skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It might be controversial but I personally agree.

Especially as an adult your BMI is something you control. I don't understand why society is so tolerant of people mildly self-harming. Especially when the poor health as a result of obesity has an adverse affect on the economics of health the health care system we all use (public health, or company group pools).

If this was about stopping people cutting themselves for a high, then there wouldn't even be a debate. But because it's about an eating related disorder people are defending their dysfunction as acceptable.
I'm not sure why they include the "available for hire" checkbox. Seems like if you didn't have that it wouldn't look like you were looking for work. Putting your info on LinkedIn, for example, doesn't automatically mean you're looking around. A lot of people in my work group, for example, are on LinkedIn (including our boss) and we don't assume that means they're looking.

I'd suggest they lose the "available for hire" box.
If there was one tweet worth protecting it would have been:
"Watson, come here. I need you."
I wonder about the merits of this sort of thing as an interview screen, though. There's not necessarily a strong correlation between knowledge of language esoterica and other more important qualities like perseverance and raw intelligence.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=959884

I hope this submission doesn't get killed too.
Here is an article from a few years back that addresses this: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060222/sirlin_01.shtml

It's main points are is games like WoW teach the wrong lessons, like "investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill". This addresses MMOs more specifically, but relates to the larger point raised by the pixelpoppers article.
Who cares if college is frustrating. Stop being a victim. I had the worse teachers, but I did whatever it took to get an A. I didn't care if the teacher didn't have an interesting teaching style i put that aside and tried to learn the material he/she taught. In college, you need the "superficial" good grades just to get your foot in the door.I was autodidactic and learned all the things that really interested me in college on my own. People need to stop being wimps and try harder.
Josh Waitzkin (the kid from Searching for Bobby Fischer) wrote a book called the Art of Learning and he talks a lot about the difference between these two modes of learning. He calls it Entity versus Incremental intelligence. (Really good cliff's notes on the book by Derek Siver are here: http://sivers.org/book/ArtOfLearning). He's even harsher on entity knowledge-ists -- they crumble under the pressure.
It's a good theory to explain why some of the brightest kids I knew in high school have done nothing with their lives since: they are afraid to mess up their 'undefeated' academic records.
One of the key disciplines with stats, which is unfortunately not helped by the default configuration of most popular tools (looking at YOU Google Analytics), is that it either drives decisions or it is useless. If you are checking stats more frequently than you're making decisions based on them, you're wasting time.

Spend an hour and condense the stuff you absolutely need into a dashboard, and schedule time to do any drill down or reporting you need to do on a regular basis. Then, ignore the flowing river of noise your tools would otherwise distract you with.

P.S. If you find yourself rationalizing a once-an-hour check as a sanity test, either put it in a dashboard that you can check out of the corner of your eye while doing productive work, or reduce your heuristic to code and then fire it on a cron job. The computer's time is cheap. Yours is not.
I asked this in the Techcrunch comments but I'm thinking it will be more visible here:

In terms of the iPhone app, how do they trigger anything without having to keep your iPhone on and in their app the whole time? Other than that I am sold.
Ask HN: Where do you prefer to get work done?
Hi,

I am a hacker and a long-time lurker of HN (Since 'Startup News'!). In a few weeks I will have a considerable amount of time away from my workplace. I set it aside to allow me to work on personal projects.

I have a simple question: When working on your own projects, where do you prefer to work? I find that the environment I am in has a great effect on my productivity, for example I struggle to get work done at home.
You want to google "Remote Timing Attacks Are Practical", which is the landmark paper in this subfield and also the one crypto people use to scare their children around campfires with.

What you're really observing is the flip side of the "covert channel problem", which has been a well-known Hard Problem driving systems research since the '70s (it's part of Saltzer/Schroeder). Systems security people generally concede that the covert channel problem is impractical to solve in theory, and have resigned themselves to occasional fire drills as theory becomes practice.
If your school has a ssh account for you that you can access from the outside you can forward the web traffic via ssh. If all the sites are looking for is the IP block of a school that is paying for the subscriptions then you should be good to go.
I find it hardest to be passionate about my work when I'm doing mundane, uninteresting work. No job involves doing something interesting and challenging at all times. If I was 10x better at my job, it wouldn't improve how I felt about doing mundane work. In fact, I might detest it more because I would feel like my time could be spent doing higher-level work.
Maybe not having a KFC on campus would help...
http://www.lincolnuniversitydining.com/locations.html
See this

http://www.skepdic.com/myersb.html

on the personality test.
In fact I strongly suggest you consider ntfslink (http://elsdoerfer.name/=ntfslink) which provides a nice UI for doing all this in explorer.

As far as I can tell, reparse points for directories will usually work perfectly well for most of the things you'd expect them to. I use them, and a subversion repository to version control pretty much everything config related on my windows machine.
Introducing: blurl.me - A stripped back Twitter client
I totally agree with you. I think Twitter is basing the pricing decision off avoiding blowback from charging $1,000 a month from the people who will under no circumstances pay Twitter so much as $2 a month.
I thought this was funny, "So is it pronounced twitter or twatter?"
You (supposedly) only move around when you're in certain sleep stages, and not others. When you're moving around, you're still asleep, but you're much more lightly asleep than when you're not moving around, so it's a much more optimal time to wake up and you can also track how "restful" your sleep is.
Maybe I'm thinking about this too simply, but wouldn't fugding the timing on any cryptographic operation in a random fashion make it (much) harder to deduce the keys ?
The Mistakes I Made in My Programming Career
No. This is basic signal processing. Increase the noise, and all you do is increase the number of measurements needed to recover the signal.

This is a really common misconception about defeating timing attacks.

A more pernicious problem is that many of these microarch side channel attacks don't rely on direct timing of crypto code, so much as on microarch artifacts.

(For what it's worth, the specifics beyond this get to a place where I'm out of my depth and Colin and Nate are still in theirs.)
Where I live you can access JSTOR for free, logging in through the public library's website. This only covers a lot a of liberal arts material as well as journals for some of the "softer" sciences (and it's licensed for personal, educational use only).
Maybe not quite what you're looking for, but a great resource nonetheless.
Interesting. Shall see what use I can make of it.
The iPhone has to be on and the app open for it to work. No way around this limitation without 1) jailbreaking 2) digging around in private apis or 3) applying to be an approved accessory maker.
That did it for me as well. Pre-ordered.
Grins, I know just about everybody at SoftLayer, they're really good peeps. Who do you want to be connected to?
Darwin's notebooks go online on 150th anniversary of 'Origin of the Species'
It seems like it's too easy to just object "sorry, that's the price" to "is there room on the price"

Sure, some places and people just won't negotiate. But, I think you'd be surprised by how rarely this doesn't work.

And, worst case, if you really need the item, you pay full price and you're no worse off than if you didn't ask for a better deal. They aren't going to raise the price.

The best response to any kind of "no" is to walk away. You can say, "Oh, that's a shame. I sure wish I could afford it. Maybe another time. Thanks." if you want to be nice about it, and give them one more chance to think of some way to give you a better deal.

But, as with talking to girls, the first thing you say to open the negotiation is not really all that important, it's just indicating interest without committing to anything. It's where you go from there and how you react as the negotiation proceeds that determines how things end up.

And, yes, mattress salesmen are among the worst people I've ever met in my life, with regard to lack of honesty, predatory sales tactics, etc. Being largely immune to said tactics, I infuriated a couple of mattress sales guys on my last mattress shopping adventure by turning things around and not being at all fazed by their aggressive techniques. They're at least as bad as used car salesmen. I've been surprised to note that the RV sales people I've been dealing with are almost universally low pressure, easy going, forthright, and decent folks. It seems strange that such closely related industries would have such vastly different people gravitating to them.
It sounds like an onomatopoeia for vomiting.
Like McDonalds, Coca-Cola, and QDOS (Microsoft), the real riches came when a savvy businessman took an entrepreneurial effort and scaled it into a latent market. Unfortunate for those of us who like the cultural minutia of "local" business, but important to remember when building your startup.
You could do what I did and just link to another CV from your Github profile.
I don't get it. My college required 3 credits of physical education/nutrition to graduation and we didn't have newspapers bemoaning that we were forced to take these courses. The point of controversy seems that they only require the course for overweight students--but on the other hand students who can demonstrate proficiency in other subjects (by placement tests or AP scores for example) can skip otherwise mandatory classes. (on the third hand BMI is probably a lot closer to bullsht than an AP score)

"Forced" seems a bit strong a word though when it's your choice where (or if) you attend college.
I'm an ENxP. (It's been hotly debated whether I'm a Feeler or a Thinker. I seem to drive both categories nuts and Feelers accuse me of being a Thinker and vice versa.) I'm acutely observant of some types of things but I can also be really oblivious to some other types of things. I tend to pick up on social patterns more than specific physical details.
I think you could pull off something similar with desktop software

You certainly can -- I have done it for years. (I would not assume "rapid releases create buzz". If you're doing it right customers will not even realize they're happening. Launches are a marketing event, not a technical one.)

A word on version management: you can conceptualize the installed base of your software as a series of pools, with a faucet (your website) pouring water into the version of the most recent pool, a few trickles (out of date download sites) pouring into older pools, and some directed flow through your update and purchase pathways. All pools constantly evaporate as customers cease using the software.

The exact size of your pools depends on the specific rate of evaporation and timing between releases, but for most people this heuristic works: "The version most commonly in use is whatever was available from your website two weeks ago. Somebody, somewhere, is still using v1.0 and every other version you have ever produced."
Reborn Coma Man’s Words May Be Bogus
This is a much better idea than jobs.stackoverflow.com -- find people who have publicly produced something of executable value, rather than those that are publicly addicted to a MMO hint line.
BitTorrent’s Future: DHT, PEX, and Magnet Links Explained
"...an arousing melange of exasperated groans..."

I'm pretty sure the author meant "rousing," but I think I prefer this more titillating version.
Why do you need a smartphone to use the product?

Why doesn't the device just use wifi to call any number so that I could have it call my cell and wake me up?
Quick E-Commerce Optimization Tips
Websites are all in a continuous need of enhancement and we can always be improving our websites. E-commerce websites may be more complex however are no exception to the rule.
Google Scholar might be what you're looking for.

http://scholar.google.com/
Inefficiency, in this case, isn't really an issue. Its efficient enough to serve the number of people Adrià has decided to serve.

Scarcity would be a better choice. The inefficiency may create uniqueness, which contributes to that scarcity, but its the scarcity, together with the over-the-top quality that makes this so desirable to people.
You should be able to get the data programmatically, most isps have looking glass servers that you can look at to figure out who is peering with who. You can also look their AS #s up on Robtex and see if they're peering..
Right, I get that, increase the noise by a factor of two and you'd need more samples, increasing the chance of detection but ultimately not making the problem much harder.

But every factor of two that you make it harder is effectively one bit extra on the key that you're trying to find right ?

Assuming that's true (going out on a limb here) the more you are willing to waste time the harder it will get for an attacker to recover the keys, so ultimately it is a measure of efficiency vs security.

As for micro architecture, I don't know much about that other than reading up on the 68K when it came out and how it functioned at the block level, but one way to side-step that issue completely if you want to write bullet proof crypto code (if that is even possible) would be to write it for a controller on a separate plug in card (pci, possibly usb) that would be permitted to allow exactly one crypto operation per fixed interval of time to be performed.

That way you could effectively 'hide' the key and all its side-effects from view from both local and remote attackers.

It would then take at a minimum physical access to the card to monitor its buses in order to recover they keys.
You can get a lot of things on CiteSeer
I'd rather enjoy the business that I start, someone else can take advantage of this environment -- I'll pass on the business opportunity.
Boston Lisp Meeting: Monday 2009-12-14 Sam Tobin-Hochstadt
Health Care - The Values Question
It's not the answer that makes this a "keeper" screen, but the candidate's progression of facial expressions.
The things I can think of is to get the logs of who accesses this paper and to get the links to point to the original instead of to scribd ?
I live about a twenty minute drive from where I went to college; I still find the campus to be a good place to focus.
The point is not to assess language knowledge, but disposition. Even if the candidate is unamused, they should still instantly get what the interviewer found punny about it.
You may have followed all the rules: no caffeine before bed, an early bedtime, and all the rest

I need something for the mornings after I don't follow all the rules ;)

Congratulations to the Wakemate team! I think you've helped me with my Christmas shopping.
ACM's site has tons and tons of papers, highly recommend joining - it's cheap too
That guy actually seems normal and is above average compared to the absolutely crazy ex-paratrooper Karl Bushby. Karl crossed the Darién Gap on foot.

"Karl Bushby (born 30 March 1969) is a British ex-paratrooper, walking adventurer and author, currently attempting to be the first person to completely walk an unbroken path around the world. Bushby's trek is known as the Goliath Expedition."

http://odysseyxxi.com/

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Bushby
Is there any reason to suspect its timed-wake-alarm could be better than just sleeping until you wake naturally?

Also, I presume the analytics can be used without the alarm?
Anyone here tried the Zeo?
Found that, but they don't seem to have a checkbox for "only papers that can be downloaded" :-/
The first error is embarrasing. The second might come to pass, but only if Google want to commit suicide.
Another important argument in favor of a native app over a webapp is the iPod Touch - sales of the Touch are doubling year over year, getting pretty close to the iPhone, in terms of units sold.

Requiring iPod Touch owners to connect to wifi before they access your webapp just puts another hurdle between you and your users, one which they won't always be able to clear.
There are also other options. I've come to enjoy playing RPGs with the deliberate goal of underleveling. Where a performance-oriented player's idea of an ultimate fight is walking up to the end boss and smacking them down in one hit with damage to spare, my ideal battle is every member of my party down but the mage, every expendable expended, with the only option left for the mage to attack with their staff... and that 1HP hit finishes the boss off.

I've never quite experienced this exact ideal, but I've come close. And I've also been beaten, which makes the next time even sweeter when my adjusted strategies carry the day.

This turns the game into a bit of a puzzle. Despite your mentioning them, Final Fantasies have typically been very good at this, if you take the minimal/"easy" game path. Which does mean not doing all the extras, but as FF games get bigger and bigger via copy&paste questing I'm finding this is less of an issue than it used to be. (You can still do the "postgame" stuff if you're that into it.)

The Persona series also involve some skill and some luck; sometimes I find it hard to believe how one error can be the difference between wiping my party out without me touching the enemy and my wiping out the enemy without them touching me. It doesn't seem like it should work that way, but it has happened to me numerous times, where even a well-leveled party for where they are gets themselves wiped out because I had a momentary brain fart and hit the wrong command in the first round. It's a very mathematically unstable system, vs. FF's very stable/predictable one, but great fun.
> "Forced" seems a bit strong a word though when it's your choice where (or if) you attend college.

"Forced" wasn't considered too strong a word when we were talking about tuition increases.
I think Github is very adroit at extracting value from other people's open source coding. (I don't say that as a criticism of Github.)
Until we get real high speed internet, 100 Mb or better, the web will not really come into it's own as a potential replacement for the desktop.

Until I can get anything off the web as fast as off of my hard drive it's not happening.

I love the web and and I love the desktop. Both have their strong and weak points.
Fraps vs PlayClaw competition
Emblaze's First Else (new smartphone platform)
Sushi DNA Tests Reveal Fraud
The evidence you cite for low-obese BMI's being healthier than normal BMI's is a blogger's critique of published research which had the opposite finding. Incidentally, the first commenter on the blog did a pretty thorough job of refuting the blogger and defending the original study (whose findings contradict the claim you made here)
The Closed By mechanism seems so obvious in retrospect. What a great improvement to stability of applications overall by embedding that simple and error retardant pattern into the language.

I'm trying to understand why the collections syntax would create only immutable collections? Anyone know why so?
It's not so much 'where' as much as 'when' for me.

Home is fine, it's the disturbances that get me (cell phones, tv's, neighbours, other people and so on). I work best at night because of that.
An open platform for publishing applications
All respect to Colin, especially for his nice visualization of the cache behavior for RSA. However, I think the Tromer paper has more detail on multiple approaches to measuring cache behavior. It also pertains to AES, so you can compare side channel analysis of symmetric algorithms vs. public key.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/tromer/papers/cache.pdf

A lot of approaches can work without "eyeballing" the timings. The Aciicmez paper on BTB predictor side channels shows how you can retrieve the key in a single trace. It shows the interesting result that randomness, such as blinding, has no effect because it only helps when you're trying to compare multiple traces! (They take multiple traces, but then use a heuristic to throw out those that have too much jitter from other system behavior and then only analyze the one best trace.)

http://eprint.iacr.org/2006/351
http://eprint.iacr.org/2006/482
http://eprint.iacr.org/2007/039
http://eprint.iacr.org/2007/336

This discussion is timely since I've written an article comparing the various side channel attack approaches for IEEE Magazine's Dec 2009 issue. It should be available online soon.
Is this really any different than the "diversity" classes that some schools make freshmen take?
I've posted this because of this passage:

"Their goal is to build a catalog of every fish species on earth so that anyone with a handheld DNA reader could definitively identify fish within minutes."

Now, I've heard about people that wanted to develop handheld DNA readers, but to my knowledge they don't exist, yet the article mentions them off-hand as if they are commonplace technology.

Is that true ?
Sounds really interesting. It's a shame it's not shipping sooner. I just had a 7 month vacation and getting my sleep pattern back to normal has proved nearly impossible. Some days I wake up super energized after 5 or so hours and then days like yesterday, I get 7 hours in and I wake up feeling like I haven't slept in days. Pre-ordered one for sure.

On a side note, this page is terribly hard on the eyes. http://www.wakemate.com/about/ I don't know if it's just me or not, but I think they need some more spacing between the letters??
Dan's going away party @ Foundation Room
This reminds me of the gadgets sold in inflight magazines.
<i>
No object you're shopping for is precious or unique. Do not get attached to specific items. There are many more just like it or better, in other places, and other times. View it as something you will someday throw away or donate to Goodwill, and you can view it more rationally. That beautiful iPod? In five years it will be trash, and in three you'll probably replace it anyway. In short, always be ready to walk away from any deal.
</i>

I'm sorry but I tend to disagree - having the
right product' at the 'right time' does make a difference. Sure ipod will be a trash in 5 years, but you sure wouldnt want to go looking to buy a walkman when ipods are in vogue.
That's a nice paper. Bitsliced implementations, for those who don't know, use sequential instructions to perform parallel computation. They compute the logic function for the S-boxes instead of a lookup table.

Here's Biham's original paper on bitsliced DES. I think it's a good intro to this approach.
http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/users/wwwb/cgi-bin/tr-info.cgi?...
No, twitter is already successful; its growth and reach are spectacular and it could be sold for quite a tidy sum. Was google not a success before adwords, when all it had done was revolutionize the way we sort content on the internet?
Milo.com Raises $4 Million… without revenue plan