skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I've seen so many losers and fuckups (people I've worked with who have destroyed teams and companies) with large numbers of tit-for-tat, glowing recommendations and ridiculous endorsement counts

I've seen this too, but it's not a new phenomenon. This has always happened behind closed doors; LinkedIn merely makes it public.
I never said Samsung didn't copy Apple. I said the design patent was bullshit. You're setting up convenient strawmen to knock down.

You reaffirmed this by quoting that "They sued samsung over a number of combined similarities:" and then listing design features that the iPhone copied from the LG Prada.
There was the HCL (halt-and-catch-fire) opcode as a submission...
The Full Stack Product Team- 3 Sketches
Democrats today worship education, while Republicans today worship the market, neither of which faith has brought us close to a solution.

Extreme leftists cheerlead higher education under the belief that if you give the proles a leadership education, they'll eventually revolt and overthrow the capitalists. After all, the undergraduate experience was designed for aristocrats, and if people go from young aristocrat to prole in one post-graduate summer, they might be pissed off enough to take up arms and overthrow governments, like what almost happened in the 1960s student riots. It doesn't happen that way, however, so they (the extreme leftists) don't get what they want.

Lazy centrists and liberals push for widespread higher education because they believe education to be a magical fairy dust that can be sprinkled on inequality to make it go away. (In fact, tuition and credentialism and admissions-- nonacademic admissions elements being the worst offenders-- do the opposite.) They don't get what they want.

Right-wing, religious nutcases throw their weight behind religious education because they think it will help them in their losing cultural war against modernity. They don't get what they want.

The center-right, increasingly fascist, corporate elite cheerleads widespread education because it gives HR departments a sorting mechanism where the people being sorted do all the work, and pay exorbitant prices for the "privilege" of taking part in the indignity. As for this set of people (center-right), they are the ones who do get what they want.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7839226

Also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7838910

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7839353
While I agree with the recommendations of the article, I wish it would cover some of the history of US geo-engineering too.

I wonder what concerns were raised when they filled in Back Bay in Boston, or created artificial islands like Balboa Island in Newport Beach.
Yes very topical.

In most of the other examples you can rationalise the control aspect "oh, it's to prevent stupid people injuring themselves" or "it doesn't stop law abiding people from..."

In the topical spikes example there is no such rationalisation that we can do and this is why there is such outrage. Because it hurts psychologically, because we cannot pretend it's not there. The outrage is not really about homelessness - it's about our shame.
Free market indeed:

http://www.finaid.org/questions/bankruptcyexception.phtml
Which OS? For some reason Arch's Gnome handles hiDPI terribly, but Gnome Ubuntu is very good. So I stopped fighting it and just installed Gnome Ubuntu.
Solar Energy: Springtime For The Artificial Leaf
“The biggest energy source we have by far is the Sun,” he says. “The best way to store energy other than in the nucleus of an atom is in chemical fuels. It's inevitable someone is going to take the biggest source and store it in the most dense way.”
Thanks for a constructive response to my question. I'm simply trying to gain a better understanding of the situation.

> How would you feel if every time you were in a store, an employee followed you around and took notes on your actions?

Most people would feel uneasy/bothered by that. But are those emotions warranted? If we did not get such emotions, would the same scenario be okay? Or are the emotions a consequence of the true reason why we're against such behavior.

It's also worth noting that the employee following you around is a visible behavior, while being tracked via Wi-Fi mac addresses is much less intrusive.
Clearly "follower count" is not a good metric, just like "inbound link count" from the early days of search engines was not a good metric.

It's pretty damning these fake followers were able to game Klout's algorithms, since that's what Klout was trying to solve.

But "number of followers" is easy for people to understand so people will continue to consider it important.
It's pretty clear that Apple is positioning themselves in stark contrast to Google, they want to be the privacy/security company. Internet companies with advertising business models are a dime a dozen so that is a real advantage that differentiates Apple.
> Intel is ok too, but their hardware is not really targeted for gamers.

FWIW, I find the latest graphics units from Intel, e.g. HD 4600, rather okay. Even graphically nontrivial things like Crusader Kings II or KSP run decently, although usually far from the highest possible settings. But on the other hand, the drivers are rock-solid, delivered directly in Debian without any fiddling around as was/is necessary for the Nvidia drivers and I don’t need my own powerplant just to run a computer :)
*points to the fourth sentence

The joke.
Medium's image blurring "feature" is kind of annoying sometimes. I'm trying to look at the picture, and I want to scroll to see the bottom of it, and then the picture just suddenly becomes obscured for no reason. I know it's to make the caption more readable, but I want to look at the caption and the picture at the same time. They should just put a caption in a darkened, translucent region.
Thank you! I'm surprised by the amount of traffic submitting it may take out on a server. I wonder if I should put in better caches and controls on my own sites!
Where is Collarme : When founder go ballistic
According to the footnote he tested with pypy 1.9. There was just a post here a day or two ago that pypy 2.3.1 was release. Seems like one should at least use the latest version when testing. Pypy 1.9 was release 2 years ago.
I got to see it too, and got an informal tour by one of the grad students. He showed us a steel tie about a meter long, and said they'd calculated that two of them could hold down the Space Shuttle while it was trying to launch. To hold the machine together while it operates, they need 38 of them.

It's not surprising they they have so much trouble getting time on the machine. They barely have the funding to run it. During the budget problems last year they went a whole year without running it at all.
The Turing test only tests for mimicry in human conversation, not "intelligence" as measured through a behavioral framework.

A better "Turing test" proposed a few years ago was, "develop a team of robots that play soccer so well they can win the World Cup". While not the best possible driver of AI research, the quest for such a goal would still drive AI research orders or magnitude better than "trick random people to mistake a chatbot for a human".
You make a good point. Making a living is a pressing issue, and I feel that we do have a responsibility to aid those that can't take care of themselves. Further, you point out correctly, that I was harsh in my dismissal of those supporting Seattle's policy. Most people that support Seattle's policy probably do it in the belief that it will help the people that need help. Nevertheless, I believe that there are likely to be unanticipated negative consequences and a further eroding of our freedoms.

I must disagree with you that simply because the people of Seattle have had a democratic vote for a particular policy that we must respect it and refrain from criticizing it. The majority isn't always right and there is a long tradition in my country (the USA) of speaking out against policies that are either morally wrong (in some way) or wasteful despite the positions taken by majorities. I'm old enough to have demonstrated for civil rights at a time when there were states still refusing civil rights to their racial minority populations. While I was in college, there was a minority in this country demonstrating against a war being waged by conscripts that didn't want to fight. Today, there are states that don't allow gays the rights that the rest of us have. Do you dismiss criticism of these (sometimes majority held) positions as condescending and anti-democratic? Our cherished Bill of Rights is fundamentally anti-democratic, protecting us from simple democratic majorities.

I'm curious, although not hopeful, about the outcome of Seattle's experiment. I share your wish that it will help (the difference is I believe it won't). You can say to me "I told you so" if it really does help the people of Seattle, that would be a good thing.
If anything I hope the latest anti homeless spike story to open people's eyes a little bit more as to how our urban environment is planned and designed... and by extension to more things in our lives.
I'm a professor at an ivy league university who has gotten some insight into the budgets. There's a few things that are often not reported in the media:

1) The tuition sticker price is going up, but the actual price paid remains about the same due to increasing financial aid given to students.

2) The largest cost driven in the past decade is partially due to a successful increase in recruiting+admitting underrepresented minorities and low-income students. Because of a program called "need blind" among many universities, students are admitted regardless of ability to pay. So when more of these students come, not only are they unable to pay tuition, but the university pays them a stipend which results in a double financial cost.

3) There are administrative programs that cost money and are not flat screen TVs and new buildings, and actually benefit students at the same time! This includes funding for student organizations, undergraduate research or teaching assistantship programs, writing centers and tutors, etc.
The problem is voters have increasingly poor choice or say in the matter. Increasing concentration of wealth has shifted great electoral power to the few, both political parties are dependent on that wealth to finance their campaigns against each other, and ultimately answerable to it, hence there's no real choice for voters at the ballot box (other than on insignificant wedge issues), and it takes a herculean effort to compete in between elections with lobbyists who used to be Congressmen or staffers.

That may or may not be specific to America's "implementation", but that's the problem.
Thanks for a constructive and very insightful response.

This definitely seems to be a valid reason why people would be against being tracked. We don't want to be more easily manipulated (through the data that the ones doing tracking are able to acquire) and coerced into buying things we don't want/need (but the ones doing tracking want us to buy).

Would it be accurate to describe it like this: the consumers' interests are to be rational, less easily manipulated and "unhackable", and being tracked is a threat to those interests.

On the other hand, the store owners are trying their best to get their products sold, so their interests are opposite of the consumers, to find ways to sell as many things as possible.

If that's accurate, I find it interesting that there are these underlying "wars" occurring within a single species. In fact, a single person may wake up and go to work one morning, serving in the position of the one doing the "tracking" and fighting against the interests of consumers, then in the evening they may go shopping and end up on the other side, fighting against the interests of the ones doing tracking.

Pretty fascinating.
Absolutely! Let's get rid of the loans (like the ones I had to take to finish school in the late 80s), and go back to modest grants (like the ones I received in the early 80s) to pay for school.

Having been in college in the mid 80s, I got to watch first hand the defunding of higher education by Reaganism. Granted, "prop 13" in California started defunding schools 2 years earlier. I wonder if all of the boomers and WWIIers realized what they were getting back in 1980.

Of course, it was only in the 90s that I (personally, at least) could look back on the 80s and realize what a disaster Reaganism was visiting upon the US.

* unions busted
* regressive income tax structure (i.e. - FICA/Medicaid rates greatly increased, counterbalancing "normal" income tax with high bottom end rate)
* increase in immigration
* increase in "free" trade
* defunding of education and other public infrastructure

None of these were good for rank and file workers. As a result, the choice in the 21st century is pretty much "college", or "prison", due to the ability to find a job at all, or likely not. So, yeah, colleges (the leadership parasites in charge) are grabbing all they can, because that is the culture now.
Baumol's Cost Disease makes this failure mode pretty much inevitable no matter what schemes might be involved.
Is it randomized using Dual_EC_DRBG? Seriously though, it's something that should have been done a long time ago, and for Bluetooth too. Hopefully no iOS8 users get arrested for changing their MAC addresses.
I think the complete unabashed copying is specifically why Apple sued Samsung.

Companies have been getting design patents on generic looking devices for years, this one just got a lot of attention because it actually ended up in court. If Samsung's devices were simply the same shape as the iPad but weren't otherwise so similar, Apple would have had no case to argue, (and probably never filed the lawsuit) and no one would care about this patent.

For reference, the 30 pin connector wasn't actually on the first iPod - it was introduced with the 3rd gen. Previously they used a full sized Firewire 400 (1394A) port on top next to the headphone port.
If this project gains more traction, maybe it will get more people interested in Dart. (which is essentially javascript with a standard library reimagined for the things people are using javascript for today: async APIs, stream processing, mapreduce, webapps, etc.)
What we learned from our first, WiFi enabled, wall mounted prototype
It's my understanding is that in many (if not most) colleges, the cost for a single students tuition is exceedingly greater than what the school actually charges the student.

That is, schools make up the difference by getting grants, and getting alumni to donate.

With that model, there is no way school can continue to operate at that deficit.
The article actually notes that higher power densities showed a much smaller effect. Low doses were much more effectual, which is why sitting outside on a sunny day may not work quite as well, if at all.
It's pretty clear that Apple is positioning themselves in stark contrast to Google, they want to be the privacy/security company. Internet companies with advertising business models are a dime a dozen so that is a real advantage that differentiates Apple.

It's difficult to reconcile this claim with their participation in PRISM et. al., previous long-term storage of cell tower locations, ownership of a mobile ad network, and wanton abuse of the patent system to stifle competition.
Doggie Bag: Night Owl Edition
> Python is more dynamic than JavaScript, in that it has __getattr__, __setattr__, __getitem__, etc.

No, it's not. You can do equivalents to all of those in Javascript. Javascript objects are all mutable with a few exceptions. They are just maps of properties, very similar to Python's. Properties can be added or changed at runtime.

For example, setattr(obj, item, value) in python is basically just obj[item] = value in js.
> Your best bet to make it in America is to leverage yourself to the hilt. If you succeed, the benefits are privatized and you can sail off into the sunset. If you fail, the losses are eaten by the public.

I couldn't agree more but I would say that it applies not just in America, but in many other countries too. We are seeing it across the western world at the moment, where, because of low central bank interest rates, the virtuous savers are being burnt alive to repair the balance sheets of the wicked banks.
In my opinion, college is worthwhile ONLY if you attend a university that is worth the cost. In most situations, students attend a particular university wishing that it will guarantee them success at some point in their lives without researching the ranking, quality of education, etc. In terms of ROI, it is a safer option to attend a Top 50 university than a for-profit university nobody has ever heard of. The discussion shouldn't exactly revolve around whether college is worth it, but about how we can improve the quality of education across the board so that graduates are adequately prepared for the real-world.
Larry Page's Connections (2000)
Just a cap would help. Ideally non-constant e.g. average salary of a uni grad.
Yes, I do this at home because it resolves the problem of a duplicate IP addresses on the network caused by a device assuming it still has the same IP address (Apple devices seems to do this in particular) while meanwhile another one has taken it.
Last I heard, in some cities you had to have a BA to be a barista.

Well, who wants to hit on a girl who didn't even make it through college? When that socially awkward 28-year-old "techie" comes in and pays $7 for 620 calories of milk, sugar and coffee so bitter that it would be undrinkable without all the added sugar, he's doing it because he wants to run "Day Game" on the barista. How can he do that if it's not a girl he could actually, at least in theory, marry, because she doesn't have a BA?

(No, these aren't my actual attitudes. I'm trolling. But most people who make important decisions in our economy think that way, although they won't those sentiments so openly. Sometimes you have to think like a horrible person in order to know how the horrible people think. )

By the way, of the economic elite that is running the U.S. into the ground-- the ones who control job definition, in VC, what kinds of companies can be formed-- most of them actually know that they're doing it. They don't see the long-term severity, but they know that they're making the world poorer and themselves no richer by shutting the labor market down. They want white maids. Downton Abbey is porn for them. But that's another discussion entirely.
The increase in tuition costs has actually been relatively small. The price for tuition, fees, room and board at public 4-year colleges for in-state residents increased from $7,400 in 1990-91 (2012 dollars) to $12,110 in 2012-13. At private non-profit institution the net price increased from $18,330 in 1990-91 to $23,840 in 2012-13.
I visited Flour a year or so ago and it was absolutely delicious! Lovely atmosphere as well. Totally recommend, regardless of potential nuclear meltdowns :)
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/06/28/040628crbo_books...
This isn't a grand conspiracy. Its all about too much of other people's money chasing a large and growing inventory of academic seats.

Lots of well-intentioned and self-interested advocates have successfully made the assertion that more college == good. So Uncle Sam dumps billions into it.
Kids and parents are pretty dumb at assessing long terms value.

All education is like this. When you hear about things like schools providing iPads to the entire student body, that's a signal that there is too much money floating around.
How is this diferrent from http://www.mailgun.com ?
It's also worth noting that the employee following you around is a visible behavior, while being tracked via Wi-Fi mac addresses is much less intrusive.

It's less visibly intrusive, but the effect is the same. Our instincts aren't very good at reacting to effects we can't see, having evolved in a world where there were no undetectable ways for someone to follow us. Thus, we should consider what our natural reactions would be to a person doing the thing we want to use technology to do, before we create the technology to do it.
What Edward Snowden didn't disclose
It seems to me that by taking a good KDF-hash of the user's password, then "compressing" it (either by truncating or re-hashing it to a new output length), you could get it down to a size where the base32 representation of those bytes, would both A. fit into the legacy password field, and B. obey its alphanumeric-only restrictions.

Naively, you'd think the compression would make the password field much more prone to preimage attacks (e.g. JtRing a hacked DB dump), but calculating each attempt would still require a full KDF series, even if large amounts of the KDF's output keyspace are getting conflated at the end. You'd likely have a lot of accidental collisions between passwords that happen to hash to the same value in your restricted keyspace, but they'd be no help in finding a purposeful collision, because the input keyspace would be unlimited.

Of course, if you only have 40 bits of output keyspace available (i.e. a field with a capacity for eight base32 characters), you "only" need to KDF 2^40 passwords to generate a probabilistically-complete rainbow table. So, make sure to salt the compression step with something user-specific, e.g. The UID. One simple method of achieving this would be to have the output look like

base32(trunc(40, kdf(pw)) XOR trunc(40, kdf(pw ++ uid)))

This basically means that a successful preimage attack on your compressed KDF be would require a unique collision between the salted and unsalted hash outputs—effectively doubling the output keyspace one would have to search, as well as giving you the regular benefits of per-user salts.

---

...or you could just put the hash of a random opaque token in the password field; stand up a modern, separate server that runs a "password service" (in the SOA architecture sense) to keep a map of full (UID, KDF hash) pairs to the opaque tokens; and then have your web service hit the password service to (potentially) return it a token to use as the password in the conversation with the legacy auth system. You know, either way.
Your comment fits the general pattern of "I want to keep it simple but if I could just do X" which is entirely valid from a UX perspective and the reason why any generalised janky buster is a good step forward (assuming it does the job, and with minimial overhead).
I have my own BIN file format, but you are not allowed to use it. All code must be JIT compiled. I'm just going to out-right ban BIN files. Fuck-it. Yeah, that's the obvious answer.
Yes, but am quite happy and impressed to see how well Pypy is holding up.

Something that I have learned about reading benchmarks is to pay attention to who is coming consistently second. Usually that is the most informative part of a benchmark.
Taking England back to the Dark Ages
"Our lives are spent trying to pixellate a fractal planet."

~A. King in Society
> It's pretty clear that Apple is positioning themselves in stark contrast to Google, they want to be the privacy/security company. Internet companies with advertising business models are a dime a dozen so that is a real advantage that differentiates Apple.

Yes, Apple certainly wouldn't develop/release a product whose sole purpose is to track user's physical presence, with the primary use point being able to sell the ability to push 'app usage':
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBeacon
http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/06/03/apples-ios-8-uses-...

This is about the ability to track handsets, and how Apple wants to corner the market on tracking their own handsets.