skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's been a while since I read the Bitlocker paper, but I remember having the distinct impression the author found it critical to have. And Ferguson knows more about this stuff than I ever will, so I trust his assessment. If this has changed, wouldn't it elicit a bit of an explanation? "Windows 8 takes advantage of better crypto knowledge to remove improve Bitlocker speed."

I'd also note that the trend in Bitlocker seems to be to just delegate to the SSD, completely relying on the SSD vendor to get it right. That has zero performance overhead and is more suitable for low end devices.
I'm building an app that utilizes people giving to charities - red cross seemed like an obvious choice to include, but now there's no way.

This has been helpful in sleuthing out reputable charities: http://www.charitynavigator.org/
A JavaScript interpreter implemented in RPython (2012)
So if I sign up in February I get 28 days to enjoy the service; if I sign up in March I get 31? That seems like the fundamental problem here.
Actually hypervisors (VT-x) run in Ring -1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_ring#Hypervisor_mode
Operator overloading always looks like a clean solution, but complexity finds a way to leak through.

Avoid it, unless you're really overloading things that always behave.
Not sure transit is designed for the same space. E.g. there seems to be no schema, and the default JSON encoding isn't super readable either.

Protobufs can be encoded as JSON and as text, so there are some ways to address the readability I guess.
Showpad - seeking brilliant back-end/full-stack web developers to own projects they're barely ready for.

We're a Series B startup, focused on Mobile/SaaS. We're in SF and Belgium, invest in our culture, and are growing exponentially.
$500M sound like a large sum. It is if that is you personal wealth. However for Haiti with a population of over 10M it is only $50 per head.

According to the article the Red Cross built shelters for 130,000 people. The would be $384 per shelter if that was all the Red Cross did. But they also fed people, provided clean water, medical aid...

It is easy to attack big charities. You get support from people who feel guilty for being mean bastards, for people who don't like foreign organisations, from big business who want to profit out of natural disasters...
Support in Canada is also pretty good. I think the only retailer in my regular routine (Kitchener, Ontario) who doesn't have contactless POS is a building supply store.

It always boggles my mind being in the US and realizing the number of places which with either don't take cards at all, or have only stripe-and-sign.
Ask HN: Programming jobs/companies at which you can apply with a coding challenge?
Hello!

I'm currently looking for an entry-level developer position, but I've got a bit of a problem: I've been working a non-programming job for the year and a half I've been out of college, and no portfolio or anything of the sort built up in the mean time. I know - that's not good, and I'm working on it, but due to time constraints I'd still like to see if its possible to find an opportunity sooner than later.

Thing is, I hear these anecdotes of people getting interviews but not even being able to FizzBuzz, so clearly there is a need for people who can code competently. I'm confident I can, but I really have nothing to show for it other than my degree which I guess is pretty meaningless in 2015.

My question is: Is there anywhere I can apply with a coding challenge as a sort of pre-screen? This way even if my resume is lacking, I can still prove that yes, I do know the fundamentals and can think like a coder (I think this is an important skill!) and would be good at entry-level.

Alternatively, any other idea for people in my situation? As I've said, I've started picking up on the new stuff (I'm currently exclusively a Java/C/data structures/algorithms kinda guy), but there's only so fast I can build up a portfolio.

Sorry if my questions have already been asked or is too dumb - but I appreciate the help!
At work we're using HTTP requests and now we added RabbitMQ in the last few months to deal with the fact that our frontend has to talk to our backend. After seeing this article it feels like we chose the wrong tool for the job; protobuf/thrift appear to be typed which would have saved us a lot of frustration as we've already run into multiple cases where the receiver or sender have messed up the type conversion or parsing.
Is it really overloading that's the problem here? Even if you used method names to do this, you'd still have to deal with the fact that the operation being performed is non-commutative.

I don't know that there is a way of expressing such a restriction even if you were using dependent types in such a way as to prevent shooting yourself in the foot here. Possibly you could not implement the month or year span elements altogether and only allow addition of days or seconds?
CurrentC - which is an initiative spearheaded by Walmart. Unlike Apple Pay which uses NFC, CurrentC uses the good old QR code scanning technique, which should in theory make it ubiquitous. But it's not happened so far.
It all stems from that `+` in Ruby is not something mathematical. It is merely a method that needs to be defined on the expression that it follows:

Time.now.+(1.month).+(5.days)

Or:

Time.now.send(:"+", 1.month).send(:"+", 5.days)

`Time.now` evaluates to an object of the class `Time`, which implements the method `+`.

If you are looking for a language basis itself more on "laws" then on "message passing", I found this is Haskell.

In Haskell `+` is a function that need to be implemented for all types in the `Num` type-class. `+` can only add two `Num`s of the same type (and evaluates to a value of that specific type), thus explicit conversion is needed. See the docs here:

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.8.0.0/docs/Prelude...
The resistance really just boils down to 'we can't track our customers any more'. Big chains' POS systems almost all have contactless readers built in (but disabled).

To me this is a feature-I don't particularly want to be profiled by the places I shop at.
Or more accurately, "Doing math that deals with different units of time will inevitably lead to unexpected results."

If you gather 6 different company executives and business requirement authors and ask them all to explain what it means to be "one month and 5 days later" than a given date, I guarantee you will get at least 3 or 4 different answers. No matter WHAT your code implements, it will be unexpected to some users.

As a developer, when I encounter a requirement like this one I feel it is my duty to push back on the requirement. I won't ACCEPT a requirement like "the grace period is a month and five days", and will instead (try to) force those writing the requirements to specify something clear like "the grace period is 35 days" or "the grace period is until 5 days after the same same date in the following month" (still somewhat misleading).

I have been working in software development within big business (banks, mostly) for quite some time now, and I frequently observe that developers -- probably because of the nature of their job -- tend to be good at thinking of something clearly and precisely, while those writing requirements tend to be fuzzy on the specifics but better able to understand the overall picture. Working at the interface between the two, my job is often to get each side to step up to the level of the other.
Yes you can choose to some extent what to remember, but if you have a good memory it is impossible to recall all your old memories so you don't forget them. My memory is still really good (I am hardly suffering from dementia), but it is not able to add new memories without losing the old. I hate this, but I can't really do anything about it :(
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That expression wouldn't always be true even if months did have the same lengths. Two calls to the clock in the same expression are not guaranteed to return the same time.

In the article, that problem is papered over by using string equality. That makes the problem much less likely (because it only occurs at rollovers of seconds) but it will still happen. Tests like this one - has a subscription expired? - should use inequalities, since that's all that's needed and it won't contain heisenbugs like the above.

Edited to add - just to demonstrate:

irb(main):045:0> i=0; loop { i=i+1; raise "#{i}" unless Time.now.to_s == Time.now.to_s; }
RuntimeError: 61473
It took me a long time to come around to the perspective that we should him as a hero and patriot rather than a traitor, but that's where I've ended up.

We don't view the reporters who uncovered Watergate this way--why him?
> Not a 'fixed unit' of time. Where I define 'fixed' as being always of the same size (like gram or meter).

I would regard that as part of what 'unit' means (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_measurement), though I'm not sure that there's any universal agreement.

I think that it's fair to say that even, or perhaps especially, the most obvious concepts, when sufficiently well understood, exhibit subtleties. (I always tell students in my mathematics classes that the correct answer to every question is "it depends", and, though it's somewhat facetious, I honestly can't think of a mathematical statement so basic and obvious that a sufficiently sophisticated mathematician couldn't correctly raise this objection.)

With that said, while I agree that there may be different colloquial definitions of 'day' and, as you mention, of 'hour', and even of 'second' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second#Other_current_definitio...), they also have unambiguous scientific definitions that can be pinned down by sufficiently precise reference; whereas 'month' simply does not.

EDIT: I should clarify that I'm not attempting by any of this to say that programming with times isn't hard—it absolutely is. I just think that a large part of it can be traced to confusion about what is not a unit (which, as observed by cies above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9665366) and DannoHung below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9665472), can include such seemingly innocuous concepts as 'day'), and that it might be profitable explicitly to state this unifying idea as one way to guide attempts to program successfully with time.
2016 Honda Civic Release Date, Thought
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> Munich is amazing.

Indeed.
Looks like a flurry of work on Mar 25 & 26, then no commits since then. Do you consider this complete / ready for production?
> But wouldn't they also have more responsibilities?

From https://hbr.org/2013/06/entrepreneurs-get-better-with/:

“The average age of a successful entrepreneur in high-growth industries such as computers, health care, and aerospace is 40. Twice as many successful entrepreneurs are over 50 as under 25. The vast majority — 75 percent — have more than six years of industry experience and half have more than 10 years when they create their startup,” says Duke University scholar Vivek Wadhwa, who studied 549 successful technology ventures. Meanwhile, data from the Kauffman Foundation indicates the highest rate of entrepreneurship in America has shifted to the 55-64 age group, with people over 55 almost twice as likely to found successful companies than those between 20 and 34.

The narrative of "it's hard to start a company when you have a family and a mortgage" might seem intuitive, but the data around entrepreneurship and small business ownership in this country shows that most people don't start successful businesses when they're young, single and have limited responsibilities.

> If you are an engineer, you likely graduated at 22. By the time you hit 29, you've had 7 years of real world engineering experience.

> Good enough to start your own company, in my opinion.

I don't want to discount the value of engineering experience, but this is hardly all that's required for success. One should not mistake Silicon Valley investors tripping over themselves to provide seed funding to engineers with the creation of successful businesses. A lot of the startups today aren't going anywhere, and you just don't hear a lot about the failures because employees typically aren't out of work for long when the money runs out.
The Week in Bitcoin Issue 20 – A Free Curated Bitcoin Newsletter
URL is the new MP3
Ask HN: What are some interesting labs?
I'm looking for interesting "labs" sections of companies, where they do some experimentation.

Do you know any and willing to share?
I'm currently leading an effort to introduce Haskell in a mid-size Chicago company that was historically a Ruby shop.

Haskell has past "made it". At this point it's an embarrassment of riches. It's easy to get tied up trying to figure out which great Haskell library to use when the fact often is that any one of them is usually better than the leaders in most other languages.
Tldr; a month is not a constant amount of days, it depends on the month of the year
I don't agree that the modern Red Cross has anything to do with Christianity. I've never heard of them evangelizing or take any position on religion. Why do you think that?
What's the context? Which discussion was particularly heated?
Wouldn't Censorship Be Exciting
Unfortunately, ECDSA support is not as universal as RSA.

But I understand that the plan is to start working on ECDSA support pretty much as soon as the first root is stood up, so it shouldn't be long after the start.
The article later clarifies that the Red Cross did not, in fact, build shelters for 130,000 people. According to the Red Cross' documentation, many of those people attended a seminar on home repair or were provided temporary shelters.

This is not the first time the Red Cross has had problems aseembling or executing a cohesive plan. Indeed, this seems to be a problem all of these large aid organization suffer.
Grpc doesn't work over the browser. This is stated explicitly in the FAQ.

See https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/grpc-io/5Ic8MKgltwY
Location: Ahmedabad, IN
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Design, HTML/CSS
Résumé/CV: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wkmsn7rd7zj4lv1/Tejas-Sompura.pdf?...
Email:tsompura[at]gmail[dot]com
In a big 3-letter multinational corporation your experience with the build process might not be representative of the corporation at large.
I think I agree with the sentiment, but your per shelter example is a poor one, it should be "per person sheltered". And any examples would benefit from comparisons to regional costs.
I believe they mean that the Mission of Hope program that they mention is overtly Christian.
The same approach is in legal issues. Words "a month and a five days" shouldn't ever get past a lawyer, you'd get "35 calendar days" or more likely something like "25 business days as defined by XXX; if the notice is submitted past 18:00 then it's treated as if submitted on the next business day"
> Yet you can play new games on a steam machine in decades to come.

Where? Good luck playing something on a 2014 Steam Machine in 2024. If there is still one game 10 years later working on such a configuration that will be a miracle. PC gaming moves very fast, that's the point of PC gaming usually : you upgrade often.
Probably one of the best books on the topics (parallelism, concurrency, distributed programming) overall in addition to being a great Haskell resource.
And the 0.01% of them that succeeded big time (I don't know about the other 99.9%, but don't assume it's really different)
If I recall correctly, Google Wallet should work with any of those contactless payment terminals. I've tried it a few times in the US, anyway.
My first jobs involved maintenance programming with some huge applications and truly awful source code.
http://www.beatlab.com/
> PC technology has slowed down a lot compared to 10 years ago, and it's not the constant upgrading it used to be.

You know that VR is coming right?
Checking your order before you pay us anything
Their defense is pretty weak. Essentially they're claiming the reason houses didn't get built was because they didn't know how to build them, or that there were land disputes. All of which are true. But that should have prevented them from spending any significant amount of money.
You could alternatively say that the brain is constantly full.
It's $166/head counting every person in the area affected by the earthquake, and $2000/house counting all the houses destroyed by the earthquake. Most Haitians did not lose their homes to the quake.
This is true - the metadata about a memory and the actual memory are often stored seperately. In regard songs memory loss seems to occur with the song title before the cord progression is lost. This results in the classic old person lament that all new music sounds the same.
> Some merchants said they were holding out because they plan to participate in a new mobile payment system to be launched by a coalition of retailers later this year.

Oh yes, CurrentC. http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/25/currentc/

> The idea behind MCX was that if enough retailers teamed up, they could convince consumers to adopt their mobile payment system that would let retailers avoid paying credit card fees in the 2 percent to 3 percent range by processing payments through Automatic Clearing House transactions through bank accounts that have much smaller fees. MCX’s app could also help retailers by encouraging loyalty to participating merchants and possibly provide them additional intelligence on their customers.

They want to save money on transaction fees by having your bank account info on file. But don't worry, I'm sure they'll keep in safe. No history of huge data breaches or anything to be concerned about. Meanwhile, their app is a seaspool of their wildest marketing and promotional dreams coming to fruition. It's purpose / existence is not at all for you, it's entirely for them.
Source for the claim that fraud has increased?
Sabah Earthquake: Strong 6.0-magnitude quake rocks Mt Kinabalu region
The biggest revelation to me in that article, which I feel should be highlighted more, is that the Red Cross provides almost zero information about how it spends its money.

It refuses to provide more than very vague information about how the money was spent in Haiti (information like "35% of $488 million on shelters"), with no specific details about what projects they spent the money on, how those projects went etc.

When the author challenged the general counsel of the Red Cross to provide more detailed information ("because clearly you must have it") he just gave her some evasive boilerplate spiel about having provided the summary information he'd provided already.

How can anyone donate to a charity that's so stunningly opaque about how it spends its money?
I like to use Protobuf in my server code, but then support JSON _or_ Protobuf as the encoding. So browsers can continue to use JSON, but the server gets strongly-typed Protobuf structures.
I would not let a single news story exclude you from including them. I've seen too many cases where journalists completely botch an investigative story due to biased sources and their own ignorance.

I personally would like to see the Red Cross's response.
At one fell swoop
This is a problem I have with much of technical discussion, not just web. The writer focuses on details of a solution, assuming knowledge of the big picture. I'd often like the big picture, so I can have some context for the details I choose or stumble upon.

It's like reading documentation for MS Word, with every menu item explained but no clue as to how you'd put together a large, complex document. How to use every little feature, but nothing on when and why to use the features.

Please keep that in mind, writers. :)
You know that in that video, Windows wins clearly in FPS in high settings right ?
Why do you even do all of this?
It's rather painful that they don't seem to have any design docs up for their HTTP transport, leaving it to things like FAQ entries to explain these details. This was my first thought too- grpc does this.
Probably multiple, but this one certainly seems to qualify.

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg93416.h...

"TLS everywhere is great for large companies with a financial stake in Internet centralization.
It is even better for those providing identity services and TLS-outsourcing via CDNs.
It's a shame that the IETF has been abused in this way"

Looks like a very unprofessional and offensive attribution of motive, which completely fails to keep the conversation on a constructive course.

P.S. Nice to see someone's trying to bury this. It's exactly the kind of thing the OP talks about, provided in direct response to a question. How could that possibly be worth a non-partisan downvote?
I almost agree. Probably the 7% is too much for only getting use to the setup and training, but to be sure I think this experiment would be much better if he compare again the performance after he stopped taking the drug. Something like a A-B-A test.

Article about A-B-A: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-subject_research

Much more information and other variations: https://onlinecourses.science.psu.edu/stat509/book/export/ht...
Really surprised this hasn't gotten more traction here, as it seems to be right in HN's wheelhouse.

I hadn't heard of Curtis Yarvin or his online nom de plume until yesterday, but this statement is completely unconvincing on why someone whose presentation passed a pretty thorough review process should be disinvited for essentially unrelated political writings.
My guess is that if you have a universal hardware hypervisor escape, you write the abstract for that talk much differently.
Yep. I'm actually thinking that it'd end up less about drugs and more about high-power prostheses. Bottles of oxygen, tweaked pacemakers, artificial muscles, full-blown new limbs, that kind of thing. It'd rapidly become all about how intelligently the athlete is able to train with their new technology, making informed consent a requirement for performance rather than an ethical task.
OP here. Surprised to find this article on the HN front page, a month after we originally posted it.

Glad to answer questions. Ask me anything!
As long as we're posting wikpedia links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second

I wouldn't trust any time unit larger than seconds if I was concerned about my units staying consistent. Hopefully time-keeping bodies don't decide we need leap-millis at some point.

Which is only to say that this is a problem that can't be solved simply by discarding some concepts that you find problematic. There's a lot of shit about timekeeping that's problematic. I'd advise tossing all the problematic shit when trying to figure out some internal representation for the underlying time that more or less always makes sense and then building out more human-usable representations with the uglyness on top of it.
I don't see how protobuf is mutually exclusive with RabbitMQ. RabbitMQ is a message broker and can send around byte arrays. These byte arrays can be anything, including protobuf messages.
RedditStorage reminds me of a couple business models we tried out that tanked..

The first was a new business where we would go to trade shows, conventions, hell even fast food places, and just collect as many free beverages, condiments, napkins et cetera as possible. Then we'd sell them online.

The other one didn't do much better. We'd go to a Lowes Tool Rental, and just rent a bunch of tools and then re-rent them out of our truck in the parking lot. They had to have them back an hour before Lowes closed for the night.

Our current business model is, we go to bars and hit on people, and if we get their phone numbers, we add it to a subscription service where other people can have access to it.

Honestly, I feel we're no more in the wrong than RedditStorage is.. /s
My main issue with it is I still have to get my wallet out for the grocery store's loyalty card, so I don't get much of a time savings.
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