skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reading that letter for the first time in years (and having worked on a commercial startup for the first time since)...

My main question is, how could Bill Gates afford the $40,000 of computer time? That's quite a lot of capital at the time.
It's a good thing we never make any decisions without perfect information.
True true. But if it is all dumb luck, then what the F, do want you want. I guess that was my point.
AMA with Pebble's Creator – Eric
An Outspoken Voice for Women in Tech, Foiled by His Tone
I only have one VPN, GoldenFrog's VyprVPN service. Sorry, I didn't intend to suggest that I was running multiple VPNs.

I haven't experimented extensively with things, but usually setting my exit server to a random country on the other side of the planet (e.g. Malaysia) has yielded consistently good results.

And yes, I do tend to book on Tuesdays.
How To: Configuring Nagios to Monitor Pivotal Cloud Foundry
This is actually against the law.

Title 10 explicitly disallows the NSA to proactively interfere (good or bad) with private industry services unless specifically requested by a law enforcement agency and in cases like you propose would have had to be requested by the private organization to the LEA in the first place.
Good point, but my understanding is that it was kind of an open secret in the civil rights community at the time. And I they include a tape containing proof, as I recall.
Don't forget that long before we have SMI, we will have very powerful AI on our side to improve ourselves biologically and cybernetically. We may be able to grow into a SMI ourselves.
What would you call sending people to the moon? A tool shed in the woods or something else entirely? It's not like there isn't documented historical precedent for building such complicated systems. That's what the link to Margaret Hamilton was supposed to illuminate but I guess I should have been more explicit.
Unusually short, and I feel very biased essay with examples from 3 big(est) companies out of hundreds of thousands (more?).
#NotConvinced
In Google's defence - they have stated they won't support versions of v8 that reached end of life and have announced they're supporting io.js in favor of node. I totally get why Google won't backport fixes like this.

Google is actively helping io.js and development is coordinated.
Research tools are getting closer to what people consider "real" programs, even if they often focus on embedded systems software. CompCert already deals with a quite large subset of C. Frama-C can deal with most if not all syntactic features of C, but then the next challenge is the C standard library, e.g. specifying every useful function (and even "simple" ones such as memcpy can be quite tricky). Afterwards, you have to deal with the glibc, then other high-level libraries, etc...

Most of these tools are either still in a mostly-academic setting (where "documentation = conference paper"), or do not have enough funding to pay for the development of more user-friendly features and extensive documentation. But with the ever-increasing security issues receiving media attention lately, we can hope more funding will allow these tools to reach a more mainstream status.

By the way, could you give an example of a small program that you would consider "real"? Just to have an idea of its size and complexity.
Your analysis is correct at the lower level functions but I was thinking slightly higher level, you are correct there is no scripted procedure for example, ordering a pizza and diet coke, but where is the procedure or policy or anything, to handle "verification that something got delivered" "Follow up with customer to verify he's happy with his delivery" "company wide standards for tipping or including gratuity in the cost" "how to deal with a journalist on the internet complaining" "Documentation and analysis of failures"
Unless I'm misunderstanding, this is a site selling resume creation tools/services, so I'm not sure how "real" or generalizable these examples are. It's less "these are real resumes" and more "look how your resume could look if you gave us money!"

Incidentally, a lot of these look kinda bad, and I certainly don't want to see how badly they turn out when printed on a B&W printer.

Also I think the title should be edited to make it clear that this seems to be advertisement by the person who created the website.
In retrospect, the only difference between the fork in my road and the fork for others is that mine was so obvious in hind sight. Other people probably unwittingly passed over great opportunities but just did not ever find out what they missed.
The question is: is it reasonable for researchers to keep the upside when someone else pays for the cost of development? Why does choice matter to answering the question?
Oops, yeah: FBI. Sorry about that.

To which one might be tempted to say "Well, sure, but J. Edger Hoover was totally out of control", but that's the thing: we let a totally out-of-control guy abuse a extremely powerful agency and do these things.
As a taxpayer I'm certainly entitled to think that the work I am paying for, I own. Just as in almost any other business relationship.

As far as I can see, if a professor runs a lab, he or she gets grants to fund it. If they can not get grants, they don't run a lab. The profits from university patents and tech transfer feed the general fund, they don't generally all go back to academic work. That general fund subsidizes many things, like the administrators' and football coach's salaries and the glitzy new student union. I don't really want to subsidize those things.

If you really want the NSF-funded work to subsidize more research, then the NSF should own and license the patents. But personally, I'd rather the research be free and have it benefit society.
I'm sure I would... as a minimum there's password reset emails, payment confirmations & tickets, old friends and colleagues which I'd want to be certain got through to my primary mailbox.... which basically means my primary mailbox is widely publicised information anyway.

And most people have potential clients, casual acquaintances etc that would enrich their life by contacting them, but certainly wouldn't pay 0.1 BTC to do so, so I'm not sure I'd ever stick pay-to-email as a contact on a business card or website. Those people whose email addresses people would happily pay for tend to be able to pay for assistants to screen their primary contact email anyway...
So issues beyond the control of io.js then? Makes more sense, just unfortunate I suppose.
Yep. Huge survivor bias both in the article and the comments here. Plenty of people talking about the time they turned down a job with early MS and came to regret it. We need some stories of the people that took a risk and failed miserably, because that's the far more common occurrence.
To be clear, I find it annoying Google is not yet making the bug public even though the fix and test driver are available. Since they aren't going to patch the v8 in Node, I'd think Node users would really like to know if they are vulnerable to this and should manually patch it. stares at Joyent
Ask HN: How to deal with not being accepted for internships?
I'm a junior in high school (DC area) and I've been applying to a bunch of different summer internships. So far I've been rejected from 2/3 of the internship programs I've applied to (haven't heard back about the 3rd).

I thought I was qualified for them since I program a lot along with contribute to a number of different open source projects. But then I keep on getting rejected. Any advice?
What a ridiculous characterization.

Elon Musk doesn't hate hydrogen fuel cells; he sees their very obvious physics-based limitations and calls them out for it. This is a very disappointing piece coming from the Washington Post. It's plainly anti-intellectual. They quote some very matter-of-fact statements from Musk, but their rebuttal is composed entirely of non-sequiturs.

Musk: Best-case hydrogen fuel-cells fail to meet the specs of current-case batteries.

WP: Hand-wavy quote from Toyota SVP alleging that you can't take Musk's statements at face value because he has a dog in the hunt.

Utterly ridiculous. Musk's statements are based in fact. Later in the article, WP glosses over what should be a real eye-opener for anyone looking at the matter with a critical eye:

"Though its emissions are greener, hydrogen is now mostly sourced from natural gas, which carries its own environmental impacts."

Granted, battery technology isn't exactly clean either, but hydrogen sourced from natural gas is a complete smokescreen. It is impossible to recover 100% of the energy available in natural gas when extracting hydrogen. The only reason to do it is so that you can feel good about the fact that your hydrogen end-user device is zero emission. It also has the down side of funneling dollars to the existing oil-based incumbents. It might seem irrational to base ones belief on what appears to be a vendetta, but the oil industry incumbents haven't exactly been good stewards of the resources they trade in.
Open-sourcing PINCache
Show HN: Lunchcruit - Zero-commitment free lunch with amazing companies
FedEx and UPS Refuse to Ship a Digital Mill That Can Make Untraceable Guns
Hey guys, founder here! We moved out to Bay Area in January of this year, and are excited to be working with startups to curate and recommend software engineering talent. We are now working with 30 startups in SF (homejoy, Lob, URX, etc) Here's how we envision the future of recruitment:
1- Curating talent based on actual work performed: i.e. with software engineering talent, our engineers are consistently checking code repositories on github for selected candidates, and we're building out algorithms that can actually decipher whether the candidate can plug in to a startup's code base as soon as they join.
2- Timed scenario-based challenges: Our challenges will identify the "ideal" candidate from assessing current employees at a startup, and timed scenarios determine how quickly a candidate can -write clean code or even -make cold calls and meet sales quotas. Our sales challenge has been able to accurately determine the likelihood of sales performance, and candidates achieving a score of 85% or higher have been able to achieve sales quotas.
3- Actual skills gap assessment: We're building out a trending skill engine (in beta), that determines which skills employers are consistently searching for. This allows us to advise a candidate exactly WHY they aren't getting hired. For e.g. C++ or Java developers who should consider learning Python or Ruby or Marketing graduate.
Would love to hear your thoughts/questions as we hack through this process.
At that point you've reached a point where humans are no longer the dominant economic players at all, and this discussion is moot.
My understanding is that generally, for things like new grads they will hire for the company and then assign those new grads to teams.

However, each team has head counts for positions, and it's more or less up to them to hire for their own teams. It's certainly true that they may want exceptional generalists, but companies don't just hire people and then find a way to put them on a team. This wouldn't make sense for both the company or for the person involved, as someone who's more senior would generally have some sort of preference on what they want to work on.

My experience with interviewing at Microsoft and Google and working at Amazon is that basically a recruiter will try to find teams that might be interested in you and vice versa, and then you will interview with those teams. That being the case, you could get rejected by one team but then get accepted by another team. Or, even if you seem awesome, if none of the managers are interested, it's a no go. This also means that your success depends on how well your recruiter can sell you and find positions for you.
Did you want the MS job? I mean, I could figure out how to make things overlap without repainting, and I'm a 4-year-old child.
Ouch, that's quite a price for data when you can get gigabytes for $10 each.

I'm sure it's not their fault, cell companies love to gouge.

But I thought I'd compare with a couple other options*

Spark: $3 per device with 1MB, $1 per MB

Ting: $6 per device, $3 for 100MB shared

Zact: Requires a Zact device. claims $0 per device, can do 20MB for $1.40 or 100MB for $3.08, shared

* selected arbitrarily on the basis of Ting being an option I've heard good things about, and Zact showing up in search results when I tried to remember the name of Ting
Don't worry about it. As notahacker said most people didn't get those internships either. And really what you're saying is that those internships helped people get their first real gig. You have a gig, so you can make use of it too.

Three things you can do:
1 - Ask your advisor or other profs from your department for referrals. These should be better even than a big company internship
2 - Keep pugging your CV out, and when get the rejection, ask why. Most people won't tell you (either can't be bothered or, in the US, fear of legal reprisal) but some will and you can use that to improve process
3 - Build a portfolio (yes, same as a new grad or even an undergrad). For many people a PhD is a negative because many PhDs have excellent theoretical knowledge but no actual implementation skills (what's needed for a thesis can be harder but also a lot simpler / easier than what's needed to write something used by actual users). So turn that around: "I did my dissertation on compilers/OS/network routing/XXX and look, here's a project that some people are using and that is real and solid"
This class of thing is known as a Global Catastrophic Risk, for a more general overview, one can have a look at the Wikipedia article: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Global_catastrophic_risk
SMI might enter this world as a defensive measure in the fight against terrorism and/or cybercrime. It seem obvious that the task facing intelligence agencies today is overwhelming given the vast volumes of data they would like to monitor. This abundance of trainingdata paired with nearly unlimited resources seems a plausible incubator for an intensionally paranoid and possibly hostile SMI. As others have pointed out: self awareness and creativity might very well be emerging behaviors. This would not be first time in history that weapons-research crosses a point of no return.
Single UEFI executable for kernel+initrd+cmdline
> you simply don't get to control your community size in this fashion

You actually do. If enough residents don't want this to happen (and if the politicians are responsive to their citizens' interests), you deny construction permits. Just look at the various municipalities that have blocked 'big box' retail stores in their boundaries (or in specific areas).

The biggest problems are unforeseen circumstances. No one blocked Walmart when they were up-and-coming, but the objections started rolling in once they saw what effect big-box stores in general, and Walmart in particular, have on the local economy, traffic patterns, etc.

The same is true of tech companies. We'll start to see some towns, counties, municipalities, whatever turning down these companies because it's bad for the community they have already. Not all areas will do so, and not all the tech influx will be harmful for everyone, but it'll still happen in some places and in a lot of cases that might be the best decision.
But how do we account for the perennial bad ideas? The 15th time we get pitched "stock market for small businesses" or "social network for coupons"?

Are these good ideas that are just too boring to have attracted a good team yet? I've heard these ideas going back and forth for 10 years now. After 10 years, nobody has gotten it right? Or are they lazy ideas that appeal to get-rich-quickers who think they can play the startup game? What is it?

I understand the value of "don't make fun", and it's something I really struggle with in my own life. I've (unfortunately) been on both sides of that exchange, and frequently feel bad about my involvement in it. It's a weird world we live in where you can't just keep your mouth shut sometimes. It's probably a sign of internet addiction. I digress.

But I also have to consider things from the standpoint of someone who is being pitched by non-technical founders on these ideas. "It might be a good idea" isn't enough.
Page layout is broken on Firefox (paragraph wrapping the two shirt images is apparently missing style attributes).
Docs look good to me.
From what I've seen, yes. Also common to marital status, citizenship, sometimes even equivalent of Social Security Number, driver's license info as well.

Basically all you would need to steal a person's identity.
With disabled JS, this site is empty.

Why?!
You could also say that having a wealthy family was not an incentive to work hard. There is no rule to success.
That's what I understood and wanted to reinforce :)
Just a point of clarification:

col-- should have been col-[asterisk]-[asterisk]
If this really had anything to do with it, why did he keep going at all? After all, what's the point in trying to start a company if you already have a wealthy family and a safety net?
So, a vague idea that might possibly turn into a testable theory someday…

Talk about wasting people’s time.
Curated + code-verified software engineering talent
undoubtedly it's much more difficult to make a good argument for why only the super rich should be allowed to own intellectual property.

In that case, Rightsholders become the new aristocracy: a patent or something is akin to a coat of arms.
Financial Regulator wants oversight of banks due to “systemic risk” of attacks
From Aluffi's text:

This text presents an introduction to algebra suitable for upper-level undergraduate or beginning graduate courses.

In this text, categories are introduced around p. 20, after a scant reminder of the basic language of naive set theory, for the main purpose of providing a context
for universal properties. These are in turn evoked constantly as basic definitions are introduced. The word ‘universal’ appears at least 100 times in the first three
chapters.

That means Pinter's book is more elementary.
> that using Twisted's web capabilities is a bad idea

Isn't async just a bad fit for a typical Web page? Two things which take most time per request (in my experience) are DB queries and rendering templates. While you can have async DB driver (only for postgres right now), all the template engines do their job synchronously, which - with async event loop - blocks everything until finished. There's deferToThread in Twisted, but if we're going to use a pool of threads anyway, what's the point?

I also thought this problem was mostly solved with Nginx and uWSGI. This setup works extremely well in my experience, eliminating problems with handling too many sockets and such but allowing to write Django code as usual.

Async is good if you mostly do things which can be asynchronous, like fetching things over the net, reading files from disk, communicating with Redis and DB. You really need pre-emptive scheduler for tasks (not necessarily threads, see Erlang) for anything that's going to be CPU-bound. And it's not true that rendering web pages is 100% IO-bound - not when you're using Python, Django and need consistently ~100ms response times.
> Everyone who actually works in on AI and understands it thinks the fear surrounding it is absurd.

This isn't true. Please don't state falsehoods. Stuart Russell, Michael Jordan, Shane Legg. Those are just the ones mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
Comparing the energy requirements of current Bluetooth Smart solutions [pdf]
The plan to resurrect ToeJam and Earl
The parent comment could be interpreted as "They do not need to break encryption as they do not need to prove guilt due to the patriot act, and breaking encryption is a dog and pony show when they can just hide you in Guantanamo or a Romanian black site."
Hey guys, founder here! Happy to field your questions. We moved out to Bay Area in January of this year, and are excited to be working with startups to curate and recommend software engineering talent. Here's how we envision the future of recruitment:
1- Curating talent based on actual work performed: i.e. with software engineering talent, our engineers are consistently checking code repositories on github for selected candidates, and we're building out algorithms that can actually decipher whether the candidate can plug in to a startup's code base as soon as they join.
2- Timed scenario-based challenges: Our challenges will identify the "ideal" candidate for the startup by assessing current employees at a startup, and timed scenarios determine how quickly a candidate can -write clean code or even -make cold calls and meet sales quotas. Our sales challenge has been able to accurately determine the likelihood of sales performance, and candidates achieving a score of 85% or higher have been able to achieve sales quotas.
3- Actual skills gap assessment: We're building out a trending skill engine (in beta), that determines which skills employers are consistently searching for. This allows us to advise a candidate exactly WHY they aren't getting hired. For e.g. C++ or Java developers who should consider learning Python or Ruby or Marketing graduate.
magic money wand, right?

How do you even find 8000 people who would want to live in Cupertino… I mean have you even visited that place?
Except if you don't control the software on your device, like all smartphones.
Yes, Altair BASIC was definitely great. If I understand correctly, Microsoft (at that time, BillG and Paul Allen) were the first that managed to pack the whole thing in 4 KB for the 8080 processor.

Google was also great: before them the best search engine was AltaVista where I often had to load a a few tens of pages in order to find the link relevant for me, the one that Google returned typically at the first page. Other engines were even worse, as in not even indexing most of the sites on the internet.
Mac Users Have Fallen Out of Love with Personal Databases, but Why?
Yes, surely the "delay" one should be Asynchronous, the "async" one should be Synchronous and "one by one" should be Sequential.
Agree this could be a good approach, although maybe not necessarily suffering through six months. This is your chance to rock the boat, and get some practice selling your ideas. What do you have to lose? If it's something you care about, make an attempt to get people on board with the changes you want to make. Re-evaluate in a month and bail if people refuse to cooperate. If you voice your concerns clearly now they will at least understand why you're leaving if you do. You might be able to gain their respect without burning any bridges.
Yeah, so sorry! We modified an existing theme and haven't had the chance to fix that yet. We'll be taking care of that in the coming days!
Whether that investment is public or private is irrelevant.

It's not at all irrelevant. With Kickstarter, the private transaction is between two parties that are fully aware of the terms of the transaction, and explicitly agree to them.

In the case of taxpayer money paying for university R&D that is then privatized and locked away, I find that repugnant. I am a party to the transaction that does not at all agree with the way this works, that does not at all agree with my money flowing to this private company for no benefit to me or the public or the society in which I am a participant.
They paired their HTML and JS.
Raymond Sellars and his nuggets of wisdom on building fantastic products
It's easy for my repositories because I can just take a look at the Signed-Off-By: in the commit body. :-)
Apparently this poem is not meant to encourage taking that less traveled road.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken#Analysis

Also, reminds me of my favourite variant of this quote:

"Two roads diverged in the woods. I took the one less traveled, and had to eat bugs until Park rangers rescued me."

( from http://lesswrong.com/lw/xm/building_weirdtopia/ )
Ok, but we're talking about a website, where the toolset is limited by political decisions, not technical ones.