skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow. Extremely impressive all around. I can see how Standard Treasury's priorities are well-chosen, in every respect. Personally, however, I find it a bit regrettable that interacting with personal investors' brokerage accounts does not seem to be on that list of priorities. I'd just like to weigh in by saying that for me, for the project that I'm working on, and ultimately for every personal investor, it would be awesome to be able to interact programmatically with brokerage accounts, in a way that is not indirect, kludgy, and costly. The first and most important step would be to get daily balances and cash flows. Next would be getting information about trades. Ultimately, of course, one would be able to make trades. Again, like everything else, this is possible now. It just needs to become easy and not cost an arm and a leg.
It's more than just grade inflation -- in high schools across the united states the quality of courses vary so much as to be incomparable. Suppose you and I are both taking the most advanced English classes our schools offer. If I get an A and you get a B, but you're in a high school with just 300 people in it and I'm in a high school with 3000 people, I have no idea which grade 'means' more.
>I don't think a smart person would do this.

I don't think a dumb person would be able to find a bug of this type in iCloud, which undoubtedly has thousands of people trying to break in around the clock. That's part of why I believe this was probably done with a much more basic, script-kiddie-accessible attack that essentially boils down to weak passwords and not a server-side technical flaw.

Another interesting potential attack vector of a more accessible character would be sniffing the air in areas where celebrities congregate and looking for plaintext credentials going over http. That'd be a fairly basic way to perpetrate this kind of hack.
This is a bit disheartening to me, but not surprising. I know of several people who have used this type of service, and some who have provided it.

For me, my essay was the difference in attending the likes of Harvard - my essay was egregiously bad, and it was explained to me by the director of admissions of one Ivy League school via a family friend who was a professor at that same university as the primary reason for rejecting me, even though by all other metrics I was an almost stellar candidate, even out of those they typically admitted.

I wonder how many people have gamed the system like such, and what effect has it had on the lives of those who would have otherwise attended those schools? For me, I have miraculously succeeded in my path, although it was a pretty unique one - the confidence I built before college in my abilities helped me overcome the setback. There are many people not so fortunate though.

We probably will never know the true effects of such unintended gaming, but it goes to show that people shouldn't take as much stock in the school someone attended but their pure mind in industry.
Sort of. All of the test scripts are written in bourne shell. There are ~10K lines of bourne shell in git itself, and ~136K lines of test scripts.

That may be nitpicking, but I think it also goes to show that sometimes seemingly simple numbers or visualizations can miss subtle but important points.
Sorry, everyone cheats.
The device in that picture has movable scales, so it's really a slide rule[1], not a nomogram.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule
> I can guarantee that about 45 seconds after leaving the door at work, I'll be starting my car and moving out of the lot.

You can't guarantee that, since car problems to arise.

This is the same issue with bike share schemes. I don't have to worry about anyone stealing my bike, or if the bike gets a puncture or has issues, I pick another bike.
Probably just because there are a lot of Chinese people. Every time a story singles out particular 'identity', people feel the need to defend that identity.

I remember when this article[1] was linked on HN a whole bunch of people felt the need to point out that chimps are not smarter than Britons. Of course a similar effect occurs when people who identify with other things think they are under attack.

[1]: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24836917
Also not having to worry about parking.
Last Day for Best Rate to Business of Software;Spring Break for Software People
With enough data, almost everything becomes interesting and a path to new understanding.
Loved his rant on glibc, etc. breaking stuff. I've been saying this myself for years. Really static linking is the only way to make a binary for Linux that will work on any distribution.
This is nice:
http://myreckonings.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Journal...
This is where they are heading, they want to be the Visa of personal transportation (and more).
I think he meant it as a joke.

As in: "for every line of code a functional programmers writes" he'll write 5 blog posts and 10 HN comments on why functional programming is better, how currying, functional composition, monads, etc, work etc...
> No one hired a ghost writer, all of them wrote their own essays, but in all cases the consultant asked them to rewrite 5 or 6 times, at least. There it is where it seems to exist the ethical line: ghost writer, no good; rewrite yourself until every single sentence is exactly like the consultant wants, good.

That's definitely where the ethical line is, and makes total sense. Nearly all professional writing you read (books, magazines, etc.) has gone through a similar process between the writer & editor. It's totally expected, but nobody pretends it's not still the author's work. There are thousands of ways to write the same essay, hundreds of which are "good" (acceptable by the editor/consultant). But a ghostwriter only writes it one of those hundred ways, which is almost certainly not the one you would have picked.

It also comes down to a quest of fairness. My public school counselor happily read over a couple essay drafts. They never would have written one for me (that would have required hiring a ghostwriter, which I definitely couldn't afford).

I hope you can see the difference.
> Yes, but you're confused about the meaning of "actual copying". Any method that substantially reproduces the original constitutes actual copying.

Nope, you're flat out wrong and I'll stake my bar license on it. Actual copying requires that "the defendant actually used the plaintiff’s work in order to create his or her own work."[1] Courts typically require proof of "access to the copyrighted work" in addition to substantial similarity between the results.[2] Substantial similarity can help constitute circumstantial evidence of copying but does not indicate infringement in and of itself.[3]

---

>> That doesn't mean you can get around the Happy Birthday copyright[2] by simply randomly generating six note sequences until you get the one you want.

> That is absolutely false, and I am shocked that you would post this nonsense in a public forum. The result is the only issue -- if it's a copy of a protected work, no one asks how the copy was generated.

Read my original quote again. I think you missed the "doesn't" in my statement. We're in agreement that randomly generating content until it resembles a copyrighted work will get you in trouble, albeit for different reasons.

---

>> On the other hand, let's say you somehow never heard the Happy Birthday song and somehow just came up with them on their own. That's fine -- no copying, no infringement.

> Also false, as much case law demonstrates. The difference in the case of simultaneous invention is the severity of the punishment, not the judgment that it's a violation.

Can you point out a single case where that's true? There's at least one appellate level case saying the opposite (albeit with 3 notes, not 6):

'''[D]efendant submitted affidavits by experts analyzing the two compositions and showing that the only similarity between them is a recurring three note sequence found also in the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. The evidence presented clearly does not raise a question of fact as to whether the two compositions were so strikingly similar as to preclude the possibility of independent creation.'''[4]

You may be confusing patent law with copyright. Under patent law, independent invention is no defense (except as to damages). But copyright law != patent law (unfortunately IMHO -- some semblance of an independent invention requirement would make patent trolling less profitable).

---

Citations:

[1] http://www.americanbar.org/groups/young_lawyers/publications...

[2] See, e.g., Sid & Marty Krofft Television v. McDonald's Corp., 562 F. 2d 1157, 1162 (9th Cir. 1977), available at http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1674068343222286....

[3] See, e.g., Donald v. Zack Meyer's TV Sales and Service, 426 F. 2d 1027, (5th Cir. 1970), available at http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1791074878897978..., and Orgel v. Clark Boardman Co., 301 F. 2d 119 (2d Cir. 1962), available at http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9525184415609798....

[4] Ferguson v. National Broadcasting Co., Inc., 584 F. 2d 111, 114 (5th Cir. 1978), available at http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1791074878897978...
> Published in: Volume 33 Issue 4, July 2014
> Software - Code available soon.

The tragedy of modern science, where scientists care more about getting published than enabling actual scientific progress by allowing others to reproduce their results and continue work building on these results.

I really hope that scientific publication platforms will begin refusing papers provided without proper reproduction means before more research is practically lost.
Show HN: Homeslice.in: find time across timezones
Indeed, however, according to the following :

| ... Corresponding Application Code in a form suitable for, and under terms that permit, the user to recombine or relink the Application with a modified version of the Linked Version to produce a modified Combined Work ...

This is practically impossible to do with under Apple Store forcing digital signing of applications (forbidding combined work), even if the developer provides modified source code.
Yeah. I'm always surprised at how much hassle people are willing to put up with for their cars. I very much look at them as transportation appliances. I'm an ideal consumer for self-driving cars. There's really very little about driving that I actually enjoy, so I'm simply not very tempted to go out and buy a great driver's car or an expensive weekend track car or something.

People just have different tolerances for things I guess. I just have very little tolerance for times when my car goes bad and for wasting time at the dealership. There's other stuff I'd much rather be doing than going through the hassle of buying a car or getting one repaired. So I seek out the cheapest, most reliable car that offers a reasonable level of comfort I can find.

My parents apparently have made the equation work for them to go to a car dealership once a year or so and spend time having one of their cars in the shop every few months for this or that minor thing. All so they can save a few thousand dollars on the sticker price. Once I got out on my own and had to deal with that on my own, I couldn't make it work, so I don't mess around with it.

New doesn't necessarily mean "more reliable", but a make/model (of any sort) with a multi-year track history of ultra high reliability puts you statistically in the game to have a trouble free car.
This tool is ancient. I remember using it in 2010. I see a lot of people complaining that it's not working. It's not surprising, it probably hasn't been updated since then.
Random educational videos. Learn something new
As a Chinese student who applied to US grad schools 2 years ago, this story is interesting and somewhat sad to me, even though I always know such ghostwriting exists in China.

Unlike the wealthy Chinese students described in this story, my family is poor--even paying the application fees is no easy. Besides, I really don't like being unauthentic and cheating. I wrote all the essays myself, without buying any guides or paying anyone. Just like in this story, I searched every corner of my world and put in pieces that most represent myself. The writing process took me 3 months, which was an incredible learning experience.

In the spring when I was doing a video chat with a professor from UBC, she asked me whether I had any native speaker to help on my writing (legit to ask, I should say). One month later, I got a personal email from the chair of NYU Tisch school of Arts, that he's moved and impressed by my essay. It was reassuring the efforts paid off (at least it stood out from the fake authenticity). That fall I came to Stanford.

Thanks to Chinese education, Chinese students are usually very weak on independent thinking, we're trained to give standard answers and follow certain scripts. Applying for schools abroad is a good opportunity to re-think and re-learn. But apparently all the "consulting" services, ghostwriters have provided again, crutch to rely on and scripts to follow. After coming to the US, as they probably haven't thought clearly about why they came here, many Chinese students fail to make the best use of their time here. It can also water down the quality of education programs, as some of the students are under-qualified or not motivated.
Can you please make a more specific criticism? What should be simplified?
Why Uber must be stopped
Or you can start a startup.
> The hardware access routines, real time operating system, and bottom level I/O can't be written in ADA.

I disagree, Ada has fantastic tools for writing these sorts of code; you can precisely define data types down to the bit level and their precise locations and endianess in memory. Have a look at pages 50-68 of [1] to see these in action. you don't have to know Ada to be able to see what's being defined, and that's it exactly matches the specification of the memory mapped IO registers. Some reference c code is given, but there is no guarantee that the compiler will do what you want; the Ada language does guarantee it.

[1] http://cs.anu.edu.au/student/comp4330/Lectures/RTES-03%20Int...
Yes, sorry if I didn't make that clear: this article reminded me of Morey precisely because of the recent criticism.
Akismet?
Yup. It was a couple years ago, but I actually put a good deal of thought into it (probably had 20 drafts).

Despite the edits, it was not at all contrived. Nothing was made up, and it was based on an actual 270-mile hike I did.

Ended up doing pretty well for me too (lots of Ivy acceptances).

Total cost of my actual application process: $50 (for some registration fee).
Lyft was allegedly rebuffed by investors over the summer (they apparently tried to raise another round once Uber raised their 1B round). It sounds like Lyft's investors are really pushing Uber for an acquisition (http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-lyft-wants-us-to-acquire...). I'd be surprised to see them ever make it to an IPO. Their recent spree of attack articles against Uber seem to line up with the alleged threats to "go nuclear" if they aren't acquired. It seems like a desperate company on the way out.
Why not? First, I thought the response was perfectly reasonable, but second, I think the way Linus behaves publicly entitles any person with or without credentials to legitimately question if that is the best approach. Linus, by making his criticisms both public and humiliating at times must expect to be criticized by anyone, especially someone willing to come out from behind a keyboard and ask him in person!
I am really heartened by his push for consumer-facing simplicity of the OS which, by his account, the distros have not helped in achieving. I didn't expect that from him given that he operates at a much fundamental level of computing. But his example with his kids' connectivity issues tells me that even the nerdiest person starts appreciating the value of simplicity when they start facing use cases that demand it.
I may be able to help you fix it.

If you're interested send me an email, my contact info is in my profile. Please indicate what technologies you are using (ie. OS, language(s), 3D API, any major dependencies, etc.)

It sounds like you're budget constrained, equity-only is a possibility.
> Lots of parents don't have any other options but to put their kids in their local public school.

That's certainly true, but think about what you're saying. When a Midwestern state tries to outlaw the teaching of Evolution in public schools, which letter-writing political constituency do you think is behind it? How about sex education? How about the treatment of controversial topics like Marxism? All these hot potatoes are vetted by the parents of the students.

I'm not saying parents have realistic alternatives to public school. I'm saying they can whittle away a progressive curriculum, item by item, until you see a clear ground truth in many places -- enforced mediocrity.
> Hence, it's absolutely expected that any educated adult should have no problem writing in an unrelated humanities field, because they've already gone through the system.

It's also part of the reason most reporting on technical fields is so horrible.
I'll never understand the mindset where not going to an Ivy is a "setback." That's not meant to be an insult at all, if it sounded like one.

Good for you for having that attitude, of course, but that's such a foreign state of mind to me. I stumbled across the finish line in high school and self-destructed in college. Things have worked out but I wonder what even a small change in state of mind would have done for me as an adolescent.
Chip and PIN has nothing to do with Amex's consumer-friendly chargeback policies. C+P tries to prevent fraudulent transactions, charebacks give consumers over misbehaving merchants.
> I prefer solar to both.

If solar gets to the point where it can provide reliable base load power, I will too. I keep watching for solar thermal plants to take off.

> It's the controlled fission of a super critical amount of enriched uranium.

No, it's the controlled fission of a critical amount of enriched uranium. Supercritical means the reaction is not controlled--that's a bomb, not a reactor.

As far as operating "on the edge of danger", that depends on how the reaction responds to various changes in conditions, particularly those caused by failures in other parts of the plant. The key is that you want reactivity to go down in response to a failure condition (i.e., you want the reactor to become subcritical, so the chain reaction dies out). Early on, we did not know how to design reactors that had this property under all failure conditions; but now we do, and we have for quite some time (and, as I noted in an earlier post, nobody since the Soviet Union has been insane enough not to make use of that knowledge when designing a reactor).

The problem with the Fukushima reactor was something different: decay heat removal, i.e., once the reactor shuts down, you still have fission products inside the core that are producing heat because they're highly radioactive. At the time the Fukushima reactor was built, we did not know how to design a reactor that could remove that decay heat in a controlled fashion without backup electrical power available. Now we do know how to do that; in fact there are at least two different ways to do it (either design the cooling system to operate using natural convection, or redesign the reactor core so that fission products can be removed and reprocessed while the reactor is operating).

So while I'll agree that early reactors were more like motorcycles, recent reactor designs are more like family sedans, with all kinds of safety features that protect the driver even from his own mistakes. (The Fukushima and Three Mile Island designs were somewhere in between.)

> People are the weak link

Agreed; we humans are almost always the least reliable component of any system that includes us.

> and we're pretty much intrinsic to the process.

Not necessarily; it's often possible to design passive safety features (i.e., ones that work automatically without human intervention), and in systems where reliability is paramount, this should be done whenever possible.
Korea’s Plagiarism Problem
The fact that Linus didn't take offense to the criticism of his abrasive nature shows that he expects it to be a two-way street. He really does have a thick skin.
> Surely, there are people in the world who are not destitute and who don't feel like they are selling their soul?

Yup! I make great money and also strongly believe in what I'm doing (building a platform to showcase great writing).

She's helping people cheat their way into college. The soul-crushing nature of that is absolutely appropriate, and hopefully a mechanism for ending her unethical ways.
Mr. Coffee Ain’t Got Nothin’ on Mrs. Bentz
6 Damn Good Reasons to Startup in Buenos Aires
How to Compute MD5 and SHA-1 Hash Values of Cydia Packages
> It's also part of the reason most reporting on technical fields is so horrible.

Indeed. Your humanities degree is enough to understand the basics of economics, politics, etc. — but not compilers.

Unfortunately, when technical people do the writing it rarely ends up much better (since most were never taught how to effectively synthesize ideas for a general audience). Hence why I wish more technical programs had larger disciplinary and liberal arts components.
> So if 10% of the people outperform the market and they all happen to be value investors", is that a random event?

Yes, of course -- that's the default assumption until there's reliable evidence pointing to another conclusion. But if you were a deep thinker, you would realize the problem in your alternative hypothesis -- assuming certain individuals are able to read the market and reliably choose winners, then:

1. They would stop talking to ordinary investors and directly invest their own rapidly increasing funds.

2. Following obvious principles, they would drain the market of its capital.

3. Not being stupid and seeing a game they cannot win, businesses would react by refusing to raise capital using equities.

But that hasn't happened, ever, even once. The conclusion a scientist makes is that this stands as evidence against the idea that there is a reliable, consistent winning strategy for playing the market.

And to think, you could have come to this self-evident conclusion on your own.
http://qz.com/181178/its-not-just-google-that-cares-less-abo...
Given the openness of ghost writing and the ease of video communication there seems to be benefit in institutions moving this process to a one-to-one interview, or at least to a post essay interview.
there may be six good ones, but i can think of one bad one: the argentine peso.
It works here in US too. Wave a few $ bills at a packed bar, you'll get to order your drinks quickly. (usually those dollar $ bills go as tip).

In India its almost always like this at most of the local grocery shops, vegetable vendors and bakeries. Often the customer holding up is oblivious of others waiting, and the shopkeeper cannot just cut a conversation to serve the new customer in line (unless he'd risk being considered rude).
I assume he was getting his degree in "management".
Some of the more recent negative stories around the Astros are alluded to in the article, but it's worth emphasizing that Houston is probably the most dysfunctional organization in the majors.

The focus of the piece, GM Jeff Luhnow, has an ongoing and borderline public feud with the manager Bo Porter.

They were the only team in recent memory (and possibly ever) to have 10 months of internal trade talks leaked.

And most recently, they were the first team since 1983 to not agree to terms with the 1st overall pick. Sure, they supposedly identified a red flag in Aiken's elbow, but it seemed driven by their desire to sign specific additional draft picks (none of which they did) and earned them the wrath of the player's union.