skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, thanks for the Jing link -- it's exactly what I was looking for. Screenr is really slick in terms of UX and simplicity, but without private (or hidden) sharing like Jing, I can't use it very much for day to day work stuff.
Is anyone else really curious what sort of degree the author of this article has? I just graduated in May and almost everyone I know with a CS or engineering degree found jobs pretty easily. It was only the bottom of the barrel that struggled, and even most of those people still managed to find something in their field.
Make the coding part of a larger flow. Instead of saying "there's something wrong with this code; find it and fix it," perhaps say "this is a (synthetic) bug database, and this is a repository for the project it refers to. Prioritize and fix the bugs you think are the most important. Don't worry about not knowing the codebase—I want to see how you go about learning it." Give them a day or two (and make sure there's way more than two days' worth of work entered as bugs); let them work from home, and track their commits.
He's not talking about disclosure to the IRS. He's talking about disclosure to readers. It isn't an issue of hiding income from the government in this case, it's about hiding 'who gives me money' from your readers so they can have an informed opinion on what you write (including any potential conflicts of interest).
Because the police are going to find hours of footage of the front of a house exciting? Hey look in this one he comes out with the trash. Wow, here he's cleaning the front yard - bet we can sell this to Hollywood.
What does whether he is a "crank" have to do with whether he is wrong? I stopped taking the author seriously when the ad hominem attacks started. Taleb may be a crank, he may be unsympathetic or inflammatory, but that has no bearing whatsoever on the state of his theories.
Can anyone briefly explain how factoring a large number is used to crack the TI? I know they needed to figure out what key to sign a new OS with, but is it symmetric or asymmetric? Also, what are the inputs to the problem and how do you know when it's solved/cracked? Thanks.
"They can arrest you before you've even THOUGHT of committing a crime."

You arrest (halt people from continuing in their normal activity) in order to determine if a crime has been committed or to determine if the person halted is prima facie guilty and accessory or privy to information about a known crime.

It's almost a truism that the police should arrest those who are not able to be proven guilty or are not guilty of any crime.

When I've been stopped, yes it makes me nervous, but it also affirms to me that the police are actually taking part in tracing criminals and attempting to reduce crime.
You know Twitter has scalability issues when...
Google Project 10^100 update 'within a month'
No, fuck this guy and his bullshit attitude. I'm 25 and I work over 12 hours a day in my technology services company and startup projects and I make a good god damn living for myself and so does everyone who puts in time for our company.

It's his problem for believing the bullshit "adults" told him all his life. I knew from day one it was complete and utter nonsense. I bet he learned to blame others from them too. He should only blame himself for his lack of foresight.

I also have a degree from a good university but the difference is I used that time as an opportunity to extend my social and professional network instead of counting on a fucking piece of paper to grant me magical opportunities. College is what it's always been: a club for the children of privilege to come together and make relationships. If you treat it as such, the value of an "education" is apparent the minute you step foot on campus. Don't waste your time going to a bullshit school without any smart or wealthy people. Just skip it unless you can go to a good school.
It doesn't matter how well he explained himself, sighing is equivalent to rolling your eyes, it's the tone it sets that is taken badly. I actually agree with everything he said, I'm just pointing out that sighing is offensive; he basically said "you're ignorant, and let me explain why". The quality of the explanation makes little difference.
The most important thing about taking VC funding is the money. Its real money that you can spend now. We raised $3MM and this allows us to iterate on the product and the pitch and to get it right.
Without funding, there would be no way that I could have done this business, with a wife and two kids, ramen is not feasible for dinner (more than twice a week anyway).
Sidenote: As an Australian, I love the state of California simply because the federal government will pass one law, and California will say, "that's stupid" and do it their own way. It's like Texas without the backwardness.
TWiST Ustream recap
I might eventually relax the license. I'm a permissive guy and don't mind people sending links, copying or printing stuff, but I'd like to be notified about distribution (I would mainly allow non-commercial stuff, educational and archival purposes, fair use, etc), mainly because I want feedback to make sure the content is right. Some people caught simple arithmetic errors in my stuff already; it would suck to have distributed stuff being wrong because I couldn't update it. At least I can try and notify people who distributed it for some reason.

Your version is legit enough for me to ask you if I can link it in the FAQ under the question about books :)

What do you think? (I can host it, of course)
Present the top few apps (representative of the content of the store, I assume), and then give them the option of taking a quiz about their interests which will give them a more specific list which they might be interested in?

Not that good if the goal is to get them to go through the entire store, but workable if you just want to give them an idea of the contents and increase the chance of them buying other apps.
Joe Jonas:American Idol judge?
I'm sorry but I disagree (I'm a 20-something but not for much longer so I really don't think it counts).

Volunteer work is just that. You're supposed to volunteer. It's purpose is to show people the value of sacrifice. Doing volunteer work for Government compensation is called being a Government employee. Plus, as a former low income student I can tell you programs already exist that allow them to go to college for free and they're called Student Loans. With a part time job you can pay your living expenses and through grants and loans you can pay for school with very little problem.

Health care's screwed up and it should be cheaper but I don't want to send the message that it's ok to live off your parents at 26 years of age.

I don't have a problem with loan forgiveness for graduates that serve impoverished communities but that already exists for teachers and public servants.

Finally, while micro-loans seem like a good idea it would almost certainly end in a huge cash drain with virtually no pay off. Programs like YC work because they educate while funding. A 22 year old with little work experience who thinks the answer is to turn to the Government for money stands almost no chance of creating a successful business imho (and as someone who knows his fair share of entrepreneurs I've found most will tell you their first venture failed)
The Syntax is the first hard step to go over for many people. Erlang is hardly what you'd call an easy to read language, except if you've used functional languages before. The recursion and pattern matching are relatively uncommon (and different from what you can get from Haskell, too), with naming conventions and atoms also a bit weird at first.

Once you get used to it, it becomes very easy to read and concise language. Once you know it. (like anything else.)

The syntax turns off a lot of people. It's a shame because even if you might never use Erlang for personal or real-world project (although it's very well done for that), you'll see a different way to do error management and possibly to organize code, depending on what you've done before. It's worth learning.
I am more than happy to shell out $4.99 as a casual traveller. The reason -why- my flight is delayed is way more information than the airlines give you. Knowledge is power.

I've been burned by United several times when they have lied or not disclosed delay information to me. This app could have saved me hundreds of dollars and tons of anxiety last year.
Send me a notification at that point then! my email is straight on the first page of the site, so I'm easy to find ;)
> By the way, that huckster is also the minister of a small youth oriented church in his city.

At this point in your argument you've driven entirely off course and closing in resorting to personal attacks instead arguing the point on merits.

The BTK Killer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Rader) was also a 'family man' and 'community leader.' Being a minister does nothing to disprove one of being a huckster. Just look at all of the priests accused of child molestation/rape.

I know my examples are fairly extreme, but the world comes in shades of grey. It's possible to be a minister, community leader and huckster all at the same time. You can't use one of those roles as evidence to disprove the existence of another.
Vim on rails screencast
Fred Brooks On COBOL's Success
PayPal Doubles Fees, Forgets to Tell Customers
Be careful about PDFs too: http://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Amilw0rm.com+pdf+reader
From the forum discussion, someone mentioned that a Core2Quad extreme would need about 2 months (running 24/7) to factor the key. I don't know if there's anyone out there that's written a CUDA version, but a GTX295 should be able to run at at least 10x the speed of the CPU, if not something like 20-30x; that means if there are any other keys that need cracking (like for the TI-86 firmware), it could be done in a much shorter amount of time (probably less than a day for someone with a multi-GPU rig).
That's explained in the comments to the submitted article.

Short answer: an adoptive mother provides BIOLOGICAL inputs (food, etc.) to her children.
Personally I think we should stop SETI on its tracks.

If we find intelligent life in the universe (we let them find us) chances are they will come, if they are more advanced than us, and exterminate us for their consumption.

As we would do if we found inferior species in the universe.

If we find monkeys on mars, rest assured we will use them for experiments and take everything they have for our use.

So, if I were a monkey on mars I wouldn't be flashing that light to us in this very moment.
author: randall lucas, senior associate, voyager capital

http://www.voyagercapital.com/team/index.php?category=Invest...
not really all that amazing considering NASA even reused/overwrite many of the tapes from the moon landings...

and besides, they only circulated the moon..
MySpace Disables Auto-Play Of Profile Songs To Get Streaming Costs Under Control
Just to name a couple: The Foundation endowed $20 million to Duke University (University Scholars program). He also endowed $10 million to the University of Washington in his mother's memory (Mary Gates Scholars program).
What company do you work for, I'd love a job...

See, the way it is where I work is that you better fucking have your laptop with you 24/7 because if one of the duct-tape and chicken-wire projects that you're required to support goes down...well then hollly shit it better be fixed like RIGHT. FREAKING. NOW. (never mind that these outages and crashes happen at companies that we are customers of...as in: they won't let me into their FTP server to fix it when it is just fucking dropping connections for no reason).

But by golly, we better be glad to even HAVE a job! See, if we whine, or don't perform 100% all the time every day (even during our "vacation") there are a few hundred qualified applicants ready to take our job for the same pay and the same requirements (these people will burn out in a couple of months...again...and the cycle will continue).

How did this start? Too many people were told that they were special. Too many degrees were given out, and now the job market is flooded with people. We have a surplus of "skills".

How is it that people can't wrap their head around man-hours as a commodity? De beers knows this, they keep vaults full of diamonds locked away in a basement in NYC because they know that if they dump all those diamonds on the market, the price will get driven down.

We've been screwed. I'm sorry, this isn't entitlement. This is facts.

We've been screwed.
"..Even at 42 it's interesting..."

Somehow I find that hard to believe its just a co-incidence.
Interestingly - I always kind of felt & have seen the opposite, all of the people I know from HN have indeed launched something, although my sample size is only 6 people.
Why AT&T Killed Google Voice
> I have not involved myself actively with the LA startup community but I have to say, it does not come close

"I don't know anything about it, but I'm definitely qualified to comment on it because I'm so awesome."
Not just old; old and bad.
Read this:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/13.html

It's pretty rare for airlines to be honest about delays at departure time. Rather than update their online databases when they know they're running late, they wait until the flight has taken off, because then they only have to update it once. It's pretty maddening. I can't tell you how often I've been standing at a gate with a big LED sign that says ON TIME for, say, a 5 pm departure, when the current time is 5:30 and there's no aircraft in sight.

For frequent travellers this may give you enough information to get rebooked before everybody else does. For example if there's an 8AM flight and a 10AM flight, but the 8AM flight is running 3 hours late, there's going to be a stampede to get rebooked on the 10AM flight, which might only have a few empty seats. The first person to figure this out is going to get one of those seats. This app is very reasonably priced for the audience of frequent flyers who would benefit from it.
"The purpose [of volunteer work] is to show people the value of sacrifice."

No it isn't. It's to help people and/or the community.
Code vs. Create
Unlikely. General Electric has separate IT departments for its various divisions and each of those departments has it's own CIO and as a consequence it's own set of rules and requirements. That said you have to ding them a little bit for having the corporate CIO (which all the other ones report to) be a person who has seemingly no formal IT credentials (http://www.ge.com/company/leadership/bios_exec/gary_reiner.h...)
The real answer is no. Inheritance is absolutely unnecessary for API for GUIs. Absolutely unnecessary. If we are talking about GUI callbacks, what you want is a type systems that's statically-typed, with functions as first-class citizens (Hindley-Milner type system preferred) and with records (which are syntactic sugar anyway, they are just glorified tuples). Put a bunch of functions into a record and there's your GUI callback. This is a much cleaner and simpler way of doing it.

Inheritance is a fundamentally flawed concept in type systems. It suffers from the fragile base class problem. Josh Bloch, writer of Effective Java, recommends using composition over inheritance. If you want inheritance so that you can selectively override event handlers, and fall back on default implementations... you want something that's broken, because that suffers from the fragile base class problem. You need a guarantee that the superclass you are overriding won't call your subclass methods in an unexpected way... in other words, you need implementation details. A better way is to explicitly call default handlers on the superclass.
Well, the one good thing about this is it screams a simple truth that the haters never want to address which is that proprietary software is what locks most companies into IE6. So all those people yelling about IE6 should leave the CIOs alone and spend their time going after the small businesses unwilling to rewrite their shitty html.
"Failure is good." - I think they need to clarify a little, failure is generally considered bad, but when followed by success is seen in a much more favorable light.
I'd guess that it's an asymmetric algorithm that uses some kind of public-key signing of the code:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography

The 'input' (the public key) of the problem can probably be found in the firmware of the device (it's probably too large to have been bruteforced). To be able to sign code so that the device will run it, you need the private key, which is one of the factors of the public key. So the guy used a program to factor the public key to get the private key so that he could sign the code (whatever code he wants) with it and get the calculator to run it.
Yikes. Potty mouth.
How would a tetrachromat perceive a website through standard CRT/LCD/LED screens that are based on 3 channel (RGB) color? Is there any difference?
Yeah, well, doing 5 minutes of research shows me that plans in the 300-400/month range are available.

http://www.ehealthinsurance.com

...the deductibles tend to be 2000-3000 dollars, but that's not unreasonable. If you have any data to provide, please do so, because chirpy little responses are just so much pollution.
Fortunately, I think the creating stage comes much faster with programming languages.
"Maybe that's related to the upbringing of today's 20-somethings and maybe it's not"

Science shows pretty clearly that it is related to upbringing. C.f. Punished by Rewards.

The way high-SES parents overstimulate their infants and toddlers also seems to be causing long term damage to executive function. Because of poor parenting and the way our school system is designed, kids are essentially graduating with severe cognitive damage and are unable to invent and manage their own lives.
Actually I would consider myself "of the Abrahamic faiths" - I'm Mormon, and we accept both the Old and New Testaments, among with other books that we consider scripture. The reason I don't feel conflicted, is because I don't place a huge amount of emphasis on

1) My own interpretation of that scripture, or
2) Theoretical science

A lot of both of them is just ideas. I think it's good to have ideas and theories and try to improve those over time, but just because one turns out to be wrong, doesn't destroy my whole belief system. Those theories exist because we're trying to piece really complex things together, and it will be a long time before we really understand the whole picture. My "religion" is based on simple things that I feel very sure of. I'm very sure that there is a God, I'm very sure that Jesus Christ is the messiah, etc... And those are the things that I base my faith on. Science is similar - there are simple principles that every scientist accepts as fundamental, and they work on those to come up with more complex theories. I see creation as one of those theories. The scriptures aren't specific, and it's left to us to try to understand it for ourselves. I don't think we need to understand it to be "saved" - it's just part of learning and understanding more about the God we worship. What God requires is, I believe, that we simply live good lives according to what we believe to be 'right'. So if a comet shows up with Amino acids, it has nothing to do with my religion. The Bible never said there WASN'T life on other planets, or that God didn't work natural laws. Personally, I believe there is life on other planets. After all, why would an infinite and eternal being limit himself to one planet? But like I said - that's not one of those "fundamentals", and so if something conflicts with that, it doesn't bother my faith. It's just a part of piecing those complex pieces together - and so I see nothing wrong with discussing different religious ideas with people, or discussing science and religion, etc... To me it's just a discussion of what we think makes sense. God wants us to try and learn for ourselves - reasoning and making guesses is a part of that.

I hope that makes sense. If anyone's interested in discussing the matter further, I'll add my email to my profile.
So where is all the US output going?
Wufoo is the easiest to use backdoor to a database out there.
> Doing volunteer work for Government compensation is called being a Government employee.

So does that make people that collect social security and/or welfare cheques 'government employees?'
What My 7 Year Old Learned From MMA (Mixed Martial Arts)
It seems safe to assume that, if there are any other civilizations out there who would care (either enough to try to visit or enough to look), they'll know that we're here - after all, we've been sending bunches of stuff out into space for a while, mostly radio and television signals, and it would be hard to miss it constantly (even with telescopes which only look at a very small area of the sky, they would have a window of many decades to look at us and notice).

So, why bother not looking for them? At least this way we'll have a potential warning.

Secondly, unless they've found a way around the issues with long-distance travel (hugely energy intensive if you're sending actual bodies, takes forever, generation ships have space for errors / cultural shifts), it's unlikely that they'll come to visit unless they have to (for example, if they've ruined their home planet and decided to set out in generation ships).

Also, you seem to have the misconception that SETI is going to allow other things to find us. It won't; the fact that we're using radio waves so much will. It will just give us a warning that there's someone else out there.

Not considering the possibility that they've move on from radio to something else, existed thousands of years ago and then all died out because they ruined their planet (and the light from the thousands of years ago when they were alive is only just reaching us), never discovered radio, or all the other things which would prevent us from noticing them / them from noticing us.

Though if they've got uploading and assemblers, they might visit - send a tiny probe with some number of minds is stasis on it, and configured to assemble whatever they need to communicate / destroy us all.
I was wondering the exact same thing. That BA in a philosophy wasn't such a good idea after all, eh skippy? :D
I got the HDTV for $80 and some crap that I gave away, which makes Listia my favorite YC startup ever.
The two prime numbers are multiplied to generate a larger number for use in the RSA algorithm. It is a hard problem to factor a large number and that is why it is used in the RSA algorithm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA . The inputs to the problem are the primes and you know when it is solved when you have the two numbers multiply to give you the larger number.
antirez (the author of Redis) says good things about MongoDB, but like him, I found Redis suits my needs better (as a high-performance log server; 60k writes per second, trivial replication, etc.)
[video] New Nokia 5800/5800i XpressMusic Commercial Ads
I didn't know facebook was useful. Does techcrunch get paid for this?
Google trying to hire mortgage-backed securities analyst
Social security and welfare cheques are hardly quid pro quo for volunteer work. Of course not.
Expansive China faces grass-roots resentment
It would be more interesting to discover nearby life, but at least if no one else is out there we'll get to colonize the nearby stars ourselves without conflict.