skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even more interesting to me is if one could create a test for prospective programmers that could be taken before one even knew how to program and would distinguish people who would be good at programming and those who wouldn't. Is this even possible? Programming is more complex than learning a new human language in that there are a lot more things that go into it than just knowing the language. But it's clear that some people are better at both programming and learning new programming things. Could one find a verifiable way to predict this ahead of time?
Processing 2.1.2, now with Python mode.
Ah. You appear to be right. I'm glad I asked now.

[edit] I'm going to skip using the Mersenne twister engine and just use std::random_device for all random data, instead of as a seed. It seems on Linux at least that random_device is basically /dev/urandom. I assume the source will be sane on other OS's too.
I believe you would use it to determine a random outgoing port to use to contact the DNS server; this prevents spoofing. However, the port space is only 16-bits, so how you map the outputs of the MT into that space would have the biggest impact -- but you're right that's it's probably best to avoid it entirely.
vpsdime is crazy cheap...
This strikes me as being a different problem that needs a different metaphor -- overbuying up front rather than overpaying. Or, as people sometimes say, scope creep.
I am not advocating traditional diets, I am pointing out the silliness of demonizing pasta, bread and rice when many groups of people that basically live on these things do not have the problems that staying away from these foods supposedly solves.

> those guys were tiny

Diet was hardly their only problem.
Lawyers and lobbying.

Airbnb is in for a very rough ride in the near future.
If a random stranger can remotely hack your router, I wouldn't be confident that any settings change will secure it. The router is garbage and needs to be replaced, which is easily within the understanding of an average person.
How can I improve this site?
This is powerfully written bad journalism. There's so much wrong with this article.

This paragraph near the beginning sets the tone:

>But repeated searches by a robotic submarine have so far failed to find the source of the pings, which experts say could have come from marine animals or even from the searching ships themselves.

Repeated searches? About 3 days searching of an enormous area, actually

Experts? Which experts?

Then the writer devotes hundreds of words to apparently tearing apart Inmarsat's attempt to estimate the plane's course. You'd think that's what he's doing, from the tone. However, all he is really saying, at great length, is 'Inmarsat won't show all their data to me or my sources'.

Then, after making all that fuss, he even suggests some plausible reasons why Inmarsat won't share the data publicly (such as confidentiality), appears to concede that is reasonable, and then veers off into an vague, irrelevant tangent about the Malaysian government's openness.
Gather round: here we have a rare example of the North American Ivory-Billed True Ad-Hominem Fallacy in its natural habitat.

It is obviously possible for Andreeson to simultaneously be chief among "bubble deniers" and also correct about private company valuations.
100K is not more than enough to live on, if you live in the Valley and have a family (say 3 kids) then 100K barely buys you a comfortable lifestyle. I know that is not the point of this thread but so much focus of these discussions seems to pivot around a 22 year old college dropout who lives with roommates in a shared apartment.

When you reach a certain point, say your mid-30s and you have kids your financial obligations can extend far beyond what people think is necessary to 'live on'. You have retirement contributions, savings for college, long term care for family (most people believe it or not, have to help their parents out at some point).
Those tests don't cover most of the test discussed here, though, since there's no assessment of phonemic processing abilities, resilience to distractions, etc.
Thanks, that's an awesome answer!
The code he pointed to is for kernel 2.6.18 which at this point could be considered ancient history. If you look at current master - https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux....

it looks like it has been re-factored somewhat, although the lock is still in there.
I really like the fairness and simplicity of this system.
The resolution for not taking a salary could be made fairer by adding interest to the IOU (eg: 5%).
Webvan Founder Giving Grocery Delivery Another Shot
I learned French in my 30s, through a mix of immersion and an overly large Amazon.fr bill, and I speak it a bit below a "professional" level. I agree that if you "burn your ships", language learning can be surprisingly easy and natural. If your brain can't retreat into an English bubble, it will suck it up and internalize the new language.

One other interesting wrinkle: I know quite a few bilingual families. It turns out that kids are only amazing language learners when they have no choice. Kids will master the languages used on the playground and in school. But they don't always learn their home language to an especially high level.

So both children and adults seem to best when they don't have much choice. Or when all the cool books and TV shows are in another language.
What I mean is, how would we verify the BIOS firmware matches what that source code should produce? If it's possible for us to make our own builds (i.e. there's no cryptographic signing for the BIOS binaries) then an adversary can insert a backdoor into the source code, make their own build, and then remotely flash your hardware with it. Or does flashing the hardware require some kind of manual operation, like holding down a button for 30 seconds?
I think it's a problem of adjusting to something new.

Looking at alcohol for comparison, societies have evolved cultural norms for dealing with it. In W. Europe for example, wine is part of meals; in UK a pint at the pub is a routine social occasion. In the US, with the heritage of puritans, "reformers" and a younger culture, there is more of an "all or nothing" mentality, the prohibition experiment, and youth drinking to get drunk.

As cannabis legalization spreads, norms will develop to govern what's acceptable in households, coffeeshops, etc.
Well, maybe my perspective is different because i don't touch css that often, seeing as i use extjs.
Well said. To take things one step further, I’d suggest the main failure may be the claim that we desire to learn languages in the first place, when we’re not willing to integrate a language into the things in our lives that motivate us.

With the exception of Japanese (with Anime‎ etc.) I can’t think of a single door that a foreign language opens, which we can truly expect the representative American high school student to be interested in.
You also use it for randomising the 16 bit ID in the request packet, and you can use it for randomly capitalizing letters in the qname (0x20 bit encoding). Both of these to help protect against spoofing.
Longest experiment sees pitch drop after 84-year wait
If the idea can't get angel funding or a bank loan, then perhaps the idea isn't good enough to build.
How to reduce the number of ads in Gmail
You probably meant fluoride. You don't really want fluorine in your water.
"Harmless pot? New marijuana study shows brain damage in those 18-25"

Although this could certainly be the case, I do have an issue with the article. The conclusion of the research seems to be this quote:

"Breiter and his colleagues found that among all 20 casual marijuana smokers in their study — even the seven who smoked just one joint per week — the nucleus accumbens and amygdala showed changes in density, volume, and shape. The scientists also discovered that the more pot the young people smoked, the greater the abnormalities."

It is never actually stated that these changes in density, volume, and shape cause brain damage. Seems to be a bit of a sensationalist headline in my mind.
Great idea, I'm not into games but it makes it more fun to make habits. thanks so much for creating this.
No, it's not; the fullness of our glasses is orthogonal to the specific cryptographic issue we're discussing. I would recommend against the NIST P- curves.

One fortunate result of the Snowden disclosures is that for several reasons, some rational and some irrational, the market value of NIST/FIPS certification has plummeted --- it's still an issue if you're selling to the government, but no longer carries security cachet.

As a result, there's minimal upside to adopting cryptographic primitives and constructions simply because they have NIST standards backing them. Which means there's minimal upside to using the NIST curves.

Meanwhile, there are multiple downsides. One of them is the potential for backdoors, but I don't need to reach that issue in my analysis because another is the difficulty of safely implementing curve software with the NIST P-curves.
Dedication to DAVID COUPE,RIP victim of uk gov.com
New cubesats deployed too!
That's not the problem with pasta and bread. The problem is what the food industry does to flour and kernels, and that it's become a fools errand to even attempt to buy pasta or bread that's not stuff full of processed carbohydrates.
example of why I wouldn't want to live in the US
Launches aren't all that often, and this launch has the entirely new feature of looking to recover the first stage. This is a technical project of interest specifically to hackers, I'd've thought, hence the number of up-votes. I know that up-votes alone aren't enough to show that something is relevant or of value, but I thought this was.

Certainly I thought the discussion was interesting.

FWIW, it's not me who has down-voted you. Not least, of course, I can't since your comment is a reply to mine. Personally I think your comment should not be down-voted - it's certainly of value.
This is attractive for someone out of college, but if you're trying to attract someone senior with a YouTube/Google/LinkedIn/Facebook/Twitter exit in their resume (and sometimes multiple of those, not that uncommon in the Valley), your fair salary is likely to be less than the total package they can get elsewhere.
At 27, I've worked over 10 jobs since 18. I've been a janitor, wrenched rods in the oil field, ranch-handed horses, worked construction, tutored students, edited news publications, and many other things to make money. I did most of these things while going to school, not to make ends meet but to HELP lighten the requirement of money I borrowed from my parents, whom I'm lucky to have willing and able to lend me that money.

At 21, I was pursuing a bachelors of science, and working two jobs. I was NOT paying my own way.

I'm now a VP at a startup working for a livable salary and commission. I pay my bills on my own (and have since shortly after graduating), and am paying my family for the money I borrowed. I have strong alternative job prospects in different roles in multiple industries, and have real experience in a variety of professional settings.

Could I have cut all my expenditures above what I was making at 21, enrolled in a different school, and paid my own way entirely? absolutely. Would I be more or less successful immediately upon doing so? What about now? Hard to answer either, but I am not worried in assuming I would be less successful in both time-frames.

You have a very narrow definition of success in your comment. You are welcome to your opinion, but that particular one will probably be misleading in understanding others. I think you've done very well for yourself if you are self-sufficient at 21, but to define this as success seems quite dismissive to me. As said in another comment, this is labeling all but a select few university students as failures which, as it seems to me, is a plainly bad assumption.

I like to think this is a fair assumption at 30 years old, though. I would imagine it is a source of shame if a person is not paying their own expenses at this age; it certainly would be for me. This term 'emerging adults' is describing those people going from adolescents at 17 to self-sufficient adults at 29+.

I think 'emerging adult' is a quite good description of a human growth stage. Having lived through that time period more completely than you, I know how much growing I've done since 21 both in my ability and acceptance of responsibility to sustain myself and in my understanding of others. I am also much more willing to accept happenstance as a contributing factor for my successes and others' failures, which is something I can suggest to you.

To old gray-hairs in the oil patch, management in tech companies, among VC lenders, or any other 50+year old 'successes', both you and I are still 'kids'. This is true regardless of whether we're paying our own way or not. That, to me, is a good working meaning of 'emerging adult'. The basic notion is that people still have some 'growing up' to do at 21 or even 25, which I agree with.
1 and 3 are the same thing. I think the best way to address these, if performance is a problem (don't optimize what doesn't need it) is buffering to reduce syscalls, and optimizing the kernel implementation to fix the sort of internal performance problems like the link describes.

For 2, entropy pool depletion is a fictitious problem if you're worried about security. Some discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7361694

If you're worried about blocking apps that use /dev/random, the answer there is to fix them to use /dev/urandom so they don't block.
This is not one of them.
"Don't resolve these problems with shares. Instead, just keep a ledger of how much you paid each of the founders, and if someone goes without salary, give them an IOU."

The IOU solution is not a good one:

1. Not taking salary when a startup starts is basically a very risky loan. An IOU simply doesn't take into account the risk involved.

2. This is not symmetrical to how investors are treated. In both cases there is an investment in the company which can be measured in terms of dollars. In the case of the employee he is only getting an IOU, but in the case of the investor, he is getting shares. I don't see any reason why these should be treated differently.
Even with pot being illegal a lot of my friends started smoking in their early teens. You can't solve that with regulation (and I'm not a hacker libertarian, I think some issues should be addressed with regulation).
Try to relax just before impact.

I use a maul (about 5lb head) to split wood (mostly elm since a neighbor cut down dozens of elm trees in the attempt to stop Dutch Elm disease from propagating) and the best motion I know of is to lift it straight overhead with hands spread wide. Then accelerate it downward while sliding the hand closer to the blade down to the base. Focus on coming down in a line through the center of your body. At the moment of impact, both hands are close together and your grip is just tight enough to hold onto the maul, with arms and shoulders relaxed.

It substantially reduces stress on your body and you still maintain good control. Feels like a Kendo "shomen uchi" strike.
What? Why? Don't the overachievers then become bitter knowing that the guy next desk to them is making more by working less, just because he was better at negotiating at some point?
That may be true, but I'm not convinced it is. There's some evidence to the contrary [0]. The explanation I've heard is, if what you're selling is always illegal, you won't discriminate much about whom you sell to since you'll get in trouble if you're caught no matter what. On the other hand, if you can make a bunch of money legally selling something to adults, you won't be as eager to take extra risk just to get a few more sales.

[0] - http://www.cbsnews.com/news/teens-pot-easier-to-buy-than-bee...
You might save yourself trouble by thinking of a "hash algorithm" as an infrequently-used primitive, a password hash (or KDF) as something you'd store a password authenticator with.
SpaceX's second attempt at launching a reusable rocket
Medisas (YC W13) is hiring engineers to revolutionize hospital care
Medisas is revolutionizing hospital healthcare. Technology in hospitals is outdated, slow and difficult to use. We are on a mission to change this and improve patient care.

Our product helps doctors and nurses to transfer crucial patient information between shifts, a process that is currently responsible for 80% of all serious medical errors. This equates to more than 60,000 deaths per year.

We are hiring great developers, who are driven by a burning desire to have a huge impact, and to use their skills to save the lives of the sickest people in society. The only requirements are that you are smart, driven, and want to change the face of healthcare. The three pillars our engineering team is built on are security, reliability and speed. These should be important to you.

As Medisas is an early-stage start-up, your responsibilities will vary greatly. One moment, you’ll have your head in a complex technical problem, another moment you’re working with one of our doctors to help them best utilize Medisas. We offer a competitive salary and generous equity, and have a fantastic office in SoMa in San Francisco. Benefits include free food and drinks, and an onsite doctor. Naturally, you’ll also get comprehensive health, dental and vision plans! But we think our best perk is the small, close-knit team you'll spend your day (and sometimes night) with.

We're backed by YC, SV Angel, Andreessen Horowitz, and a number of prominent angels.

If you are interested, send us an email - careers [@] medisas.com; include a brief resume and tell us why you want to work at Medisas. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!
I feel like this should have just been worked into the original price, instead of having it seem like this whole time it was unsafe.
That explains about as much as saying, "God did it."

Caloric surplus equals kilocalories in minus kilocalories out.

But kilocalories in is a function of what you eat, and of appetite, which is itself a function of metabolic processes, which are functions of a lot of variables we don't fully understand, just one of which is what you already ate. And kilocalories out is a function of your voluntary physical activity and your automatic metabolic processes, again based on variables we don't yet fully understand.

So "energy in - energy out" is a gross oversimplification. The implication there is that you can eat less and exercise more to lose weight from stored body fat. And that usually works for most people, but not necessarily for the obvious reasons. But you also have to explain all the counterexamples.

And for that, you have to figure out how the human body responds to specific food chemicals. One food with caloric value might cause the eater to lose weight because it is used for its chemical value (such as for methylation) instead. The same food might cause weight gain later, because the body no longer needs that chemical as much.

Ignoring your ignorance does not make you smarter.
(defun foo (&key foo) ...)

In Common Lisp an implementation can implement a call like (foo :bar 10) how it wants. There is nothing said about lists, hash tables, property lists or assoc lists.

Whereas having a syntax for hash table {} and using this syntax in definitions/calls clearly indicates a conflict. What is it? Coincidence? Purpose?
Lisp-1 is pretty firmly tied in most people's minds to Scheme: at the very least the paper that coined the terms (http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Technical-Issues.html) ascribed it to Scheme, and as far as I know it first came from Scheme (although it's so easy to create a low performance Lisp I wouldn't be surprised if that had been tried before).

loop/recur is of course much less powerful than TCO, because the JVM doesn't natively support it (it's not trivial, security wise). There are three other Lisps on the JVM that I know of: SISC Scheme is mostly dead but does TCO at a cost in speed, Kawa Scheme has as of late added fine grain control over TCO, and Armed Bear Common Lisp doesn't try, as Common Lisps are not required to.

But loop/recur sure looks to be ultimately inspired by Scheme style use of TCO; I just did a set of functions using it for the first time and everything I learned from SICP/6.001 applied and made that part of it trivial.
Yes, it's not so much a "languistic aptitude test" as it is a test of general intelligence. The isn't about separating the math geniuses (or whatever) from the language geniuses, it's about separating the lower intelligence enlisted men from the higher intelligence enlisted men.
You're right that rsync's comment does not deserve a negative score. (I suspect that somewhat overwrought language like "I want nothing to do with" tends to attract downvotes from people who already disagree with the opinion being expressed. But this is about as minor a case as you can get.)

All: when you see a substantive, civil comment that's unfairly faded out, it's good community practice to upvote it back to par. In most cases, users already do. But this practice is more important now that we've made some downvotes more powerful.

When a comment has been downvoted unfairly, simply upvote it and keep your own post focused on the topic at hand. If instead of its first sentence this one had said "I agree", it would be a very good comment instead of a mixed bag.

A simple "I agree" or "good point" is a more effective way to pipe up for a downvoted comment than going off-topic is. Let fair-minded users notice the situation for themselves.
I think risk can be defined in many cases as taking less money than you could get with an established company. Basically, this discrepancy has to be made up and the one way to do that is via shares.
Now if we could just get this to autopost if the referenced article mentioned nutrition and obesity. :-)

Looking at the software that is probably not feasible, but it would make for some interesting forum software which did an autoFPR[1]

[1] Frequently Posted Responses - probably needs a better acronym.
Great way of thinking of it. Adults may have different brains for learning languages than kids, but I’d argue the problem adults have is more that they have more "ships to burn" (and are more hesitant with the torch).
A hash serves as the PRF in a KDF construction; it's a building block, not a subset.
The Silent Hybrid Motorcycles the Pentagon Will Use for Stealth Raids
No, prices are set by buyers and sellers obviously. Except in this case, most people are negative on Yahoo but don't know about Alibaba, nor do billionaires who could move the stock believe Yahoo could dispose of Alibaba at reported levels. In fact, Yahoo's stake is bigger than the initial amount of stock the IPO will offer.

This could all change of course.
I agree with your conclusions. However, the poster I was responding to was suggesting that the category of "int" necessarily excludes non-decimal representations in the same sense that the category of "stone" excludes "paper".

I think in this case it's not parseInt that's at fault, it's the fact that map optionally passes additional arguments.
Yes, it should be fixed. Yes, it's still a "misdesign" to use the cryptographic random number generator when you just want "a" psuedo-random number, right now. For choosing which of the several DNS answers you use, you could pretty much get away with keeping a counter and returning that counter modulo the number of choices. It's technically wrong for several reasons, but you could get away with it. That's how low-impact this random number usage is. Using a cryptographically secure random number generator for that is always going to be overkill for such a task.
You mean, should we trust SHA2 and AES?
WTF. I can't believe it.