skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When it comes to surveillance, Scandinavia is not a beacon. Sweden has their notorious law that allows any signal passing the borders to be intercepted by military intelligence. Since most of Norways traffic out of the country goes via Sweden, that's caused a few issues...

And Norwegian security services have decades worth of history of blatantly illegal politically motivated surveillance (basically anyone to the left of the Norwegian equivalent of Labour used to be under extensive surveillance - some of it so blatant it was clearly intended to intimidate rather than uncover anything; it was supposedly stopped in the mid 90's, but given that the security services were illegally monitoring the head of the parliamentary committee investigating them while he was investigating them gives me zero confidence anything has changed)
...and just when you thought it was safe to go back outside leap seconds rear their ugly head and ruin your day.
Sadly, the law will be passed before their researcher gets round to reading your letter.
Show HN: Power – Zero-configuration static web server
>> The ingredients in cigarettes are what actually make nicotine addictive

Uh, that sounds wrong.

"Snus" users get addicted. That is tobacco, even if it isn't burned. But afaik, users of e-cigarettes also get dependent -- that isn't tobacco.
Keto Friendly Protein Rich Alternatives – Post-Workout and Breakfast
Thank you for that insight. I couldn't upvote it enough.
Just pay for the archives. It's not expensive, doesn't require more effort on his part, and although it's not something I find myself using very often, it's super helpful when I need it. I've got pinboard bookmarks going back to 2005; link rot is a problem on the older ones that pinboard's archive occasionally solves.
Typescript v1.0.1
This is inspiring. Out of curiosity, do you use/how do you work with the note function?
My favourite movie credit was for a "butterfly wrangler". I had an image of someone in chaps and a cowboy hat, holding a really tiny whip...
An example of some of the pitfalls involved: http://search.cpan.org/~drolsky/DateTime-1.10/lib/DateTime.p...
I contracted to the company first, did my best to impress them during the contract period, then brought up that I'd love to work with them permanently and negotiated a package to switch over to FTE.
> nor an affiliate of him.

Might want to look up that author again ;)
As said by thinkpad in this thread somewhere, Haskell functions are unary.
(Well I don't get a vote being south of the border. But I do hope that Scotland does get its independence. (I'm not really sure why I feel like that. I'm not anti-europe. Shouldn't the sum be greater than the parts?) Sadly that will most likely leave England, stuck with the Tories and UKIP. Shudder. I still think Salmond only got in because Blair pooch screwed Labour. The Scottish debate has been pretty pathetic so far from both sides, will watch with interest.)
Get YO from BARACK OBAMA
Post Millenium Tension
Strongly disagree. The fewer comments the better. Reviewing and maintaining code is hard, and within reason you want the code to be expressed in as few bits as possible while maintaining readability and good structure. Comments in English are just another thing for me to have to process mentally when understanding the code. Even worse, there is no constraint on the comments that they have to be accurate. Code at least has to appear to be working correctly. Every single comment added to the code comes with zero guarantee about whether it's true or not. Similarly, the comments can get stale, and there is nothing technically opposing that.

Literate programming is a horrible idea; comments in code encourage verbosity and showing off, lack any guarantee of correctness and should always be a last resort.
I think that's right, but in another way Wikipedia does keep the plebes out:

When you defend a reverted change on the talk page all too often you get something along the lines "I don't care about this discussion, it was an IP anyway. Stay away!".

Wikipedians often see "IPs" as vandals and don't even pretend to judge on the merits.

Together with some "ownership" feeling that many Wikipedia users have regarding "their" pages, it makes for a very unproductive and frustrating experience for a casual would-be supporter.

Unless you're willing to really commit to Wikipedia, learn all the jargon and be a part of the power games, Wikipedia is effectively read-only.

As an "IP" you're mostly restricted to fixing typos.

That's perfectly fine, but a stark contrast to how the project is painting itself.
RFC2616 (HTTP 1.1) is Dead
#2 tells you nothing about the ability of the candidate to do the actual job.

In fact, mostly it is assumed that the candidate should prepare for the interview (i.e. #2).

Instead of this, maybe you should concentrate to come up with better interviews which tells you that the candidate is a good fit AS-IS for the given position?
Mice don't even get Parkinson's. The misleading title is not even in the university's press release of the mouse model study: "Cinnamon May Be Used to Halt the Progression of Parkinson’s disease"
Semi-unification is always a pain, I really hope this is technically sound and tractable.
Emergency phone and Internet data retention law set to be passed in the UK
> The notability requirement is not there to keep out the plebs, it's there to keep the information on Wikipedia accurate.

Then it should be a verifiablity requirement.
He was unbanned a long time ago; he only recently decided to come back to HN, which I wasn't aware of.

Fortunate for us.

edit: Looks like he might've only shown up because someone lifted data from his bedbug site. If we're lucky, he'll stick around, but I'd be (pleasantly) surprised.
http://freerice.com/node/2916823
A little more advanced, but this resource has been indispensable for me. Thanks Stephen!
Most important part of the linked article: "The bar for notability or even remembrance is simply much lower for recent history."
Been interviewing people around 8 years now. I continue to be amazed at how much people who look like rock stars on paper can flounder on the basics, and "average" looking candidates can shine.

No strategy is perfect, but put yourself in the shoes of someone about to drop a large portion of their budget on you. Wouldn't you want some idea that they'll be able to do the job?

Talking over coffee sounds great, but I've encountered many a candidate that talks a big game on the high level, but just can't write code.

(fwiw, I don't use "gotcha" questions with tricks, I'm quite flexible on languages used, I'm not being a stickler on syntax, and I don't care if you code on a whiteboard, paper, or laptop I provide.)
I think there's a huge startup opportunity somewhere in building reliable, stable router software with a slick webinterface built in Bootstrap (without framesets).

Of course, there's the Apple Airports that have excellent stability and UI, and while I have one and far better than any router I've owned, it doesn't do stuff like VPN.
There are one or two. The most prominent is Netmap (https://code.google.com/p/netmap/) another is the Intel Dataplane Development Kit (DPDK - http://www.dpdk.org/. Both of these allow you to handle millions of real packets, per second from standard software. No lua coding required.
Coding together at scale
This smells like a rat. They appear to be introducing this law to protect their current activities, which were declared "invalid" by the European Court of Justice.

The sunset clause is an attempt to prolong the debate to the point where the public loses interest, at which point all that needs to be passed in 2016 is a simple "confirmation of existing practice" for this to become permanent.

I wonder, though, how much the European Court's ruling is binding on the UK, and if they would fall foul of it if this law is passed.
A Painless Guide To CRC Error Detection Algorithms
There's a bunch of on-going research on nicotine gum dependence too. I was a participant in a study for this.
I do a lot of contract work these days and I recently found out about a service that promises to put high quality programmers together with high quality clients. The average fees are somewhat high (high for a global average but low-ish for top-grade programmers). I won't mention them here because I'm not going to give them a free plug.

Their interview process has half a dozen independent steps including live coding tests, HR screens, etc. I had some very specific questions that would have been a deal breaker for me and tried to contact them to get them answered directly before I considered jumping through all of hoops they have set up.

Long story short they gave me the runaround and refused to put me in contact with someone who could answer my questions. They told me my questions would be answered at stage 3 (or whatever) of the interview process. I said no thanks (seriously, I was polite about it, said I wasn't interested and even thanked the guy for his time) and he responded with a snarky reply about them being very selective anyway. Not sure if he was implying that I wouldn't make the cut or not but I found it offensive.

Now the funny part -- the only reason I found out about the service was I had googled the name of another programmer and he has a "resume" posted on their site. He has apparently done dozens of projects for them. Someone approached me to fix a project that this particular programmer had messed up to the point where he couldn't take it forward. While it was in a notoriously difficult area, in no way should it have been an intractable problem for a competent programmer, at least in my opinion.

My takeaway is that these protracted interview carnivals are good at filtering out two types of programmers -- the worst and the best. Having made it through probably says more about your tolerance for bureaucracy than your actual abilities. There are exceptions of course -- Google et al -- but I would imagine the average company or service is missing out by not allowing people to circumvent this process when they're discriminating enough to want to do that.

> The whole process is a real pain. I'd love to just grab a coffee and discuss how we can work together. Is there any way to circumvent/short-circuit this whole tech interview process?

Exactly. If you want to hire exceptional people, don't treat them like they're average.

[Edit: wording]
$1995 WHAAAT
"fashionable" is a form of condescension

This is a very social-group-specific point of view. In much of the world describing someone as fashionable is a compliment.
> Supported Operating Systems

> Windows 7.x

> Windows 8.x

Is that really the way to launch a successful game these days? No consoles. No tablets. No smartphones.
It would be interesting to plot the PageRank score of each person's page as well, showing their significance. I would expect a long tailed graph (as we filter only the very significant persons the farther back we go in time; less notable ones gradually pass into oblivion).
I'm a big fan of long, definitive plain text documents.

Peter Gutmann's X.509 styleguide is another prime example.

So much valuable information without any mental capacity wasted on bullshit like getting your collapsing margins to work like you expected them to work, and all this other web stuff.
Reminds me I made thing with far fewer features (just definition lookups within the same repository), but with support for lots more languages :3 --> http://ghctags.shishnet.org/
That doesn't preclude Wolfram releasing the source code for the calculation engine.
There is plenty of good work on anonymising and fuzzing location data. But unfortunately the results show that the amount of fuzzing required for anonymity is huge. "Hours and 100m" are far from enough, only something like "year and state" might work.

Some of the notable results are:

* Golle and Partridge 2009 (http://xenon.stanford.edu/~pgolle/papers/commute.pdf) - Just the home and work location at city block level is enough to uniquely identify 50% of the US population. Home and work at zip code level is enough to uniquely identify 5% of US population. Home and work county is still enough to identify 1% of people to a set of 6 candidates.

* Montjoye et. al. 2013 (http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130325/srep01376/full/srep01...) - If you have a time-location dataset of people with hourly accuracy of time and cell tower accuracy for location (100m in cities, a few km in rural areas), then four randomly picked points for each person uniquely identify 95% of them. Just two randomly picked points for each person uniquely identify 50% of people.

The main conclusion is that it is not possible to release an "anonymised" location dataset of people that is still useful for mobility research. The only realistic approach seems to be to have strict privacy regulations and NDAs with people who are given access to this data.

But more generally, all research into anonymisation and preventing de-anonymisation is difficult because it's not known what other data sources the attacker has access to. If I have a time-location dataset of anonymous people, and if I see from Facebook when a friend visited Paris and Barcelona, then it becomes trivial to match these dates and cities against the location traces, and find their full movement trace. Similarly, if I can get an anonymous dataset of phone calls, then I can make 20 missed calls at 4am to a friend, and later look for that pattern in the data to find their other calls.

The best example of this was from the Netflix dataset of anonymous movie ratings ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy#Netflix_Pr... ) - people were anonymous in their dataset, but some people also rated movies with visible identities on IMDB. Correlating the two datasets allowed researchers to discover the identities of people in the Netflix dataset.
One Week, 3,000 Product Ideas
Oh come on, digital copying is very, very cheap.
>Labour agree to it too.

Labour are not considered champions of personal privacy to the same degree the Lib Dems are...
Just in case anyone is thinking of purchasing through Alibaba:

Alibaba is notorious for scammers. I know two startups that have lost around $20,000 each on material suppliers listed there who send something cheaper (usually completely different) than what has been requested upon payment. It's usually the orders that are around $1000 that Chinese chemical/raw materials supply companies selectively scam on.
This stack may be open source, but it is handcrafted to work only with the Solarflare NICs. Having looked at it seriously, we decided that it wasn't worth trying to port this to our own devices and therefore wrote yet another one. This time, without the pretence of "open".
>their researcher

Read unpaid intern.
One is mutable, one is not. Performance. Also, look up namedtuple. Useful for returning multiple values.
US Department of Energy doubles lithium-ion battery capacity with spongy silicon
An interesting intersection of those is that the bar for notability is really low for ancient history, if any information is available. Minor people about whom some documentation has survived are interesting to historians, simply because the number of ancient Greeks who we know by name and about whom any information has survived is small, so essentially all of them are of interest to historians. Same with texts: every ancient surviving poem is at least somewhat notable and has some study of it (even surviving poem fragments), which is definitely not the case with every surviving poem from 1995.
How about all the plagues? Those would have killed off plenty of people.
Typical capture cards have a resolution of 6-7ns. 300ns PHY is an out of date value. These guys can do ~425ns wire to application (or 850ns round trip to software) http://exablaze.com/exanic-x4
First of all, if your business wants me to memorize stuff that has nothing to do with my job so that we can both engage in a game of pretend, I don't want to work there. Who knows what other stupid shit you'll make me do.

But what really alarmed me was the following sentence:

> Don't complain about a system when you can game that system to your advantage!

This is not only morally dubious, it can be downright dangerous. A broken system is unstable, and can quickly turn against you. If you see a fire in your neighbours yard you should do something about it, even if he is a total asshole.
The energy is still there, it's just misdirected.
Huh. Embarrassingly, I didn't even know it existed.

I played with it for a moment and I don't know. I've already got a system for saving bits of text and notes and things that works for me -- pinboard might not be better than that.
4 billion IDs = 32 bit = Math.pow(2,32).

For a 50% chance of collision you need Math.pow(2,32/2) calls to your ID generating function which is 65536 calls.

And that's just a 50% chance. Even a 1% chance is too much (for which you would need much less than 65536 calls).

I doubt "IBM, Google or Microsoft" are using 32bit UUIDs.

"4 billion IDs is likely Unique within an organization"

I don't think it's unique within any organization.
On of the serious drawbacks of Netmap is that it amortizes, but does not mitigate system call latencies. This means that although it can handle high packet rates, latencies for processing are dominated by the system call overhead (typically about 5us). This may not sound like much, but on a 10Gb/s network (1 bit = 0.1ns), 5us = 50,000bits or roughly 5KB. For small packets, this means that you have to batch very aggressively (about 150 packets at a time) in order to keep up.
LHC scientists to search for 'fifth force of Nature'
New German-based end-to-end encrypted e-mail service launches internationally
The trend isn't surprising. 15 minutes of fame is easier to achieve than 300 years. It's also less work to research Justin Timberlake than Justinian because one need not even open a book.
In my opinion, the verifiability requirement has mostly (though not 100%) superseded the notability requirement on Wikipedia over the past ~5 years. Nowadays it's close to necessary and sufficient for something to have good third-party sources: if something has good sources it's usually presumed notable because it clearly has been noted by others (e.g. by scholars, if the sources are scholarly sources), while if something doesn't have good sources, then whether it's notable or not is moot because there's no basis for writing a Wikipedia article on it anyway.

I wrote a longer-winded version of this argument a while ago: http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability...
20 Life Lessons You Won't Learn In School
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25840502

Alcatel-Lucent and BT said speeds of 1.4 terabits per second were achieved during their joint test - enough to send 44 uncompressed HD films a second.

Awesome!
Not bad for startups? So the merit of this is based on the value to startups, not society?

Another way to interpret what you said is: Google and other large companies can't apply large quantities of resources to health.
I think you are trying to justify your strange preferences after the fact. How exactly were there bugs caused by nested for loops that you encountered? It's not like if you mess up the order it will actually run without throwing an exception. Nested list comprehensions are idiomatic python. It's really strange that you don't let your team use them because you are afraid of them.
What are you revealing online? Much more than you think
I have a lot of friends but really enjoy being alone. Unfortunately people can't accept that as a reason for not joining them on an activity so I constantly have to come up with excuses. I do like hanging out with people as well but being alone is just as fun and rewarding, and is never tiresome.
The government, police and security services.

I never mentioned any 'nefarious schemes' so you appear to have filled that in yourself. My guess is that GCHQ and others have demanded more powers (some of which to cover stuff that they already did but they knew was illegal all along)
I think even better metric would be number of translations to other languages for each person's page (maybe in combination with PageRank), I noticed it correlates with "notability" (not just for people) pretty good and I even have been meaning to do it myself for some time :)
MindRDR – First Google Glass app controlled with your mind
Reading the comparison table you linked, there is a misleading point, but I may understand it wrong:
they claim that CT "does [...] avoid the need for the client to trust a third party", but in reality the client still needs to trust CAs, and have the CA keys in his trust store. Removing a CA key from the trust store of the browser basically invalidates all certs signed by that CA (just like it is now). It's just a framework for monitoring the released certificates. Trust on the CA still needs to be there. And as Moxie sad: "Whenever someone is proposing an other authenticity system, the question that we should all ask is: who do we have to trust, and for how long? And if the answer is: a prescribed set of people, forever, proceed with caution."

With CT we still have to trust CAs. Basically forever.
I wonder what would be happening in government now if David Davis hadn't resigned as Shadow Home Secretary to protest against Labour's intrusions into personal liberties, but instead made it to be Home Secretary.
Specifically, that's BT Infinity 2 -- confusingly, BT use Infinity for their fibre-to-the-home product as well, Infinity 3 offers 200Mbps and Infinity 4 offers 300Mbps. Availability is limited to a handful of exchanges, however

http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/products/broadband/fas...
As someone who spends a significant amount of time in python that is much harder to follow. There is an expectation for order in list comprehensions and what you wrote completely violates it.
Amazon bypasses French "no free shipping on books" law by setting it at 0,01€
I'm so tired of reading this stuff. I really feel like I'm taking crazy pills. If anything, it sounds to me like staunch creationists arguing that "both sides" of the "debate" need to be heard.

At this point I attribute most of it to basic human envy, or perhaps even just not liking the "nerds" getting ahead.

Most of us here work in tech. We know our co-workers. We know where we came from. For many of us, years growing up spent reading, tinkering, being maybe a little anti-social. A lot of us probably found a computer at a young age, and just felt a compulsion to learn how it worked. Now we're getting paid for it.

I guess I just don't see this greedy group of evil doers out to ruin a city when I look at the people I've encountered in the industry. I see people who got a bit lucky that their passion became profitable.

I mean, bashing Google busses? Yes, Google created a perk, but they created it because a lot of their workers wanted to live in the city, and it beat having them all bring cars into SF and clog the 101. But I guess if you're a tech nerd, you're not supposed to live in the city, because that's for OTHER people, not you.

Do doctors, lawyers, and people in finance get harangued constantly in other cities? (substitute anyone with a well paying job) Do they have to take surveys about their donation habits to charities, and if they didn't, answer why not?

Why do we collectively put up with this? It really all seems to boil down to a class of people deciding that "techies" aren't worthy of living in THEIR city, and that's that.
This is the USA, it's about 40-50 years behind even my country (the UK) on discrimination-related law and practice, and law related to societal issues in general. One could argue that this is just the set of trade-offs that the US has made for itself, but the real-world results are looking grim.
Every Simple Mobile App Idea Could Open a Plethora of New Opportunities
Yeah, but a Vertu is excessive, just as a Porsche. Normcore is the word. You have to look just better than your peers, not everyone at once. So, even though a lot of people couldn't affort a pricier phone than the 5S, even those who can afford a Vertu stay on the 5S and spend on other accessories.
His tl;dr of it is "Piketty is jealous".