skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When going after VC money, entrepreneurs should understand that while the financial interest of VC’s can be aligned with that of an entrepreneur, they can never be identical. VC's portfolio is much more diverse than ours. Therefore, after we take VC money, it is not enough that we succeed; we must succeed big enough to make up for their other losses (or losses by other partners of their firm). In general the VC's and their partners are willing to take much greater risk than entrepreneurs alone since in their eyes, succeeding small is as bad as failing big (“go big or go home”). So by taking money from VC, we will substantially increase our own risk profile and force our financial outcome to be binary, either a small piece of a big pie or nothing. My own experience is that with VC investment, your probability of having a zero outcome is not only real but common.
Really? You trust backtrack on client networks? I'm not suggesting that bad stuff won't be built into mainstream distros, but given the target audience, community and contributors is it really safe? I appreciate it's not a strong argument compared to other distros, but other distros tend not to be set up specifically for hacking.

I tend to find Backtrack provides a decent starting point, but most of the testers (and all of the full time day-in-day-out testers) I know tend to use their own Linux systems on live network tests. We use VMWare images for both Windows and Linux, which lets us work in situations where clients don't want our laptops plugged in, or where the data can't leave site.
The more I stare at that question, the more I can't figure out if you mean the obvious or the subtle pitfalls of alloca(). Off the top of my head, some of the potential "evils" I can come up with is: automatic deallocation after the function (and not the scope iirc) RETs, difficulty in passing alloca-allocated memory to other functions, being totally non-thread safe, looks foreign to other devs, classic stack-allocated buffer attacks are easier on certain systems, more pernicious effects from off-by-one errors. Did you have anything else in mind?
Thales's proof that any angle inscribed in a semicircle is a right angle.

http://www.cut-the-knot.org/pythagoras/Munching/inscribed.sh...
Yep, so basically one request can touch hundreds of servers. It's basically the opposite approach of Twitter. They aggregate the graphs on write.
Top 3 Facebook Apps for Android Devices.
Menasia tables are limited to 4GB on a 32bit OS but can get to 16 exabytes on a 64bit OS, p 294 Programming Erlang, http://books.google.com/books?id=Qr_WuvfTSpEC&pg=PT1&...
Ive talked with one of the guys from face.com . They have put a lot of effort into making their system very fast and scalable.

He told me that they built it from scratch and did not use OpenCV. Some parts were even written in assembly.

Im pretty sure that this is the only web application that I use that has had major parts of it written in assembly.
Which also is the reason you can only have 5000 friends on FB. If you had a million friends, you'd probably touch all their servers for one request.
This article title is ambiguous enough that it makes what happened sound like it was a bad thing...
My theory, which is pure speculation, is that Fusion Garage misinterpreted Arrington's support. He promotes many companies on his blog, TC50 and elsewhere. It seems entirely plausible that FG thought Arrington was simply an enthusiastic supporter trying to help a small company bring a product to market. Maybe they figured he would buy a bunch of units OEM and rebrand them as CrunchPads while they were free to sell the design to other companies or market a device at retail themselves. The fact that Mr. Arrington, who is a tech savy lawyer, apparently did not enter into any formal contracts supports this theory. He should know better. It's very suspicious that he would not clearly define the terms very early in the process. This suggests to me he wanted to swoop in and take control of the product only when it was nearing its completion. FG takes most of the risk -- he jumps in at the last second if they pull off the engineering side of things. The big question is who was paying the bills?

Mr. Arrington originally said the CrunchPad was not about profit. So what's the problem with Fusion Garage selling their own device? Or even selling the design to other companies? Again this strikes me as being very suspicious. Wouldn't more manufactures competing against each other be true to his original vision? Was FG unwilling to sell him this hardware to be re-branded as CrunchPads or were they unwilling to give him exclusive access to it?
I'm not particularly worried about the most popular Linux pentesting distro secretely phoning home or trying to infect networks, but, if it makes you feel better, we don't have to take it on client networks, since we don't do much net pentesting. Like I said, great for playing with wireless.
I'm not surprised traffic simulation is amenable to this approach -- most traffic simulation visualizations I've seen look quite a lot like the movement of ant colonies, and this is precisely how ants navigate.
Ok, alloca() is a really bad question too.
I believe the following: in evaluating someone's capacity for implementation in one level of abstraction, their understanding of the next level down is a good indicator (but neither necessary nor sufficient precondition) of their understanding of the whole of the system. I'm sorry for the grammatical awkwardness of the preceding sentence, edits welcome.
I'm not surprised.

The last time this lawsuit came up on HN, people were saying how Arrington was arrogant and they said that parts of the story probably weren't being mentioned.
Standard C/C++ interview question for me for the past few years: "how would you go about debugging a program that segfaulted inside of malloc".
It's just a language-specific variant of a 'Microsoft problem': you don't want the answer, you want to watch the process. It's similarly useful in theory. But in practice I think it has the same key failing: Performance is too skewed in interview situations for it to give you consistently useful insight into candidate fitness.

If you want to thin out a hundred otherwise-equivalent candidates - knock yourself out. But at that point you might as well be flipping coins.
Who is "They" in this case? Both a read and a write could be a "request", so I am having some trouble with the ambiguity of your last sentence. Thanks!
Where does the info for the landmark recognition feature come from? Is it from street view?

I dont see how the landmark recognition feature could be useful. If you have a camera + 3g on your phone, you have a GPS.
Here is the primary source I found of Gardner's review. I suggest anyone interested read it themselves, as the review itself is a well-written reflection on Gardner's own mathematical philosophy.

http://books.google.com/books?id=oXEaTdstD7gC&pg=PA280&#...

I did not find it scathing, but rather of mixed opinions. He criticizes the sort of mathematical "cultural relativism" that the authors sometimes suggest, but he also praises the book's treatment of specific topics as accessible and inspiring.

Thanks for noting this review, because this book is one I like and often recommend to less-technical people, and I had never encountered it before.
I'd say it's this tablet - if I'm buying a tablet I want note-taking ability, drawing ability, and various features that really leverage the power of touch sensitivity. So far all they've shown us is a friggin web browser.
$499!? -- I'll wait for Apple.
And as it says in the draft spec, the reason they are using 1.8.7 is basically because it's a dead end version of Ruby and, therefore, isn't changing.
If you add &esrch=RTSearch to your the URL after you've done a google search, you get the feature. You also need to selelect "Latest" from the "Show Options" menu.

Example: http://www.google.ca/search?q=copenhagen&hl=en&sa=G&...
When you're looking for an expert in a field, do want to find someone that claims to know what they're doing because they read a book somewhere? Or do you want to find a seasoned pro that has actually tried and possibly failed using different techniques? Their failures may give them more insight and experience than their successes. Especially if they can tell you what they did to improve themselves afterwards.
I’ve seen a working demo of this in an iPhone app, a few months ago: it’s like some kind of dark magic to see the translated words show up in the still-moving picture. I don’t know if the guy has released his stuff yet though.
You know, the more I read suggested interview practices and the responses they elicit, the more I think that the best interview question would be to get the candidate to critique a few interview questions.

The point here is not whether this is good practice, or whether the candidate knows the answer, or whether they would write it themselves, or whether they get the right answer immediately, or whether they automatically know the darkest corners of the C++ spec (of which this isn't one).

The point is whether they can reason through, with the interviewer, and then potentially change their mind if they find that they're wrong.

Part of being a good programmer is finding the good ideas among the dross, finding the right implementation technique among the many at their fingertips, and finding the right design among the myriad plausible constructions.

If you can't find the good ideas in these sorts of interview questions, if you can't read carefully enough to see that the whole point was to uncover whether of not the candidate can reason through then potentially change their mind, or if you think that to do so isn't an important characteristic to test for, then that tells me something.

Yes, it's important to see why things don't work, or are broken, or are a bad idea, but the ability to find good ideas is infinitely more important.

I like this interview question, and if you don't, then we're not a good fit. It doesn't mean you're a bad programmer, it doesn't mean (necessarily (I hope)) that I'm a bad employer/manager/programmer/interviewer - but it doesn mean we probably won't work well together.

But I could change my mind if you provide better arguments than the ones I've seen so far.
One thought I had is that there really aren't enough different signs.

In most foreign countries, I've been able to recognize signs for bathrooms and such, and most place names I can memorize (even if I can't read the language I can still think "okay, I want to go to the one with the squiggly second character").

I actually think this has high "cool factor", but have difficulty really coming up with uses. I think restaurant menus (as mentioned by my sibling comment) is probably the only real use, and even then knowing the name of the dish doesn't guarantee an item I'm able to eat.

Also, when I go abroad, I am definitely not enabling data roaming. In some countries, buying a prepaid SIM requires lots of documentation which is difficult to do if wandering around doing tourist-y things, etc.

(Sorry, I do think the idea is cool, I'm just trying to come up with reasons why its not the neatest thing since sliced bread)
This question and the associated discussion remind me very strongly of something I learned very early in own professional C++ development:

C++ the language is an extremely leaky abstraction. There are so many places where you really do need to think about what the compiler is doing and what is happening behind the scenes rather than thinking at a consistent abstract level.

Is that a bad thing? I suspect that C++ programmers would say no. But then again, there would be a lot of bias in that answer...
I actually laughed out loud. Well done, sir.
3g adds nothing to this. Any network of sufficient bandwidth would work.
On the theme of a imperfect gatekeeper:

>>If the transhuman AI offered a cure for cancer, should the gatekeeper accept it?

What if the gatekeeper has cancer? Or his/her child?

(Can we really assume the HR department is perfect and never hire idiots, depressed, psychopats, drug addicts or people with early Alzheimer?)
Oh, cool, I forgot that one. Thanks! Especially nice is the symmetry argument instead of the tedious angle-chasing, although the angle-chasing technique generalises.
IMO, one of the fundamental problems with AI research is the idea that thought is important. When a chess program keeps track of the best moves nobody really cares how that thought is stored or retrieved. What's interesting is how to measure what thoughts are useful (for a given problem) and how to generate useful thoughts efficiently (better than random.) But, when people focus on thought implying something that people do, but earthworms don't do they get into a tailspin.

Language as a portable method of conveying thought is a great subject of research. But, attempting to attack a human language in all it's glory is a huge pitfall. Nouns, verbs, additives, adverbs, intonation, tense, and a 29 years of knowledge and I frequently have no idea what someone is saying. But, linking the word ball, with the concept ball, with the sensory perception of ball might be possible today. Link that to some simple nouns like roll, toss, catch, etc and we can start a meaningful integration of language and actions.
Before SIGGRAPH in August 2008 Intel was talking about raytracing, but since then the PR focus has been almost completely on rasterization. IMO raytracing was a diversion (sort of like Cell's mobile agents with true AI); it was never serious.
"public static void" has zero chance of containing errors. If you make a typo, it won't compile. It's not code, it's just "stuff". It doesn't translate to code. It doesn't "do" anything.

It is verbosity. It's less harmful than some other instances because as you note it's extremely unlikely to cause bugs, but it's still noise that detracts from readability by obscuring the code that's actually relevant to the task at hand.

Would you rather debug regexps, or java code? Which is easier to work with?

If the regexp is expressing a concept that would otherwise take 20 lines of ad-hoc string processing in Java, I'll take the regexp.
Update - the code has been uploaded to Github!

http://github.com/scottjacksonx/hnsh
My favorite: "Standards are great. Everyone should have one."
My favorite proof is Fuerstenberg's proof of the infinitude of primes, seen here: http://primes.utm.edu/notes/proofs/infinite/topproof.html
That chip appears to be worse than Larrabee in every respect. In particular it is much harder to program, which would just make Intel's late drivers later.
Done - http://github.com/scottjacksonx/hnsh
Thank you for your post. The notion of appealing to intuition is a very serious one. Intuition does not exist, at least not in the sense that it is commonly understood. There exists simply familiarity and permutation, but most explanations of intuition appeal to some form of ex nihilio proposition generation. What we refer to as intuition is the subconscious process of synthesizing previous experiences and transformations (permutations) of component parts. It is precisely for the rigor of explicit predicates and rules governing the transitions from one statement of fact to another that distinguish the reliability of math from the fallibility of informal thought. As you so deftly described, the ability to entertain varying predicates and explore the possible routes without violating the rules is a stimulating task that is unfortunately absent from most lower math education.

I whole-heartedly agree that the capacity to identify your assumptions is a valuable skill that rigid & formal thinking help to cultivate.
My problem is, I need to implement this on real cars/roads.
The author is 100% clear that the exercise is an attempt to escape debt. He's got plenty of options if he just wants to afford an education.
>I know there is no such thing as "standard English," but you can get pretty close to it through guides like Diana Hacker's _Rules for Writers_.

The problem comes then when we try to say "this is Standard English <refer to guide on English>". The books many people feel represent "proper" English are often full of nonsense propagate mindlessly by people who learned what they were told was "proper" English. If I had a nickel for every time somebody regurgitated a "rule" derived from "A Short Introduction to English Grammar" by Lowth, I'd be a very rich man indeed.

Ultimately, setting a standard form of a language ends up devolving into Lowth style shibboleths designed to create an in-group and an out-group usable as a basis for discrimination but not necessarily useful for communication.
Another one I forgot is the proof that the topology of lines through a point is the same as the topology of a moebius strip glued to a disk, which is a projective plane. That's the same as identifying antipodal points on a sphere.

That's a talk I give to 14 year-olds who seem to love it.
I've got "loaded up" web application running fine in 128M RAM.

(Where "loaded up" equals a lot more than Rails/Django/etc gives you out of the box. We have a separate Tomcat running with a Solr instance for search, but that's for deployment reasons. If we put that in the same Tomcat I might push the RAM up to 192M, but it would probably be fine as it is)
It's probably a good interview question for a language lawyer.
That's why I said "Agree to disagree".

If I'm looking at code, the "public static void" doesn't detract from readability at all. I would much rather see "public static void" than some new 'less verbose' &$%||foo|| stuff I have to look up. I find it much easier to read words than characters.

It's a wonder anything works in some of these new 'unverbose' languages, where a 'concept' is a single character, and a single char typo can mean you've suddenly got a bug you have to go find.
An impressive statistic:

"In aggregate, Memcache at Facebook processes in 120M requests/sec."
I think it's a mistake to believe that this has a big impact on new users or which implementations any of us support in our code.

Plus, it's important to note that the current draft spec actually supposedly covers the existing 1.9 implementation and all other existing implementations by excluding features that differ between them. From the Drafting Guidelines (http://ruby-std.netlab.jp/):

Second, we intend that existing implementations such as Ruby 1.8.7, Ruby 1.8.6, Ruby 1.9, JRuby, Rubinius, and IronRuby can conform to the specification without modifying them. There are some features which are not implemented in some of the implementations or are different among the implementations. Those features are excluded from the specification, or described as either "implementation defined" or "implementation dependent."
For sure. corrosion just isn't a big problem for most consumer or home electronics though. Where it is, it's a problem in more than just the connectors, because most electronics aren't sealed. (it's especailly useless if the connectors on the $100 board aren't protected... and the $3 cable is..)
Scapegoat 1
I have only the foggiest idea of what's going on here (this is a tablet PC running a web OS, right?), but this whole thing smacks of desperation.

ChromeOS just went public, Apple may or may not do some tablet thing, Arrington is somehow involved and seems to be acting like an ass again, etc.

I think someone pushed the panic button and said something along the lines of 'we go live now or the whole thing is dead!'

All-in-all not a good way to start. My magic eight-ball tells me this project is doomed.
Scapegoat 2
Scapegoat 3
Scapegoat 4
Scapegoat 5
Scapegoat 6

No idea how many of these might be needed, so I'll stop there. Interesting to see if this idea works. If you do, thanks for playing.
Why do posts about interview questions always attract such vehement reactions? The politer replies on the blog itself suggest that the author should work for McDonald's instead of programming. Reddit's discussion isn't much better (predictably). HN can't even have a reasoned discussion about it?
Usually for me it's two Windows Update ActiveX extensions for IE that need to updated before it even lets you get anywhere, a an update to the update installer, a round of ~40 updates including IEX which pops up a dialog in the background that blocks installation, and then once it's 'finished' there will be at least one more round of updates if you close it and reopen it.

As bad as Microsoft's clusterfuck is, Adobe's is orders of magnitude worse!
Virtual Laboratories and Virtual Worlds
http://kotiro.petermichaud.com/writing/on-drama/

http://kotiro.petermichaud.com/writing/the-story-conversatio...
I always assumed that wifi-aided geolocation used the MAC address of the router.
>Regardless of the political issues involved, speaking the "standard" language or the prestige language is an asset in most circumstances.

This is probably the best one line summary of the issue I've ever read.
As an outsider looking in at the world of C++ development (I work on hardware), my first thought is "Why would you want to use a tool that requires an understanding at that level of complexity for mastery?"

Perhaps C++ has some extraordinary benefits that I don't understand, which makes deleting the v-table before the method returns the stack to the heap worth the trouble [1]?

[1] I might have mixed up some of the terminology a little here. Feel free to correct me vigorously.
This has huge bar-bet potential.
I'm about to go off-line, but I'd like to run an experiment.

This submission could easily sink without a trace simply because not enough people see it. I'd like it to get voted up, but I don't care about the karma. So I've put in another few replies. If you want, up vote the submission, but balance my karma by downvoting one of the scapegoats.

Just an idea ...
Another favorite: in any group of 6 or more people, there exist either three mutual acquaintances or three mutual strangers.

Proof: Assume to the contrary that there's some group of six people not satisfying the theorem. Let the six people be named $p_1$ through $p_6$. Since acquaintance and non-acquaintance are symmetric relations, we can model this by drawing between each pair of acquaintances and edge of a certain color (say red) and between each pair of strangers an edge of a different color (say blue). The result is then equivalent to saying there is no way to color the edges of the complete graph $K_6$ with two colors that doesn't produce a monochromatic triangle.

Consider the six edges incident with $p_1$. Since there are five of them, we know at least three will have the same color. WLOG, assume the three edges of the same color are red, and, further WLOG assume the other ends of these edges are $p_2, p_3,$ and $p_4$.

Now, if we want to avoid monochromatic triangles, we have to color the edges $p_2 p_3$ and $p_3 p_4$ blue. But, to avoid the $p_2 p_2 p_4$ triangle being mono-blue, this then forces the edge $p_2 p_4$ to be red to avoid forming the blue triangle $p_2 p_3 p_4$. This then yields the monochromatic triangle $p_1 p_2 p_4$.

Since all of the edge colorings after the initial three coming from $p_1$ were forced, this implies no $2$-coloring of the edges of $K_6$ exists without a monochromatic triangle.
Thanks rg. That's very insightful info.
Given enough exposure, everyone looks like a dick.
I really don't understand why anyone would want a VPS with 1.4GB RAM for the same price as a 12GB RAM Quad-Core dedicated server. (for example from hetzner: http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr... - we've been using servers from this provider for 3 years and we're pretty satisfied so far).
Verbose:
1 : containing more words than necessary
: wordy <a verbose reply>; also
: impaired by wordiness <a verbose style>
2 : given to wordiness <a verbose orator>

The word has a definition and you're either ignoring it to suit your point of view, or you don't know what it means.

If you want to argue that there are good kinds of verbosity and bad kinds that's fine, but don't try to make up your own definition and expect anyone to buy it.
What gui is that on the videos that shows the supervisor tree?