skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are fairly standard statistical tests for randomness. They can't be 100% perfect (if it is truly random you can expect some results that don't look random occasionally) but with enough runs you can be sure to an acceptable degree.

It can't be beyond the wit of man to add such tests to automatic build and regression tests if the project has such a process in place, though it would potentially slow that process down depending on how you define the "acceptable degree" and therefore how aggressively you test.
The key to greatness is not making the same mistake twice.
Thank you; this is a better explanation of what I was getting at in the GP comment. While it is theoretically possible that we could conclusively find BB(X) for any X, we don't know, nor can we prove, that we can (aside from the ones that have already been proven). Therefore I don't know that it makes sense to talk about it being a specific number, but rather the concept of a number (more like his "number of grains of sand in the Sahara" example, which he explicitly mentioned is not valid^.)

^Although his reasoning is that it is not valid because it is always changing, not specifically because it is unknown. Still, I assume that "Number of grains of sand in the Sahara at exactly midnight, Jan. 1 2050, on this atomic clock" would also be disallowed, even though it's possible we would somehow be able to know exactly what that number is in the future.
Here are screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/qGLAc

Seems like a legit case of bait-n-switch to me. Granted, it's not a lot of money, but still something to lookout for.
Why the world's biggest military keeps losing wars
An interesting discussion on /r/AskEngineers:

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/2w4q6j/worried...

This seems to echo what's been said here, for the most part, but the concern of getting through HR is very real.
Even upon rereading OP it is not clear it was referring to Federal Law, there is even mention of both State and Federal Departments of labor, so I think use of the word rule was an all encompassing term for classification law. Still it only adds to the problems with this area of the law, after all it is not only possible, but common, for an individual to be classified as an employee/independent contractor on the federal level and then classified the opposite at the state level.

Nevertheless, while the federal classification 20 factors have been around for about 30 years, since the enactment of the Revenue Act the IRS has been prohibited from issuing regulations and rulings with respect to the employment status of any individuals. As a result the IRS acknowledges the same subjectivity going so far as to admit different IRS agents may reach different conclusions, the Courts are no different and hence my calling factors tests the worst kind of law.

>As far as I understand the rules, the "most heavily weighted factor" you cite is in fact not an IRS employee classification factor at all. A contractor can still be classified as an employee...

This is likely due to the IRS being prohibited from issuing rules and regulations, and as a result in the words of the IRS, "Previously issued guidance may not
reflect current case law, statutory changes, or changes in workplace situations." However, you are correct that this factor, under FL case law, though weighted more heavily is not determinative by any means.
Follow his profile, you'll end up here

[link redacted]
I've been working on something similar for a little while. While I am still building the main site that lets people create their own realtime feeds based upon geofences they create, I couldn't resist making a quick page to keep up with the latest posts from various Vegas hotels.

http://guiyui.cloudapp.net/ig/vegas_hotels.php

I also created a tool that can take an Instagram username and group their geo-tagged posts by physical address - useful for determining home/work addresses (requires Instagram login):

http://guiyui.cloudapp.net/ig/username_geo.php
>We all know there are professions (fire fighters, police, soldiers, nurses, doctors, computer programmers, etc)

Which one of those things doesn't belong? 5 of those are responsible for the health and/or lives of other people. They aren't sitting at a desk.

Unless you're working on some critical infrastructure, which is probably a very small percentage of people, in what circumstances should computer programmers be working "extreme" hours? Very, very few.
I agree with those points. My comments are in regards to Macros. Why is VBA better for a sales manager? Why not use VB.Net, Python or C#? There is nothing inherently better about VBA.

My issues with Excel come from the perspective of modifying these ad-hoc apps (many business run off these for a long time as they grow). Yes, there are other great features, but for me, for growth, Calc is taking a better approach.
You probably meant desktop environment (DE).
> The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association has already launched challenges... ... over alleged surveillance of groups opposed to the construction of the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline in B.C.

Anti-Canada activity if you do, anti-Canada activity if you don't.
Not to sound snarky but Saddam was boasting sitting on an arsenal of WMDs before the world found out there was zero truth to it. That's why UN inspections are used, however effectively, you just can't rely on Government propaganda to establish facts.
Define "follow". My company "follows" development but does not run production servers with it.
I have been re-reading Domain-Driven Design bit by bit on the train each morning and nearly every day I find something I can immediately apply.

Bonded contexts, for example, immediately clarified how to establish naming conventions across micro-services.
I presume they mean international groups that oppose the import of Canadian petroleum.

The Canadian oil sands are vast, but take a relatively large amount of energy to process into usable fuel. As such, Canada is particularly unpopular among some groups.
Show HN: Object Migration Between S3 Compatible Storage Providers
Uber vs. Lyft: 5 Things I Learned from Giving Up My Car
It sounds about the same, with differences being that it would affect anything that uses kernel randomness (Debian's problem "only" affected code that used OpenSSL's CSPRNG) and it didn't make it into a release (Debian's was out in the wild for a couple of years before being discovered).

In short, I think it's a bit worse if you're actually vulnerable, but vulnerable systems will be much more rare.
Mars One Candidates Speak Out in 'If I Die on Mars' Short Film
Even insane-looking problems are sometimes real
Along with the legal gymnastics regarding independent contractors, this struck me as notable:

"If Solominsky had built his own handyman business, he would not be so impacted by the decisions of another company. But all he has of his supposedly independent business—his pages and pages of glowing reviews, his nearly unanimous five-star ratings—is tied up on the TaskRabbit platform."

Something to keep in mind as/before we replace an economy built on independent small businesses with an economy of "independent" Uber drivers, Amazon sellers, etc.
Apple sells industry competing products and can differentiate itself using those products. What is radio shack's competitive differentiation?
Well, from the product page, the pocket screen actually has more battery capacity than the armband. In fact, the screen can be used as a on-the-go charging station for the armband.

Personally, I don't know how I feel about this. Their battery benchmarks are assuming you're going to use the pocket screen to charge the hub, but I don't necessarily want to be tethered to this pocket screen either.
Same here; the stuff I end up seeing is all over the map. I only rarely see locked questions, and those are usually older ones.
Change how you think about your laptop.

If you think about it as a luxury item or or something that is fragile, you'll always be OCD about it. Perhaps because it is your only laptop, your more careful with it.

If tomorrow, it fell down a flight of stairs and you had to replace it, could you on the spot? How long would it take otherwise? How much work would you loose if it happened?

I was this way a long time ago and probably to a certain point, still am with my primary laptop / phone. To me, they're just tools now to get the job done. A couple months ago, my laptop died and fortunately, I was in a position where the only thing stopping me from getting a new one was a 20 minute drive to the Apple Store. That's not to say that I'm careless with my laptop, but it's just a tool, and tools break.

I remember breaking my fathers Snap On Ratchet once. Fortunately, they're tools are warranted for life, but it was just a tool easily replaceable.

"The things you own, end up owning you"
WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT? (2014)
> But here’s the catch: According to people who study human physiology, 44.1-kHz recordings provide enough upper-end treble to exceed the capabilities of our ears. Anything higher and you’re spending money for sounds your dog can listen to but you can’t.

You can't hear above 20 kHz in the sense that if someone plays a 22 kHz tone and asks if you hear a tone, you won't be able to answer correctly more accurately than if you just guessed.

However, that doesn't mean that it makes no difference if music above 20 kHz is present.

See the paper "Inaudible high-frequency sounds affect brain activity: Hypersonic effect" [1], available for free online here [2].

They exposed listeners to gamelan music, which is rich in content above 22 KHz, sometimes with the ultrasonic sound included, sometimes with it removed, and looked at brain responses via EEG and PET. They clearly found statistical differences in brain response when the ultrasonic components were included.

They also did long double blind listening tests where the participants were asked to subjectively rate the sound, and the music that included the ultrasonics was rated higher.

[1] T. Oohashi, E. Nishina, M. Honda, Y. Yonekura, Y. Fuwamoto, N. Kawai, T. Maekawa, S. Nakamura, H. Fukuyama, and H. Shibasaki. Inaudible high-frequency sounds affect brain activity: Hypersonic effect. Journal of Neurophysiology, 83(6):3548–3558, 2000

[2] http://jn.physiology.org/content/83/6/3548.full
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, UK: https://instagrams-kew-gardens.herokuapp.com/

(Today was very sunny, and a school holiday — super busy and lots of photos.)
The 10k hour concept is sticky/durable because it holds out hope.

The hope that you could be one of the best in the world if you just worked hard enough.

The hope that it's not too late.
It was supposed to be that way, but it hasn't worked out. Originally the idea was that there would be some wiki-like aspects to the site where collaboration could result in up to date and comprehensive answers to important or common questions. That hasn't worked out, instead the site has largely kept the same features it had in 2009.
To be fair, in your example as long as you didn't make any claims during that period, the cost to them was next to nothing (maybe some stamps for mail? couple cents for your share of the automated billing processing).
... and Whatsapp uses FreeBSD extensively. Could this affect the end-to-end encryption that Whatsapp uses?
I've been checking in a bit too and am somewhat discouraged. I'm not exactly sure how he is counting his rounds towards his hour goal, but it seems like he is playing more and more and practicing less and less. He also seems very equipment obsessed. It could just be that what he writes about has changed.
Coming from just the data, I'd say impossible. It would be like achieving infinite compression on any pseudorandom data. There's no practical way to search through all possible short algorithms that could generate it.

With knowledge of the algorithm, you can do a lot more.
> "Just throw Boost in there and you're done [and turn your 1s compile time into 10 minutes] XDDD"

You know this to be hyperbolic.

My unfortunate experience has been that on a larger scale project, people will eventually desire every feature from a boost container, re-implement it in a buggy fashion, leading to a slower, buggier, poorly designed clone of something boost had.

I eventually started fixing container bugs by rewriting them in terms of boost containers...
It will never occur until the workers start making a concerted organized effort to tip the scales the other way. The majority of the profits of any enterprise should go to those doing the work, whether it's driving a car or developing software.
Scientists warn of a 'deaf generation' that will lose the ability to hear
Show HN: Just Launched Wordpress Enhanced Category Pages Plugin
SO-the-infrastructure might be biased towards MS, but the people on it certainly don't tend to be, at least in the tags I'm involved in.
This would also be a great way to warn other devs off of the company (note that the sites are given).

I actually tried a couple of searches based on your comment and I really didn't get anything that wouldn't taken quite a bit of effort to piece together into this listing.

"what does an expert web programmer know"
"what does it take to be a web programmer"
"what do I need to know to be a web programmer"

This might be a warning written by someone who is leaving. In other words, with a less-than-friendly parting of ways, his/her final task was to write a job description to hire a replacement. If so, well played.
Keep in mind that privilege separation does not cover all possible use cases of sandboxing.

Privilege separation is an answer to the question: "I have a program whose authors I trust even though they are fallible, and the program needs to process untrusted data"

In desktop scenarios, I really want an answer to the question: "I have a program whose authors I don't trust, but I want to run it anyway"

For that, you really need full sandboxing; privilege separation is not enough.
"Lose this workforce structure—either by a wave of class-action lawsuits, intervention by regulators, or through the collective action of disgruntled workers—and you lose the gig economy."

Hang on, lemme get my tiny violin to properly eulogize the loss of an opportunity for VCs to get rich on the backs of low-wage workers. Won't you please think of the billionaires?
Do others have examples of software "where the way it works is a crucial part of the user experience"? The one that comes to my mind is lisp macros; if you mess with them for a month or two you can't help but have a pretty good understanding of how they work. Clean internals can colonize your brain in a way that merely clean interfaces can never compete with.
Firefox Makes Flash Player Obsolete, as Mozilla Launches Project Shumway
I doubt they're on CURRENT.
Shouldn't it be (9!)!?
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=9%5E9%5E9+-+%289%21%29%...
Does WhatsApp run on -CURRENT? That seems unlikely.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=NRI
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ABCD
So bulky glasses with dongles attached to them is our future? :)
I didn't think this was horribly written until I saw the "move to SF" line about 8 times. Sorry, SF location isn't going to do anything for MSFT. So sick of all the fanboy shit about life in SF.
There's only a specific group of people that "benefit" from editing questions. Most edits are an attempt to make it even slightly better and/or clearer in some way.
Car allergic to vanilla ice cream
I'm a big believer in "Readme driven development" [1]. It's critical you go through the exercise of 1) explaining what the software will do and 2) how it will be used with concrete examples. The value of this documentation will always outweigh the time spent writing it.

[1]: http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/08/23/readme-driven-devel...
This post has put in to words much of my own, un-reputable experience with SO and stack-exchange forums. The technical corrections and constant closing of questions by mods discouraged my asking of questions ages ago. There is a feeling that researching the details necessary to describe the question adequately takes away from research that may have yielded how to solve it by looking at similar questions or documentation. I know that this is partly the intention of the mods: go do your homework before asking. But, it can swing to be the flipside: homework of asking is as long or longer than deciphering your problem. In my experience, much of a questioners research to prepare their question was UNRELATED to their problem, so the amount of information included in the question is far above and beyond what is necessary to solve their variable typo, or whatever.

Where this is a good thing for the long-term usefulness of SO, like the OP said it takes away from the short-term usefulness of the site for us plebian self-doubters.

Having said that, previously asked questions on SO answer ~90% of my programming questions, so they're obviously doing something right.

I've thought before that a 'staging area' for questions might be useful, where a question gets posted by _anon_idiot_user_ like me asking why thier code won't run because of something simple. It is marked as 'not useful' for whatever reason, but can still offer (diminished) reputation to answerers. After a particular amount of time, the question is removed from the SO 'canon' (i.e. unpublished and deleted), but the reputation sticks. Nobody's ego is hurt from having thier stupid question memorialized, and mods would be more forgiving to stupid questioners knowing it will go away once solved.

just an idea. All in all, I'm eternally grateful to SO and it's 'asshole mods'. They've taught me more programming than any other entity on the web.

EDIT: Clarity
True but not uncommon to just use one device for the marketing. Also went looking for the platform icons myself as I would have tried this out on Android.
Just because we (usually) need managers doesn't mean we need managers of managers of managers of managers of managers of managers of managers of managers of managers of managers of managers of managers of managers of managers. That's the primary observation, here: that the quantity of management staff is needlessly bloated, and the levels of indirection between the highest-level executive and the lowest-level subordinate are excessive.

You're trying to paint a picture where the only options are either having five janitors per room or having no janitors at all. The point a lot of others are trying to make is that we just don't need as many janitors.
I saw some @HNstatus tweet about ZFS issue that shows that it runs on FreeBSD. Are they running the storage layer on FreeBSD only, or everything?
As of right now wearable is still pretty thick, but style and implementation wise this is superb. As usual I reserve final judgement, until I will be able to see reviews.
Has anyone had some good experiences with Spark?

I put several weeks in to moving our machine learning pipeline over to Spark only to find I kept hitting a race condition in their scheduler.

After doing a bit of searching, it seems this is actually a known issue https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-4454 and there's been a fix on their github for a while: https://github.com/apache/spark/pull/3345 and yet in that time two releases have swung by bringing a tonne of features.

I ended up having to drop Spark ultimately because I wasn't confident about putting it in to production (the random OOMs and NPEs during development weren't great either). Does anyone have any positive experiences?
> So there's a fairly constant fall-off of activity from people who've previously posted a lot. And this gets worse when these folks find fewer questions that interest them

Is this data publicly available?
Well, I don't believe that's true. All my understanding is that systemd does too much, not that we shouldn't have an init doing more than SysV.

Event-based and dependency-based init systems are not controversial. Having an init system with inseparable and breaking changes to logging, IPC, etc. with its own DHCP client seem to be what people think is absurd.
"Poaching" is disgusting rhetoric, as if employees were the property of their employers.
I really do hope there's an android version planned.
It'd be great to have some competition in the field of "intelligent email clients". Inbox is doing a great job, but it's for Gmail only.
I'd like to see open source firmware too.

But to the specific argument, wouldn't a reference hash of the blob and/or crypto signing be adequate to verify it's what was delivered?
Your Digital Photos Aren't Built to Last
Reminds me of this old Dilbert cartoon...

http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25
How to Inherit 7 Habits of Insanely Successful People
Everyone wants to know, what makes successful people who they are. I've spent the better part of my last 20 years reading various books, scouring the internet for articles and listening to many podcasts from successful people in every field. If you are looking into this topic, you will find a plethora of helpful information about successful people. What you may not discover a lot of is how to incorporate the habits of successful people into your own life. If you are ready to take massive action towards the life of your dreams, you are going to love this article.

Read the complete article here:

http://www.fieldofsuccess.com/inherit-7-habits-of-insanely-successful-people/
My dad (an experimental physicist) still has ~10 of them in his lab.

(They run the code that directly controls his apparatus -- it was written in the 80s, and with them being so plentiful in university surplus there was never a reason to change platforms. Plus, the code itself is some combination of assembly and BASIC, which would probably be kind of a pain to port!)
I'm not an expert, but it looks to me like if randomdev_init_reader isn't called then read_random will use dummy_random_read_phony which in turn calls random(9), a linear congruential generator.

http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/dev/random/randomdev.c?im=3...
Show HN: WikiZen – Simple Markdown Wiki Stored in Your Dropbox
You are correct. Most of the obfuscation comes from the fact that people don't like to follow the rules.

It's actually not that hard to sum up the difference between a contractor and an employee. If the suspected employer regulates the time, place, and manner of the work being performed, chances are they're not contractors.

Yes, there's more nuance than that. But most of the supposed controversy usually involves people trying to pretend that basic premise isn't true for some reason. Usually without success.
As I mentioned in another post, my guess is it's a disgruntled (ex-)employee who was tasked to make the ad. This is a warning to other devs.
Again, goes to show that content always be what will make or break your niche market.
> Think about the problem as this: A worker sets up a website offering services. A potential customer is looking for a local purveyor of that service to hire. How does the customer find the website? If there are 25 local workers willing to do the job, how does the customer choose between them?

Right, but these issues that the Web currently faces (discovery, signal-to-noise ratio for example) will plague any given open marketplace after a critical mass is reached as well.

> If the customer wants to pay with a credit card, how does the worker get the money?

There are numerous payment systems that aren't terribly difficult to implement for small transactions (PayPal, Stripe, et al). Sure, a little HTML, JS knowledge might be needed, but that is really nothing difficult to do after a small amount of reading.