. I do a whole variety of development (PHP, golang, python) with MongoDB and MySQL.

Currently, I have a few tabs in the terminal open connected to a few servers, MongoHub (MongoDB client), Sequal Pro (MySQL client), Firefox (2 open tabs), Chrome (15 open tabs), Sublime Text 2, Spotify, Cyberduck (FTP/SSH client), MAMP Pro, iTunes (phone is backing up), Adobe Reader, VLC and Excel open. I usually have those, along with Photoshop and Parallels opened as well and haven't felt any slowdown at all.

I'm using the Microsoft Wireless Keyboard 800 and Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000, have a 23" AOC monitor hooked up via Displayport to HDMI adapter from Monoprice. This setup was probably around ~$1500 without any warranties. I just picked up a nice SD card that is sized to fit almost flush with the Macbook Air and is 128 GB w/ a fast 90 MB/s read/write which I can use as a file dump, that cost around $50 on Amazon, but worth picking up a few if you want to isolate projects or just use as backup.

Unfortunately, the Macbook family isn't too upgrade friendly so you may buy a laptop and it may be underpowered and until you refresh your hardware, you'll be stuck with that hardware, so it may take you a few years to get the exact setup you need. This is why people recommend maxing out as much as you can with RAM and expand hard drive modularly. I'd honestly recommend not going with an older model laptop or desktop because HD space is going to end up being your bottle neck, not RAM, and the newer lineups have USB 3.0 so you want to be sure you get that, then you can pick up a 1 TB external USB 3.0 HD for $100 and won't suffer with USB 2.0 speeds.
I love that Stripe puts together these competitions. I still wear my shirt from the first CTF proudly :) I wish I had more free time to participate again...
My Best Productivity Apps and How I Use Them | JaysonFeltner.com
Side question: don't other people also have serious issues with the practice of using tracking software that take screenshots, or even worse, webcam shots?

When I was freelancing I quickly refused a lot of potentially well paying jobs because of the requirement to use such monitoring software (their loss imho...). I don't have a problem with video-chatting with an employer about anything, or even with a temporary screen-share during a testing task or interview process, but having my actual work monitored like this felt like a total invasion of "my space".

I don't know about you, but doing it this "big brother-ish" way feels very demeaning and I refuse to work for people that treat me like that and I hate it that it's starting to become a "standard" nowadays, at least for "low level" work.
I just recently started at MongoHQ and have found the experience really interesting and wanted to share a few observations.

- Remote work makes a company more transparent. The documentation and writing that makes remote work possible has an interesting side effect of giving insight into all corners of an organization. While this might not be desired in some organizations, I think it empowers individuals to get a sense of the overall company goals and health and make the best decision of how to use their time.

- Remote work breeds trust. Instead of getting the trickle of information from closed door management meetings, you get a log of what is happening and a sense of what decisions are to be made and the implications.

- Remote only works if everyone is on board. I have been at organizations that tried to make remote possible, but it never quite worked as some groups refused to monitor the central chat for fear of it taking too much time. You do really need everyone on the same channels and using the same tools to maintain the level of communication required to make remote work.
Great comment -- with you all the way on this one.

I use "they" for Google on purpose, it's a fleet of ships for sure. But I also confer with my VP Engineering, Chrome counterpart regularly and know (mostly) what projects are official and intentional. :-)

/be
ah, so like lance armstrong?
Read the blog post carefully:

> it is time to retire it from common use and replace it with the more effective one of mean deviation

> Standard deviation, STD, should be left to mathematicians, physicists and mathematical statisticians deriving limit theorems

>There is no scientific reason to use it in statistical investigations in the age of the computer, as it does more harm than good

He is saying it's not useful for real world things and people are just confused. What you wrote is reasonable view. What Taleb writes isn't.
I have a mirrored copy of all RAW files on a local file server, separate disk. A daily cron takes care of the mirroring using rdiff-backup.

Every time I do a shoot, when I bring the RAW files into workflow I also export them as fullsize jpgs. Those are what's sent/stored in the cloud (rsync.net).

I do this in the interest of saving space/money/time -- I am not a professional and I only have 768 kb/s upload (if that).

The mirrored raw files cover idiot mistakes/disk crash, the jpegs in the cloud covers the more catastrophic fires, theft, flood, etc.
Great project.

Needs encryption, access controls and some kind of public namespace for publishing.
Lorem Ipsum and the Meaning of Life
I create an AMI with a bare minimum OS. Then I use a configuration management tool to install all software packages, libraries and configurations. My new favorite is Ansible (ansibleworks.com) but Chef and Puppet are others.

Updates are easier this way versus having to rebake images.
Bugs and Drugs gives good local info.

http://www.epocrates.com/e/BugsAndDrugs
Probably more about the style than the substance, here.
Thoughts on the future of wearable technology
A programmer might not be allowed to show you their past work due to it being proprietary.
> MAD, however is nicer for reporting data since it is more intuitive.

I have a hard time fathoming how anyone could think such a thing. This is math: we should be using things because they map to reality in some way, not because they are aesthetically pleasing.

The standard deviation maps to processes where the "importance" of changes is proportional to their square. For example, electrical power is proportional to the square of voltage, so AC power systems are conventionally rated by standard deviation. My 120 V power outlet has a standard deviation of its potential of 120 volts.

Standard deviation is also commonly used in situations where we cannot put a number on the importance of the deviation but we know it is big.

The mean average deviation is useful for numbers that are directly proportional to their importance. For example, if we have a hundred lamps and we measure their optical power outputs, the MAD would be a useful measure of their variation. Optical power is already in units of oomph.
Do you need a laptop?

Well if you wanted to save your self a whole heap of money get a mac mini.
I think Collins has a more succinct definition:

> Feeling or showing no mercy

Ruthless doesn't have to be 'towards others' - you can be ruthless in cutting unnecessary spending.
That's not accurate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Finan...

"About 70 percent of the construction and maintenance costs of Interstate Highways in the United States have been paid through user fees, primarily the fuel taxes collected by the federal, state, and local governments."

And about 1/7 of the fuel tax revenue is redirected to public transit, rather than highways.

A moderate increase in the fuel tax[1] could make the IHS completely self-sustaining for both capital and maintenance expenditures. Unfortunately, raising the gas tax is typically a political loser.

Local roads are predominantly paid for through local property and other taxes, but that's easier to justify, since everyone takes advantage of local roads even if they don't drive.

[1] At least until electric cars become commonplace, in which case I'd probably be in favor of a simple mileage tax which could achieve the same effect.
OSv, a new open-source operating system for virtual-machines
It's lovely to see the torch being handed down in such a graceful way. This attitude is probably another reason why node has turned out so great. Really cool.
How can jitter on a cable be hard to measure if it is actual bits being flipped?
This started out with some boilerplate SV platitudes (obsess over your product, obsess over talent), but got quite good by the end. The concrete items, particularly "They make something a small number of users really love" and "They don't get excited about pretending to run a startup" really resonate with my experience and are things I think everyone should keep in mind when running a company.
Forgive a fool. But are the volatility plugins used (truecryptmaster and truecryptsummary) only provided to students of the official volatility training or is it released somewhere? Can't find it on their Google code page.
I know this might be shooting the argument in the wrong direction...

Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that the term inverse square law was erroneous, and I have yet to come across a complaint from anyone.
Cobook + FullContact
3 Recruiting Lessons Learned From the Red Hot Chili Peppers
> Taleb doesn't point one situation when MAD works better than SD (I pointed out some where SD works better than MAD) he also doesn't address obvious problems which such substitutions create.

Ummm, are we both discussing the same article?

> Yes it's ideology of calling people out when they assert incorrect things in condescending tone without any arguments while insulting whole groups of scientists and statisticians.

No. It is the ideology of dissing Taleb. Obviously I am not his paid spokesperson. But please argue to the merit of his arguments.

To quote from Taleb's edge.org article:

>> 1) MAD is more accurate in sample measurements, and less volatile than STD since it is a natural weight whereas standard deviation uses the observation itself as its own weight, imparting large weights to large observations, thus overweighing tail events.

Also he alludes to his paper with Goldstein. It is clear form Goldstein and Taleb's manuscript that that Taleb is not just throwing these arguments to talk trash about practitioners of statistics. They report findings of an experiment with multiple groups of applied statisticians. I'll quote from it [1]:

"We first posed this question to 97 portfolio managers,
assistant portfolio managers, and analysts employed by investment management companies who were taking part in a professional seminar. The second group of participants comprised 13 Ivy League graduate students preparing for a career in financial engineering. The third group consisted of 16 investment professionals working for a major bank. The question was presented in writing and explained verbally to make sure definitions were clear."

That makes Taleb's edge.org claims far from unsubstantiated.

[1] Goldstein, Daniel G. and Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, We Don't Quite Know What We are Talking About When We Talk About Volatility (March 28, 2007). Journal of Portfolio Management, Vol. 33, No. 4, 2007. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=970480
well, the biggest segment of the graph isn't identical to what the previous guy said, so you must be right! </casm>
>Toys are very fun, and I would never try to take that away from anyone, but (in my opinion) there are waaay too many people pushing Node for production work that should know better, and that's the scam.

Walmart used it to deal with much of their Black Friday traffic with no incident and with modest hardware. Node hasn't hit 1.0 yet, but the major API changes are now in the past. So what, specifically, do you see as immature about the project?
Hate Parking Tickets? Fixed Fights Them In Court For You
Easier in what sense? Baking, deploying, or managing the AMIs?

Also, are you using AutoScaling Groups with this methodology?
If you're looking for something more immediately usable, try Cudafy.NET.
In what way(s) is Amazon a "gatekeeper" to e-commerce?
Is it telling that in his review of Black Swann he's seriously citing Malcolm Gadwell of all people?
I think it's ruthless in regards to their suppliers/competition/clients, not their employees. The reality of the capitalist system is that you can't be "nice" to your competition or suppliers.
Heterogeneous Environments Still Alive and Kicking
Change the law? Absolutely. That is actually what I've been trying to advocate all through several discussions, that the outrage is misplaced. Don't like the law? Demand a change in the laws instead and stop wasting time on the companies that follow the law.

It's like that silly issue where everyone gets mad every year at international companies following various country's tax laws to reduce their tax obligations as much as possible but never actually demand a change in the laws themselves. They rail against the company as if that will change anything.

But to answer the question again, yes indeed, Disney deserves that money because that's what the law states. I don't understand how I can make that more clear. The fact that they get any money at all from their original creation is directly tied into such laws. Without those laws they have to hope for the best on the goodwill of people to compensate them for their work. As for deserve? They created it didn't they? Do they deserve anything at all? If they do, for how long until it could be considered public domain? Should anything be considered public domain after a time at all? That's what the law is for, to answer those questions. If you want to change the law, the current law applies until you change it. You can't start at zero and build up, you have to start with what's already established. Therefore, Disney deserves that money because of the law as it stands today.
I hope linking to reddit doesn't get me banned, but this question was asked there and explained nicely:

http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/1va904/truecrypt_mas...
My philosophy for a happy life: Sam Berns at TEDxMidAtlantic 2013
I have also written polygon ray casting function a year ago. It can process thousands of rays at 60 FPS. http://polyk.ivank.net/?p=demos&d=raycast
"So what do you do, Mr. Levie? You help businesses sync files locally across computers for quicker access? Sounds like a feature Sharepoint will add to its roadmap, removing the need for your business."
Vegetation Analysis Via SkySat-1 Near Infrared Imagery
It's weird to me to blame the "state of U.S. broadband" on the telecom providers, and in the same breadth compare it to Singapore, a city-state where all 5 million people live in a single urban area of 270 square miles (i.e. a bit smaller than New York City with a population density a bit higher than San Francisco).

The state of broadband and wireless in the U.S. is proof only of the fact that it's much more expensive to build infrastructure to a huge, sparely-populated country with large suburban, exurban, and rural populations. Half of South Korea lives in the metro area of the largest city. About 30% of people in England live in the metro area of London. About 25% of people in Finland live in the metro area of Helsinki. Only 4% of the people in the USA live in the metro area of New York City. Beyond that, more than half the population of metro London lives in the city proper. For a typical U.S. city like Boston or DC or Atlanta, its more like 15%.
Http://ai.com/
Who is backing up their OS? I thought most people were only backing up their unique data, which by definition wouldn't exist in 'the cloud' already.
right now we are only using them in the class, but in the next Volatility release (2.4) they will be in SVN like all our other ones.
On Windows, requesting a particular font size is just a hope and a prayer. The OS will draw things at the size it thinks is best, with heavy-handed hinting, so the size of a rendered piece of text is quite non-linear with respect to font size: http://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosophi...

This makes it quite impossible for an application to implement a general solution to the problem. You pretty much have to treat HiDPI as another translation of the GUI with respect to sizing things.
There are things other than luck that are out of the control of the startup.

Here is a quote:
"In a great market -- a market with lots of real potential customers -- the market pulls product out of the startup."
When Did We Start Trusting Bad Code? Silent Circle Vulnerability Handling
For the curious, you could also check out Brahma, which translates LINQ to GPU.

http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/05/Brahma
Take this with a grain a salt. Taleb has made a lot of enemies with his writings about the bank bailouts and gov inefficiency. There are a lot of reasons for people to attack him, especially anonymously on the internet.

I am not saying that the arguments are without merit, just to be cautious in forming an opinion on the man.
Online courses, and Kaggle competitions. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Amazing Surf Video Shot with Drone and GoPro
I'm having trouble seeing step #2 here:

1. Start a farm out in the country
2. ???
3. Launch a startup based on step 2.
when I'm coding, I like listening to classical, although I've also been liking swinghouse recently.
Amazing. I had a blast in the last CTF and the shirt is considered one of the more presentable I own according to the wife.. ;-)

Thanks a lot for the work you put into these things!
So it's not the actually the key that's easily located, but the key schedule from which you can get the key out easily?
Playing with Scala 2.10 Reflection API
I like posts like these, there was one on REST that explained it pretty well too.

I would like to see if there's more folks have found which are somewhat high level but are thorough as well like this post.
RHCP are really a smart group of people, and this article which is a good one does itself and them justice. I saw an interview their drummer Chad Smith did with Santana a few weeks back, a really laid back smart guy http://www.musicradar.com/news/guitars/in-conversation-chad-... I'd definitely listen to some life lessons from him.
lol not the 'actually' part : ) just comparing the budgets and saying npm is 0.01% as important to the world as the UN
There's nothing particularly hard about this, or special about javascript though. This is the kind of stuff you could've implemented back in the day and ran on a Pentium MMX. It's about having an efficient algorithm.
>> There is no scientific reason to use it in statistical investigations in the age of the computer

> As someone who uses it daily I am eagerly awaiting his argument.

The use of root mean square error|deviation comes from the ease of calculation in the days before computers. Now that we have computers we can just use mean absolute error|deviation. Before computers, we needed calculus to find the "best fit line" -- parameters that create the least distance between predicted and actual values. Calculus plays well with parabolas but not so great with absolute value functions. Now that computers are around, we don't need calculus (as much).
Doesn't the lack of an fsck tool for ZFS worry you? I know it's supposed to never ever get corrupted, but HDDs do lie sometimes, bits get flipped other times and knowing there's nothing that can try to discover lost files is a deal-breaker for me.

Also, from what I remember, due to the fact ZFS keeps previous versions of files around, the effective data capacity you get is something like 1/2 or even 1/3 of the capacity of the HDD, no?
"They don't get excited about pretending to run a startup"

That's the biggest difference between me now and starting my first company - I was ultra-excited to call myself "CEO of startup" the first time around, this time around we don't even have titles because we don't give a shit. We have a CEO because you need to know at whom the buck stops, but we've even discussed using that interchangeably depending the situation (decided against it) because of how thoroughly we don't care.

I don't think the way I felt the first time around was bad or the reason we failed - but it was a pretty good signal, and I even knew it at the time.
>That said, even dismissing him as a 'crank' would add more substance to your argument than calling him a 'vile idiot.'

Neither "crank" or "vile idiot" would add substance to bluecalm's argument. "Vile idiot" isn't even part of the argument, it's part of the conclusion.

I disagree with bluecalm on the "vile idiot" conclusion - I think that he's either vile or an idiot. If he's really communicating how he sees the world, he's an idiot. If he's just cynically trying to come up with another Gladwell/Taleb style thesis that will catch fire with the NYT and TED crowd and bring in buckets of money, then he's vile.
Actually, Isaac was definitely part of the drama.

Ben rejected a third party pull request, Isaac commited a change related to the pull request, Ben rejected Isaac's commit because Isaac broke the commit rules by not getting sign-off before committing.

Ben walks away after getting libelled by Joyent and virtually fired (http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun) while Isaac gets to go on and make coin from NPM...
A funny rant on imperial units you might find amusing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7x-RGfd0Yk
"must remain neutral regarding the data flowing through their pipes" - what would be the technical definition?

"If you want to know...." - no, just looking for an actual stated technical definition of net neutrality without the hand waving from these articles
The first question that came to mind upon reading this was: "are lawyers involved in the contest letter filing process? If not, I wonder if they may have a problem re: unauthorized practice of law in CA.
screenhero is great too, no video, but it has voice
>Processes running as the root user can.

Unless you're using a trusted computing environment, right? In which case, if you trust the processor and startup environment, the kernel can be assured to run safely and prevent such attacks. Correct?
This article was a waste of electrons.

"Vitamins are "nice to have," but not "need to have." " I'd like for the author to go for several months without Vitamin C.
To be fair, in your kid example, the kid IS feeling a pain NOW: low confidence, and muscles will help him build that.

I think anything forward looking is seeking to solve:
1) things that are painful now but current execution on technology isn't optimized. Either you combine existing technology in new ways or develop new technology.
2) things that will be painful in future. For example, we're building drones to help with the pain and cost of shipping physical goods. Someone is going to develop software to manage those drones, someone is going to develop expertise in drone laws, etc. All pains that don't exist today because drones aren't widespread enough yet.
Is there any evidence backing up these claims? I can think of exceptions for just about every one of these points.
3 Million Teens Leave Facebook In 3 Years: The 2014 Facebook Demographic Report
That's not really how biases work. For example, I'm sure many of the founders of failed startups were nice people, who got stuff done and moved fast (while responding to emails quickly).

I do believe that the people at YC have a lot of experience (and are likely to be quite systematic in their analyses when they do them) but that doesn't mean I'm going to take every post at face value.
I think URLs help explain this

Internet Explorer on Windows 8.1: One browser, two experiences:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ie/hh771832.aspx

CNET Reporting on Multiple IEs:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57405765-75/ie10-in-window...

Google brings Chrome OS straight into Windows 8 in latest update:

http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/14/5309326/google-chrome-wind...

The TL:DR; is that Chrome in Metro will launch a Chrome OSish layer.