skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That made me ill. I'm sure a16z is great and all, but there wasn't even a hint of criticism there. They couldn't find one slightly pejorative anecdote to contrast with the endless amount of fawning? I had to double check the byline, because by the end of it, I was convinced it had to be written by Robin Leach. Champagne wishes...
According to the Department of Transportation Commissioner, “the chances of a person being killed is cut in half when you reduce the speed limit of the moving vehicle from 30 to 25.”

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/08/09/gov-cuomo-signs-bill-...
Regarding point 2.a.i ("adds random latency to packets to reduce bandwidth of timing channels"):

There's actually a "better" method. Hash every packet, and add latency not only randomly, but also, for each field in the packet, add latency based on the hash of that field. (In actuality you want a random salt, so, HMAC or similar)

That way, assuming they cannot figure out the salt, you actually actively prevent a large chunk of timing attacks. You're adding deterministic variation that hopefully swamps the server-side variation, deterministic being the key word. You cannot get around it by repeating measurements, as the delay stays the same.

(Alternatively, keep each packet so that exactly 100ms or whatever has passed between getting the packet in and sending the response, silently discarding any packets that take >100ms to process.)
They have different growth strategies because of their different core competencies, and those get accounted for differently under GAAP.

Google tries to accumulate cash so that when there's an opportunity - say, buying DoubleClick or YouTube or Motorola - they can pounce. Since Google is basically an IP company and tries to avoid having physical assets on the books, these are usually whole other companies, usually technology-related. These opportunities are unpredictable, so they bank the cash on the books, invest it in liquid instruments, and then spend it all at once.

Apple is a mature company now - it pays a dividend. But during their big growth years between the iPod & iMac and the iPad, they suspended the dividend, and ran very close to break even then too.
I will look into creating a .deb package. No $100 necessary for me. My email address is in my profile, I'd anyone wants to connect before I can put together a pull request.
Absolute fastest way to iterate through an array in C or assembly
Two Cities with Blazing Internet Speed Search for a Killer App
How do you quantify that (is there really an accurate count of how many of those farms exist?)
Second WordStar article posted today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8272952.
When you build a free product, the end user is not a customer, they are the product. I wonder how many farmers like being the product and not the customer.

Careful because the other extreme has its own problems: my company only has paid customers who prepay for the entire year. While this has helped us pay the bills and cover cost, it has been detrimental to building a great product because we aren't getting as much feedback as we would if we had 10x users. I'm finally reaching a stage where I may take up a job just so we can give away free trials and not have to rely as much on near term revenue to pay the bills.
Signup without explanation of features or cost?
Love you guys :)
This is a nightmare and we need to fight it tooth and nail.

Those aren't just cameras, they are networked to a facial recognition database (thanks facebook), which is cross referenced with criminal records and commercial profiles built from your every online purchase, gmail and facebook post.

This is what you can expect after the police get this as socially accepted

1. Facial recognition and additional suspicion of anyone walking down the street with a criminal record.

2. During an encounter with a officer micro facial expressions, speech patterns, eye movement and heart rate will be analyzed at high speed by AI to assess reasonable suspicion, to detect deception and emotional state and to direct the line of questioning in real time. The kind of technology the Gestapo could only dream of.

3. Body language of everyone in view will be analyzed for suspicion as they pass by.

4. These AIs will analyze anything you say in real time for factual accuracy against a huge database of personal information (half of which comes from your phone) and for context based on your commercial profile.

The implications here are that these databases represent a power shift and will redline demographics and make living in society with a record far more unpleasant than it is now. You can get a felony for forgetting your bus ticket. This effects everyone.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/189259-real-time-emotion-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVwBXr_nU9Q

http://mic.com/articles/30975/how-the-nypd-is-using-your-fac...
You could probably do that for the entire internet, assuming you had their levels of resources.
I agree. John Deere or possibly Cargill feel like natural fits. If they really do get a huge market share, some company will buy them just for all the customer relationships, not the software.
My understanding is that they attempted a login a few times. User: dpr. Password: ababa, dada, bobo, etc. This in turn triggers the web app to display a captcha after too many failures. The img src for the captcha revealed the IP.

It wasn't much of a "brute force" attack, it wasn't SQL injection (though it's possible they were poking at that too), but just the simple question, what happens if we try to login five times with "miscellaneous" passwords? Hey, look, a captcha! I wonder what server the image comes from...
Our Place in the Universe: Welcome to Laniakea
No, I have no objections to Great literature, but let's not pretend that Shakespeare can say more about our world than this week's TIME, for instance.

Understanding today's news is a vital skill for survival. You could complain all about "incumbent power structure" controlling our media (which is rather strange... how come _you_ have no problem saying these things? Are you somehow outside the influence of the power structure?), but our everyday life (from finding out upcoming road closures to deciding whether California should reduce water usage) depends on knowing what's happening around us.

Sure, it's very important to view the information critically, but you can't criticize what you don't know. Get rid of the mainstream information source, and you frequently end up with worse source of information, like moon landing hoaxers, antivaxxers, and 9/11 conspiracy theorists. (Well, these people also think the mainstream news is beyond redemption and only they know the truth. Shoving CNN through their throats may be actually doing them some favor.)
AH is doing some remarkable stuff.

1) Like any great knowledge based firm - which strives to differentiate over and above its people - they have invested in tools. While the inspiration maybe CAA, firms like Mckinsey (knowledge management system) and Goldman (SecDB / Slang on the trading side and a detailed CRM system for the banking side) used the software / infra layer to develop a sustainable advantage which did not just depend on hiring the "smartest people" I.e. if people quit Goldman / Mckinsey - suddenly they were not able to outperform. On wall street - they call it seat value (how much value are you adding versus the seat/organization)

2) As a complete outsider - one can still easily see how the CRM software + sales connectors capability translates to $$$ for portfolio companies. For e.g. Box's recent deal with GE.

3) Therefore, on the enterprise side , if AH acts like a sales force (led by Mark Cranney) - then how does an enterprise company that is not backed by AH compete? In other words, over and above the prestige factor of being backed by a top tier VC firm- will NOT raising money from AH in the enterprise side put you at a disadvantage?

4) How much of this sales force / business development muscle applies to the consumer side? AH partners have referred to consumer startups as fruit fly experiments and will invest with a strong offer post-traction/ series B? But is there value in the consumer side as well in BD deals like how Moritz/Doerr helped Google power yahoo search and collect valuable search engine user behavior which was used to refine and test thier algorithms.

5) The article did mention in passing about recruiting support. But - I have read about a detailed software + people capability on talent hiring.

6) So, if sales + recruiting + strategy/advise are three value adds by VC firms (not counting money!) - does AH have a lock on 2 of the three?
FarmLogs is in the right market. Agriculture is a growth industry.
Wasn't WebMynd (now trigger.io) trying to do this? A Tivo for the web.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/webmynd-corp

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/26/webmynd/
How can I test for how many significant figures a float has in C++?
This is really awesome.

I dream of the day when we will have a lot of options for small specialty digital cameras. You see a small trickle of them coming out(Ricoh GR, Fuji X100s, Sigma DP2), but no where near as many as in the old film days.

I could never imagine someone taking on this as a DIY project. I think it was a really cool decision to take a Sony NEX's components, which I always thought were lacking in ergonomics, and give it the feel of a classic rangefinder.

So, from my understanding, the camera you have currently only works in bulb mode. It would be interesting to see a post as to how you would even begin to tackle getting a predetermined shutter speed to work. Also more sample images would be great as well.
My university was the same for most math classes, but some allowed printed notes.

Creating a LaTeX template that fits everything on to the sheet was an amazing time saver.
Oh, yeah, sorry. That's some zsh automagic. Maybe

wget -r -np -nd -l 1 -A pdf "http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~atri/courses/coding-theory/book/"

would be more portable?
I wanted to make the signup process as simple as possible. I am looking for a good way to show the user the pricing and features. Maybe I should show it after the signup?
Thanks for trying it out :)
Is it just me or is that A7 performance crazy impressive? Especially comparing an iphone to the size of an i7 + cooling + power
Why isn't it his right? Are you OK with your boss paying you 1/10th of your salary random months because he can get away with it?

Just because you can easily get away with not paying what he's asking doesn't mean you should be legally entitled to do so.
Just wondering, is there a reason why twitter doesn't use one of the many distributed in-memory database solutions?
It seems like they had to write a lot of custom layering on top of it just to scale
Also, what's the significance of calling it expired if it continues to be honored? Honoring an expired document breaks the rationale for expiry.
I agree. It's also worrisome that Marc Andreessen predicts the future so much lately. The future simply can't be predicted with such reliability as his certainty implies.
T-Mobile sues Chinese telecom giant Huawei
7 hour old account, his only post is this one, advertising a phone.

Very likely a astroturfer working for Coolpad (not too say that the phone isn't better or worse than Moto G).
That's the thing - the FBI didn't have a warrant. They're trying to argue that they should be allowed to use the information anyway, because it wasn't 'hacking,' it was 'entering miscellaneous strings.'

On a related note, why the hell didn't they get a warrant? I doubt it would have taken long.
First of all, don't worry about them stealing your idea when they can't even get their own off the ground.

Secondly, if your working relationship with the founders is "let the lawyers decide" you don't owe them anything, much less any more time out of your life.

Thirdly, staying on longer would give them room to maneuver you into a bad legal position with respect to the non-compete clause. If you give final notice of leaving and the next day the company unexpectedly pivots to your idea, you're left in a bit of a jam. Sooner might well be better than later in this case.

What you decide to do is ultimately up to you. But be wary of being manipulated into another 4 month notice period, and another, and another. Your time is the most important resource you have (up there with your health); be wary of wasting it.
Some people advocate using the term "Gynophobic" for a term for the hatred and disdain of women as the use of the term "Misogyny" has evolved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gynophobia
Can anyone more familiar with the matter tell me what is wrong with the parallel collections? Does he plan to reimplement them in a more maintainable way? Or do away with them altogether?

All the talk about scala makes me wonder what the language would have looked like if Java compatibility was never a goal. I'm no language designer and I'm probably wrong but some things that come to mind are 1) no nulls, 2) no distinction between classes and their companion objects, 3) no distinction between traits and abstract classes.
"mathematically proven programs that do not require maintenance" - very funny.
What would be the (software) VC equivalent of contrarian investing?

Let's see, we could invest in companies that

- are tackling problems for which solutions already exist

- are staffed by experienced people, not youth

- use mature technology

- have nothing to do with the web or even the internet

- are run outside of the valley (bonus points for flyover country)

Surely there must be other things that warm the heart of the contrarian investor?
Which they could easily claim as being incidental to gathering the evidence needed to obtain the probable cause that is mandatory for a warrant.

CFAA talks about "unauthorized access", not about any "unwanted" interaction with a computer. Though I think FBI will simply claims that the steps used at that stage of the investigation were implicitly permitted by the fact that it was conducted for a lawful government purpose (there's some fancy legal term for this, but I forget what it is), and wasn't otherwise forbidden to the government since it didn't involve a search or seizure.

If accepted, that would mean that J. Random Hacker doesn't get to mess around with websites just because the FBI got to, even in situations short of CFAA violations.
Ask HN: What was that shared email service I saw here recently?
I can't remember for the life of me and share email / shared email / team email aren't turning anything up for me on HN search.
You can also transfer your balance to a new card.
Quit ASAP. You owe them nothing. I am telling you right now, whatever justice you are trying to achieve by "standing by your word", you will not achieve it and they will still fuck you over. DO NOT under any circumstances waste more of your time. Let me rephrase. Do not waste any of your LIFE on this situation. It's not worth it.

Here is what you should do starting right now.

1. Document everything that you still can. Emails, conversations, records. Get everything and put it into a folder. You will need this in case something comes up later.

2. Quit tomorrow.

3. Go pursue your startup idea. If you need more savings and want to build some up, do some freelance projects which I'm sure others on here would be happy to point you towards. You already said additional money is not a requirement so there should be nothing stopping you from wasting your time.

Again, you owe them nothing.
I'll be honest -- my first impression after reading this piece was to research Peter Sims and figure out his connection to a16z, since my gut reaction was that blatant puff pieces usually have some sort of connection hidden below the surface. (I was unable to find anything.)

Sims brings up the following point about VC returns:

> The predominant old way of thinking about venture capital is that you: a) build up a great brand and reputation with a large portfolio of investments, b) hire partners who have individually strong brands of their own, and c) collect hefty management fees on each fund. The industry standard is a 2–2.5% yearly “management” fee, a figure that gets pretty large on a billion dollar fund. And, in my experience, not surprisingly, the senior people get a disproportionate slice of that management fee. At the same time, the venture capital industry has been a glaringly poor-performing asset management group, consistently underperforming the S&P 500. (For more detail on the struggles within the VC industry, a recent article on the Harvard Business Review Blog by Diane Mulcahy, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, entitled “Venture Capitalists Get Paid Well to Lose Money” is well worth reading).

But never swings back around to it (unless I missed it amongst the flowery prose). Which leads me to ask: are there data points that compares a16z (or other VC firms!) against the S&P 500, besides the aggregate?
I don't see how its not a big deal.

If all messages are seen by my phone, just to be inspected and discarded, then my phone is consuming bandwidth and processing cycles on irrelevant data. And unless my phone has free bandwidth, and the processing cycles don't consume power (or it has infinite power), how can it ever not be a factor?
You're an employee. 2 weeks notice is all you need to give. You already gave that, so move on.

Why would you stay at a place that you didn't like for 4 months? That was silly. So was telling them your business ideas. Honestly, you've got nobody to blame but yourself here.

Non-competes aren't even valid in California so just move there and start your social network for dogs.
Can someone explain to me why pedestrians are being hit in NYC? Are they wandering onto the roads? Are the cars driving onto the pavement? Are pedestrians stepping in front of cars? Cars running red lights while pedestrians assume that "green" means they can go?

I'm honestly curious what sorts of "pedestrian accidents" people have seen in NYC?
You're right that the drug war is a farce, but your reasoning is wrong. Altering consciousness is never going away, even with steep penalties. All that accomplishes is making the externalities of drug law enforcement even more severe.
The Second International RoShamBo Programming Competition (2001)
His accuser signed his name to the criminal complaint already, if you'd read the indictment.
I disagree. Investors almost never value cash $1 to $1.

It's always about the earnings, then it's about the sales, then it's about the assets (unless the assets are staggering in size in relationship to the operating business, and in that case the market cap will get a severe discount vs the assets, which is why you end up with weak businesses trading at discounts to assets).

If investors almost always valued assets at a $1 to $1, you'd almost never under any circumstances see a company trading for less than either cash or net tangibles. When in fact this is historically frequent, and for the majority of the history of the US stock market it was quite common.

You can see the cash and asset discount demonstrated across companies including Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco, banks small and large, and classically in cable companies like Comcast or Time Warner.

It's fairly easy to prove this is the case. When companies with low multiples and tons of cash, drop that cash off their balance sheet, the operating business does not receive a hyper small multiple, and the market cap does not collapse in line with the cash dump. If Apple dumped $100 billion to investors with a one time dividend tomorrow morning, their stock would not plunge by 15%. There is case after case after case of historical examples to reference.

If investors valued balance sheets so strongly, Comcast would be nearly worthless. It's the operating business that is valued first and forecast. Investors know cash does not yield a great return (especially right now), and for most businesses it does not provide great growth opportunities period, it is thus investors heavily discount cash.
There is no provision in the constitution for the federal government to regulate money exchange. Thus the law he was convicted under is itself a criminal act (and under USC 18-242 everyone enforcing it is a felon).

The constitution is the highest law of the land. If you think this guy belongs in jail, then you need to amend it.

The supreme court has already ruled that unconstitutional laws are null and void the moment they are passed. They do not need to be struck down by the supreme court.

Remember the legislature, executive and judicial branches all derive their power from the constitution, thus none of them have the power to exceed the power it gives them, by definition.

The real problem here is not that people haven't changed the law (which they can't since the people are not in power).

The problem is we have a criminal syndicate for a government.

This is why there are no prosecutions for spying on the NSA's part, despite breaking the law. This is why the TSA violates the fourth amendment with impunity (again, a violation of USC 18-242) without ever there being charges filed.

Hell, the TSA is violating state criminal statutes in most states when they molest minors who opt out of having their nude photos taken (which itself is child pornography).

No charges have been filed. Why is that?

So, we can't really say we have the "rule of law" here.

The law only is used against people like Charlie, never against the rulers.
A menubar app written in swift to notify you new posts of HN
There is a widespread belief that customers don't give feedback today because they feel that businesses don't listen. It doesn't help that giving feedback today is not easy; there is no simple and consistent way of doing it, so the users don't bother. Businesses don't seem to listen because they usually don't focus on feedback (studies show that small businesses are not aware of the costs of aquiring customers vs retaining them) so it's a vicious cycle.

Our hypotesis (that we are going to test next) is that:

1. Providing an easy and consistent way to submit feedback across all local businesses will lower the barrier to the point where some users will start using it.

2. Providing an easy way for businesses to receive and respond to feedback via known tools (email) will improve the level of response. Also by being the intermediary, we can act on behalf of the consumer to help close the communication loop.
Am I the only person who immediately thought of the Half-Life chapter?
I've never understood why pedestrians seem to be given the right of way by default in many countries - pedestrians can see cars, stop, and change directions far easier and faster than vice-versa, so this makes for a more dangerous situation. If you slow down the cars to compensate, doesn't that somewhat defeat the purpose of having cars in the first place?

As anyone who has experienced the traffic in Beijing probably knows, having a mix of pedestrians, cars, bicycles, and other vehicles of various construction in the same space is not efficient nor particularly safe at all.
Didn't they do the "miscellaneous strings" before they got a warrant?
I think SA has suffered from some of the original core developers (myself included) moving on to other projects in a completely different tech area. The good news is that other projects have taken up some of the mantle, like Haraka, check out the karma plugin. It does some amazing blocking of spam and penalizing clients.

Beyond that also one of the things SA doesn't do well is actually rejecting hard on sensible blacklists like the CBL. We worked hard to make everything heuristic based but it wasn't always the right choice. Some things need to be black and white. There's some code on SA for short circuiting now but it's not really the best solution. In my own spam filtering I have a bunch of hard rejects and they work really well.

Anyway, check out Haraka or Qpsmtpd for solid anti spam mail serving solutions. They work really well.