skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To the best of my knowledge, this was an accusation made by Kasparov after he lost the game, there is no actual evidence of this happening - or if it was within the rules of the tournament (to tweak). As you might know, "Deep Blue" was more than just software, a big part of deep blue was its massive parallel processing power crunching literally 200 million nodes per second (nps or positions per second), even though source code of deep blue is not available to public, raw logs of the game are available and nothing from those logs suggest that any monkey business was going on (it has been debunked many times).

I think Kasparov got overwhelmed by the numbers that DB was crunching and he lost the game psychologically even before the game started. If you actually studied the games he played against DB - you would see amateur mistakes made by one of the world's greatest grandmaster.

I think if he knew he wasn't playing a computer, he could have done a lot better.

Regardless, there is no comparison between deep blue and modern computer engines. To the best of my knowledge, most (popular) comp-comp tournaments and comp-human tournament, the binaries of the engines are given to the tournament organizers which are used in all games throughout the tournament. This is most definitely true for comp-human games; for comp-comp games it might depend on the participants and the organization hosting the tournament.
Except most providers grossly oversell their VPS instances just like bandwidth, and when someone actually starts using 100% of their quoted capacity, it throws everything out of equilibrium.
Found Functions
A really good one! Thanks for the pointer!
Busted. The hardest thing is always trimming our beards to exactly the same length.

Edit: the real answer is that I work with great hackers who aren't as mouthy as I am and so don't show up in interviews etc - my "twins" are Andrew, Ben, and Luke...
The comments on that are amazing!
Salary is important and in more ways than just having more money. Titles vary at different companies and have different meanings, so salary is the easiest way for a bigger company to place you into a title at that company. Once you're in the company, sadly, title matters since most people at a company don't know what each other make. So if you want to advance your career, you actually have to get raises with every promotion. Don't accept a promotion without a corresponding pay raise -- since promotion means either more work or more responsibility.

Changing jobs is the easiest way to make more money. If you change too often, you'll be pegged as unreliable, so the strategy only works to a point.

Your job should be giving you annual reviews, this is a good time to get a raise and if you don't get one, complain about it. If you don't get annual reviews, asking for one is a nice way of saying you'd like a raise and feedback is actually really nice in either direction (compliments, points of improvement).

Threatening to leave is the worst way to get a raise. But it is important for your employer to understand that you can leave and that you choose to stay -- such loyalty is rare and is something that should be rewarded, with money.

If it comes to it, get an offer in hand from the new company that you are going to go to. Then quit. Don't threaten to quit. And don't bring up money as the reason unless they ask why you decided to leave. Then say "I needed more money, I love working here, but I understand your budget constraints and didn't want to put you in a tough spot." It's business. You're not an asshole for leaving. There's no contract that says you must stay and don't think for an instant that you're so effing awesome that you wouldn't get layed off if they had to do it. It's business. Because it's business and money is now in play (assuming they asked) they might decide to make a counter offer. If they don't, you're taking the new job. If they do, it's because you deserve it and they've decided that the cost of replacing you (explicit cost and opportunity cost) is higher than your raise. Yes, you're replaceable, and despite what others have said, your NP is not fucked. They will survive without you.

By the way, if you're awesome and your boss is awesome, this is never an issue, I've asked for raises casually over beer or whatever, and got them before. A few thousand here, a few thousand there adds up in time. Keep a 5 to 10 year perspective on things.

Lastly, I would point out that salary is not everything. I've made more at other jobs than the one I have now and hated them. It's hard to put a price on happiness.
How much you spend depends on (a) how close you are to the couple and (b) how rich you are. Rich relatives might easily give a $420 gift, but there's a real lack of gifts in the sub-$100 range there.

More to the point, if I'm going to give a couple a $400 gift, I want them to keep it and appreciate it. I want it to be the good silverware which only comes out on special occasions, or the fancy glassware that the children aren't allowed to touch. I don't want it to wind up as a small part of a line item on an accountant's bill.
> If there are 8 VPS on a machine

There's probably 64 or 128 VPS on one machine.

> and I'm always using 1/8 of CPU time

There's your problem right there. You're believing what you're told by someone selling shared access to a finite resource.
The RIAA keeps saying it to everyone.
It's a reiteration of a sentiment I've seen a lot recently: "My livelihood doesn't depend on copyright, so I'll feel free to violate yours."

Are people really so unconcerned about the livelihood of others? Each of us is already free to give away the fruits of our own labors -- but why insist that others must do the same?
echo "todo note" >> todo.txt
vw todo.txt
where vw is an alias for less.
You should note the security model here sucks. You embed your diagram with the same unique Id that is used to edit it. However, editing isn't authenticated. So anyone who can see your diagram can figure out the edit page and alter it.
Doesn't include data on % of companies in each category that fails.
Computer program helps decode ancient texts
I think karma can be very informative-- it gives me an idea of what the majority viewpoints are.
Per billable hour, for a good tax accountant, probably. Per working hour for an average accountant, I doubt it. It's not impossible for a good programmer to make $420 per billable hour (or whatever the equivalent is in "real" hours).
This article reminds me of Hard Disks. Talk to any "PC fan" and they'll regale you with a story of how they will never, ever use $HD_BRAND after it crashed and lost all their data. Thing is, the brand changes depending on who you talk to. And a real professional will tell you that all the brands have similar failure rates, not to put your faith in any hardware, and advise you on a RAID and backup strategy.

Same here. I know people who use rimuhosting, they seem happy enough. I use Linode personally but have no real preference. This article smacks of a one-off bad experience which could happen anywhere - and doesn't even seem that bad. It's a VPS, for christ's sake, if you don't like it get a dedi or even better a colo.
Well first off, everyone should read the New Yorker article referenced. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_...

The issue at hand is not teacher compensation, but the fact that no mechanism exists to weed out ineffective teachers from the pack. I don't think $100,000 a year (after 20 years of service) is too high a price to pay for a competent professional who can have a positive impact on hundreds of lives over the course of his/her career.

In fact, the argument could be made that it is not enough, and that is why traditionally those working in education are not as talented those in other, more well funded fields like finance and medicine.

The scariest part of Steven Brill's article is many teachers' aversion to quality metrics that could actually measure performance and hold them accountable for their work.

Two quotes:
1. Our schools are indifferent to instructional effectiveness,"the study declared. Under the subhead “All teachers are rated good or great," it examined teacher rating processes, and found that in districts that have a binary, satisfactory-unsatisfactory system, ninety-nine per cent of teachers receive a satisfactory rating, and that even in the few school districts that attempt a broader range of rating options ninety-four per cent get one of the top two ratings.

2. I asked the woman for her reaction to the following statement: "If a teacher is given a chance or two chances or three chances to improve but still does not improve, there’s no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences."

"That sounds like Klein and his accountability bullshit,"she responded. "We can tell if we’re doing our jobs. We love these children." After I told her that this was taken from a speech that President Obama made last March, she replied, "Obama wouldn’t say that if he knew the real story.
I'm a high school student and until recently I always thought I'd go into academia, simply because I have a low tolerance for greedy people trying to use ideas for their benefit rather than societies.
But I'm beginning to see that the inside of the ivory tower isn't as perfect as the outside...
So this is interesting.
Just wondering if you see the same HN as everyone else? Are there tools for power users you'd suggest? Have you ever had a negative karma score placed on a comment?
what about this: make up random names for people. these names should be consistent for the entire discussion on this page across page views, but different for a different discussion.

i've never been able to remember who someone is or what they do. the benefit of trusting A more on a security issue because A has proven himself to be a master of security issues...well, that's a tough problem. i'd rather see anonymous names, no karma and a security certificate.

karma is useful to draw n00bs into the system--i found it pretty darn cool when i started out. now i don't care at all. after 200 points they should disappear: now you've earned yourself a real soul.
Amazing how there are five 22-year-olds that make $1,000,000
Traditionally, a married couple would need to furnish their new home after moving in together. Modern couples cohabitate before getting married and already have all this stuff, but wedding gift registries are still used to get "better" stuff.

As explained in sister comments, much of this stuff will be expensive, impractical things they don't actually use very often if at all, but will provide an expensive and symbolic keepsake that satisfies people's mammalian hoarding instincts until making for an awkward asset-division discussion during the probable divorce or, less probably, will probably either be inherited or bring in some moderate amount of money at the longest-lived partner's estate sale. (You can look at it more romantically than this, but I'm in an existential mood.)

More practically, a gift registry prevents a couple from getting ten unique waffle makers when they only need one.
Finally, a chess engine I can beat!

Just kidding, probably not.
I think Slashdot's and Reddit's problems run deeper than one-liners. /. has some features I think would be interesting to add to HN (meta-moderation is a very interesting concept), while HN has some interesting things /. would stand a lot to gain if implemented (the idea editors shot down stories rather than post them).
In fact, the paper proves itself recursively.

People who have achieved a high level in academia putting a lot of effort into a study that proves that people who achieve highly in academia have a lot of self discipline (i.e. put in a lot of effort).

Clearly they don't have a high level of intelligence as if they did, they would have figured out (having put in a bit more thought and a bit less effort), like you and I, that the educational system is obviously like this.

Or maybe we just are differently efforted
The big gain in speed will come from optimizing away the "meta_send_op_plus" operation. That has to do a hash lookup, which is much slower than an array index.

Ruby should be taking the same route (PIC) that the Javascript VMs are. Perhaps this is planned for one of the Ruby VMs but I haven't heard anything along these lines yet.
Many of the functions aren't the greatest fits, but this is still very cool.
An excellent article! I found the idea of "mind creationist" intriguing. While I'm not a creationist, I think I have mind creationist leanings....which now I feel obligated to question.
I have no idea what you are talking about, you may as well be speaking Klingon. Hearing phrases like "This also gives you the great benefit of mandating a comprehensive design phase" makes me want to kill myself. I advise you to quit your job.
And so it begins anew...
My point was that certain traits are highlighted and exaggerated for a reason, broad shoulders in men and women were seen as commanding. This meant that their attire exaggerated this in their courts, IIRC it was common for visiting Kings or Queens to wear less dramatic attire when the purpose was alliance seeking and wore more dramatic attire when the purpose was to be threatening.

Modern CEO's and Presidents don't display this type of showmanship in their attire, however take a look at Presidential portraits and portraits of the First Ladies, they still strike the artificial poses displaying broad shoulders.

It would take you an exceptionally long time to find a successful political figure in a posture that doesn't make them look commanding. They're actually trained to hold certain postures and frequently have personal gym instructors to help improve posture, this got leaked about President Sarkozy in France as he was mildly overweight, causing him to change to more comfortable postures in long meetings and speeches, etc.

People take posture to be quite trivial, but the amount of time spent on it by our societies elite really shows how important it is. I can't remember where I read it, but it can supposedly boost approval ratings by ~10% for presidents.
I think a fair question is what kind of topic would you classify as "HN material", be a bit specific if you can.
Besides, a student blowing off tests and homework may not be less disciplined at all, they may just be working much harder on other things.
It is actually a very capitalist/libertarian mentality.

"If you are able to compete in the market, good for you. If you couldn't compete, so what?"

It does not however, mean that they support government granted monopolies, subsidy, or other form of crony capitalism.

To some libertarians, copyright and patent are a form of crony capitalism.
A small part of me just died...

Well... It wasn't like Symbolics would start making Lisp machines again anyway, so, maybe it was time to give up the domain.
This announcement is three weeks old and doesn't contain any details about the second competition (which hasn't started yet). It just says there will be one eventually, it'll run for half as long, and details are coming next month.
3GS only. :-(

I wish they could do AugR without the compass, even if it was a bit halfassed...
The N900 includes a stylus and thus, a resistive screen.
Why was this voted down? I was fairly shocked too. I mean, I know we're in the minority at HN but not by this amount.
Couldn't agree more. I got a VPS from them after asking HN for VPS recommendations in Europe.

Had issues from the start. The setup wasn't what I ordered. Once it was setup properly, I started getting alerts from their staff that my VPS's resources were spiking–but this was before I had even logged into the system and done anything. That didn't do much for my confidence in their operation.

Anyway, I canceled with them and will probably use Rackspace as they have UK/European data centers.
$420 * 8 * 5 * 50 = $840,000. Where can a good programmer get paid that?
I really like Spotify. They say that they tried to outperform piracy, and I think that they entirely succeeded. It grabs songs faster and more reliably than piracy ever could. The only problem is that you can't put the songs on your ipod or something... that would be the icing on the cake.
My perception is that VPS aren't for high-CPU, high-IO or high-memory servers. If one user is using too much CPU, he should be using a dedicated server. It's not like servers are expensive. You can get an entry level box on a fat pipe for 67$ with iweb.ca.

I think rimu was right to limit his CPU share. It was unprofessional of them to root his box and shutdown apache, but it seems he was a user with an history of high CPU utilization.
I think that's a straw man. The RIAA is saying, "just because you don't like our business model, doesn't mean you get to ignore copyright". And they're right. Listen to something other than Britney.
I'd be thrilled if browsers didn't play Flash with worse performance than standalone Projectors do.... ;-)
Caml trading – experiences with functional  programming on Wall Street [pdf] or
was the referral link really necessary?
How to filter ideas and to go after capital
I'm just following Hacker News for a while now. It happens to me that once in a while I have a product in mind and think it would be great to have. Most of these times 2 or 3 years later the product hits the main stream market. This has happened to me like 30 times now. Am I Avant Garde and am I influenced by signals to my unconsiousness or should I really do something with these ideas and find capital to start a business with these? If so, I'm not into finding capital. How to proceed?
Karma can be more courteous than having to tell someone he's got his head up his butt; just downvote him, if enough people agree he should get the hint.
And Paul Ehrlich, a sort-of disciple of Malthus, made a famous wager that prices of several metals would rise due to increasing scarcity over the 1980-1990 period. Guess what: the prices fell, because consumers of such stuff constantly find substitute goods and processes.

See full article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon-Ehrlich_wager
Cisco’s CEO is stretching his company in all directions. Can it hold together?
True, but that person could get appropriately down-voted for that 'work around' if enough people dislike it.
You're right but in this case the user is a freeloader.

He can use more than his 1/8 share of CPU time but others can't use his 1/8 share.
I think it is obviously graphviz with a smart front end.
What if the karma system were kept, but people could only see their own karma score and not others'?
Maliciousness has limits; stupidity has none.
Paraphrasing Napoleon
Total nonsense.

"it is considered better to learn it the hardway[sic] first"

Blatantly false. For a certain narrow class of people, this is the best way to learn. There are hundreds of other ways, and some of the people who have a different preferred style would make great programmers.

"Colleges who have switched to Java for example are producing graduates that are having more difficult times in the "real world.""

Also blatantly false. CS programs have always churned out a lot of mediocre programmers, a handful of good ones, and a few brilliant ones. Only the language has changed.
Miracle Math (2006)
I played it two quick games, in both of which I took a piece advantage in mid-game tactics. It's not terrible, but it doesn't seem to think more than 2-3 moves ahead. I'm a pretty casual player.
How is a 'server chip' that much different than a 'desktop chip?' Other than possible increases in caches and/or the number of cores?
For those who find this too long, I suggest you skip to the "Bar none" graphic insert about 2/3 of the way down.

I would be interested if anybody here would defend the "Guess and Check" method, because personally I find it a terrible way to teach math (though I grew up in a system that taught Math more along the lines of the Singapore system, so I may be biased).
The reason we don't "get" to ignore those monopolistic practices is the simple fact that it's a law -- which says nothing at all about whether it's right or wrong.
Depending on the severity of the autism symptoms, he could try to get a more normal life. And no, I don't agree with the term normal since what is normal these days? Shooting people during a drive-by? Eating hamburgers all day? Using drugs and do everything possible to sustain that way of life? No. To me, that is not normal, but it is average in our society. He's not average, but he's using his capability to feed his interests. So let him.
Are there different terms for intentional DoS attacks, as opposed to incidental ones like this?

Denial Of Service Slip-up? ;)
If you read carefully, this is the annual salary divided by 365 days
A/Bingo: Rails A/B Testing
If I know that an author doesn't want me to copy his book, I won't copy it. It's not a matter of law or monopoly, it's just politeness.
This is also why things like the double-inclusion problem are still live issues.

http://eigenclass.org/hiki/The+double+inclusion+problem

One problem that Ruby does need to deal with is when implementation problems become institutionalised as language specifications.

http://blog.jcoglan.com/2009/06/06/when-bugs-become-features...
Yelp Brings First US Press Release Simultaneously Utilising Buzzwords "Augmented Reality" and "iPhone Store"
Man In Van
You would just need to break out the gensyms to resolve the differentiation issue.
Nokia N900 Maemo Is a Phone, Makes the N97 Look Silly
"Furthermore, special string values like "center" and "xx-large" somewhat undermine the teacher's assertion that quotations demarcate "a sort of free zone for text.""

I was delineating two modes of failure. The first, and most obvious, is when your program won't run at all and you get a syntax error. That's what happens when you misspell something outside the quotes.

But if you misspell something inside the quotes, you get the second mode, in which your program runs but you get incorrect behavior.

For us this isn't a huge difference; they're both bugs. But for the girls it was huge. If their program won't run, it's busted, but if it runs but isn't quite right, well, that's what Microsoft charges $$$$ for.

I had to admit they had a point.
If you rent an apartment, you don't call it "the apartment that I rent", you call it "my apartment". Also, the landlord owns the place, but that doesn't give the landlord carte blanche to enter the apartment anytime they feel like it. Sure, they "own" it, but that does not make it any less wrong for them to barge in and gain access. If they need access, they must provide sufficient notice and must do it for a specific reason. This is a very similar situation.

Particularly interesting to me is that they had the technical means to restrict the virtual machine via a configuration change, but instead chose to "trespass".

According to their terms and conditions, "Misuse of System Resources" is prohibited, but their only listed recourse is to "restrict, suspend, or terminate" the account. It is arguable that they had no right to access the data for his server, since they had other means to restrict or otherwise limit the VPS (which they already did). They should have just paused the VPS without accessing the data and send him an email. Adding your SSH key to a customer's server without notice or approval is a good way to tarnish a reputation among the hacker crowd (their customer base). I wouldn't allow them to have root access either.

Their argument would have been much stronger had they provided any sort of evidence of CPU load of his server. However, that probably would have shown how oversold the machine really was.
"Feed a hungry VC lunch: $291"

What kind of VC expects you to buy them a $291 lunch? If I were a VC I certainly wouldn't invest in any company that thought buying me lunch was a good use of their funds.