skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I often take a more transparent style to the same approach: "We can't think of any good solutions, so here's a possible, but obviously flawed solution to talk about. Maybe it'll inspire something better."

People generally don't like to propose imperfect solutions because of the fear of looking dumb and wasting time. But, when everyone is stumped, sitting in silence is wasting time. Re-igniting the conversation by saying "I don't want to actually do this, but here's another angle" can kick the problem-space search out of a local minima.
Make sure any equity vests over 3-4 years, with a 1-year cliff. If the marketer doesn't do well, fire before year 1 and lose no equity. Also, I'd have him just volunteer for a week or two before as a trial/interview. I have no idea how you could interview him in a conversational way effectively.
I suggest you are suffering from the Blub Paradox[0][1][2].

[0] http://paulgraham.com/avg.html

[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BlubParadox

[2] http://weblog.raganwald.com/2006/10/are-we-blub-programmers....
How the Mig-31 repelled the SR-71 Blackbird from Soviet skies
With regards to regressions, have you tried statsmodels?
"Any moralizing remnant of the British Empire is gone; it has turned back to the pirate England of Sir Walter Raleigh."

Come on - the British Empire was exactly the same under the hood as the Elizabethan Era, just wealthier and capable of far larger, lengthier, and more sophisticated acts of piracy. Fig leaves for the actions of the state change, but people are people in every age, and the goals of those with power ever remain the same.
To emphasize the point, this isn't just true to the extent that energy is scarce:

"the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase."

https://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets...

By making an economic exchange computationally expensive, we may have invented another way to make economic activity ecologically expensive.
This ones already made the front-page of HN. This ship has sailed i'm afraid.
It's not quite like that, at least in the USA.

For example, my good friend had to submit and modify his idea 3 times because the lawyers were not quite happy with the novelty of it. Documenting your idea is a bit more involved then just slapping a few paragraphs down and sending it off to the legal team.

As an IBMer, I've refused to participate in patents because they are a net negative for society. IBM does however reward you for filing patents.

In the USA, it's like $1000 for your first file and then royalties from the patent in some cases (I've heard 1%, but this is just a rumor) if it is granted. Beyond filing your first patent there are different tiers for the number filed & accepted that provide extra monetary reward.

As far as I am aware, there are no divisions at IBM that just sit around and come up with new patents. Novel ideas come as a product of working on other things, so a team doing nothing but patents would probably quickly run out of inspiration. There are however monthly meetings with "Master Inventors" who have been through the process several times and are willing to help mentor you through the process. As an employee, management regularly has asked (2-3x a year) if anything we've done we thought was patentable.
The Conceit of Oracles
Have they solved the "you need the whole blockchain" bit? Like do blockchain-based apps still require you to download the whole she-bang to participate? I know for bitcoin the blockchain is like 14GB or so, and that's for (only most of the) financial transactions for a small (on a global scale) community. If you want to do something with a bigger target audience or more complex data needs, are you going to wind up needing a separate hard drive to participate after a year or two?
It's true that we don't have much in the way of details, but it's also very hard to imagine "very kind" fitting the bill here in any way, shape, or form. "We have a portfolio of patents that we are now going to use to sue you, unless you'd like to buy them" just does not qualify as "kind" to me regardless of the rest of the interaction.

They had (and everyone has) the option to simply not file this kind of suit (or even go hog wild in the patent field). But they consistently choose to. I understand that it'd be fairly irresponsible for a large company to ignore patents, or to ignore actual, real infringement that affects its bottom line, but it is and has been blown so far out of proportion that no one in IBM's position gets a pass.
Really?

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

(And by Goodwin's law corollaries I've lost this debate)
DEC64: Decimal Floating Point
As described by Douglas himself, DEC64 is a decimal floating point format for the next generation of
application programming languages.
Ultracoin Wallet Source
Mastercoin Faucet – Get some mastercoins to test out p2p trading
Let the Agile Fad Flow By (2009)
Thanks so much! I was really stoked by yesterday's related post (and your discussion in the comments). I also find it really interesting to see Scheme used in production; I sort of marginalized it (unfairly to myself, I'm sure) after college as being a good toy Lisp for things like demonstrations in SICP.
Since ffmpeg is running your computer. "realtime" = As fast as your comp can handle. I'm sure my 10+ year old Dell celeron would be horrible but a modern Intel i7 will probably be pretty good.
Yes, if you use a weak seed on a service like brainwallet to deterministically generate your keypair then it is quite easy to brute force / dictionary attack your private key. This is why clients like Electrum force you to use a long passphrase that they themselves generate. This really isn't new or novel.

Side note: I ran this attack months ago and you would be shocked at how many weak passphrases actually had money in them at some point.
I wouldn't call random, non-hyphenated word breaks like that "looking very good"!
most libraries use some form of specialized crypto random number generator (openssl uses the ssleay random number generator, JDK has the same schema for java.security.SecureRandom): /dev/rand is used to seed it with some random numbers, each iteration computes the SHA1 checksum of the previous state, the algorithm returns part of the state as random number output.

The assumption here is that the initial state can't be guessed, i guess you would rather use /dev/random for that, even if it blocks. Now be careful with the initialization step of your favorite crypto library, most inconsistencies /fishy tricks do happen right here !

Also another issue is that that such a random number generator introduces locks; I have a small program that encrypts everything with RSA, and uses multiprocessing to speed up the process; RSA encryption is supposed to use padding schema that needs to generate random numbers, so it locks, however you don't have this problem with decryption - that's where it counts because RSA decryption is much slower than encryption.

here is my project:
http://mosermichael.github.io/cstuff/all/projects/2014/02/24...
Good job and thanks for reporting it. I can see this qualifying for a bounty and hope you'll get it.
Thanks! I have been working on a similar project of my own which focuses on remote files, and was having issues with streaming the files while transcoding was still in progress. This should help a lot!
Well, we have an official reward program with published criteria, and to a large extent, it's just a matter of reputation: if we were unfair or stingy, it would be a very short-sighted strategy.

That aside, having another party getting advance knowledge about the bugs is risky: it just gives bad actors a juicy target to infiltrate to get a steady supply of 0-days.
When I do that chrome-tab-cast, the performance is terrible.
Machine Gun Jetpack
> Good for you. Did you know everything else?

Obviously not, after all I did say "I know bugger all Python".

I did know about slices.
Hire like Google? For most companies, that's a bad idea
Sass 3.2.15 was also released today. I'm staying with it for a while to avoid breaking anything I have right now.
What about a high entropy set of 4 words for the passphrase?

This should give you fairly decent security.
It's tragic that IBM built technology that helped enabled the death of large number of people. One thing the wikipedia page doesn't make clear was IBM aware of the atrocities? The article cites the 1933 census, but things in Germany didn't really heat up until Kristallnacht in 1938?

Anyway, the point was, things are not always black and white. IBM has certainly done some bad things, but it has also had a tremendous positive impact on society, medicine, techology, etc easily; more than 36m.
Awesome! Thank soo much :)
Twitter have a public agreement to use patents only defensively, so hopefully these won't be used offensively now. https://github.com/twitter/innovators-patent-agreement
> PID controllers are "trivial" in analog electronics

Agreed. A couple of op-amps / capacitors / resistors and there you go.
I'm pretty sure there are people who would've paid to get private access to this workaround, and so I hope you will in fact get rewarded for the time well spent.
Since the title doesn't describe it, I will: it's a new James Mickens article, this time about the insanity that is the web.

I found his previous articles really funny but this one felt a bit forced. I think it's maybe too easy to pick on the web, so it ended up being a series of "also, JavaScript equality makes no sense, [NON SEQUITUR HERE]".

Here's a collection of some of his others, which are worth reading before this one:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2013/12/24/10484...
Excellent quote here:

And I really believe that's why we seem to win girls' nationals sections pretty easily every year: most people won’t tell teenage girls (especially the together, articulate ones) that they are lazy and the quality of their work is unacceptable. And sometimes kids need to hear that, or they have no reason to step up.

This could apply to boys as well as girls, and indeed to anyone at just about any age; sometimes we need to be told that we're not measuring up. I am reminded of Philip Greenspun's story about the venture capitalists who wrecked ArsDigita, the company he had built (from http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/):

[F]or most of this year Chip, Peter, and Allen [the VC Board members and CEO] didn't want to listen to me. They even developed a theory for why they didn't have to listen to me: I'd hurt their feelings by criticizing their performance and capabilities; self-esteem was the most important thing in running a business; ergo, because I was injuring their self-esteem it was better if they just turned a deaf ear. I'm not sure how much time these three guys had ever spent with engineers. Chuck Vest, the president of MIT, in a private communication to some faculty, once described MIT as "a no-praise zone". My first week as an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student I asked a professor for help with a problem. He talked to me for a bit and then said "You're having trouble with this problem because you don't know anything and you're not working very hard."
I'm sure I must be missing something here, but this article excerpts verbatim from the chapter "IPython: An Interactive Computing and Development Environment" in _Python for Data Analysis_[1]. What's going on?

(Btw, I found the original source to be a really great overview of iPython -- lots of stuff I didn't know in there)

[1] http://goo.gl/XBiyJG
Interview with Adele Goldberg
The directory.io thing is really interesting. I assume the idea is that the site does the calculation in some way that in theory produces a full set of results and they hope that Google will index more and more of them over time, thus allowing a search for some public keys to find the corresponding private key. It seems like Google does index a few pages (including some higher number ones), but not too many.

Edit: redit threads: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1rua34/all_bitcoin_...
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ruk0z/dont_panic_d...

Edit2: This is one of those basic security things I have trouble getting an intuitive grasp of (but need to). How much can being able to determine a random small part of a random large key space hurt? I've worried about this before with 256-bit key spaces and been reassured with calculations, but I still don't intuitively get it.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Game – 30th Anniversary Edition
EC2Box – *New* SSH to multiple EC2 instances based on healthchecks
This is really a remarkable bit of work. I spent some quality time in the distant past working with CP/M-80 on the Z-80, and it's pretty remarkable what you've done with a very limited platform (relative to now...back then it was the i7 of day). Cudos.
SlatePro – Personal TechDesk
This is how companies become members of the exclusive club known as "entrenched interests."

It would be interesting for a company to take an alternative route and threaten to go out of business, or, say, publicly announce that they can't implement certain features, because it would require them to purchase their freedom to do so. [Insert your own slavery metaphor here]

However, now Twitter will have to say that their position on a given technical controversy is "complicated" and "nuanced" and imply that we rabble just don't understand the real world of business.
Link to the previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7339092 (783 points, 4 days ago, 265 comments)
Thanks, I'm always looking for a good review of research on the MBTI.

Sadly, when I make these points to proponents of the test, it always seems like proponents don't really understand why test-retest reliability would be a problem, or why it matters that there's no basis to promote these four random factors to the center of all personality analysis, or why logical keying would invalidate any personality inventory.

That's what makes me think it's pseudoscience most of all: discussion seems impossible.

Gladwell also provides some history of the test and some major concerns, if you're more into his style:

http://gladwell.com/personality-plus/
Ask HN: Do you measure your productivity like John Carmack?
This blog post suggests that John Carmack uses a timer to measure his productivity - http://bookofhook.blogspot.in/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity-pitfalls.html.
I wonder if a substantial number of people do these kinds of hack. Do any of you use some kind of timer or application to keep track of your productive time? Do you maintain logs of what you got done today? And if you do, how much do you think it helps you.
The Insanely Profitable Federal Reserve
I tested with a P8700 processor, it would be able to transcode a 1080p video with a very few lags. With i7 3630QM processor, it had no lag.
> The main problem I've found so far is that python is quite bad with advanced statistical analysis, like producing regressions with the right standard errors

Can you tell me an example? Scipy, NumPy and statsmodels etc. pretty much handle these.
I sometimes wish there was a language inbetween scheme and common lisp that actually caught on. They're both powerful languages, but to me the little scheme I've done makes me feel like I'm just reinventing common lisp as I go along, and sometimes common lisp leaves me wanting for something a bit "smaller" that doesn't take up 30mb of memory just to open the REPL. This especially holds true in the mobile world.
Show HN: Soft Skills are Important Too
That's completely irrelevant. Grok the JSON specs and reconsider what the javascript number format has to do with it.
A Native American Tribe Hopes Digital Currency Boosts Its Sovereignty
Security breach found in tip4commit
Auditing gnutls
As long as it isn't "correcthorsebatterystaple."
"It boils down to this: Britain is ready to betray the United States to protect the City of London’s hold on dirty Russian money."

And when exactly did we sign up to be your vassals?
According to the classic xkcd on this subject (https://xkcd.com/936/) 4 random common words provides 44 bits of entropy which is easily crackable (you can do a hell of a lot more than 1000 guesses/sec)

Something that uses key stretching like WarpWallet might be acceptable: https://keybase.io/warp/
oh, well, I thought it was an irony :)

anyway for now our plans in terms of flash do not go beyond exporting to swf.
Despite Comcast-Netflix deal, settlement-free peering is alive and well
Designer Turns Common Client Quotes into Hilarious Posters
I misunderstood the article I guess. I thought they knew specifically what they were testing, i.e. 'we have altered the airplane this way and we will now do these things.' After the failure, they were able to essentially reconfigure the simulator to match the test parameters, rerun the test and observe the same failure in simulation.
The article is a bit misleading, as no Blackbirds ever flew over Soviet mainland, as far as Soviet air defense and U.S. Congress concerned.
Post some of them.
currently the only html/css left in the app is in the inspector and some dialogs. everything else is drawn on canvas using our own canvas-based ui controls
The old flux was basically a sunset simulator. Complaints about it really have more to do with the solar system and your lat/long.

You could set it to an appropriate lat/long to produce desired behaviour... Then you could move there since the day cycle would be more to your tastes :)
You didn't want to comment because you don't want to be downvoted? Yeah, I don't think that's rare.

Although posting a comment saying that you decided not to comment because everyone would downvote you is likely a very good way of... getting downvotes.
American diplomacy assumes NATO lapdogs (or vassals, as it were) and so the idea is probably that you signed a vassal contract when you went policing Europe with us during the cold war.

As far as I'm concerned, any trust placed without consulting the other party is just an assumption. You defy assumptions, you don't betray them. Why is America's stance any more just than Russia's?
Google battles legal fallout of copyright ruling on anti-Islamic film
Do not use your Google Voice number for Two-Factor Authentication
What this have to do with reliability of windows as a platform.

Reliable platform means, that new versions of OS do not break your old program. Which is true for windows.

Of course, as OS becomes more capable, it's possible to write programs that can't work on less capable older versions. But even then, windows tries to add fallbacks so that most new programs still work on old versions.
Now this suddenly became a valid activity for your CV.

http://nodecopter.com/
You can increase the recursion limit like this:

import sys

sys.setrecursionlimit(x)

Kind of a "hackish" way to do things but you can do it if you need to.
Six Ways America Is Like a Third-World Country
ParaSITE
Somebody will respond with a "Start using your inbox like a to-do list" as a retort in order to promote their gmail extension that turns your inbox into a to-do list. And so will continue the never-ending cycle of advice as self-promotion.
True, completely agree. But that's a skill :) you could have a teacher writing on the whiteboard for 45 minutes and zero interaction. A similar analogy would be kids abuse the right to start out an introduction paragraph with a quote or a question.
Make PCBs at home with magazine paper and your laser printer
A Self-Pubbing Future
Not if those 4 words are in the dictionary. Crackers are definitely aware of this password generation technique and it isn't hard to run through 4 word combinations from a dictionary.

In the end, the best password right now is a 16+ random password made up of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers and symbols. Use a password manager to manage and store your passwords.
If you're using dependency managers like bower you either have to import the stylesheet in your <head> or use the @include in a sass stylesheet, both will be a new HTTP request. Whereas if you compile it in one file, you save an extra request (now imagine you use multiple dependencies each with their own css file). Renaming a file would defeat the whole point of dependency management.
MSX software that works unmodified on 8-bit Sega systems
It's the same story in US too. Many startups are desperate to build a patent portfolio. Those who can afford the lawyer fee, throw out big incentives to employees to patent left & right. Much of the stuff is crass. After a while I started hating the patent process at my work places (respected, popular companies).
Satire is a deliberate mockery of the subject material in order to criticize it. You don't call something satire just because one of its bullet points is kinda funny.
I'd be a lot more interested in a device that, stock, could switch between Android and iOS. A quick search suggests this may not be hard to accomplish with an Android device (which is really pretty cool if it's true). But Windows 8? I suppose there are people who would want this, but I don't really see the appeal.
Coming from a long history of languages like BASIC and Pascal, I will bookmark this tutorial. It seems to open up a lot of interesting Python features that were, quite frankly, not always easy to understand when described in plain text, but now seem pretty simple when presented as examples.

I'll also think about the "collection of simple examples" next time I want to document something.
Yup, I'm working on modernizing our platform. Currently we're built in CodeIgniter (before I came) and I am in the process of rewriting the whole platform to use Laravel, PHPUnit, and Travis-CI.
http://jvns.ca/blog/categories/kernel/
There are quite clearly quotas dictated from above, typically because IBM wants to win the "patent race" every year. If they feel Intel/Samsung/ContenderX will file more/fewer during the year, they adjust the pace, and your idea will be (de-)prioritized accordingy. This being said, patents are generally not entirely vacuous, as they come out of things that researchers are, in fact, working on.
This one from January is not on that list:
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
Connect ST3 with Chrome browser's textarea with WebSockets
Nodecopter – Program model aircraft drones with JS
PHP, Ruby, JS.
It started as a hiring problem. Now there's still a hiring problem, but there's also this one, which is unrelated. Both should be fixed and, unfortunately, neither has an easy or comfortable solution.
I have spent quite a lot of time (~250h) on this problem as part of my dissertation and found ~18k brainwallets. Most of the 10k brainwallets found by the author have probably been made by another 'researcher' who is actively probing the network to look for thieves. There are many other similar analyses online which have better and more interesting results than this.

Edit: I can upload some rather large and confusing transaction network diagrams if anyone wishes to see them.
Manu Prakash: A 50-cent microscope that folds like origami
I'd extend that one step further

unpacking < destructuring < pattern matching < first-class patterns

where first-class patterns are increasingly becoming available in some languages which offer pattern matching (in particular, Haskell will have them soon).