skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ctrl-f procrast

> You, my friend, are suffering from Procrastination.

1000X this. I recognized this immediately because I see the same pattern in my own behavior. OP starts out doing a bunch of things that will need to be done eventually for the project to succeed, but that are essentially a waste of time and other resources at the initial stage. OP does this (I do too!) because those steps are familiar, easy, and very well defined relative to actually working on the project. Actually making progress on a novel project falls outside our comfort zone. Stop procrastinating.
That is nice to hear. I don't keep enough track to see that this was being discussed, but it does deal with the only major issue I had with C++ -> asm.js code conversion, particularly for mobile.
This is extremely unlikely. Windows API doesn't change that drastically between versions. Which is why people don't have to recompile their programs for newer/different versions of Windows.
That was a much more thought-through response than I had any right to expect. Thank you very much.

I do agree that credentials do not equal competency. Although they used to be a proxy (signal) of/for it. Universities manufacture credentials, not competency.

Many/most of us still living in a world-of-the-past where a university degree signaled a base-line competency to learn a domain. Not even that is true any more-- even from a top university.
I had a pretty similar experience, albeit not quite as dramatic. Coordination was difficult. The biggest surprise was them saying "We'll Skype every day", but with their slow internet connection, that really meant Skype IM. Not going to make this mistake again....
i'm not sure... google is certainly a company i would expect to have any number of software engineers in all of those departments, and also plenty of non-software people (biologists, economists, psychologists etc.) in core R&D.
Thoughtworks, like Accenture et al, only "lead" their clients to the milking sheds...
Why we use OPAM in XenServer
No, I got it. I just think when emotions are high, people don't always know how to act / react. Point being, people are still people. They will do dumb things that they wish they could redo.

My story wasn't about how they told everyone... it was the fact that the CEO couldn't think fast enough on his feet so he broke the news in an unexpected, unthoughtful way. I don't think he intended to publicly tell everyone, but he was caught off guard and reacted. Reacted incorrectly.
The thing I love most about the cpan is step 3. I don't tend to do steps 1 and 2 much because of that. However occasionally I find I get to step 3.5 - oh I need that and the maint has given up on it. Usually I chat to the original author and discover I don't need the feature. Rarely, I'll [steal maintenance](https://metacpan.org/pod/Plack::App::FakeApache) to get some of the features I need.
Is it really a lost art? I've recently been learning C and C++, and all three of the textbooks I've been studying have mentioned in, and two go very in-depth on it (one of those is a games programming textbook). This is a great resource though, definitely going to add it to my studies.
This isn't a pedantic point. Ross Ulbricht just got reamed in federal court because a simple physical arrest compromised virtually every secret he had. Why? Because he was relying on sector-level all-or-nothing crypto.

That is not accurate.
Someone where I work setup a similar app, only telling 3-4 people. Then, they built some really creepy/invasive stats into the service/page, too.

Just some advice: for each feature you add, make sure you consider how creepy/intrusive it is first. Nobody wants to be the person to object to something like this and, frankly, they shouldn't have to be.
It's funny how even though it's a computer font converted to straight lines, it winds up looking very much like a real person's handwriting.
TrueCrypt was much more flexible than anything Windows has to offer.

Bitlocker is great for enterprise-style encryption, in particular on machines with TPM chips. However many consumer machines do not include a TPM, even in 2015.

TrueCrypt allowed you to encrypt individual drives, even offline drives, with no Bitlocker overhead. You also weren't required to decrypt them upon each boot like Windows' Bitlocker insists upon.

Additionally TrueCrypt would also encrypt directories, USB drives, hidden volumes, various encryption algorithms, double encryption, and so on.

Plus it was cross-platform friendly (or at least more so than BitLocker). What are we meant to use to move encrypted data from Linux to Windows now? 7Zip w/AES 256?
Or some gears and a battery.
No, it doesn't matter how you implement square root. If you were able to tell me whether any execution of the program halts, then you would be able to tell me, for any `n`, whether or not `n` is irrational (since irrational results are exactly the results that it won't halt on).

But this isn't possible: it's an open problem whether or not `pi + e` [is irrational](http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/28243/is-there-a-pro...). So if you could always tell me when the square root program halted, you'd be able to tell me whether or not it halted for `(pi + e)^2`.

But if you were able to tell me that, you would have solved an open problem in number theory along the way -- you'd have solved a whole class of open problems about whether or not certain expressions are rational. I can't prove to you that no solution of this kind exists, but, intuitively, do you see how big the implications would be if you could solve the halting problem for your square root machine?
Hey Jason, good to see you again.
This makes it sound like "Tech Lead" is a switch that gets flipped on your job description, and suddenly invokes a major change in your daily routine. And maybe it is, in some organizations.

But in my experience, groups of technical folk self-organize. No matter what the formal hierarchy is according to management/HR, an informal meritocracy will form, and natural leaders will emerge... normally being those who are not only good at tech, but also at seeing the bigger picture, including business knowledge and soft skill. These people won't be spending 30% of their time coding, they will be spending 80% of it coding... and 20% helping everyone else out, and talking to leadership about strategy. People who spend 70% of their job organizing the coders are not tech leads, they are project managers (or just managers).

Maybe I am just arguing semantics, and "Tech Lead" means something else to the rest of you... it appears from the few comments here already that every organization labels themselves differently.
I think that eventually we might ditch DOM and use WebGL or canvas or something instead of it, like on the desktop.
I think there are several reasons:

1. Name array strongly implies that it has an underlying continuous memory location associated with it. All of modern scripting languages have some form of dictionary, map, set, or hashtable which is implemented using insert/update friendly approach.

1a. Typical workload for array is to iterate over it doing something with each element, B-Tree is strictly worse in iterating over all elements compared to static array.

2. Most instantiated dynamic arrays rarely perform deletes. Most common operation that could change size of array is push_back, and amortized cost for inserts is probably way less than chasing pointers in B-Tree.

3. B-Trees were created and optimized for HDD performance. With current SSD and memory trends, there are simply better data structures to use.

4. Pointer chasing got a lot more expensive relative to continuous memory scanning. This is mostly due to majority of memory performance increases coming from increased throughput as opposed to lower latency.

This does not mean B-Trees are bad, in fact they are still heavily utilized in databases because they scale extraordinarily well with data size. They are commonly used for indexes because membership testing (single value lookup) and range lookups are O(1), and updates/deletes are generally very fast as well.
The funny thing about your post is I just made like ten comments assuring people that sometimes a one-on-one, face-to-face meeting isn't always the best way to do firings, and your first anecdote speaks to that.

The other funny thing is that an employee I fired recently criticized me for not giving her notice and allowing her to be a dead-employee-walking with continued access to all corporate accounts and resources, even though I offered her a generous severance package in lieu of notice, which a couple commentators in the other thread seem to find objectionable, and your second anecdote validates the potential issues with giving notice to an employee involved in an involuntary change.

Seems your former bosses were HN devotees.
Forget about TDD, unit-testing and get something working.
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Asterisk has many SugarCRM connectors, but it's not as polished as the other two.
Can you explain this quote from you and your involvement in the TrueCrypt audit?

"By encouraging people to rely on tools like Truecrypt, you are, in a very small but real way, endangering them." [0]

It just seems like you supporting the audit (and therefore supporting TrueCrypt) is at direct odds with what you said an hour ago.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9071126
I think TW is a bit different because they never get the really big contracts. :-)
I am horrible at crossword puzzles. Does that mean I'm not smart? No!

You are not the fastest at solving programming puzzles. Does that mean you're not smart? No.

Personally I think you are one of many who overvalue the importance of solving technical problems quickly. Quoting a Google analysis from two years ago at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b... :

> Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess, except for one guy who was highly predictive because he only interviewed people for a very specialized area, where he happened to be the world’s leading expert.

It sucks that you didn't get the job you want. Don't conclude that you are not smart because of it. Throw your rationalization out the window - by analogy, chess playing computers are all about "rote learning skills", and they play better chess then pretty much every human. It's all too easy to be caught up in the idea that hard work isn't as important as some sort of innate genius.

See also http://www.kolotv.com/home/headlines/Praise-That-Backfires-W... which is one of many pieces (https://www.khanacademy.org/about/blog/post/95208400815/the-... is another) on how praise for smartness can backfire. Eg:

> In Dweck's research, she split kids into two groups. As one group solved puzzles, her team would tell the kids they were smart upon completing the task. She found that these kids started to avoid doing anything tougher. ...

> "If you try hard, it's almost like, 'Oh, you just really didn't have the talent to do it,'" said Barone.

> With sports, it's accepted that being the best means practicing. But if the brain is a muscle, just like your body, why is the body praised for going through the struggle, and the other, stigmatized?

> "In the U.S., struggle is seen by kids -- we've studied this -- as something that makes them feel incompetent," said Dweck. "They think, if you're really really smart or talented, it should come easily."
Interestingly Intel's ISPC compiler actually uses a hybrid of the two layouts to store its memory of arrays. I think it stores an array of vectors as xxxx, yyyy, zzzz, wwww, xxxx, ...
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Pretty much all of operations, not just call centers, is managing task completion. Stuff needs to get done, gets routed to individuals who work on it, perhaps needs to be reviewed or approved, etc. Looks like a generic workflow system which could certainly be interesting.
> What extra info are you looking for?

Essentially, a complete executable example of a simple ASM.js program that involves a foreign function, including processing return values. (I imagine if it's this simple, then return values are handled using the same annotations as ASM.js functions?)

While I understand that specs don't necessarily have to have examples, I believe it would benefit the community to have one in the ASM.js spec.

Thanks for clarifying here, though! I now understand.
Phabricator bot for Slack
There is no short-cut around getting a work visa. The company needs to spend time and money to even start the visa process and it can take months to years to get all cleared. The company also has to prove to the government they weren't able to find a US person to do the same job. That's much easier if you are some kind of expert in your field or the job description matches almost only you.

Alternatives are the yearly Greencard lottery or getting hired by a subsidiary of US company in Italy and then do an internal transfer after a year. That rules out most startups.

May I suggest moving to Berlin instead? Inside Europe you can move and work in any country.
Autodesk 3d printer “Ember” now available to buy
Oh, the diffuser matters a lot actually. Your former colleagues (I think?) proved this by blindly popping calc on a bitlocker-protected Windows 8.1!

https://cryptoservices.github.io/fde/2014/12/08/code-executi...

With the diffuser, we have ~9 years of conjecture and speculation, with no one overly certain that attacks are possible. Without it, we have calc.exe fairly quickly after someone got the idea to try. You can't say these are roughly the same in practical terms.
Not sure why you've been downvoted. There is no active development on the project any more and it doesn't work with UEFI.

There's no free full disk encryption for Windows users with modern (UEFI) boxes. The money would be better spent on that, but returning crowdfunded money... tricky.
I feel really bad for the little guy. It looks like he's incessantly unsatisfied with his work so he has to erase everything.
Some FOSS projects should stamp their git master commit hash regularly to protect their ideas against future patents with proving prior art. CAs' timestamping services are far more expensive.
2 Power Breakfasts to Fuel Your Day
Though I'm no tptacek, I think the reasoning here is that even though TrueCrypt is undergoing an audit, it's not under active development and unfortunately due to the licensing, any patches produced by the community could be on uncertain footing legally.
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Oh the satire. Where's the wifi?

Mirror for reference: http://i.imgur.com/cIeBqm7.png
Is it bad that men and women are evaluated differently?
Wait, ack. I used that phrase wrong. I have nothing to say for myself.
Block-level encryption is a terrible, terrible approach for many reasons (which 'tptacek has referenced a million times). However, Truecrypt is the best such implementation, and it's a required approach in certain cases. You should be doing crypto at the application/filesystem level; if you can't, use Truecrypt. This isn't contradictory advice.
I do really enjoy Fiasco! Lots of fun, and pretty easy to get "non-roleplayers" into as well.

I also enjoy running just about any game though. With practice and the right preparation, a GM can riff off what the players are doing in any game.
No.

Bitcoin is very volatile, so you could lose or gain unknown amounts during the "transfer" (even if it is within a few minutes).

Additionally unlike a traditional wire transfer you cannot prove that you're transferring it to yourself (it is an anonymous currency by design after all) therefore they could come after you for tax (or worse accuse you of laundering).

Wires are a rip-off. However the costs are knowable and there is a very low risk of any misunderstanding from the big G in either country.

I use a company called XE, and to be frank it is a huge PITA. But at least all money is completely traceable/verifiable (the broker is almost too paranoid about fraud, that's why it is such a pain) and the fees are relatively low. It would be very easy to prove with XE that I sent it to myself.
Will Viacom Show Us the Future of Media Companies?
This is HackerNews. Being right doesn't get you upvotes.
This is simply their way of telling you to avoid learning about tensors :)
I've been dealing with something related, and I asked for feedback here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9042523
I am not the type to believe management is bullshit or in the way of getting real work done and still this interview is triggering my BS detector. It feels like an endless stream of confident generalities. Nearly all of the interviewee's comments seem like the kind of thing you say to make your vague role sound challenging to justify its existence.
Ah, thanks for clarifying! I think I overlooked the "square root" part of your original response. You're right, seeing the source code is no help at all! And it's difficult to say that a human could always say if sqrt(x) is rational, for all x. Still, this seems a bit like the Goldbach conjecture example: we don't have a math proof for this now, but some day we might. I wonder if there is any program that is provably undecidable---like the way Godel's theorem proves that some statements are undecidable from their axioms.
Yeah well, context is king. The aim of the Turing Test is to say that judging machines based on their internal structures isn't very fair, since that's not how we judge humans. There's no real way of knowing about other people's "qualia" or whatever you want to call it. To skirt that problem, Turing suggested a behavior-based approach.

I think we probably judge others to be conscious actors in more ways than this though. We probably accept that other people have "qualia" from the fact that we have it, and then we kind of learn that our parents have it, and so on, until it's not a huge leap to generalize that to all of humanity. Of course it's not like people have always assumed the same kind of "qualia" for all of humanity, in a lot of conflicts this has probably been thrown out of the window so it will be easier to kill your enemies. Either way, it's probably quite complex how we determine that other people are conscious, Turing tried to skirt the metaphysical issue (that we can never really know, this goes for both humans and other machines). I think this was a huge step in the right direction.
A friend had mentioned XE to me, it looked like a good option. What makes it a PITA? You mentioned broker but I'm not sure exactly what you mean.
I'm looking forward to the next report.

One thing I noticed looking through the code is that the key generation on Windows mixes a CRC32 of a MOUSEHOOKSTRUCT. If you look at it, there isn't a huge amount of entropy in there... Some fields, such as the window handle, don't change between callbacks. Others, such as the hit test code are enums with limited possible values, and the way that most people move the mouse around will return the exact same value all the time. The difference in time between two different values is run through CRC32 a few times and then the whole thing is run through a real hash. Most users don't bother adding entropy from the keyboard.

While I don't think any of this is a vulnerability, I think it could be better.

[edit: I'm talking about Common/Random.c in 7.1a. And by better I'm suggesting additional sources of entropy be included in the process]
Prime Minister of Luxembourg Visits Ripple Labs
How long does it take to get to Pluto at a constant 8g, with a skew flip for deceleration? Don't use your slipstick.
I would love for Thomas to write an article on his blog about the difference between thinking something is dangerous to support, and then supporting a security audit of that same thing.
How digital technology is destroying your mind
It has already been discussed even in the mainstream news quite some time ago: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-...

Presumably (judging by comments on Russian websites), Yandex has got an agreement to include (or included) in the report documents that show you have to play by Google's rules and install Google services on every model in every region of the world once you signed the service agreement, or (even better for them) direct prohibition to pre-install Yandex services.
What is with this? I thought Google announced in the past that sites serving different content to its crawlers than real members would have those results removed from their index. Is this some ridiculous loophole whereby it's ok if the link works with a google referrer but not directly? So stupid. If the link is not truly open, it should not appear in search results, simple as that.
Hi, CEO of Fade here. Just wanted to jump in and add a bit more color. I'm not trying to pretend that my app wouldn't benefit from not having its mentions blocked on a popular platform used by a similar demographic. But I do want to make the case that there are serious ethical questions about a platform removing its users' speech in a way that misleads them into thinking the content was removed by their peers rather than a bot. And Yik Yak's claim that this is an anti-spam tool is simply disingenuous.

Every account on Yik Yak is associated with a unique device ID. And each post can is visible to only people immediately around you. So spamming any meaningful percent of users on Yik Yak would be very difficult. You'd probably need thousands of accounts. If it ever happened, it would to easy for Yik Yak to detect and stop.

Under my direction no one on my team has posted anything at all to Yik Yak in many months. So afaik, 100% of the posts being auto-downvoted with the word "fade" are from ordinary Yik Yak users with no connection to the company. This is exactly the sort of organic "buzz" that the Yik Yak CEO Tyler Droll claims not to want to suppress in the statement he made to TechCrunch.

Yik Yak must know this because of its unique device IDs. Yik Yak can easily see that the posts that mention Fade are coming from regular users rather than spambots. That's why they are downvoting these posts rather than deleting accounts.

Yik Yak's downvote bot is new. Previously they just deleted posts with words like "fade." Why would they do this? In the GigaOM article just published, Yik Yak CEO Tyler Droll claims that the one-downvote-per-minute bot was implemented to "give people a chance to upvote [posts], which would keep them from disappearing." This is flatly contrary with the way their platform works. As the GigaOM article goes on to point out, even popular posts on Yik Yak average less than one upvote per minute, so everything getting a system downvote every minute is quickly deleted; nothing is "given a chance" to stay on the platform. Yik Yak must understand its own platform well enough to know this.

The only plausible reason for Yik Yak to switch from a simple block to a minute-by-minute downvote bot is to obfuscate to its users why their content is disappearing, to make it seem that their peers don't like it rather than a bot removing it.
The John Romero of oss
FluxBone: Building React Apps with Flux and Backbone
Tech Lead is a nice sounding phrase but what does it actually mean? Pat Kua (the interviewee) talks about architects, lead developers as well as team leaders with budgeting and hiring responsibilities and to my mind these are all quite different roles within an organisation on any reasonable size and require different attributes and focuses.

As for the soft skills that were strongly emphasised in the interview I fully agree that it is a necessary trait of anyone who wishes to lead in whatever form or context but techies are no different than accountants or any other inherently individualistic professional in that regard.
Follow-You Printing
Yahoo! Tech was gracious enough to review this.

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/googlifier-adds-googly-eyes-to-al...