skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Given how passionately John Carmack posts about Racket development in his twitter feed, I suspect most of these performance issues can be overcome with more experience.
What is the upside down experiment meant to prove? Seems to me that the mental rotation issues indicate that mental image processing is not very rotation tolerant, but rather needs a hardwired (and slow) counter-rotation step added to cope with rotated symbols, which you could just as well tack onto a neural network. Am I missing the point?

Also, being able to consciously recognize letters is relatively easy, but the normal reading process, with which people recognize well-known letters and instantly unconsciously convert them to sounds, does require quite a bit of repetition of those letters before it starts to kick in...
Implementing an Abstract Development Server in Haskell
Employee happiness is relevant to profit/loss, unless it isn't. Look at Walmart: Profits are fine, and employees are noticeably unhappy.

Don't delude yourself with idealism. Capitalism is the way it is and it's not right or wrong any more than a beaver building a dam.
Good point.. I misread your post. Also I couldn't resist a sly dig haha
Landing a Data Science Job
What the fuck is with motherfuckers misspelling words like "fuck" and "motherfucker"?

It's rude to misquote something. The rapper known as Rick Ross didn't say "mutherf ASTERISK ASTERISK ers", he said "motherfuckers". It's right there in the song if you hit play.

Why does he edit the text of the song but not the audio?

What the fuck is wrong with Americans thinking that some words are "bad" and should thus always be misspelled?

If they're bad, stop using them. If you're going to use them, spell them right. Spelling it "mutherf ASTERISK ASTERISK ers" doesn't keep my brain from thinking "fuck".

PS: HN's markdown doesn't let one escape an asterisk to get a literal asterisk.
Wow.
Speechless.
The reason the feature exists is so the equipment can pass EMC (electromagnetic compatibility) tests such as FCC Part 15 for emissions. By spreading the radiated energy further out across the frequency domain, the peak amplitude is reduced and you stay under the limit. Of course this raises the noise floor for everyone, but my sheep ought to be able to graze in the common.
I think that people greatly overestimate the productivity gained by sacrificing sleep. For intellectually taxing work I think it is probably detrimental overall, particularly if chronically sleep derived. Lots of high profile successful people say the don't sleep, but this may largely reflect their exceptional drive and dedication, rather than any real benefits.

The second thing to consider is the use of stimulants like modafinil, apparently quite common in the startup community.
Well I suppose a guest with access the internet could also deploy malware to a website which is then visited by the host computer and downloads a hack that patches vmware to allow full host control from the guest.

Depends on what you mean by "escape".
I'm still liking Visual BASIC 6.0 before the Dotnet era.

A shame that newer versions of Windows have problems installing it.

There is Jabaco that takes VB 6.0 syntax and compiles it to Java bytecode:
http://www.jabaco.org/

It doesn't have ADO database support so I can't write apps with Databases in VB 6.0 and port them to Jabaco.

This trying to make C++ do BASIC commands is hard, might as well use this instead:
http://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/

You can find the Classic BASIC games here:
http://www.vintage-basic.net/games.html

They should work with PC-BASIC.
I lost my father 3 weeks ago, the grieving the day before Father's day has been difficult. Tomorrow I'm not sure I will be getting out of bed much.
Misread that as Cadpiss.
Um, as far as I understand, he wasn't banned from attending StrangeLoop, just that he had his talk pulled.

Given that, could we please either clarify this with Alex, or stop claiming this as it just further distorts the truth and politically weaponizes this situation even further?
> Is it normal for founders to send emails at random times all night to the team (most nights)?

In my opinion, this question is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is how the founder's behavior makes you feel.

You say that you have worked with people who are extremely effective but never seen similar behavior. You say you are concerned that the founder is too tired and may be exhibiting poor decision-making. And, perhaps most importantly, you don't feel comfortable broaching the subject with him.

It appears your gut is telling you that something is off here. When it comes to where you invest your time professionally, you can usually do far worse than to follow your intuition.
Who says that being nice is a competitive disadvantage? Being mean or stingy to employees makes them less motivated, increases turnover, and ensures you only get the people that nobody else wants to hire.

Costco is an example of a retailer that treats its employees well, and enjoys turnover rates a fraction of the industry norm. That means greater productivity, and lower hiring and training costs.

The problem is not optimizing for profit, but optimizing for quarterly profit. Short-term thinking for short-term profit but long-term costs.
would be interesting to hear Snowden's take on this
What is the probability of that guy being Snowden himself?
I think Magic could be great as a lower-price-finder for people with a more normal income.

ie.

"I found a rental car for $PRICE at SFO tomorrow. Can you find me anything cheaper?"

If Magic finds you a better deal even with their cut (they work their fee into the price they quote you), they get paid & you still save money.
I think the point of whois is about the same as the point of the yellow pages. Contact information is not supposed to be secret information except when deemed necessary by circumstances.

I could however see a strong argument to remove the email field, as any email address will be abused regardless of whom or what will actually read things sent to it.
Maybe I missed it but I didn't see this mentioned: http://gobyexample.com

This site helped me tremendously. I still reference it all the time when I'm uncertain about something.
This is wrong and should be stopped. Microsoft is another corporation after Google which gets and stores our WiFi passwords (android wifi networks backup).
And it gets even worse than that, in certain environments the fact that it takes more energy to flip a transistor than to keep it on the same output can leak information.

Noise technically mitigates, but it's like covering your unlocked safe with a cardboard box.
It seems insulting to suggest that someone's well-informed personal choice about their own life is wrong. Doublely so when you put the blame for the wrong choice on others, as if she was so incapable that she's blameless.

Just saying, if I were her, I'd be insulted you thought so little of me.
HN discussion of the paper that this is based on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6309631
Why do they do this instead of just ignoring networks with hidden SSIDs?
So write a haiku, xor your random key with repeated copies of your haiku, call the result modern art, and copyright that.
Millennials' Political Views Don't Make Any Sense
This article is pretty useless IMO. It lays out all of the challenges for going to Mars and doesn't mention once the many research programs that have been going on for years to tackle most (if not all) of these issues.

This pessimism of the target timeline seems to be based on the assumption we can't solve problems we already have been working on solving. Considering it took about 12 years to fully develop the Apollo program (from funding to moon landing), I'm pretty hopeful about a 15 year or so window for Mars with today's technology and resources, given we already started years ago.
MNIST Digits for Node.js and the browser
This doesn't help with dependency management. Changelogs, no matter how well written, cannot replace semver in e.g. Ruby / Rubygems / Bundler version constraints:

https://robots.thoughtbot.com/a-healthy-bundle
> I now have an entire life to live without him existing.

That one's we love exist for eternity within us.
So, Justin Kan has done well for himself financially, and used Magic for a bit of fun. But don't write Magic off as just a concierge for the rich.

Things in the past month I've used Magic for:

* Was in a city without Uber; Magic called a taxi to my location (and took care of payment)
* Got my car re-keyed with a locksmith
* Called a few restaurants/bars to try to find my lost wallet
* Called my doctor's office to figure out what the best insurance for me to get was.
* Delivered custom-drilled 2x4s at 9pm within an hour
* Removed a bunch of garbage (since we moved and had lots of boxes)
* Delivered an Apple Express within an hour
* I said "find me a nice restaurant within half a mile for 3 people available in the next hour", and they found and made me a reservation.
* Checked what time my parking garage closed (the hours weren't listed online)
* Called my upcoming hotel and arranged for a package to be delivered to my room.

There's a bunch more I've had them do. It's been amazing for things that aren't hard, but that I don't have time for.

I'm still trying to figure out what to use Magic for, but every time I do, it really is magical.
Having seen my fair shares of people like these, I say it has everything to do with their own personal lives not sorted and them taking it out at workplace. If anything, companies should be extra vigilant in rooting out such workers.
Aggressive behavior is the norm when working as a consultant. You have to know that it's not personal and that part of it is negotiation on the part of the client, part of it is anger on the part of the client, some of it is just due to poor personality, some of it due to your misunderstanding of the situation and culture.

Most people are not fit to work in a high-stress, aggressive environment, but some of us are. And that's why we get paid a lot for not doing a heck of a lot.

I worked as a 'clean up' consultant in Europe for a couple of years - going to clients that had failing projects and were desperate to bring in a developer to get the project back on track. My job was 75% calming the client down and making them feel loved and 25% programming.

And boy, do I have some stories...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4916629
You could extract the handshake nonces and do this easily enough. It's fairly pointless though because WPA2 uses a weak hash function, so your "contacts" would still be able to intercept enough to attempt to bruteforce your password.

Also this entire thing seems dumb. If you need to connect to Microsofts server before you have wifi then you already have data.
Around $2,460, at least[0]. Also, I suspect you pay for fuel and time although I have never rented a helicopter. There is also a fee from Magic for booking through them.

[0]http://www.newyorkhelicopter.com/charters/charter-rates/

edit:
> All additional expenses will be passed on at cost landings, parking, late operations, overnight expenses or other charges directly incidental to the flight requested.

> Charter prices are one-way and don’t include Landing Fees from the Manhattan Heliports.

A fee for landing at JFK was likely levied.
That's a fun program. Similar techniques to this are used to create "ROP" (return-oriented programming) exploits. You get enough building blocks to get general purpose programming, and it's "just" matter of mapping to those building blocks.

X86 "mov" is a bit of a cheat, though. It's a single mnemonic for what's really dozens of quite different instructions. For example, ARM has "mov" for register-register operations, but "ldr/str" for register-memory, while X86 just uses mov for everything. Even ARM mov optionally puts a barrel shifter into the path, so it's not that pure either.
Silicon Valley is a big fat lie
Are you able to share a few?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9703766
The even crazier runner is the one with MS who continues to run and is now one of the best distance runners in the country. She also collapses at the finish line. There was an ESPN short video piece about her last year:

http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=11909407

The NYT wrote an article as well and it is linked in the above article but I thought I would call it out here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/sports/for-runner-with-ms-...
I think it is to deal with data caps. And brute force is always possible if one has the 4-way handshake and the password is only useful if you are near enough to actually connect to the network. AFAIK the PSK uses PBKDF2.
Speaking purely to the professionalism and responsiveness of Magic, yes it's pretty impressive.
Even if one is generous and assumes this kind of behavior is typically well-intentioned, it's foolish to believe that it won't become a detriment as you grow your business.

A lot of startup founders don't think much about management principles and the importance of perception in an organization, but these things matter. When founders are emailing around the clock, many employees will come away with the perception that they're expected to be available at all hours of the day and night too. Your employees are never going to be as invested as you, so this typically creates stress and dissatisfaction for employees more than it motivates and impresses them.

As this Ask HN post demonstrates, a workaholic warrior complex is also a great way to convince your employees that you're an "i" word (insane, insensitive, imbalanced, incompetent, etc.).
unable to reproduce on 10.10.3.
Unfortunately for Europe the actual problem is Asia and globalizaton in general. However much you may dislike it the economy is global. Yes you can sell each other heavily regulated lattes but that does not change the market realities for fungible items.
Lenat himself was talking about using some of that tech for the US Intelligence community and policy prediction of other states. Not sure if anything came of it, but it's not far-fetched for these organizations to have shoveled some money in that direction.
Income from Blogging Success
This is a very hard problem. Not only do you have to find a distribution that follows the law, the numbers still have to make sense in context (changing a 1 hour consult/doctor visit to a 9 hour consult). With election fraud you are usually up against a state statistician who at least tried to 'Benford-Proof' their numbers, so then the challenge is to find patterns of this Benford-proofing. For instance, Benford's law can be extended to the second or third digit, exposing the 2009 Iranian elections: "The data give very strong support for a diagnosis that the 2009 election was affected by significant fraud" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_Iranian_preside...
> raises the question

FTFY
Just because you are now working on an idea that bunch of people with the sole intention of maximizing their returns on their investment shouldn't change the way you function as a normal human being although I'm more worried about this excerpt:

> "The lead founder of the company sends emails at all hours of the night, even 3 or 4AM and talks about how little sleep he is getting like it is a badge of honor."

and seeing how it connected to your original posting:

"Hi HN, I left a job at a respectable corporation to
join a YC startup "

I don't get it. YC doesn't guarantee success. From what I read, YC gets the pick of the litter, the rejects either raise money from others or bootstrap or just go back to the workforce. The same thing happens even if you are in YC...

You made a decision to leave a stable job to join a YC startup. You realize the founder is not letting you sleep or has some weird ego about being poorly productive (no sleep means you aren't performing 100%), and now you are questioning if you made the right choice, and it seems like you have every right to question your decision based on the environment you are currently in.

A normal and healthy working environment (YC or being a startup is no excuse) doesn't have people sending emails at 4AM and expecting people to read their bragging rights on how shitty their work output will be throughout tomorrow because they didn't sleep. IF I WAS AN INVESTOR AND THIS IS HOW PEOPLE WERE BURNING MY MONEY I WOULD BE FUCKING LIVID AND IMMEDIATELY FIRE WHOEVER IS RUNNING YOUR COMPANY.
You're entitled to believe whatever you'd like, but if you want to make a convincing argument that being a part of YC is a meaningful advantage, you'll have to explain why, as I previously noted, the success of YC startups basically follows the same power law distribution you see across the Valley.
Asking people to change their SSID so the system won't share something they are not supposed to be sharing to begin with is very ridiculous. I really don't understand why this is not opt-in to begin with. Microsoft should be forcing people to put in _optin in their SSID to allow this feature to work if they are so inclined to use an SSID to regulate access. At least it would be semi-tolerable if there was a web form of some sort that I can simply put in BSSID so it gets blacklisted systemwide, but I don't think that's even there.
It's not "normal", but it's quite common among startup founders. I think this says more about VC backed startup culture and the personality types that it attracts, than anything inherently wrong with an individual.

The personal sacrifices and risks that founders take on likely changes their personalities and behavior. Once they enter this feedback loop of sleep deprivation, extreme work ethic, and dedication to their startup above all else, it's quite difficult for them to get out of it. And the longer they stay in it, the more likely that things will end badly for them.

The worst part is that these individuals are the least likely to listen to reason and get help.
Oh? I haven't seen those! I definitely need to look into it more.
There can be considerable productivity gained, for very short windows of time. It's all "tortoise and the hare". If you have something due at 7AM, sprint. If it's due in three months, pace yourself and optimize average productivity, which usually means balancing working hours against sleep, exercise, relaxation, socialization, and food.
> Otherwise the star's position would have already been measured by past light being deflected

Well, this is the interesting question, isn't it. We don't actually know what happens to spacetime when you get a macroscopic divergence like this because we only have access to this one universe, and no good theory of quantum gravity (yet). It's possible (for example) that there is only one spacetime for the wavefunction, and that what is currently called "dark matter" is really the result of macroscopic superpositions of states.
So security through obscurity, well done.
Them sending emails at random times might be just their sleeping/working schedule as well as habit to send emails instantly when they see an issue when working on something.

I have this habit and my sleeping schedule sometimes gets shaky. I am also a founder of a small start-up so all this sounds like me (expect maybe badge of honor thing as I see messed up sleeping schedule as a problem not a thing to brag about). I think that as along is it's understood that those emails are not urgent to respond (or even read) and are there as just "things to look at once you have time" it's all good.

I think it's good to clarify their position on it and what their expectations are for you reacting to those emails.
"%50 of former employees admit to stealing confidential company data" [1]

Even with oaths and allegiences, the probability that Snowden is the only one to take advantage of the lax security in the NSA is 0.

[1] http://www.symantec.com/about/news/release/article.jsp?prid=...
First, I think that people aren't becoming less uncivil but that environments are getting worse. If anything (although this is probably an artifact of increasing age and status) people seem to be getting better, on the whole: fewer mean jokes and exclusionary behaviors. Work environments, with the open-plan trend, are getting a lot worse and more stressful. It used to be that an off-color joke was heard by 2 people in a private office; now it's heard by 40 in a bullpen. Open-plan offices tend to magnify the cumulative effects of microaggressions, which is one of the reasons why every population except for the most constitutionally insensitive one (those who've never had negative experiences, either due to general inexperience or a combination of privilege and luck) hates them.

Second, when you're aggressive or even uncivil, it hurts you with that person. That said, it can be beneficial-- in very small doses. Punching down is bad, while punching up is risky (the best target is a person of high status, that is "punching up", and low character, but with no real power) and if you're perceived as being uncivil for personal benefit, you're just considered an asshole. Usually, uncivil behavior is to one's benefit when (and pretty much only when) one is perceived as being that way for the group: you're a protector. People tire of selfish rule-breakers and firebrands, but those who behave in such ways for group benefit tend to inspire loyalty.

Don't get me wrong: it's generally best not to be uncivil or arrogant at all. It's just not intellectually honest to say that it's always socially detrimental to be that way. You have to be extremely selective in your targets to make it work, though.
> Most people are not fit to work in a high-stress, aggressive environment

Yep, that's me, and I have no shame admitting it. I absolutely cannot handle that kind of environment. The less interpersonal interaction I have to deal with, the happier I am.

Luckily, as a grad student I can work by myself and spend my time creating and learning all kinds of interesting things. But I'm a little worried that once I graduate I won't be able to find a job that has this much freedom...
I'd cut and run while you can. Sure, some people love this shit, but leave that to them, there's likely other opportunities out there for you.
I wouldn't mind if gasoline tax went only towards road maintenance.

We should move carefully though because I am sure hard earmarking can be disastrous if taken all the way.
> What does the projectional editor offer compared to text editors?

https://github.com/projectured/projectured/wiki/Overview
How much are you paying though? The service is undoubtably being heavily subsidized by VC money. This is the classic silicon valley model, a model I love, but there has to be a light at the end of the tunnel.

As noted in the OP, this also reminds me a lot of Exec, and Exec didn't work. In the post-mortem, JK makes a very interesting point:

> if a job request came in and there were no Execs available to run them ... we sent someone from the office to run the jobs ourselves. Unfortunately, this gave us a false sense that the quality of service for our customers was better than it was, as the average competence of our employees was higher than our average recruitable errand runners. [1]

This is a critical problem that any service business like Magic will run into. Training and quality becomes much harder at scale, and the more you have to pay for "Magicians", the more you have to charge. And if it costs too much money, it isn't "Magical" anymore. Yes, they have advantages over Exec because they can arbitrage less expensive labor overseas, but quality at an efficient price is still going to be a huge issue.

1: http://justinkan.com/exec-errands-post-mortem
Being unable to sleep is terrible especially when it happens over a longer period of time. I've had this during years when ww.com was going through the .com boom and subsequent bust and only since I finally sold it has this changed and I sleep like a baby now. The stress has to go somewhere I guess.
That would also explain the Kijiji-is-big-in-Canada submarines which have been appearing lately
Sounds like if we make a JS to BF transpiler, then we can complete this with any language that can be transpiled to JS.

Just imagine the applications of this!

The next step would be to make this into an eventual Quine.