skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Remember when BIOS flash ROMs were write-protected with a physical hardware switch/jumper?

Remember how that was only for a short 1-2 years as a knee jerk reaction to CIH virus?

Older PCs had bios in EPROM (UV window on the chip) instead of EEPROM. That was the only physical protection.
Later Intel introduced firmware hub (FWH) with software protection against flashing (you had to unlock certain memory region/io access), then we got SPI flash chips with some copy protection (again software controlled).

Jumper was a short lived, useless (after the fact) feature that died because nobody needed/wanted/asked for it.
That's absolutely true. Giving a person who has proved his/her value the 15% pay raise they want or something similar is so much cheaper than letting them go, hiring someone new, training them, and hoping they will work out.

Unfortunately, in many larger companies (with hundreds of employees), there are so many layers of managerial bullshit that prevent that. People who actually know the employee who wants to leave (direct managers) often don't have power to decide the salary etc, and people who have that power are at the other end of company and they are not concerned about the productivity, etc., just making spreadsheets green.

I know a large company, where pay raises are almost non existent, and it's normal for employees to leave in 6-12 months. Needless to say, the productivity there is pretty bad.
"So now we're gonna put colors in. North America should be red, like Native Americans, [...] Asia should be yellow, [...] and Africa should be black."
careful. montessori and waldorf pupils tend to come from wealthy families. success in later life might have no basis on their schooling at all.
i wanted to agree with you, and apparently the author, but reading the article left me thinking the title is pretty poetic

the title reminds me of a title of a poem by the russian poet osip mandelstam: sumerki svobody, may 1918(i); the word sumerki is vague in its definition and so can be understood and, as many have found intriguing and frustrating, translated as either sunset or sunrise, dawn or twilight, and the poem's terseness allows the reader to project their own preconceptions into the word,
attempting to solidify its fluid nature to either find in the poem support or something to be angry about

this word 'unravels' has a similar fluid character, here's the goog run on it(ii) :
verb

1. undo (twisted, knitted, or woven threads).
2. investigate and solve or explain (something complicated or puzzling)

undo or explain
even the author of the piece seems to feel the titles fluidity:

Should decades drift by without experimental support,
I imagine that string theory will be absorbed by other areas of science and mathematics,
and slowly shed a unique identity.
In the interim, vigorous research and a large dose of patience are surely warranted.

is this the twilight or the dawn of string theory? is it unraveling or unraveling?

and the author agrees: who knows?;

as others have noted this piece is more of a 'this is where we are and where we came from and where we're headed' so i think how you read the word unravel is largely based on your interest in the subject matter

(i) https://books.google.com/books?id=4O6F8BMhW6oC&pg=PA34&dq=%E...

(ii) https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
DHS has stated that they do not believe these to be "credible threats."
I switched away from Firefox for the same reasons. Even if the UI was as customizable as is claimed, I don't want to waste my time recustimizing it every six weeks, or whenever a new Firefox release comes out.
Alternative ways to login to FastMail
Beyond the name thing, I believe the source code for Pirate Bay is useless.

It was a crappy website, with bare-bone features, any web developer worth its salt could build a better torrent site in a couple weeks.

The value of Pirate Bay was their user base, uploader base and their resilience to legal threats and even a raid a few years ago. None of that has to do with the source code that powers the site.
>i7-4770HQ

haha

Intel cant even get rid of binary blobs from their official open source Atom platform (minnowboard).

Intel UEFI bios is >100K lines of hand tuned spaghetti code that never saw version control system, thats straight from the mouth of Intel employee.
The common man does not rent in America. The home ownership rate is 65%. The common man owns a house, or lives in a family that does.

"The homeownership rate is computed by dividing the number of owner-occupied housing units by the number of occupied housing units or households."

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_HSG445212.htm
The name seems to match, but then why not mention it?
What 'trades' do you think will prepare people to be economically self-sufficient?
I did think of this, but surely a transaction between two parties is not the same as simply posting a license on a website?

If I pay money in return for a license to use Photoshop, there is a reasonable expectation that I can use that indefinitely. I give then money, they give me permission.

If I simply download a piece of open source software from the internet, that isn't the same thing. There's no transaction. There's no anything. If the author subsequently tells me "I hereby revoke all previous licenses", I don't see how that wouldn't have legal weight.
I don't think there's a clear moral component here, unless someone can demonstrate that the author would suffer actual damage from such a port. It would certainly be a little rude, though.
the difference is that all of these beliefs are rooted in change and/or going against the grain...which is exactly PGs point.
Not really.

Most Atlassian products are "Open Source" in that after purchase you can download their source code.

You are still not allowed to repackage it / modify it and sell derivative products / run multiple instances of it though.
Phil Hartman, who voiced Jiji (the cat), ad libbed a line at the end. This might not seem like much but in the Japanese version Jiji, having stopped talking about half way through the film, doesn't talk again; possibly this represents another way in which Kiki matures. It's a small point but seemed to go over the head(s) of the director(s) of the English dub. Either that or they didn't think it mattered.

Anyway, there is much in Miyazaki's and Takahata's films that is misinterpreted or misunderstood by audiences and critics outside Japan. For a long interpretation of some of the themes in Spirited Away, by a friend of mine, see this post i made to the Miyazaki Mailing List over a decade ago: http://www.imasy.or.jp/~fukumoto/n/nshow.cgi?50927
threedaymonk behaved as a nice, well-intentioned, polite person ought to. however, the copyright claim was completely bogus as was the assertion of control over the algorithm itself.

i think we can all agree that being nice and polite to each other is a good thing, as is respecting the wish's of a fellow engineer out of professional courtesy. we shouldn't be confused about the law though. none of those copyright claims were valid.
I'm not sure if the jumpers were meant as a malware protection.

[...] make it impossible for the BIOS to be corrupted
by software, malicious or otherwise

The jumper could enable the erase voltage for the flash. On the other hand it could also just pull up or down a pin that is queried before the flash routine does its work. For example one Intel Mobo manual[1] says explicitly the jumper protects from accidental corruption.

Jumper JP4 controls the protection scheme that
prevents accidental damage to or rewriting of the data
stored in Flash memory.[1]

[1] http://www.manualslib.com/manual/77721/Intel-Iwill-P4d-N.htm...
The authors don't think programming-as-a-career is for everything, they think that programming-as-a-skill is something that, taught properly, is accessible to anyone and has value that extends well beyond programming-as-a-career.

The preface to the first edition expressly made this clear, introducing the book as "the first book on programming as the core subject of a liberal arts education", and proceeding to lay out the case for programming as a liberal arts core subject [0]. It specifically notes that "traditional forms of programming are useful for just a few people." (emphasis in original)

[0] For that explanation, see "Why Everyone Should Learn to Program", at http://htdp.org/2003-09-26/Book/curriculum-Z-H-2.html
There is a difference between being able to be good at something, and that thing being what you like to do. Generally they go hand in hand because you are more likely to spend time doing something you like.

The statement at the start of the book is just saying that anyone can be good, but it doesn't say everyone will.
Mining News Week in Review…Ending 12.20.2014 #wimine – The Navigator Online
Operation Poisoned Helmand
He's right, burning out in your job and staying in that job makes people age quickly. Life is too short to be stuck in a miserable job, if you can do anything about it.
I've seen that problem in chrome before with images; I was trying to read a massive flowchart; the part I was interested in was on the top, and I was busy tracing it with my finger and getting what I needed, when the entire image vanished and was replaced with a placeholder because it timed out while downloading.

This is not just a problem with HTML renderers; JPEG renderers do it too.
> Because the stated assumptions aren't always reflective of the actual design principles of a product.

The statement at issue very much is central to the actual design principles of HtDP.
For javascript, eslint (http://eslint.org/) is now what I use. It's more configurable than what has come before it and has good, clear documentation.
So you have these bankers boxes. It's evidence, sure. Now you gotta put someone on the stand to testify about the boxes, and why someone sufficiently high up at HSBC should have known what those boxes meant and ignored it. Beyond a reasonable doubt. You could get that conviction, but you might not. When you're using circumstantial evidence like that, you need a lot of different things that point to the same result. And they didn't have that. It wasn't a slam dunk.

Now, it's imaginable that if the same exact conduct happened with a small company run by an individual, they could've gotten the conviction. The reason is that when dealing with individuals, the alternative explanations are simply less plausible in creating reasonable doubt. It's easy for an HSBC executive to get on the stand and say: we just didn't know about those boxes--we have divisions in 100 countries and move trillions of dollars a year and it never popped up on the radar. With an individual where illegal transactions might be the bulk of the business, as was the case here, those alternative explanations are much less believable.
What is the "optimal" answer you are looking for if you ask to solve it without modulus? Build modulus by hand, or using additional resetting counter variables?
"However, no continent is represented by any specific ring. Prior to 1951, the official handbook stated that each color corresponded to a particular continent: blue for Europe, yellow for Asia, black for Africa, green for Australia and Oceania and red for the Americas; this was removed because there was no evidence that Coubertin had intended it (the quote above was probably an afterthought)." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_symbols#The_Rings
Is Proxomitron any better than Privoxy?
Let's see. Carpenters, plumbers, electricians, . . . . the skilled trades are pretty great. It's tough because trade work tends to be cyclical with the housing market and construction but it's not a bad way to go. The pay for a journeyman plumber in NYC is $55k. After doing that for a while you start a small shop and hire a few people. It's a great road to the middle class. Much better than forcing people into shitty four year degrees that wind them up in call centers or mobile phone mall kiosks.
I have savings and my credit history is nearly perfect. I'm pretty sure I can take out a loan and start one of the above businesses.

It's important to have other skills in life as a backup plan. That, and because it's interesting :)

I did wedding photography for fun, so I can tell you for certain - nobody who does it professionally bills less than $2K per wedding (which is 6-8 hours of shooting plus around 20 hours of photo editing). It's mostly $3-6K. If they want a professional looking album, it's another 5-10 hours of laying it out and ordering, and you can bill them another $500+ on top of the album cost. Of course, you need a portfolio, and you need skills, but I billed for my second wedding shoot - the first one was free for a friend.

How long will it take me to start a full blown wedding business? I'd say I will land my first one within two-three weeks. I will probably not have many clients at the beginning. In 6 months I will have more than I can handle. It's true of every single good wedding photographer - they are booked months in advance.
A Strategy for Getting Projects Done
Talking about non-conform ideas, I would like to add that what should be of interest is not what changed but what doesn't. And I would like to offer that this idea of a world of accelerated change might in fact be a self-serving, Ptolemaic fantasy of omnipotence.
What counts hasn't changed much in centuries. We're still using steam engines to produce electricity. And society is very similar to what it was in the Bronze Age.
Google Slams MPAA for Trying to Censor Internet: Project Goliath Reveals Rift
> As an employee you're at a built-in disadvantage. Management knows everyone's salaries, you don't. Salaries are a closely guarded secret and they maintain that informational advantage against you. So, you really have to look at industry averages for your role and decide if you are not being appropriately compd.

Not sure about other places but everywhere I've been, this is simply official policy but in reality, employees talk. While it's not always exact, I can pretty accurately say who gets paid what with a fairly slim margin of error. Keeping salaries a secret seems more for the benefit of the company who may or may not be unfairly compensating their employees for not-so-good reasons (not saying there isn't other benefits). That bit has without a doubt been key in determining, since salaries can greatly vary between companies, regions, etc.

> Now, about mgmt valuing you and not letting you go. First, NEVER threaten to leave.

Agreed, and this is certainly not a tactic in my arsenal because I generally like where I work and respect my managers. I have gone outside to get offers and came back with that as leverage in case things didn't work out, and that's how I ended up where I am today. That seems to be the best option since you never quite know what is going on in management's head once they know you're unhappy.

Honestly I think in the case of the larger companies, managers have their hands tied by upper management or HR and aren't really willing to put their skin on the line, something I can't really blame them for for obvious reasons.
The Most Important Conversion Optimization Numbers You Should Know About
Not necessarily so funny if you have TOC ;)
Focusing on this small part of the video is stupid and just baiting
I have a lot more that I'll be adding soon - Harvard, MIT, Boston U, I expect many of the multinationals have offices there, like Intel, IBM, Apple and Microsoft. I've mostly been focussing on the smaller, hard-to-find companies.
> Since when were you entitled to claim large swaths of this planet as belonging to an arbitrary group of people, and subsequently feel entitled to this land's resources and bounty and the rights to dictate how it would be reaped and exploited in a very arbitrary manner as defined by the current so called "modern society"?

And where did I claim that?
Don't forget Lennart.

Just watch this video of him disrupting a talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0

The shenanigans start around 12 minutes in, and continue throughout.

The last few minutes are particularly weird. He even gets up on stage at around 53:40.

It's unbelievable!
This takes me back to when computers had a lot fewer layers. He's inspired by Apple ][ and C64, but it's also reminiscent of Smalltalk-80 and Lisp machines, with the live UI links, inspectors, first-class graphic objects... I also enjoyed the birds screeching in mid demo.
The post assumes that you're unhappy in your job. If you like where you're working and the money is enough to sustain you comfortably, why move? Just ask your bosses. If they decline a raise, then ask them what you'd have to do to get paid more. Most places should give you at the very least an annual performance review where you can discuss this sort of thing.

I would be wary about someone who kept leaving after 12 months and if interviewing I would ask them to explain why. On the other hand if you have quantifiable things that you have done/built during your tenure there shouldn't necessarily be an issue. It could be a simple reason like your partner's job kept changing location and you moved with them.

Not to mention that if you have a family, kids, a mortgage (i.e. a stable life), moving jobs every year isn't in any way practical.
Open source has well accepted definition and its not the one you are using.
The U.N. salary schedule doesn't seem to include adjunct professors, only professors, associate professors and assistant professors. It does include a grade below called "instructors", can that be it? They still make a median income of almost $66k.
As I'm working on a project, I keep an eye out for the insights that arise which make me able to complete the project. If any of these insights are not entirely obvious, I note them as I continue working. When the project is done, I consider writing up a blog post about how those insights helped me complete the project.

A good filter for whether any particular insight is worthy of a blog post: If someone were trying to do a similar project, and their googling led them to this post, would they be more likely to complete their project? If the answer is yes, you've probably got a decent blog post.
So you want to learn type theory
Indeed! I miss groklaw tremendously.
I generally agree with your advice, but what I've seen at a lot of companies is that HR will put in policies that really tie managers hands. I know one place I worked at was notorious for underpaying people, and HR was stingy about how large of a raise someone could get, but if you brought in an offer letter they'd almost always match it. Which IMO is a very dumb policy -- basically the only people that got paid well were the people that already had one foot out the door.
Wikipedia keeps deleting the page for the Hornet Archive
You should start interviewing and see what offers you get. Then you can see if you're really worth an extra 20k, or more than that, or less. You can then take this back to your employer and if they don't want to match you already have a job in hand.
The numbers are falling because viewers are switching over to broadband video services like Netflix and HBO GO. The article mentions this.

If the networks begin to take their broadband offerings more seriously, then AppleTV is in position just like the other streaming boxes.
> The winds of change originate in the unconscious minds of domain experts. If you're sufficiently expert in a field, any weird idea or apparently irrelevant question that occurs to you is ipso facto worth exploring.

I frequently wrangle with challenges related to finding other people who are open to listening and helping me explore these less-than-complete ideas in an unbiased way. It's always an enjoyable moment when someone listens and then adds to the conversation, instead of immediately trying to negate the kernel of the idea based on the fact it's in a chaotic state at the time.
TheSkimm, an Email Newsletter, Draws Fans Like Oprah Winfrey – And Investors
His insight is that the very thing that makes someone an expert (I.e. experience) can also be their biggest disadvantage in that they view the world through a filter that might need recalibration.

The title is pretty accurate.If you want to be an expert you need to pay attention to fresh perspectives that might not be colored by the same filter.

whereever change happens, experience becomes a handicap. Unless you keep an open mind.
Ask HN: What project are you working on over the holidays?
Maybe you've got some time off and you're working on a side project, or maybe your team is in crunch mode to release something early in the new year. Maybe you've had enough technical work for a while, and you're doing something away from a computer over the holidays.

What are you working on over the next couple weeks?
Add to that companies like Valeant whose business model is to buy companies that already have drugs on the market and fire most of the research staff. This is predicated on the belief that in-house R&D is nearly always a long term money loser. Better to crowdsource R&D and only pay for the winners.
So what you're telling me is, adjusted for inflation, the government lost billions.

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=425.00&year1=20...

Nice spin though. Seems to have duped most of the 1337 h4x0rz here. Tell us CNN, how much of that QE* money are we getting back?
depends which inflation measure governments game the system so your RPI or CPI may actually not be a true reflection of inflation as it effects you
There are a few responses to this:

1) contrary to American myth, a good union promises quality workers, and the best way to do that is to ensure their members are highly trained. Everything is union here, but if you want to be a union employee, you must be prepared to meet that standard, starting with a thorough education.

2) American culture has seriously devalued the waiter. As a former cook, I've worked with those who had real training in the old French style, vs. those who merely took a job out of high school because the tips paid better. I'd choose the former every time. A skilled waiter is not just a glorified gofer, but someone who knows the food business inside and out.

3) It largely is on the job training; much of the trade school approach in Finland is based at least partly on apprenticeship. You take both lecture/classroom courses, as well as time spent on the job actually practicing your skills. The difference is, there's someone overseeing the process with an interest in actually making you a better professional, rather than solely on the basis of whether or not they should shitcan you and hire someone else.
The best time to take risks is when you don't have any responsibilities, so in that sense, you're at the right time of your life to do this. On the other hand, if you're good at starting things but not finishing them, then why not make a pledge to yourself before you strike out on your own: Get an MVP version of your new business up and going first.

If you don't try, you'll never have the possibility for success. But stack the odds in your favour first.
The point was to create a new revenue stream. It seems more like the company that installs them markets heavily in that regard. Part of their installation process is a 'recommendation' that the yellow lights be reduced in time as low as possible.
Investors aren't going to want to deal with you if you have a bunch of side things going. If your solo I would say you can work on a bunch of projects until you've found something others want to work with you on it. If you want investors and you have a team you should focus until it's obvious what your working on isn't going to work.
China’s 13 most valuable startups in 2014 (INFOGRAPHIC)
Tonight will be the longest night in the history of Earth
This post, also currently on the HN front page, seems relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8779799
The problem with this mentality is that if you move around TOO much, then people won't want to hire you because they will think, rightfully so, that you won't stick around. I routinely reject resumes where the person has 3 or more jobs of 2 years or less on their resume.