skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm glad Snowden said DNS should be encrypted.

You know, it's funny because just last week, I chatted with a friend of mine in the UK giving me some pretty crazy rundown of DNS issues he was having. I found out that BT (UK's leading ISP) hijacks DNS for parental control purposes (read: pornblock).

More info here: https://thecomputerperson.wordpress.com/2015/02/18/bts-netwo...

It boggles my mind actual major ISPs get away with this stuff. Sure am glad to use dnscrypt.
TPP's Copyright Trap
(Just for the benefit of anyone not familiar with the book, and meant only as appreciation, not criticism.)

"Then the gas-lights guttered in their copper rings, and the orchestra swung into a flat rendition of 'Come to the Bower.' With a huff, the limelight flared, the curtain drew back before the kinotrope screen, the music covering the clicking of kinobits spinning themselves into place."

http://differencing.blogspot.com/2010/04/kinotrope-clackers....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Difference_Engine
What are the bad features of Java
There was a parsimonious model that got to 8% improvement. We know this as it was posted publicly by "Simon Funk" [0] after he decided to give up halfway through the competition.

This simple but more accurate model would have been a useful foundation for Netflix to build its own internal models on, and highlight the flaws in the assumption of the Cinermark algo.

[0] http://sifter.org/~simon/journal/20061211.html
The stock market applies to companies that have gone 'public', not to privately held companies currently being run by the founders.

The article is not aimed at those that are about to go public or that have already done so but rather at the founders of companies with up to ~30 employees or so and < a few million dollars of turnover per year.
I think this is getting at one of the root absurdities of human existence in general: the desire to be understood, to socially connect, and the overwhelming truth that real understanding is impossible. We are born, we live, and we die alone.

It reminds me of what Sartre wrote, "Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth."
Try $1.5 million.
Microsoft Introduces: Send
Netflix: "I see you liked a couple scifi anime movies. Perhaps you'd like to watch our entire catalog of big breast anime aimed at a completely different audience."
Send is in-and-out email for Office365
Show HN: Hypervault – file encryption app in an HTML file
This is easy to tell before downloading the app (this size is usually listed) and doesn't require a comment. Apple has changed the max size limit for cellular downloads over time (it's now 100mb but used to be as small as 20mb), partially explaining the growth over time.
The intent does matter when answering the original question of why this is surprising. It's because the original author released the code under a license that gave freedoms they didn't intend. It's the original developer suddenly being surprised, and they realize the mistake they made in choosing the license they used.
Why are you interviewing the plumbers? If a million plumber and no programmers applied, you would immediately reject every resume and not interview anyone.

Note that this assumes none of the plumbers have been working on teaching themselves software development in order to make a career change and thus do not have non-work evidence of competence.
That's very situational. Read scaling a database is easy. Write scaling a database is harder and doing computational logic while write scaling a database is harder still. Computational is still a very broad word though and the intensity of those computations is a huge defining factor.

The problem boils down to the "the database" idea described earlier. There are very, very few normalized datasets that I've ever seen that have write scaling concerns on more than 1 or two tables.

Move those to a separate datastore that is built for it and you've largely solved your problem. Postgres can even connect to outside datastores to run queries against them for sake of reporting.
Yeah, it was much faster than starting up the normal way, at least for a small heap (213 ms to restore 128MB on an E5645). I didn't pursue it further because it required root (not sure if it still does) and would've required writing some kind of snapshot manager.
Thanks for the advice, I have seen lots of GCs with head and tail lights out on the road.

What year did you have?
> Also, liquid nitrogen? Is this common in the overclocking community now?

Oh yes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZr0W_g0dqk [2003]
What's your phone number? I think you're on to something, I'd like to call you and hear more about what you think.
Yes! we actually prototyped that.. didn't have great success unfortunately, because of space constraints in our particular application, we have to have our sensors look down a 1/8" passage (passed the motor) down onto the ribbons. I feel like I tested every single optical sensor from digi-key before we finally had to settle with an IR sensor. We use a pretty strong IR LED and bouncing that off of a reflector on the ribbon. We simply could not separate the signal from noise trying to read the actual color of the ribbon. Moving the sensor off the PCB (closer to the ribbon) would have worked, but the cost increase for 6400 pixels.. yeah, couldn't do it.
Hi icelancer,

I will see if I can dig up the contact info for that cleaner. It was over phone and I left Seattle three years ago. Will try!
agile. Who has time?
There are startups focussed on helping kickstarters -- things like the rewards or customer service. Most that I have seen are targeting funded projects (for obvious reasons).
I'll try to dig up their contact info
Then we need to devote actual money to pay students to spend time teaching laypeople or varied ages/economic backgrounds/attention spans how to send secure messages. Or we need some other way to build up a bunch of people who care about and have the skills to resolve that tradeoff.
Qeditas: Formalized Mathematics as a Bitcoin Spin-Off [pdf]
An AMD CPU broke 8GHz with liquid helium! http://hothardware.com/news/amd-breaks-frequency-record-with...
The App Store link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/send-microsoft-garage-projec...

Looks like it only works for email in Office 365 or some school email accounts but I like the idea of simplifying email.
A reading list for entrepreneurs
Ask HN: What are the consequences for a startup employee whose startup fails?
I am a start-up employee and it is almost 4 years now and it seems like the product might not scale up as expected and it would probably not be a unicorn or a 10x and might not even re-cover the VC investment. What should the career path for a founding employee be?
I Am Looking for Feedback on My HowTo on “Privacy and Security Conscious Browsing”
It isn't law makers, it's the common law system. The law isn't just statutes, but also law created by judges over all of US and even English history. Most of the law surrounding traffic stops is created entirely by court rulings.

The big stuff is more clear but there are always exceptions. So no, a cop can't just enter your house without a weapon. EXCEPT: if they are in hot pursuit of a criminal; as part of a legal arrest; to save someones life; etc. But each of those rules has wrinkles that local courts have rules on.
Product Hunt has always felt 'off' to me. It has always had a sense of a closed club open for public viewership. Even though they have opened it up a bit, it still feels the same.
This is a file encryption web app contained in a single .html file (so you can save it and use it offline). It's output is a single .html file containing both the decryption software and your encrypted files.
I don't see how failure or success changes that question of "is a lifetime of free money for some small value of work acceptable?" -- nor am I even saying "no free money ever".

I'm getting at, where does the passive ownership cross the line into rent-seeking?
Show HN: Statsd Manager
Security must, by its very nature, prevent you from doing insecure things. This manifests as an obstacle to users, so they end up choosing the insecure route (writing down passwords etc etc).

Decentralised systems tend to lose to centralised ones because there's no money locus for advertising, development or curation.

It's not totally doomed; the popularity of Snapchat suggests there is demand for services that don't make everything saved and visible forever.
You don't need to install an app, if you do the right pattern of clicks you can download it. But here is an ungated preprint (wasn't available when I first downloaded the paper): http://www.ereuben.net/research/StereotypesWomensCareer.pdf

They could indeed be observing that "asians are good at math" stereotypes are a useful predictor, the study doesn't really give enough info to determine that one way or the other.
Handwriting Generation with Recurrent Neural Networks
Side projects die because of other side projects I think! ;)
I was trying to remember an old joke about waiting in line, and obviously went to Wikipedia.

Amusingly, both the Russian Jokes page and the Russian Political Jokes page appear to have no Russian translations...
it doesn't help morale when you find out a junior dev is making more than a senior dev.
1. If the new company (or a recruiter) contacted you, then the easy answer is: "You reached out to me, and the opportunities sounded exciting enough for me to consider leaving a job I am otherwise happy with." With this answer, it isn't that you are leaving - the interviewing company is more interesting.

2. Don't bring it up unless they ask you why you are leaving.

3. Be prepared for the next question and the next question - your answer must be an answer that does not invite followup questions. Otherwise you run the risk of the interview consisting solely of the interviewer trying to decide if you will leave them in a year.

4. Another good answer is: The company has a great future but my position has no growth potential.

Valley is small. People change. Don't burn bridges. You never know who is friends with whom or whose wife is friends with whom.

Document, document, document - while you are still there. Document what is happening daily. This serves these purposes:

1. if you do end up having a job issue that becomes legal. Documentation is your only defense. (including exact words)

2. if the current employer acts all surprised that there is a problem - the documentation helps explain your perspective.

3. It will help you judge how bad the problem is: is it one person? your manager? the CEO?

4. It will help take the emotion out of it - so you can see the other aspects of the job. (good and bad) It may be time to leave for other valid professional reasons.

Breathe deep and focus on what you need out of this job before acting.
Sounds like that situation isn't going to change soon, and you should probably sell out earlier rather than later.
Kinda spammy? "Get your free copy" Also, what's with all the non-breaking spaces?

It
means&#160;articulating&#160;the&#160;different&#160;kinds&#160;of&#160;users&#160;who&#160;would&#160;get&#160;value&#160;from&#160;your&#160;product,
highlighting&#160;the&#160;leading&#160;benefits&#160;and&#160;features,&#160;and,&#160;as&#160;important,&#160;being&#160;transparent &#160;about&#160;pricing.

Looks like:

It
means articulating the different kinds of users who would get val
ue from your product,
highlighting the leading benefits and features, and, as important,
being transparent about pricing.
Speaking of the devil: http://www.innoget.com/D.1224/Seeking-Ways-to-increase-calcu...
In my experience, I've found Apple tends to drive way more downloads, but the quality of reviews are much worse (people either love it or hate it - 1 or 5 stars). Play users tend to be much more nuanced with lots more 2-3-4s and multi-faceted comments on the actual usage of the app.
Is it still a vote ring if it's "unconscious" ?
The algorithm is:

1. Hadamard transform into a uniform superposition of all variable assignments (very standard step)
2. Add an OFF ancilla bit and rotate it by 1/(2m)'th of a turn for each satisfied clause, where m is the number of clauses, using triply-controlled m'th-root-of-NOT gates.
3. Measure that ancilla qubit
4. If the ancilla stayed OFF, restart the whole algorithm.
5. Repeat steps 2 through 4 a total of R times, without triggering the restart (the appropriate value for R is figured out later)
6. Measure all the variable qubits.
7. Return SATISFIABLE iff all clauses are satisfied by the measured variable values

(Note that I simplified the algorithm. The paper uses ancilla bits to hold the clauses in qubits, but they are not needed because they're only measured at the end and otherwise only used as controls.)

For starters, I'll just say that up front there's no way this works. It's too simple. Other researchers would have tried it. Repeatedly rotating proportional to the amount satisfied and measuring? Too obvious. I would not be surprised at all if a majority of researchers have come up with this idea, tried it, and understood why it didn't work. Grover's algorithm is more complicated than this.

Anyways, why does it actually not work? It becomes clear if we simplify the algorithm a bit more by deferring the conditional restarting measurements.

Instead of conditionally continuing the 2-4 loop R times, simply run Step 2 a total of R times up front. Then measure the R ancilla bits you introduced, and restart if any of them was false. This is equivalent to conditionally restarting because a) there's no information dependency between the loops beyond "don't bother doing it" and b) measurements can always be deferred until later [1].

Now make the simplifying assumption that all variable assignments, except for a single satisfying one, satisfy 7/8'ths of the clauses (based on [1]). Note that applying 7/8'ths of a NOT will transition an OFF bit into a state where it has a roughly 96% chance of being ON.

Since most possible assignments are not satisfying, and non-satisfying assignments have a 4% chance of causing a restart (the satisfying assignment has a 0% chance, but it gets diluted by the exponentially many non-satisfiers), the ancilla bits' measured value will be dominated by the non-satisfying assignments. Each ancilla bit will have a roughly 4% chance of being OFF.

That means the chance of not having to restart is roughly 0.96^R. But the paper says that R increases faster than linear with respect to the number of qubits. So the odds of not-restarting are upper bounded by 0.96^N. That places an exponential multiplier on the running time, because it's so unlikely to succeed as N gets large.

Therefore this is not a polynomial time algorithm.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Measurement_Principle

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karloff%E2%80%93Zwick_algorith...
Totally: http://www.commitstrip.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Strip-...
Agreed, a hundred percent. I'm doing my own startup right now, even (not profitable, but revenue-positive!), so it's not like I have no dog in this big-picture race. Private enterprise is important. I also see how things are awful skewed in favor of the established money/power.

And as for voting on taxes on revenue/inheritance, I do, heh! A few years ago, here in Oregon, they tried to eliminate the estate tax (again), and I happily voted to keep it.
Holocracy: Chaos, or Way of the Future?
"Acidification" is a purposely alarmist term. (ie. oceans are turning to acid).

The pH is slightly moving towards neutral from an alkaline base.

I wonder if the continued use of this term by the "climate change industry" is to relay accurate scientific information or just to help increase their funding?
I'm not asking why they might want to tamper with evidence. The motive for doing so is obvious. I'm asking why, if they did decide to tamper with evidence, did they do such a bad job of it? If they were already editing the video, why didn't they make their edits at times where they wouldn't be obvious?
Find another startup. Or go find a non-startup job.

I'm confused by the question. What other choices did you expect?
Your comment was very interesting, thank you. Allow me to vent my spleen on a different topic for a sec.

> Now americas cup is all about catamarans that seems to have. http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/A...

God it pisses me off that Oracle has enough money to blow sponsoring shit like this while simultaneously working to destroy the software development industry. "We've got enough money to buy useful technologies and run them into the ground, and to run lawsuits that are incredibly harmful to the software industry for decades, and enough left over on the side to race expensive boats for fun." Fuck you, Oracle.
The Brewing VR Platform War
There's also the roads which allow you to get from point A to point B which are subsidizing you, and there's the federal gas subsidy which is also subsidizing your lifestyle.

And if the city proper really did nothing for you, then why would you be working there?
"Things I've already seen" is the worst part of it for me, and is making me more and more likely to cancel the service out of (possibly misplaced) anger at feeling like Netflix is just regurgitating the same content at me to hide lack of a fuller back catalog.
Something like this could be extremely valuable inside an organization. A lot of very valuable knowledge is locked up by employees with no incentive to reveal it.
What would be the point of Apple delivering app updates that work around operating system bugs that they intend to never see the light of day?
FSX – Aerosoft ASK21 Mi –  Gliding Switzerland – TrackIR
Given the project's scope and budget for the agency I guess doing this with actual threads would have made it very hard to maintain on site, magnitudes slower and result in a skyrocketing part count. So this compromise is fair and still impressive.

BREAKFAST did a display before which might have been even more impressive: http://breakfastny.com/dot-screen
This sub-discussion reminds me of the issues with the phrase "job offer". To native English speakers, it is generally taken to mean "company has offered to hire you with a certain compensation package". To non-native English speakers, particularly it seems continental Europeans, it is generally taken to mean "company has offered to consider you for a job" (as opposed to you approaching them).
Technically it didn't fail. If you do not mind losing your vesting opportunities, just look for greener pa$ture$.
New York's Only Female-Led Startup Studio
Again, how long after that enterprise has existed should a person get to claim free money? I think that phrasing, "may not appear fair," is kind of a weaselly way to say "rent-seeking is ok and let's keep it" (which is, I get it, a common sentiment among people who think they might be the rentiers some day). I don't think it is good for society, certainly not the one I'd like to live in, though it sure is good for the person getting that free money.

(And yes, I know this is largely in the realm of hypotheticals, because it seldom happens that the owner is totally absent...)
Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi
Re the self-correction, perhaps it's this:

> Each ribbon also features a reflective strip which is scanned by an infrared sensor, which tells the machine the color each spool is currently showing, allowing for corrections for any slip that may occur.

Source: http://breakfastny.com/f21-thread-screen-press-release
Handwriting Generated by a Recurrent Neural Network
> The pH is slightly moving towards neutral from an alkaline base.

... which would be disastrous for a huge chunk of the ocean's ecosystem. "Acidification" seems entirely appropriate; what's the alternative you'd propose?
Socialize. Get out of the tech bubble. Seriously!

One of the biggest problem of HN type folks is that they don't try to live a balanced life. Even the most hardworking people in the world try to balance things out.

Take some time out to meet some friends every week. Reach out to old friends and make new ones. Go live.

Counter-intuitive as it may sound, you'll soon see that your productivity has increased.
Link to actual paper here :
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nc...

( paywall - your tax dollars at work !!! )

This effect of ocean acidification was incorporated into a global marine ecosystem model

Are these climate models answering more questions or raising more questions?
Join us at Twitter Flight 2015
To be fair, even people aren't able to judge a movie properly. People often change their opinion of movies on second viewing.

Just watching a movie at different times of day can significantly alter your opinion of a movie.
By the same logic though, at the point that heavy write load becomes a reality it's just as feasible to move the heavy write table to an isolated datastore and leave 95% of your data (structurally) in the PG. Even use a PG foreign data wrapper to connect to that new datastore to allow PG to continue any necessary queries against it.

I'm not ever going to argue for heavy stored procedure usage but there are definitely times when it makes sense and more times still when using the features in your database instead of setting up multiple different standalone systems for pubsub, search, json data, etc when your database can do it all makes sense.

It's very similar to the "you can always switch the slow parts" point with Rails to move a part to Go. You can do it all in PostgreSQL and then when you actually reach a point where you've grown it into a bottleneck, move it out.

Postgres isn't SQL Server and it isn't Oracle and it isn't MySQL. It's Postgres. It's a tool that you choose because of it fits your needs, not because somebody told you it was a good database. You choose it as part of your stack. If you are using PostgreSQL because you wanted a dumb datastore then you chose the wrong database and should probably reavaluate your options. That's like getting a Lamborghini to make grocery runs.

http://www.brightball.com/postgresql/why-should-you-learn-po...
8 Different Personality Types and How They Challenge Entrepreneurs
There is a very real evolutionary component to side projects. They are usually born out of an idea, a will to experiment or just because they sound fun. And they are fun, not necessarily due to reaching a certain goal, but as a way to spend time. You could argue that time is wasted, but not every intellectual or emotional pursuit has to be oriented on externally viable goals. Time you spend on side projects could also be time you spend on playing a computer game, crafting something, or any other hobby-like activity. Even though the remnants of old projects can sometimes feel like tombstones or failure markers, for some reason we don't feel the same way about, say, an old save game file.

But most importantly, I want to circle back to the evolutionary aspect: side projects are explorations. The subject of that exploration can vary hugely, but at the end there is a result. The result may be that the project is not viable or not fun. Or it might be a lesson about programming that will improve your performance further down the road. Occasionally, side projects survive and get to pass on their genes in the form of continued development, or partial re-use, or even a commercial spin-off.

All of this is fine, and it's part of the process many programmers go through. I would like to invite people to embrace the impermanence and whimsical nature of side projects from the get go. Learn to love what you're doing, instead of thinking about what the world will be like when you're done with a project.
> Why not hire someone reliable to run the company

I remember reading a blog post by Derek Sivers, of CD Baby fame, how he did just that. But I cannot find it now.