skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People are saying here that corporations should be sharing the upside with employees. You are saying that since they are not, people should start businesses.

That's part of what I'm saying, but not all. Another part of what I'm saying is that, if the premise is that current corporations are not sharing enough upside with employees, then one obvious response is to start a business that does share upside with employees. If that's really as big a deal as people are claiming, employees should flock to such a business. Only some of those who are now dissatisfied would actually have to start such businesses; the rest could simply choose to work for them because they treat employees better.

I challenge you to cite references to actual regulations that are to any "large extent" preventing actual small businesses from starting.

First of all, it's not just starting but growing businesses that should be less impeded by regulation. Sure, start a business with only a few employees and the burden might not be too bad (depending on what kind of business it is--see below); but hit a fairly small threshold number of employees and all of a sudden you have regulations galore that you have to comply with or a dozen government agencies will come after you.

As for regulatory barriers to starting businesses, here are a few off the top of my head: professional licensing, even for professions like hairdressing where any putative benefit to the customer is far outweighed by the costs of the barrier to entry; zoning laws that clearly go way beyond any public benefit; government sweetheart deals for companies like cable providers, which prevent all kinds of competition in the ISP arena. That's just from a few minutes of brainstorming; I'm sure there are plenty more examples.

the implication in the Reuter's article is that businesses are doing just fine in the current regulatory environment.

That's because they (i.e., existing businesses) paid good money for the current regulatory environment. That does not at all imply that said environment is good for potential competitors of those existing businesses; if it were, they'd be complaining to their politicians that they weren't getting their money's worth.

I doubt many here will cite regulations as a key challenge. Instead, it's actual business problems, such as product development, finding market-fit, competition, marketing, lack of capital, inability to scale, etc.

But all of these business problems are also faced by existing businesses. Markets are not static; a product-market fit that worked fine yesterday might not work fine today, and businesses that serve their customers well often have to reinvent themselves. The response of many existing businesses (the music and movie industries being two outstanding examples), instead of reinventing themselves, is to try to outlaw their competition. The fact that those businesses continue to make profits even though there are obvious ways in which they are not serving their customers well (let alone their employees) indicates that their political efforts to get the playing field tilted in their favor have been successful.
And his analysis is almost embarrassingly bad. I cannot fathom how someone who worked in investment banking at Goldman could be so far off in how to price this.
Cortex as in Cortex Semi?
I first learned "true" programming with Perl. My next language was C to learn how to program microcontrollers. Incidentally, they remain my two favorite languages even after Python, C++, Java, Tcl, shell, LISP, and multitudes of assemblies. I feel these two languages cover most of my uses.

I just wish the built-in XS Perl<>C integration was simpler. I need to look into some CPAN modules for a more ctypes-like interface. Better yet, it should use libclang to autogenerate bindings!
Because apple hasn't released it yet. rimshot
Just released (MIT license); have at it.
Then I retract my "not sensibly available" for "maybe sensibly available on your platform".

But, it is still not the array size.
Ah, then what you're looking for is a comprehensive description, not a comprehensive definition. (I gather your native language is not English?) For that you will have to read a book on computability theory (at least -- it depends on just how "comprehensive" you want to get).

> And you're saying this based on what?

Based on the definition of Turing-completeness, and the (trivial) fact that there exist Turing machines that do not halt. A Turing-complete system is, by definition, a system that can emulate any Turing machine. Because some Turing machines don't halt, any system that never halts cannot emulate a Turing machine that does not halt, and so by definition is not Turing-complete.
Of course. Think of it as a percentage of your income, or wealth that you're OK with being unable to account for. Let's say that figure is 1% of your income.. so you make $50,000 per year, and somewhere $500 goes missing. No biggie.

That 1% figure is the same if you're McDonald's or Buffet, it's just that 1% of their income is a very big number. It's still only 1% though, so it's equally as unimportant to them as your 1% is to you.
There's probably a captcha or something similar to prevent bots. The number of entries is capped at 10M, and I don't think the time the contest is open will be the prevailing constraint, given all the publicity.
I've worked with teams in India (and Poland, US, UK, Australia, Spain) for several years and quality depends on how well you manage the hiring and how well you manage the communication - remembering that communication is harder with anyone the farther you are away from being in the same room with someone. You may need to hire someone local to you to do this for you as communication is a full time job (a solution architect is the sort of role you'll need).

Don't expect miracles, 'cause miracles cost money - but it's got a 50/50 chance of working out OK.
BitCoin Exchange MtGox Lays off Staff
Berkshire isn't making big money on this.

Big money for his company these days is to generate a couple billion in profit off of a deal (eg the Bank of America, Goldman, GE deals).

The tiny premium this bet is likely to pay isn't worth getting out of bed in the morning for Buffett, except it was his idea and he likes to have fun with things of this sort. It's his version of a weekend golf bet (with the odds radically in his favor).
I wonder if someone will (or already has) design a low-level language which is async and cache-hierarchy aware.
Google doesn't offer its computing as a product (well, yes, there's App Engine, but it's pretty tiny). Amazon, OTOH, has a huge, dominant, and very profitable service dedicated for just these sort of things, and it would be good if it got some competition.
> "scatology and sexual dimorphism jokes are just wearisome."

Right, but that is not because they are unimaginative or cliched (evidenced by you being able to wade through mountains of bad puns). It is because they are scatological or sexist.
Wait, can you explain what you mean? From my reading (especially from the source blog post[1]), they're releasing server designs and open sourcing some management software. If you were going to be running Windows Server (or someone convinces you to run it), cheaper commodity hardware is great, but it seems like you'll still be paying for Windows Server licenses.

[1] http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/01/27...
I did have a windows phone and very much liked having my wife pinned to the home screen but she was the only one who made it. I wasn't interested in having a whole heap of other (less attractive) heads burning my retina all the time.

I am probably unusual but I find the whole social media/Skype scene quite tedious and I have closed all those accounts as time goes by. Excluding my wife, replies and others contacting me, I send about 2 personal emails a week, about 5 SMS a week, make about 10 personal phone calls a week and that's it. It simply doesnt justify a people centric UI.
Last year, I had spent about a week in benchmarking SPDY. Server push didn't show any improvements to page load time for even first-time visitors. The whole benchmark was scripted with Chrome running in a dummy X server. The round-trip time was artificially constrained to about ~100ms.

Even if it were to show an improvement in some situations (different round trip times or network speeds), it would be in the microseconds to couple of milliseconds range; with a large variance.

Given that it degrades performance for second-time visitors, I would recommend not enabling it without further benchmarking.
PLENTY of organized crime has nothing do with drugs. A huge subset of organized crime is involved in counterfeiting - which is a billion dollar industry by itself. Counterfeiting consumer products (designer purses, shoes...) medication, and even FOOD. Yes, food is a big one. https://reportingproject.net/occrp/index.php/en/cc-blog/1758....

As well as other form of crime - prostitution and human trafficking, gun running, identity and credit card theft and other "cybercrimes," and "legal" debt slavery.
Relevant disclosure: I run an iOS developer-related website (http://www.cocoacontrols.com), and I asked Andrew, one of the co-founders, to advertise on my site sometime soon (and I owe him a follow-up email...Andrew, if you see this, sorry I haven't done that yet. I spent the weekend in bed with a seriously bad head and chest cold, and am only now digging myself out of my backlog of work.)

I received a demo of Tapylytics last week, and I have to say it is really impressive. There are definitely some rough edges here and there in the product, but if it holds up half as well as it did in the demo then it'll be the first product I've seen that might actually make people A/B test their iOS apps. It's really cool.

I can't wait to try it out in the real world with an app I've been building on the side for the past few days.

I should also mention that I have a really high bar for accepting ads for Cocoa Controls, and only do it for products that I actually like (reputation takes years to build, and can be pissed away in a second if you screw up badly enough).
If they don't respond, the case is marked as unresolved or something like that. Square's score will get dinged. So they have to say something (assuming they care about the BBB score).
> Not delivering purchases is a bad business model.

Even if this were true, there are still X number of people who got ripped off with no recourse.

> With Bitcoin, your credit card can't be skimmed or stolen

No, but your private key can be stolen/lost, and in that event, you don't have the benefit of fraud protection.
I'm really excited by all the mobile a/b testing companies that emerged in the last year. There were almost no companies working on this space just a scant year ago, though a lot of the more successful and large companies had implemented these tools internally for their own apps. Seamless updates, ui changes, full a/b testing is something we'll likely see a lot more of in the future.
While I certainly understand the idea that reporters should avoid disclosing sources and methods there are two things that warrant further consideration. First Bruce Schneier as a security researcher has knowledge of a vulnerability. A vulnerability is a vulnerability and this is one we know at least one actor is exploiting. He has a responsibility to report this. This takes me to what I think is the most interesting part of this whole Snowden situation. We now know with certainty that everything can be subverted. All those theoretical and academic ideas are being actively exploited by at least one actor. If we assume NSA as the high watermark its only a matter of time before less resourced nations and well resourced or placed companies start doing the same. Now that we know roughly the price to surveil the world I don't know how we ever put that back in the box.
"What likely happens is the right cell from a bucket of the closest size to the allocation you need is returned to you and marked in use"

...implying that the size of the block is, in fact, available to the allocator. This might not be stored explicitly (it could be stored as a pair of pointers) but it is not unavailable. It is also necessarily available to the deallocator, which must in some way be aware of what it is marking as free. As I said, this might only be an approximation of the size of the array, though for bounds checking purposes it would usually be good enough (since nothing else should be allocated in the "excess" space that is marked as in-use).

"Passing the array along with its size further goes to prove the original statement, not refute it. If you have to do something manually, it strongly implies that the language/runtime isn't doing it for you."

Take a closer look at the original statement. He did not merely say that the size is unavailable to programmers, he said it is not available at all. That is not really true -- it is more that the compiler does not do anything useful with the information.

To put it another way, a compiler could conceivably emit bounds-checking code but still not provide programmers with an explicit way to get the size of an array. The result would be the same: programmers would still be forced to pass array sizes around, to avoid a call to abort (or whatever behavior occurs when a bounds check failed).
C doesn't really have malloc or free: those are part of the standard library. You can happily code in C without malloc/free, or you can add a library that provides a garbage collected malloc. What C's type system is providing really is bare metal (although as you say, to the abstraction provided by the machine, not to physical reality) to a much more fundamental extent than even a heap allocator, and certainly claiming you could just swap in garbage collection and then have a string type is totally missing the point.
The deal is with Quicken Loans, not Quicken/Intuit. The companies are no longer related and have separate ownership.

Quicken Loans is owned by Dan Gilbert who also owns the Cleveland Cavaliers, so he's obviously interested in basketball.
It also assigns them an infantile quality.
Unless I missed it, the FBI still hasn't disclosed how they tracked down the physical server. The FBI said was it was "located in a country with an arrangement with the US, who gave us access", but remained intentionally vague and said nothing more. Can they really use that data without disclosing how they got it?
Are you serious when making this comment ? "does anyone seriously have a problem with this? In my mind it falls squarely within the NSA's mission, i.e. this is we pay them to do!"

So, I guess you are fine the US Military keeping and maintaining ready-to-fire, nuclear weapons, at pointed targets all around the world, just because "they are paid to do so" ? With this kind of logic we will never get rid of the nuclear deterrence theory, and we'll keep that shadow over our heads until someone actually pulls the trigger one day. But it's ok, because "they are paid to do so" ?
Understanding Web Application infections
Sadly, Egor (who found this vulnerability) mentioned he's moving away from exclusively white-hat security since he "[tried to do] responsible disclosures but it gave me 0 profit. So now i will play with “gray” methods and see if it’s reasonable."

It's sad to see a researcher so talented and committed be pushed to the dark side simply because companies decide their bugs aren't "worth it"

Original post (now edited): http://egorhomakov.com/post/72088934127/year-2013
Naveen here from Immunity Project. Thanks for the question. We have not done receptor analysis. We are using animal models as our starting point - we are looking for an immune response with memory to the administered peptides - if we get that response in Phase I we should be in good shape!

We received the peptides from researchers who have a manuscript in publication and would like us to keep the sequences confidential until they publish. Please see below for similar statistical research looking for targets to beneficial regions on HIV:

Mothe B, Anuska L, Ibarrondo J, Daniels M, Miranda C, Zamarreno J, et al. Definition of the viral targets of protective HIV-1-specific T cell responses. Journal of Translational Medicine 2011;9(208):20.

re: your startup / cost savings on reagents, supplies and equipment, we would love to talk to you about that. Please email us at team@immunityproject.org. Thanks!
I suspect the women who unhappy are writing posts about it, and the ones who don't want special treatment aren't saying anything because they're doing just fine. IMO it's a noisy minority, but given the recent story about the woman who got felt up at a Bitcoin meetup, perhaps more sexist behavior is going on than I see.

I'm a female programmer. I don't want to be hit on or looked at like I'm from another planet; I want to be judged by the quality of my work. It's going to my satisfaction, so I don't feel the need to complain.
Firefox applications are easy
If she knows anything about the target (glossing over the fact that the actual target is square), an attacker could get correct answers with high probability. Twitter, FB, LI, etc. provide people the target is likely to know. In many locales you wouldn't even need an exact address to know which streets cross which other ones (although frankly how hard is it to know someone's address?). And of course there is a direct mapping from social security numbers to states, so asking the SS question in that fashion adds no security.

All of this ignores the fact that these are multiple choice questions. Attackers don't have to win every time. 1/64 of targets would be vulnerable given no knowledge whatsoever. This is just an upper bound on how useful this set of questions is for Square, while the rest of TFA constitutes a convincing lower bound on how harmful they are to those who would legitimately use Square.
Paypal fairly recently switched from "login encouraged" to "login mandatory".
If you visited and interviewed there, I'm assuming you tried emailing one of your contacts?
> And there's no simple excuse for the preprocessor; I don't know exactly why that exists, but my guess is that back in the 1970s it was an easy way to get at least an approximation to several desirable language features without having to complicate the actual compiler.

Clearly this guy has never had to deal with a large, complicated code base in C. Dismissing the preprocessor as a crutch for a weak compiler shows a significant ignorance about the useful capabilities that it brings.
+1 for DAS. Gary's great and I think we agree pretty closely on these issues.
I work at Google. Most of production code is C++/Java. Python is used for scripts, testing frameworks/test harnesses, internal tools like code review and bugs etc.
That's an interesting approach.

Re not knowing if the human analogs are immunogenic yet: An alternative way to to answer your question would be to identify a T cell receptor (TCR) clone that recognizes your peptides of interest. There are several ways of identifying TCR clones that match your peptide of interest. Probably the best way is via phage display. The advantages here are manifold:

1. By identifying a human TCR you immediately prove that your peptide is recognized by the human immune system (immunogenic)--you still need to do a bit more work to show that the immune system will produce this antibody in response to your peptide--but that's a pretty good start.

2. You could perform phage display separately on TCRs from elite controllers and more susceptible patients. The differences in these TCRs would likely make for a very interesting academic publication.

3. You could make a TCR-like antibody based on this TCR. If your vaccination strategy failed, hey at least now you have an antibody you can take into trials!
Hi Howie, can you elaborate? You didn't really address the why / why not aspect of the question.

Since the Immunity Project concept relies on training the immune system to mount a successful response against HIV, why would it not present some benefit to an already-infected person whose infection is otherwise controlled with drugs?

You may just be focusing on the preventative aspect, but there are many millions worldwide who are concerned with controlling HIV without depending on expensive antiviral drugs that in many cases are completely unavailable.
There's Google Compute Engine, too.
http://www.quinndunki.com/OGOL/GATE.html
> dozens of governments that do not spy, because they do not have either the resources to do an effective job of it, or they do not have a mandate to do it,

Which countries are these? As far as I can tell, every country in the UN has an intelligence agency. Which would mean they spy on somebody, and "effectiveness" seems like a bit of a weasel-y standard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies
In the US "what we pay them to do" is vernacular for "it's their assigned job" or "it's what we asked them to do". I admit it's a bit of a weird phrase but its not actually referring to money. To your point: if the claim is that we're asking our military or our intelligence agencies to do things that aren't effective, then let's have that debate. Nuclear force reduction and end illegal surveillance? Sure. Nuclear disarmament and shutting down our SIGINT mission? Not so much.
> The only relevant attribute is consent.

The guards here are not asking the prisoners for sex. The prisoners are asking the guards for sex. If I ask you to do something, and you do, I have consented to that thing.

If I show a woman a gun, and tell her "sleep with me or I kill you", and she sleeps with me -- that's rape.

If I'm her boss, and tell her "sleep with me or you're fired", and she does -- that's not rape.

Of those two, the prison guard / prisoner relationship can be reasonably analogized to the gun scenario. But:

If I have a gun, and a woman sees it, swoons, and asks to sleep with me -- that's not rape.

That's what's actually going on. It's not rape unless I actually use (or threaten to use) my ability to coerce.

By focusing so much on the idea that a prison guard could hypothetically have power over inmates, you're worrying about the appearance of impropriety. But while that is present in this case, there is no actual impropriety occurring (toward the prisoners).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appearance_of_impropriety

The guard who extorts sex from a prisoner they've taken a fancy to is abusing the prisoner. That's not happening here. The guard who caves to an inmate's seduction and does them favors out of love is not abusing the prisoner. They're abusing the trust society placed in them when they were made a prison guard.
These superchargers are great but I think in many cases it would be more practical to fully charge overnight at a hotel. (not sure how likely a hotel would be to accomodate this) Hopefully hotels begin to build-out electric outlet access for some of their parking spaces. The beauty of charging overnight is you don't need to buy a special charger so the infrastructure would be relatively inexpensive.

Imagine if you could simply rent a fuel-cell (hydrogen?) for long trips and connect it in the trunk...
Or even just renting extra batteries. (although quite heavy and inconvenient to carry)

I'm fully convinced electric cars are a big component in tje future of transportation but there are many challenges to solve. Also ET3/hyperloop seems promising.
Thank you for the kind words and support! We are very focused on our stated goal which is ending HIV/AIDS with a free vaccine. We haven't received any pressure to stop our work yet. If we do we will definitely let you know so we can get your help in fighting back!
And people keep asking what the advantages of BitCoin are over Paypal/Square/Credit Cards/you name it.
Exactly! Fortunately, the article didn't point out one of C's great advantages is that it's so lightweight it can fit into and run on all kinds of interesting systems where other languages are infeasible economically. Cortices rule!
Dell partners with MakerBot to resell 3D printers and scanners
I think you're referring more to the "jlee" and "rsmith" combos than the "tptacek" ones.