skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How is it a problem that people who have such a tenuous attachment to their work that they'd quit next week for a bit of cash as soon as they're feeling down do so?

Seems like a great outcome for both the employee and the employer.
The purpose of predatory pricing is remove the auto-corrective components of the ecosystem. It follows that it should eventually autocorrect is wholly speculative: b/c The markets can remain irrational--longer than you can remain solvent
Neat project. A couple code-reviewish notes:

* why use protected_attributes in an new Rails 4 project? I'm curious what motivated this decision.

* if you're destroying records, you'll want to look into using the :dependent option to has_many to make sure you clean things up. However, you may want to carefully consider where in the app "deletion" actually makes sense; anything that winds up in an accounting system probably shouldn't be deletable at all.

* get the tests running. The version on Github has a controller test for "ZusersController" which doesn't appear to exist in the application...

* a minor thing, but it'll drive future contributors crazy: hard tabs vs. soft tabs. Ruby code is usually two-space soft-tabs, but even if you don't agree with that at least be consistent. There are files on GH that are a riot of mixed tabs (configurations_controller.rb is a notable example) and nobody's got time for that.

I'm not the best at catching replies on HN, but ping me on Github (same username) if you want to discuss further.
Austen! So glad you launched successfully. The new site looks great.
Not that shocking... valuation these days depend more on your growth curve, retention and reuse. Revenue doesn't matter. The number of users matters a little, but not much, as long as you're on that hockey stick.
States Probe Massive Data Breach at Experian
So the biggest difference to me is that the 1999 bubble was completely built on the backs of everyday investors. It was a rush to IPO and easy money, and eventually the market got wise and the whole thing fell apart.

The new paradigm is far more interesting, since it's almost all the investment comes from VC and Angel Investors. I think these entities can leverage risk far better, since they may lose a few million here and there, but when they hit a whale they really hit big.

I think there might be 'micro bubbles' within the industry that may implode under their own weight (F2P mobile games companies come to mind), but I think that's largely separating the wheat from the chaff.

I know some will disagree with me on this analysis, but I don't really subscribe to the sky is falling theory. The tech industry is now big business, that's not going to change.
> They were able to throw up IndexedDB support in a jiffy, but because something that actually works on nearly all platforms (including mobile!) happens to be Chrome's (??) that is a reason to hold back?

No, because the proposed spec did not actually specify the behavior in a way that was independently implementatble.

The spec did not specify the supported query language, either by simple reference to a specific version of the SQL standard (which would be problematic, because a complete and correct implementation of any, at least recent, version of the SQL standard is rare, and probably inappropriate for the use case), or by more complex reference-with-identified-exceptions, or by just listing out the supported features and expected behavior.

It was, therefore, not possible even in principle to have mutually-compatible, independent implementations (and all of the existing implementations just did "link to some version of SQlite and do whatever it does".)

> Sqlite has been around for almost 15 years now. It's time to adopt it as a standard.

Its a good, widely used, tool -- and one that is rapidly changing. But the whole point of web standards is to specify behavior in a way which permits mutually compatible, independent implementations. And WebSQLDB didn't do that, and didn't really seem to be progressing toward doing that.

> What's even more confusing is that Mozilla is actually listed on the Sqlite.org webpage as a sponsor, but they refuse to land it in Firefox.

SQlite is -- or has been, at least, not sure if it still is -- used in Firefox. What they haven't included in Firefox is a WebSQL database implementation, because they believe -- and rightly so -- that WebSQL database wasn't appropriate as a web standard, and didn't show any sign of heading toward something that would be appropriate as such a standard.
Hey, I just modified my comment because the patent part is probably not that important (it would just help me sleep better at night knowing that no one will file a patent while I'm developing the product and sue me when I'm ready to ship). I cannot physically go to New York but if that lawyer can work with me by email/phone, I'd love to hear the recommendation.
> The NoSQL data model - please read as document oriented

These few words are pointing to a fundamental problem I'm already getting annoyed about, as little as I know about "NoSQL" databases so far: The term NoSQL-database is flawed, just as Fowler says in his introduction talk. Theres's document-oriented databases, and array-ish data storages (column family-oriented), there's graph based databases - and they have very, very different strengths.

The article falls flat on that problem as well. Some data is not relational and you are correct that there is a strong overlap between document based storage systems and relational storage systems. However, I'm dealing with time series data, or with lock-graphs. I could shoe-horn those problems into a relational database, but after tinkering around with better storage engines for my problem... I'd call myself stupid for doing so.

So, as the article says: Use the right tool for the job. And stop calling the tools "SQL" and "NoSQL", those terms are useless.
Hypothetically, C could use the first `sizeof (size_t)` bytes to store the length. Endianness shouldn't be much of an issue; just use the endianness of the current machine. You don't typically write the NUL terminator when writing a string to a file; similarly, you wouldn't typically write the length field when writing a counted string to a file.

I agree that NUL-terminated strings were the right decision at the time (and aren't that bad now), but there are sane ways to do counted strings.
It is not hard at all. people just hadn't built as much of the tools for it. Which also confuses me because we now have package managers that run on package managers.

My own little WebSQL Object/Relation mapping library uses promises to get away from callback hell, and it's a pure joy to work with.

It handles creating tables and inserting fixtures before the first connect promise is returned, so that you don't have to worry about the setup process and your data being available.

Creating and inserting entities is as easy as

> var P = new Presentation();
> P.set('name', 'test');
> P.Persist().then(function(result) { console.log('Done!') });

http://schizoduckie.github.io/CreateReadUpdateDelete.js/demo...

I'm using it extensively in my Chrome plugin, and it runs on 10.000+ clients right now.

Real world offline synchronisation example right here:

https://github.com/SchizoDuckie/DuckieTV/blob/angular/js/ser...
Can you give examples? I assume you're talking about hadoop-related tech, but you left it vague.
If you liked this, checkout the interview "Scott Aaronson on Philosophical Progress" [0]. Possibly my favorite read of last year.

[0] http://intelligence.org/2013/12/13/aaronson/
New stock market game, plus it's competitor of stocktwits
this is something special, just try it. It can become strong competitor of stocktwits
> Uber thought its capital would be best used to run a fleet of cars, it would simply hire people straight out to be drivers. That it’s not doing that suggests something.

Uber buying a bunch of cars and hiring a bunch of people to drive them is FAR less in line with market principals than using that capital to help other people start their own small businesses, so they can work on their own terms and set their own hours.
Webscripts for PagerDuty
I hate to be THAT, guy, but Nasdaq did not look good last week. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare#Quotations

I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965
For audio yes. For the stability of your circuit it can cause mayhem if you are doing wonky things. Often can be solved by adding extra capacitance, but can be quite tricky to do (no room on PCB, capacitance was already large, ...)
Data mining (the analysis step of the "Knowledge Discovery in Databases" process, or KDD),[1] an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science,[2][3][4] is the computational process of discovering patterns in large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics, and database systems.
I was really hoping that they had done a study to find out if it actually works.

They didn't.
This reminds of the unlimited vacation policy. Essentially with both these policies, the company is deflecting issues regarding job satisfaction and burnout onto the employee. The employee almost gets bullied into not taking the offer so as to show that they are above the petty reward. These psychological games are not created by chance; they are instituted to keep everything black and white, with us or against us. By drawing a line in the sand, they are eliminating the necessary conversations employees should be having with HR or supervisors to improve the workplace and their own individual situations.
An Open Letter to Brogrammers
Especially if you get a batch that was manufactured in the original factory, and the faulty one put on the grey market. Indistinguishable product, but guaranteed and tested to be out of spec (might be a important parameter, or not).
France bans work e-mail after 6 p.m.
I wonder what the chances of labor coordinating and everyone deciding collectively to take the offer at the same time? That would put Amazon in a tough spot and allow labor to negotiate a better deal. Amazon must be very confident that won't happen.

Maybe this type of program says more about the weak state of organized labor in the US then it does about breeding a healthy and good company culture. There seems to be something you can read in between the lines with this.
Your basic ticket comes to about $400 with all the extra fees in California. If you were to get a few, it pays for itself.
I don't fault for employers for using the system they are given to cut costs, but that's all it is.

I'd be fine if it were an immigration visa, but these worker visa programs have no oversight and there is no conversation at the decision making level representing the american worker.

the cheap labor angle isn't irrelevant just because you say so. It's been documented that a) there are plenty of STEM graduates b) H1B workers are under paid[0]

[0] https://www.google.com/#q=h1b+workers+underpaid
HMO:
I'm designing and running a STEM curriculum for a local Boy Scout camp. We'll have more than 1000 11-17-year-olds come through to do merit badges and "Open STEM" which is basically relatively unstructured exploration of STEM related stuff (see: building catapults, model aircraft, what-if.xkcd.com style questions). We don't have a huge budget, but there's a small fund for needs.

I would appreciate:

- Advice on what to cover/the kinds of activities to put on

- Resources for cool cheap/free science-y things to give out/use

- Cool demos/graphics that explain difficult concepts (think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diffie-Hellman_Key_Exchan...)

- What you wish you had seen as a kid in STEM education

- General advice on teaching science/math/technology to people without much background in the middle of the woods

Thanks!

jp [dot] smith [at] wq23 [dot] org
Or in my company's case we dont innovate we "buy" it and then add our logo.

It really sucks because I can see what new technologies can bring to the table. I really feel POS systems should run on any desktop hardware.
If its once a year its Probably in Jan or Feb and keeping people from quitting during the Christmas season is a good thing for them.
Remember that Priceline had a history of loss leaders. Amazon was patient in making money too. A couple million here or there is pennies if you're funding the next big thing. This turns into a way for companies to subsidize early adopters. Yes, the interface may not be perfect, and you never know what will appear in the box, but if you'll give us a go, you'll get an $8 lunch that might just be good... Sounds fair.
A length field really is insignificant. On a 64-bit machine, a 4GB max length field is half the size of the pointer to the string itself! C++ STL strings already use a length specifier and I don't think anyone is complaining about performance because of it.
This post first agreed, then upon further review retracted that finding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7561399
Like Snapchat with its ephemeral "snaps", Tinder has practically invented a new mode of interaction (swipeable cards). They're hugely popular and growing, so it makes sense that they're going to command a huge valuation.
The simple statement that was given here: http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/analysis-of-openssl-free...
that the developers just had to test with normal malloc to detect the error is a little to simple for me. I can't see this "simple" solution.

Testing is utterly hard. It means that you need creativity, something that many lack or are to lazy to. Many programmers are to lazy to think about testing, I fear. That is the reason, there exist some very limited number of really good software testers in the world.

When you want to find that bug in testing (taken, you even have the super-malloc), you first have to come up with the idea, to send a falsified message length for exactly this message type. Without this idea, even the super-hero-malloc would have no chance at all to give any indication of a bug.

AND when you have such an idea, you would find the bug, even without any super-hero-malloc ... any malloc or any freelist would suffice, because the result would show you, that something bad is going on.

So the focus on the self-written allocator seems to get a little biased in this discussion.

Yes, when writing security relevant libraries, you should be really, really careful and you should take any chance you get to make it more save. And it might have in some cases increased the chance of finding the bug in production, when just using the standard malloc (with security mitigation active) -- but I really doubt, that it would have increased the chance in testing.

I also must say, that really many successful software products use their own specialized allocators -- the reason is simple: Because malloc is so unspecific, it is not the fastest beast around -- and many specialized allocators have their own security mitigation build in.

A last point: Google also wants (or wanted) to switch to OpenSSL. The reason: Speed. So to blame the OpenSSL guys that they want to make their library really fast, has a little bad taste. Everybody wants speed -- even those that claim other after something has happened. My thought for you: What would be the benefit, if OpenSSL would fail because of bad speed, nobody would use it but an other product -- and exactly that product would have the trouble we found now in OpenSSL (or worse?) .....

Computer Industry can sometimes be unforgiving. How you do it, it is wrong.
I wouldn't put it that way. There's an economies of scale advantage to buying cars and hiring drivers. So that option isn't any less in line with "market principles."

The reason Uber doesn't buy cars and hire drivers is: 1) it insulates them from legal liability; and 2) they get to use other peoples' capital instead of putting up their own.
"When we moved our Github repository from private to public (as the co-founder was leaving and I had to share it with some other prospective co-founders), the AWS keys were all in the open for everyone under the sky to play with. Doing some online search, I figured out we were not the only ones. It’s apparently quite a common mistake developers do."

Yes, Yes and Yes. I have made a similar mistake once on Github for a personal project, I realized my mistake and immediately updated the file and did a new commit. Guess what ? Even after committing a new version of the file, you can always check the "History" of the file which will show you the version with the credentials. My only option was to delete that config file completely.

Having said this, it can be scary if you leave your credentials on sites like Github. I work a lot with Python Flask framework and oen of the commonly used extension is Flask-Mail to send emails. Guess what ? A lot of developers are leaving their email credentials in the open and being a flask dev, I know that most of the time, it is MAIL_PASSWORD variable usually in a config file. Knowing this, I can just do a code search on github with keyword MAIL_PASSWORD. You figure out the rest.
> bearded, plaid-shirt-wearing startup guy

You just described every coder in Portland. I can send you a few truckloads if you need them.
Heavy duty article!
Tamaggo ibi
Can A First-Person Shooter Game Be Successful Without All The Shooting?
The question isn't "which is better?" as much as "how do I survive?"
Xctool v0.1.15 released
Mixpanel Trends: Which U.S. Cities Are the Most Work-Addicted?
That only enforces the GP's point.
My "ideal" string would be to store it as a UTF-8 rope, with the additional restriction (doesn't change the interface any) that all characters within a node in the rope have the same length. (You can use overlong encodings internally if it makes sense (One single-byte character in a bunch of longer characters), which is a microoptimization that will in some cases save a few bytes.)

I'd also treat a character + combining characters as a single character.
Ah steples fingers "heretics" :-) sometimes I wish I had had the traditional "jesuit" eduation my paternal gradfather would have wanted
Amazon to Acquire ComiXology
>Uber drivers absolutely do meander congested areas hunting for fares.

When they do that it's usually because they're former cabbies with old habits that are hard to break. Doing a meander makes absolutely no sense. I work for an uber competitor, and typically I will go to hotspot, find parking, stop there, and wait for a ride.

Also, roads are usually subsidized by gas taxes.
Another one to put on my wishlist for Satya.
Check out Burp Suite as a good tool to run: http://www.portswigger.net/burp/

Owasp is also a good resource for learning: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page
Don't forget, cabs (and Uber drivers) also pollute and reduce the air quality of those dense, high-value places while meandering.
How to listen to Stripe webhooks and use them in your dev environment
Bouldering is for Engineers
never graduate!
Alright, I stand corrected. Do you think it's worth the time/opportunity cost/H1B costs/lawyers as opposed to hiring a local worker, if there's not something else going on?
The Army v. The Press
I was hoping as well. It seems like you might be able to do it with a decent number of frames, a year, and some sort of OBD+GPS log to measure speeding.

It seems like it would be hard to do from say, data relating to getting pulled over by cops etc, since they may not pull over someone with one of these frames. But if you could compare frame owners vs everyone else, it could be interesting.
Finally, usable GCM cipher suites in SChannel
Zynga Names Ex-Best Buy Exec David Lee as New CFO
Wouldn't your insurance rate go up as well after a speeding ticket?
>A remote code execution vulnerability exists in the Microsoft .NET Framework that can allow a specially crafted Microsoft .NET application

An attacker has to get the user to run their application. If you can get the user to run arbitrary executables, usually you've already won. It's only news in this case because .NET, Silverlight, Flash, Browser JS, Java Applets, etc. offered a sandbox.

It would not have any impact on applications a user is running.
> If so, then much like in Zeno’s paradox, your computer would have completed infinitely many steps in a mere two seconds!

The next target isn't infinitely many. The target is infinitely infinitely many.

Like something along the lines of forking infinite number of parallel Universes - that is pretty much "many-verse" interpretation of the quantum superposition(and thus computing) - enhanced with forking of infinitely many time dimensions inside each of the said Universes...
In Russia you can buy a blue light bar and they will let you speed.
They did not add ECDHE with GCM though.
Not saying a 5B valuation makes sense, but I think Tinder is employing the thin edge of the wedge strategy [1] (like Instagram did with photos) and is using their huge success with dating to become a more generic social network.

They've already been public with vague plans to move beyond dating. Also, their new verified accounts for celebrities make a lot more sense with a generic social network than with a dating app.

[1] http://cdixon.org/2010/12/27/the-thin-edge-of-the-wedge-stra...
Hi,

I have a opensource project I would like to have off the ground. It's a Web based chat much like Hipchat and Slack... It is still in early stage and needs a lot of design work... But anyone that want to get involved is more than welcome :-)

Http://Github.com/fmarani/tunnelchat
great initiative, I hope something similar will be organized in Paris
Yep, I thought this was general knowledge. Here in the northeast we have "PBA Cards" which can be given out by police to friends/family/donators that you are supposed to hand the officer with your license if you're pulled over.

Although to be honest I've found that just being nice (& maybe driving a real clean volvo) has gotten me out of a speeding ticket every time I've been pulled over
ITS SAFER IN RUSSIA THAN USA, ALSO PROOF THAT JESUS LiveD
These work. Very much discussed in SV car clubs. Many spotted in my local Audi club.

This + LIDAR jammer = no tickets.
Not in MK or Bedford which are the two bigest towns near the UK's main distribution hub
Yes my friend it is. Someone downvoted me for suggesting this.
Stories like this one and Glenn Reid's essay[1] about working with Steve on iMovie seem to be vastly more informative than any movie or book on SJ.[2] One of the biggest takeaways from both of these essays is that working with Steve was an iterative process. Pop culture always highlights "eureka" moments where a problem is solved all at once in a brilliant flash of insight, yet when you read these first-hand accounts, the story is the opposite: that making something great is a slow and repetitive process, with lots of follow-up meetings and gradual improvement towards the final product. Eureka moments look good on TV, but in the real world, great things are built by long-term focus and hard work from highly talented people with uncompromisingly high standards. I have no idea how or even if that could be shown in a movie, but I'm very thankful we have these accounts. I hope more people who worked with Steve during his second tenure eventually put their thoughts down in writing and share them so that we can all gain more of these types of insights.

[1]http://inventor-labs.com/blog/2011/10/12/what-its-really-lik...

[2]There's also Andy Hertzfeld's folklore.org, however that is focused on Steve's original tenure at Apple, not the "comeback" from the late-90s on.