skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Professors who write textbooks receive 15-40% royalties off the cover price.

I'd like to know where to get that kind of deal! I have only one experience publishing a textbook (currently in progress, with Springer), but we get 6% total, split between the authors (so 2% of the cover price each). That seems to be a fairly common rate at least for niche stuff. I guess if you're writing a "blockbuster" textbook and are a Famous Name you can probably negotiate something better.

In our case we're also putting the book free online. The main issue in getting that through wasn't our own worry about losing royalties, but difficulty convincing the publisher, who I think are in turn worried more about precedent and the way the market is shifting than this one book. If it were up to us, the whole thing would be open-access, and also the cover price for a print copy would be considerably lower than whatever they're likely to price it at. In the end we did a sort of "take it or leave it" ultimatum where we put a draft manuscript online to teach last fall's version of the course, before we'd signed a deal, and told the rep that we would only sign a deal if we could leave an author-formatted manuscript version online, which the publisher (somewhat reluctantly) agreed to. It helped that the rep is part of our research community and we have a good working relationship to explain what our goals are.

In our case the competing incentives are: 1) institutionally it doesn't "count" as a published book unless it's with a recognized publisher, and having it with a recognized publisher also makes it easier to get it into libraries and get other researchers and teachers to take it seriously; but 2) we want people to actually read it, and a €100 Springer book massively cuts down on potential audience, especially non-academic audiences, who we think the subject matter might appeal to if it weren't for the price. Hence the arrangement where Springer publishes it but you can also get the penultimate "author's manuscript" PDF (which will be identical except for formatting) for free online seems ideal for us [1]. We will also not be requiring our students to buy the paper version; the PDF version will be fine for the course.

[1] Well ideal from the perspective that both audiences are served: non-academics, autodidacts, hobbyists, and students who want a free-or-cheap book can get a free book through the PDF channel; academics, administrators, library acquisitions people, and methodologically conservative educators can get a Traditionally Published book through the publisher channel. This is probably not an ideal arrangement from the point of view of royalties, though: if we just self-published for €20 and put some effort into advertising, we would probably sell many more paper copies, and get more money (and also get to keep all the money, not 6% of it). But ultimately writing this book is not our day job or expected to be a significant source of income, so getting it into The System of libraries and official approval was worth the tradeoff of (probably) not making any money from it.
I feel the same about your last statement "Reading HN gives me the impression that developers get better pay and more interesting work in SF", especially since 12 week bootcampers seem to earn nearly double my wage when I have a 3 year degree (in CS from a good uni) and live in one of the most expensive cities in the world...

I have to wonder, to what extent is the whole silicon valley situation overated for us Australias? (I am West Coast so obviously I'm in a much less 'better off' situation with those two points than someone in Melb and Sydney)

Maybe we are just jealous, I sure think I am a lot...
Sounds good. We've been out "talking" but for most of the early years weren't "selling". But part of the reason for that is that what we're doing isn't entirely novel. There's a known market for the general class of things we're doing, so we're not operating completely in the dark.

It doesn't help that we don't yet have a dedicated salesperson with selling experience. So I've been working to reinvent myself as a salesperson over the years, and I think part of it is that I'm only not starting to feel like I know what needs to be done to go out and sell this stuff.

That said, there are things I would certainly do differently if I could go back and do it again. :-)
This is good advice and probably one of the best methods to meet people. I am currently looking for some other options( online communities) as there is not enough developer meetups in my area. But thank you for advice, I appreciate it
Their example distribution is buggy. Users 3-6 all have the same 3BTC balance, yet they receive different distributions (users 3&4 get zero, user 5 gets 2BTC, and user 6 get 3BTC.)
January 8th, 2013 - Multiple vulnerabilities in parameter parsing in Action Pack (CVE-2013-0156)
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rubyonrails-security...

Hacked May, 2013. Blame the exchange's devs who didn't do security updates.
Thanks for the tip, motivated me to dust off the old Pentium 4 I have here and install OpenBSD on it.
It's still nowhere near its peak. I wonder what happened around Sep last year?

https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-re...
I wrote this Koan a while back. It amused /r/ruby:

When Matsumoto first came to these shores, he met a precocious young hacker who was strong in the way of Perl, which had many practitioners then.

“Matsumoto,” the young man said, “why should I learn your foreign Ruby? I am strong in the way of Perl, and I have yet to find a problem it is not flexible enough to solve.”

Matsumoto smiled his kind smile and said, “One does not learn Ruby for oneself. One learns Ruby for others.”

“Ha,” the young man said, “then your way is not for me. I am not the cooperating type. I work on my own projects and my projects alone. No one but me reads my code.”

Matsumoto bowed his head and said, “All hackers cooperate, even you.”

“You are a fool, Matsumoto! Did I not just say I work alone?”

To this Matsumoto said, “Even those who work alone, cooperate with all the people they once were and all those they will become.”

Upon hearing this, the young man was enlightened.
I'm not sure it's the same in Germany as in the Netherlands, but I'd recommend getting a good tax lawyer.

Our tax company generally tends to lay down strong demands (which makes sense,) but becomes very lenient when it's clear they're more likely to recover the full amount by being patient.
With BI it always is beneficial to work. Even if you only work for a couple of months a year (for instance picking strawberries) you will make more money than not doing anything.

So if anything BI incentives people to work even if only for once in a while.
Show HN: Password generator (terminal)
"So following their academic study, Moore and Christin calculate a 1/3 failure rate for Bitcoin exchanges."

"Just one year ago, a study by Computer scientists Tyler Moore Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas) and Nicolas Christin (of Carnegie Mellon University) found 40 exchanges offering bitcoin services. Of those 40, 18 went out of business — 13 without warning, including five that collapsed instantly following cyber attacks. Almost all of the exchanges that collapsed took their investors funds with them. They estimated that: “Exchanges handling 275 Bitcoins’ worth of transactions each day have a 20 percent chance of being breached, exchanges handling 5570 Bitcoins have a 70 percent chance of failure” It was calculated that in 2013 the median lifespan of any Bitcoin exchange is 381 days, with a 29.9 percent chance that a new exchange will close within a year of opening. So following their academic study, Moore and Christin calculate a 1/3 failure rate for Bitcoin exchanges…"

http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/2014/03/22/bitcoin-foundation...
Really? That's what passes for journalism? Straight up copy garbage from reddit, which copied it from 4chan, and republish it without adding ANY original thought to it? That's normal on Buzzfeed, but I didn't know kottke.org was this worthless.
Too easy. Score 55200 in first game.
That's almost how the current system works, and is a source of much of it's woes. There is no actual "karma rating", but prosecutors are very mindful of their success rates as they are generally considered to be a measure of their worth as a prosecutor and the basis on their future career advancement.

Because of that, once they prosecute someone, they must succeed -- and this leads to situations like the prosecution withholding or trying to hide evidence proving innocence.
If you understand German (I couldn’t find the French version) you can also watch this about the same principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A2LYK9x9eM&t=325s

It’s basically identical to the Susu in the Wikipedia article you linked to (and many of the same points are made in the radio and TV show), but this time it’s called a Tontine and it’s being used in France (imported from Africa): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine

The Tontine described in that article is a bit different from what you were describing and from what Susu is – but the Tontine described in the TV show is basically identical to the one described in the radio show.
This sounds a lot like the attitude that Palm CEO Ed Colligan had about Apple entering the phone market:

> We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.
Very informative video, I like the style.
Thank you.
This is correct. Start with something like C#, Java or Go.
Like I said blaming software is not a legitimate excuse. And there is no silver bullet but there must be procedures and good practices that make it too demanding and hard where time + effort will be way greater then the reward.
Roll over Beethoven
Ignoring the personalities for a moment, I viewed this column as pushing the Bayesian vs. frequentist views.

Nate Silver believes you should be purely frequentist viewpoint of the data first.

Krugman is pushing the Bayesian viewpoint. Given experts' assumptions (that have been built up from examining lots of prior data with critical thinking), let's examine this data.

This is a battle that is being fought on many other stages than Krugman's blog.
If exporting chips to the US were against Chinese laws, yes, of course.
Exactly. Statistics without purpose, ie. as a fishing expedition, is dangerous. Scientists use statistics all the time, but usually under the guidance of hypothesis driven experiments. Krugman is merely mentioning that if Nate Silver keeps drawing conclusions based on statistical analysis without a deeper understanding and grounding, it is highly likely that he'll come to some bone-headed conclusions.

The best value of statistical wizardry is when it works alongside domain experts.
Link: http://javascriptjabber.com/099-jsj-npm-inc-with-isaac-schlu...
Is there no incentive to spend the seized assets as well?
First 2048 game where i won!
:D

Heck, well I'd respect if someone were good at one thing.

I have some weak spots because I sort of drifted away to seek pleasures of life. You get good at what you repeatedly do. Part of me would like to trade that with being a great coder and bang code at will. The other part kind of likes banging chicks at will.

Now I decided to get serious and solidify my weak coding skills, networking stuff. The good benefit is that I know all the concepts, etc. I just didn't have working code. I can make a simple thing. Never started a "real" project, for I haven't had something that matters to me.

Now I have. I started doing it. Little by little.
Slo-mo on Raspberry Pi and Laser etching Jeans: That Maker Show #2
I am fairly certain that it is illegal not to allow disabling of overdraft protection.
When I went to my old bank's branch, I asked for it to be turned off, and they said "We need a letter written to this effect."

I asked for a piece of paper, addressed the branch manager, and asked in a sentence to disable it for my account.
They seemed perturbed that I would do this while the line was waiting behind me, but frankly, it's their policy.

I had it turned off immediately.
Stop me if I'm wrong, but it seems misleading to ask whether or not the problem is in P. It seems to me that it is better to ask more generally whether the problem is tractable. There are a lot of games that are solvable in exponential time (not in P) that are still tractable because the branching factor is low enough that simple methods like minimax searches work well.

Take chess as an example. It's an EXP-TIME complete game with a branching factor of 35, and AI techniques win pretty much all of the time. In this case you're looking at a much simpler game (if you treat it as an expectiminimax problem, you alternate between turns with a branching factor of less than or equal to 4 and ones with a branching factor of less than or equal to 32). The game is much less complicated than chess. The game tree is really small, meaning that it should be tractable to most AI techniques.

Even though it is reasonable to 'solve' the problem, there are board setups that are unwinnable. Since the player has a lot more power over the game in placing tiles than the agent does in moving them, it is easier for the player to force the game to one of the unwinnable states than it is for the agent to prevent these things. Even if the agent is acting optimally, the player should still be able to win.
>The 75% wealth tax point was only a minor point in an article that expressed many many other points and anecdotes, and whose greater argument was that the entrepreneurial climate in France was poor.

Yes, the greater argument was that "the entrepreneurial climate is poor" because they wouldn't get very much sympathy saying "stop taxing the ultrawealthy so much. We don't like it!".

Nonetheless, it's pretty obvious what they thing the 'fix' for this supposedly poor climate of this is when you read stuff like this:

>Some wealthy businesspeople have also been packing their bags.
>While entrepreneurs fret about the difficulties of getting a business off the ground,
>those who have succeeded in doing so say that society stigmatizes financial success.
>The election of President François Hollande, a member of the Socialist Party who
>once declared, “I don’t like the rich,” did little to contradict that impression.

Or this:

>“It is a French cultural characteristic that goes back to almost the revolution and
>Robespierre, where there’s a deep-rooted feeling that you don’t show that you make money,”
>Ms. Segalen, the recruiter, said. “There is this sense that ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’
>means that what’s yours should be mine. It’s more like, if someone has something I can’t have,
>I’d rather deprive this person from having it than trying to work hard to get it myself.
>That’s a very French state of mind. But it’s a race to the bottom.”

Essentially, this article is emphatically NOT about entrepreneurs, particularly not struggling entrepreneurs. It's basically a good old whinge by the French elite.
Krugman seems to be attacking a straw man here. I don't think Nate Silver has argued that data must be examined in an absolute vacuum.

However, Krugman often takes it (as in this case) to the opposite extreme – like many economists, finding a model, then examining the data and interpreting it to fit that model. This sort of confirmation bias and narrative-based news is what Nate Silver is trying to oppose, not the lack of a narrative or model whatsoever.
Italian living abroad here.

The interesting thing is that they mention how many startup were registered but not how many of them survived their first year. Few friends of mine tried to stay in Italy and they're now struggling just to get some money home. Most of them had to go back living with their parents because none of these measures worked and are currently employed and with humongous debt with Equitalia (the italian IRS).
"Stop Saying Bitcoin Transactions Aren't Reversible"
http://elidourado.com/blog/bitcoin-arbitration/

Other commenters here have mentioned n-of-m multisignature transactions. This article describes how multisig works, and how it can be used to implement better arbitration than what's been possible with traditional payment systems.

Unfortunately we're in the early days of Bitcoin here: support for multisig isn't common, and neither is the awareness of just how important it is for large transactions. We'll get there though.
USA, New York
This is one of those ideas that seem so obvious in hindsight. Waiting for a web page to load on mobile is one of the most annoying things to do on a smart phone - much more so than on desktop because of variable network conditions.
About 2-way data binding with BackboneJS
The unveiling of kdbus
Krugman frequently disparages the predictions of most economists... His own record isn't perfect, but pretty good. IMO, he is pretty careful about not making too many falsifiable claims. His main point over the past couple of years has simply been that under current economic conditions money printing won't result in inflation, and that the government should have done more to address unemployment as the biggest problem of the financial crisis.
Trying to make ... geographic/domain scope a thing here is a huge problem. At some point, you either spend your precious seconds on your brand ( which makes your scope larger ) or you spend it on solving problems. Serious problems are proprietary, secret or ( even worse ) security-clearance secret.

It smacks of "social media thinking". I do not think the mores and practices of social media apply to much beyond social media. Social media looks like narcissism to me.

I am pretty much a full-fledged multiplier but I rather doubt that makes me the top 2%. It just means that I stayed focused on technology ( over a span of 30 years ) while my contemporaries didn't. They chose the "up and out" path. At least one is trying to get back in.

I can turn "lower performers" into higher performers by talking to them. I've done it. That's just me being a human who likes people and needs their stuff to work too. And I've certainly had other engineers help me out in that way. You get stuck; talking helps your brain to find solutions.

Why do we need this method anyway? Peoples is what they is. Why do we stack people into boxes like this?
Mozilla's adoption of SPDY shows that they (we) are not dogmatically refusing Chrome innovations.
The Union Square Ventures MBA
Why should Microsoft have extrajudicial powers that exceed those of the NSA and the Police?

When I worked for BT if say some one in marketing had done that our internal security department would have fucking crucified them - read Bruces resignation letter and note how carefull he is to make nice with SD.
Yeah I can easily win just pressing random buttons
it's more customizable, more secure, and free. really hard decision.
Did April Fools Day get moved up?
Next iteration of 2048: build 2048 2048 clones to win.
should save the low score
Do you think government is required to provide insurance?

You mean like the FDIC or SIPC?
92K needed. There are only 8K signatures. Though that's still surprising.
I've got 16384 tile. I have a strange feeling that I might be doing something wrong...
"Other people's resources are generally just not as useful."

I wonder whether this is true. I believe that someone else's teaching resources might be harder (i.e. less useful) for a _teacher_. However, I find it hard to believe that teaching resources (like lecture notes or lesson plans) don't vary in quality and that, therefore, the teachers with the worst materials are doing their students a disservice by using the materials which are easiest for them by virtue of being familiar, although better (for the student) alternatives exist.

Just use the best ones. There are no unique snowflakes.

(BTW I take your point about reversing the question. It's a little tricky to find the 'right' answer for software companies because code within a company is more tightly coupled than teaching resources for different courses are in a school.)
We need less journalism more information. We need less journalists more Snowdens.
Greg Mankiw’s utility function
Smartphone Marketing Missteps at HTC
I don't think its that deep, most of the comments here appear not to know what the column is about, so they're just churning out standard anti-krugman or pro-silver cliches.
Do juries ever "find innocent" then? My understanding is that innocence is presumed until guilt proven, in which case a jury simply not finding them guilty is sufficient to say they're (legally) innocent.
Im from Turkey and I don't recall any particular move let alone this big. It was probably "deep web fad" or something about Tor.

Also, this peak also happens at other countries, alth. they vary by size.
https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-re...
This is singapore, I have looked at others(uk etc.) and they are same too.
That too! One of the most common contracting jobs is to fix somsone's mess.

Maybe the video series will be: Top 10 Code Fails and How to Fix them
What the hell? Extrajudicial powers? Microsoft isn't a part of the executive branch of the government, and doesn't legally need anyone's permission to look at their own servers. We can have a discussion on whether it's ethical or not, but framing it as a legal matter is bonkers.
re: insert speed - if you want to do a bulk load in sequential order, use a batch of multiple writes per transaction, use a cursor, and use MDB_APPEND.
Anyone here use Bitcoinity? The creator of the site, Kacper, has asked the bitcoin community to put pressure on the exchanges to:

TL;DR exchanges can prove that:

-they own specific amount of bitcoins
-and that your bitcoins on their exchange are included in this amount

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=22929.msg5286474#msg...

These stories are a bit alarming and can have some of us wondering if the exchanges we are using actually have the amount of coins they claim to have...
Why Doctors Still Use Pen and Paper
I think a realisation of something similar made me decide to call myself a software engineer rather than programmer.
If you have 100KLOC in a complex system, it takes 1 line to destroy the security of the entire application. Unless your procedures and good practices include each line being meticulously checked for security vulnerabilities then you're going to have security bugs. Generally the only way this happens is if the software is used by millions of people and can afford to have this kind of verification done. Random bitcoin exchange put up over the duration of 3 weeks is so far from this level that you can't even begin to define procedures and good practices.

Just don't trust random websites with your money unless you have some form of insurance. It's not a hard concept.
There is a zero-copy mode, but it only makes sense for pretty large messages (>512k IIRC).
Kind of like buying a gun for self protection and then having an intruder get hold of it and kill you with it. In a talk I gave to some Swiss banks about security a looooong time ago I talked briefly about security measures as vulnerabilities which are analogous to data protection bits being the source of data corruption errors. You have to evaluate whether the system as a whole with is more or less (or the same!) level of secure with the code you've added for security.
> import Crypto.Random.random as rand

Kudos for using an appropriate random number generator.
The irony of Krugman writing this is palpable. He is exactly the type of pundit that the world needs Nate Silver to counterbalance. He on the left, and his ilk on the right of the political spectrum, never miss an opportunity to try and fit cherry-picked facts within their predetermined political views. This is precisely why I think 538 might be a solid alternative. With the Fox News, MSNBC, and yes, Paul Krugman's of the world editorializing and pontificating, it's refreshing to see a news source that at least claims to take a non-biased, data driven approach to determining the truth.
Especially considering that the 2048 website links to the Threes website.