skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Continuing that logic:

You could get 6% if you can also do the same on the end of the file. There's a 1 in 16 chance that any random sequence of data will start or end with 5 zeros. The same trick could be done for 1s to bring it up to 12%. In other words, 12% of sequences will either begin or end with 5 ones or 5 zeros.

Since you can inspect the data before writing the decompressor, if we can figure out how to pad the beginning or end of a byte sequence with five 1s or five 0s in 5 bytes or less, then your expected outcome is $625 (minus $100 to play). Using 6 bytes would give you an expected outcome of $312.5, 7 bytes would give you an expected outcome of $156.

7*'0'+a

That's 7 bytes. It's not really a executable decompressor, but it does capture the necessary steps required to decompress.
That seems like an exceedingly childish exchange.
I agree. I only did a CS minor (10 courses), but even just doing that exposed me to things that I'd never really been exposed to, like operating systems and numerical computing.
Blah. I got my recollection confused with the Greater Good magazine, which is at Berkeley. /facepalm
https://lwn.net/Articles/603815/
It looks like a "thread-sync" feature for seccomp.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1379020
http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-arm-kernel/2014-J...

seccomp ("secure computing") is an application sandboxing mechanism in the Linux kernel (since 2.6.12, 2005-03-08). seccomp allows a process to make a one-way transition into a "secure" state where it cannot make any system calls except exit(), sigreturn(), read() and write() to already-open file descriptors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seccomp

Chrome uses seccomp to sandbox rendering subprocesses and the Adobe Flash Player.
I am not a lawyer, but maybe if multiple MACHOs in the right positions could make this work.
That's another tsync.
Ok, lot of negative impressions here. Only 10MB space, bad ssl cert etc. These things are easily fixable in future updates.

The reason this is nice to have is this quote from the site:

"How is DigiLocker going to help me?

It will minimize the use of physical documents and will provide authenticity of the e-documents It will provide secure access to Govt. issued documents. It will also reduce administrative overhead of Govt. departments and agencies and make it easy for the residents to receive services."
NASA Crawler Transporters – 5 decades old this year
The real reason is that companies don't want to implement the systems required to hire a more diverse workforce. Their success depends on having an extremely narrow band of aptitudes.

Greyston works because they make no assumptions about the type of person they receive. Because of that, they need systems surrounding each individual to ensure they're successful at all costs. And they have them.

The latter can be far more effective, but requires a broad humanistic approach that very few people, businesses, or cultures in the world have. The chance of transformation is extremely low, and the costs extremely high, so the resistance is nearly insurmountable, companies take the traditional (chaotic) approach, and we suffer for it.
I see. I should be going to GopherCon too, so I hope to see you there.
Not contradictory. Everyone's allowed to TRY to control how their story is told. She tried to get him to modify his apology to be less muddy. He tried to mitigate the damage of being called out by playing for sympathy. I see no contradiction, and I see no foul play in either of those actions.

> She didn't ask him publicly, she went through back channels to his previous employer for social leverage.

I'm sure going public would have resulted in people accusing her of "going nuclear", or adding insult to injury, etc. Considering this guy was recently fired, I wouldn't want to speak directly to him if I were her. That leaves going via his former employer. You can choose to see that as using "social leverage" but there's no real way to know. If that was the point, it wasn't enough leverage, because he didn't change it.

Facing down this king of online scrutiny and doubt of your motives is exactly why women tend to keep quite about this kind of stuff, and then things don't change because nobody's talking about the problems.
Just because you changed the market doesn't mean you'll stay in the market forever.
"because there are no immediate practical uses for this"

It depends on how hard a problem you're trying to solve. If you're writing the MVP of some CRUD app that supports a handful of users, you don't care about efficient algorithms. But if you ever hope to scale up to support massive numbers of users without using up massive amounts of extraneous servers (think of Google's or Facebook's data centers, and what their power and cooling costs), then knowing how to create efficient algorithms is of tremendous practical importance - it could mean the difference between profit and loss.

Another example on a small scale: If you want to write a game that drives a virtual reality display in real time with realistically rendered imagery, knowing how to write efficient algorithms is also going to be very important.
Aside from the obvious: that he/she is not doing anything else, that is the big challenge!
How do you determine whether the file is kolmogorov-random?

The only approach is to try a perfect kolmogorov compressor, which doesn't exist (well, excepting brute force over the space of possible turing machines).
I got my degree in the early 90s. At that time, it was already common knowledge among grad students that we couldn't all be hired into academic jobs. How could we not have known? My dad, who got his PhD in the 50s told me it was well known even then.
They are two different things. One is directly related to the job. The other is being a felon for an unrelated reason.

I wouldn't mind someone being a teacher if they got caught with pot 20 years ago. I would mind if they raped a few kids.

The point is that if their crime was related to the job, it's fine not to trust someone to do that same job again. That's not the same as never employing them for anything.
> He didn't say "okay, but there will be a 256 byte size penalty per additional file", he just plainly agreed.

Exactly. IMO the challenge-setter is the one being more unfair here, since his metadata-based reason to reject the solution applies to submissions made under the original rules too. He accepted an amendment without counter-amending to cover that loophole, so if he stands by his word, he has to pay up.

It casts doubt on whether he would pay if somebody won by the original rules with some luck. Maybe he has an implicit allowance, that merely two files can't "encode" a big enough advantage, but again, then it's his fault for not addressing that in the new rules.
Sure. Vacuum is an insulator until you exceed its breakdown voltage, just like other insulators. Electricity will go through a vacuum just like it will go through a polyester film or whatever.
Generate your own map of all the streets in America
Do basic CS concepts pertain to the job? Well that depends on your job I guess. I consider them the tools of the trade that will outlast all the languages and frameworks that will come and go in a career. And you can intuitively learn them by self-teaching, but it's less certain, and just as importantly, you may not learn them in the same vocabulary as others. CS gives you a shared vocabulary for talking about these concepts with others.

Given your other comment I suspect you're speaking from an observation bias leading you to judgement about the general case that doesn't necessarily stack. You witness those who've made it as devs, but that doesn't tell you anything about those who didn't.

The important question is of those who self-learn, how many of them end up as decent developers, vs those who go through a formal CS ed. Or to re-frame, what's the better course for the majority of people who want to become developers? I don't know of any numbers on this, so can only go off what I've seen, and what I've seen is that for the average person considering dev, a CS education is the best option.
The feature might very well be backported to 3.10.
> We ALL need to be able to learn quickly or we simply don't last.

I totally agree with that statement. In my response, I meant that self-taught devs have a leg up, so to speak, in the beginning. In the end, we all need to learn quickly and adapt regardless of how we started.

> Assembly, lisp/ada/scheme/etc., C/C++/Java, graphics, computer learning, computer architecture, etc.

From my own experience as a self-taught developer, I have learned, though maybe never used professionally, almost all of those topics to some degree because I had a keen interest in understanding software and computing in general. I find that self-taught devs, though not a majority, are like that - they want to know and understand because its passion of theirs. Also, i'm not saying that university trained students lack that passion either. I believe at the end of the day it really doesnt matter whether you are self-taught or not, only the passion you bring into learning and understanding is what matters.
Oh yes, there are definitely books that deal with this: I highly recommend "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug. Quite an engaging, useful read, and it is well-reviewed on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/032134...
The point of the challenge was to tempt people who do not understand compression as well as Mike into putting themselves into a position for Mike to mock and/or shame them. From that respect, it seems to me like it was a trick.

In my experience, people who set up such tricks do not usually respond well when the tables are turned.

There are some people in the world who take it personally when other people don't understand their area of expertise as well as they do. They get angry and offended at naive questions, and seek to punish the idiots. This is a great way to take an interesting subject and ruin it for everyone.

One of the best aspects of the HN culture is that experts here tend to incline more toward teaching and less toward chastising. It's a nice change from Usenet.
I actually find both 2 & 3 to be more prevalent in self-taught programmers (especially those who know enough "officially" taught people to have an inferiority complex. (i.e. why re-invent the wheel when (surely) someone else has already re-invented it better).

Also, I find that most CS students miss the "forest for the trees", and focus on the technical - rather than the immediate reality (Big-O < shipping features) at a small company.

Overall, none of those qualities are bad, but both can contribute to the success or failure, of a company.

Morale: caveat emptor. Culture & Diversity is important.
Unfortunately you're confusing bits and bytes (I did the same thing too at first). Fitting a decompressor in five bits is a lot harder. :-)
Their own nightlies started working again recently: http://5digits.org/nightlies
Don't send your iDevice to a landfill. Apple stores accept any of their products for recycling at no charge and you can also mail them in.
> An employee does not have a "right" to a job.

... says you.

Someone else might say that a human being has the right to realize his potential in an activity and be allowed to sustain himself and his family out of such activity -- which in practice means there is such a thing as "the right to have a job". There is a lot of philosophic and economic literature on the subject; several nation states even wrote it in their Constitution.

I know we tend to forget, but the XXI century came after the XX and the XIX; those were times when the best minds would think and write about the world around them, rather than looking for ways to trick people into clicking ads.
The answer seems to be "yes", as Jessie has a 3.16 kernel.

Lots of speculation though - there's no official announcement, as far as I'm aware, and the OP on the mailing list did not identify as a Google employee.
FYI, if you don't need required/optional, non-zero defaults and extensions, try `syntax = "proto3"`. It generates much better Go code.
I would first of all want to check if any religion's historical claims are true.

That would help a lot of people with their beliefs!
+1 to this, the computer history museum is truly awesome.
It's common way to see things now, although I guess it's pretty normal. I always viewed distro as something people do primarily for themselves, if you want something from particular distro — you join the community. If your wishes are drastically different from what this community accepts — you go to another community or build your own. I'm not saying people should be rude and talk nonsense, but it seems that too many people tend to forget: Debian mailing list (or lkml, or what else people complain about) is not Starbucks or McDonalds where people are paid to smile and do what's requested.

That's been said, I find question about TSYNC completely appropriate, and its support to be expected, but answer about "Google spyware" was funny and enjoyable anyway. So, yeah, maybe childish, but not "exceedingly childish".
HandStack -- Lead Developer and CTO -- SF & LA (remote ok) -- handstack.com

Are you passionate about politics, community organizing, activism, or connecting people?

HandStack is Meetup + Trello. We provide a more real-time, spontaneous platform with finer coordinating capabilities like group task management. Our vision is to provide an unprecedented ability to mass-mobilize local people for events, projects, and causes. Our primary customers are political consulting firms & nonprofits, but we also serve grassroots organizations.

Our stack consists of Ember JS, Python, Bootstrap, Objective C, and Django (on its way out)

You are

* passionate about the product & ambitious

* excited to work with MVC frameworks like Ember JS (OR) have experience in native iOS or Android

* experienced in building scalable products

* like working in sprints & deploy code often

* can be remote but prefer being located on the west coast

Reach out to us at jess (at) handstack dot com. We're happy to chat!
Hacking iPad for art
as pointed out... bits vs bytes... I think the overall idea here is interesting. It is "cheating" because the implicit "EOF" and "start of file" allow us to forego indexing the data. This "cheat" is similar to the technique used in the article.

Similar cheats would be to leverage hardware instructions (imagine if x86 had a "pad with N zeros" instruction that fit in 7 bits). That's still cheating because the information is hiding in the architecture.
You're a moron. It's possible for a man to disrespect a man.
microsoft.com redirects to windows93.net. It's inception.
What? That doesn't make any sense.
Well, it's worth noting that this has been John Mark's statement for some time. Here's the earliest instance I can find online: https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?artic... (2011)

I'm also somewhat certain that his view was mentioned in Zimbardo's 2007 book; I loaned out my copy, so I can't check.
Thousands of women are throwing a guy a dance party after he was body shamed
When you commit to a 10-year support cycle, you'd better be prepared to backport quite a few things.

Google's being aggressive about taking advantage of a kernel-level security feature that they developed to solve a real problem. This seems like a good thing overall.
Chrome "unofficially" dropped support for pre-3.16 kernels, such as the kernel in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, about half a year ago. More precisely, they introduced a bug that caused installing extensions to fail with that kernel, and then declined to fix it.

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=401655

See comment #47: "Ok, while it sounds like this is technically a regression, I'm going to mark this as Wontfix because there is a reasonable workaround of updating your kernel."
Why was there only one shell left for the crab at the end?

There was an extra shell at the very beginning, so at the end it should be able to choose between 2 shells.
In practice this has been long sidestepped by abusing short-term contracts, which are renewed every year and are not protected by such clause. So in practice, for the last 20 years or so, it's actually been much easier to fire people in Italy than in most other European countries (as long as they were recent hires). That didn't really help job growth though.
oh for fuck's sake.
Like others have said, I find self-taught programmers (I'm a tutor, so I meet a lot of them) have an attitude of, "why should I care about time complexity?" They are motivated to get things done quickly, and will do it to the best of their ability, but it may not be the best solution, since that would require deeper theoretical knowledge.

On the other hand, programmers coming from academia are expected to "just know" a lot of the practical tools that are used these days. I did C++, Java, MATLAB, and machine learning-type stuff in school, but learned Git, Rails, Python, Hadoop, etc etc. after graduating. Recruiters, etc. expected I'd just be ready for that stuff right off the bat.
This is a very subjective answer. Personally I studied computer engineering which is essentially the hard classes from computer science combined with the hard classes from electric engineering. I suck at algorithms. I have a hard time with abstract theories. I contribute to open source not too much but I do. I started in .net and now try to stick to JavaScript and node or rails. I have held titles of architect, director, and team lead. My favorite title though is "engineer".

The answer to this question is very simple. It's not school vs self-taught. It's PASSION and I fucking love programming :)
Engaging your audience: tips and tricks for producing quality online content
So you keep your files and your backups in dropbox?

Rule 1 of backups is "don't keep your files and your backups in the same place". Pretty much common sense.
Show HN: Micro Media Type
Squirrel Falls into a Pool, What Happens After That Will Melt Your Heart
The core problem is that there's little incentive to build complicated, high-effort startups and hire appropriately-skilled people for them because venture capitalists are giving tens of millions of dollars to people who build quick-and-dirty apps that follow trends which will die within a month.
> You witness those who've made it as devs

If you read my other comment you also read the part where I said I have been around a lot of terrible developers (worked with, for, under, around, consulted for, etc). These people have "made it" as you said, with long careers in software development, but they are far from competent. Which leads us to your next point:

> how many of them end up as decent developers

I don't honestly think where or how you start can be used as any sort of determination for how "decent" you are. What matters to me is passion (i've said this a few times already in other comments). When I am hiring and interviewing developers to bring on to the team I barely look at their resumes and I definitely don't look at their education history. Whats more important to me is the initial call, and then the face-to-face. I don't even bother asking any real technical questions. What i'm looking for is a spark; something that tells me this person loves to build and learn. Self-taught or university taught makes no difference at the end of the day, and should never be used as basis to judge whether a person is a "decent" developer or not.
Thanks to its bad cert, an attacker could MITM it and then the user would simply click past the error and give his Aadhar details to the attacker.
> Many self-taught programmers I know reject the idea that these CS fundamental knowledge is important.

Besides some CS math courses I took while doing an unrelated engineering degree, I'm self-taught. And I've always felt incredibly limited as a consequence. E.g. given the popularity of Rust, I'm really interested in type systems to limit aliasing. But the papers make my eyes glaze over. Self-teaching is difficult, because even the stuff written with an eye towards approachability assumes mastery I don't have of a couple of years worth of discrete math.
Apparently it will catch the edge cases for you.

https://github.com/feross/standard/issues/5#issuecomment-716...
What Jeff Wise has learned about MH370 since 2/23
From random.org, used as a source for the data:

> RANDOM.ORG offers true random numbers to anyone on the Internet. The randomness comes from atmospheric noise, which for many purposes is better than the pseudo-random number algorithms typically used in computer programs.
Content-creation software. Like Microsoft Word? Like Adobe Photoshop?
Pentadactyl is just disabled on the web tools, for what it's worth.
A Hacker heaven..
I will certainly agree: there should be more skepticism for such at article by a known untrustworthy author. Does that mean we should immediately dismiss something written by him?

Your advice is good to take in general: don't trust what you read without judging both the credentials of the writer and the content the writer is putting forth. But to dismiss it based only on the author is shortsighted. I see nothing in your reply specifically about the content of the article, does anything else truly matter? Sure, take the author's history and intentions into consideration, but at the end of the day the content is what matters.
Perhaps I should have been clearer: don't do anything serious with it if you have a deadline to meet.
Also self-taught with a EE degree behind me..

I'd agree 100% with the algorithm point but I'll add data structures to the list. Beyond low level memory - think shift registers - I had no concept of linked lists, pointers, stack vs heap, etc.

My solution was simple. I contacted the CS department from my undergrad (Rose-Hulman - small school, I knew the department head) and asked for the syllabus for the data structures course. The prof was great and went so far as to send me all the homeworks, last year's tests, and recommendations for books. It was above and beyond and reinforced my appreciation.
I'm self taught (from the time I was 9) and now, at almost 30, nearly done with my CS degree. I've worked "in the industry" before going back to school, and the biggest stand out for me is that the majority of CS students are terrible at figuring things out on their own. What I've noticed that many, regardless of course understanding, when faced with a programming problem that they don't understand, is that they give up and start asking others for help, whereas most of the self taught coders that I've noticed are much quicker to pick up a manual or start reading documentation prior to reaching out to others. This is probably an advantage in some areas as much as it may be a disadvantage in others. Another thing that I've noticed is that many CS students are terrible at producing clean looking or consistent code, which is probably a detriment once they reach "the industry"