skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> time slips away

It doesn't help that many modern games explicitly use Operant Conditioning to keep people playing. MMOs and "free to play" games are notorious, but you will find Skinner Boxes in a lot of modern games.

Extra Credits has a nice overview, which includes a few design suggestions which games can use instead of hooking players with a reward schedule.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c

Also, it's not just games - you will find Operant Conditioning style reward schedules in some "social media" businesses, too, which can waste someone's day just as bad as any game.
My blog post does explain the standard algorithms! Just, the ones that are standard now. That reply actually made no sense. I guess the maintainer thought that my post described novel research. It didn't.

There's now a ticket to implement the dynamic oracle, as I recommended: https://github.com/nltk/nltk/issues/905
Aren't you using the Web 2.0 right now though?
When I alt tabbed to the site there was a slow fade-in on the menu.
Nice to see tools make tasks easier, but I do not like the trend of using every other new (I know Haskell is not new) language for it. I don't need the large download and compile time for a simple tool.

But great work!
This was a good article to read.

Less seriously, back in hn, re: "we're going to change the world!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I
Convert your COMPETITORS into MENTORS with these hacks
Complex software is possible to get right in the same sense that it is possible for all the O2 molecules in this room to move to the other side of this room at the same time.

It is technically possible, but improbable enough that, in the absence of direct evidence to the contrary (in this case, a functional browser that doesn't have bunches and bunches of exploitable bugs in its JS engine), it may as well not be.
It's not mine - it's from http://tantek.com/2015/069/t1/js-dr-javascript-required-dead
Email Marketing Mistakes
springer book advertisement.
Well it seems that in this case PE firms have managed to cripple the firm and then sell it. Strangely the details of that sale are not discussed in the article.
> A front door that unlocks when you approach.

Mmmh, what could possibly go wrong with that?

I do not deny that there might be some useful applications for "IoT", but what I have heard / read about so far sounds mostly like solutions desperately looking for problems so everyone can ride the hype train.

Given the numerous security issues we have seen on the Internet so far, I have serious doubts about hooking up everyday objects or critical infrastructure to the Internet just for the sake of a little convenience.
Sidestepping the question of if that actually adds anything to the article - they couldn't be bothered to do the fade-in correctly?
The dialogue from the teachers is precisely in line with what I experienced in gradeschool. I'm sure you can find dozens of others to corroborate: there's something about school administration that seems to attract (or create?) petty authoritarians who convince themselves that any slight against their person is an egregious crime in and of itself.

> 1997 also seems very very early for this kind of activity

It wasn't.

> Also is it being implied the American friend gave up his identity?

Could have been the teacher saw his reaction, overheard rumors, or asked/coerced the information from other students.
Does your username really mean goat-armpit-guy?
I was almost suspended at school eight years ago for using `net send` from .bat files and because I had Everest portable on my network drive (a tool that lists system specs, I was curious what hardware the PC's had).

The guy that managed the network at the time was almost personally offended and accused me of 'hacking' the network with dangerous tools. He got the school board involved, my parents had to go talk to the headmaster. My parents and I had to sign a contract which said that any other 'unauthorised' use of the school network would get me suspended for 3 days.

If you have one bitter person working somewhere and nobody knows enough about something to stop them, you can get these power-mad types. Probably happens a lot at schools with just one network administrator.
> Public schools are often filled with petty tyrants.

If you think that's only public school you're deluding yourself. My secondary education was in private schools (in the US sense of the word) and I have no issue whatsoever seeing this scenario unroll there (I can even cast the parts).

Petty tyrants is what you get when petty people get access to any sort of power to lord over others, the exact nature of that power has little relevance. The concentration of petty tyrants is only a function of how easy it is to be granted power by the environment.
Getting past the idea of having wine with breakfast(!) what's in your personal Italian blend?
Stalin said, "Quantity has a quality all its own."

100,000 lines of code is super simple!
In-Stream Big Data Processing
I find a good way to unfuck those sites is to use something like uMatrix or Web Developer to disable CSS (in uMatrix's case it can't disable inline CSS and needs a page reload, but of course it does a ton of other things and this probably isn't an as important use-case). Also works well when text doesn't properly wrap when the browser window is narrow or when broken menus and bars obscure the content, etc.
>There's an obvious startup here.

Maybe, but the related startup idea that came to mind for me might seem
a bit odd; similar linguistic patters might exist in statements made by
startup founders and they might be indicative of success or failure. The
"excessive positivity" and "unnatural politeness" seen prior to betrayal
may also be present prior to startup failure.

The real problem with attempting to prove or disprove this conjecture
seems to be getting the needed data. It might be possible from public
statements from founders, but I think the more significant gems would
only be found private correspondence between the founders and investors
(or possibly customers). I sincerely doubt YC partners or VC's like Marc
Andreessen (@pmarca) and Ben Horowitz are going to let "just anyone" do
linguistic analysis against all of their private personal/business email
content.
No one here is interested in reading inflammatory posts about tiresome old flame wars. You call it an awful virus, I call proprietary licenses a distasteful cancer. You call it insane, I call it entitled attitude to other peoples work.

At work and private life I don't include other peoples copyrighted work if I don't have a license for it. It's one simple rule. If I don't want to agree to the license because its too expensive or it put requirements on me which I refuse (like NDA's), then I have a simple choose to make. I can chose not use it, I can implement it myself, or I can hire someone else to do it.
This is essentially the flip side to the more banal paradox of the casino itself: the expected value of casino games are strictly negative for the player, but people choose to play them anyway. In the case of the St Petersburg game, the variance means that you're far more likely to lose money than win it in a single game, despite the highly positive EV; in the case of the casino, the variance means that you can often walk out ahead after playing roulette for an hour or two despite the slightly negative EV.
I had a really similar experience when I was in high school, though I didn't get expelled. I made a website with photos of students (and their first names) giving the finger to the camera. People of course set this as the home page on library computers.

Unhappily, this was right after Columbine, so the administration was super paranoid and I was a little X-Files-obsessed black-trenchcoat-wearing weirdo... so I got a week's suspension.
This happened all the time, all over the US.

Felt like authoritarian heavy handed red-faced response to early anonymous publishing of tracts and pamphlets, all over again.

Good read starting with the 1500s here:

THE IDEA OF A FREE PRESS:
THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS UNRULY LEGACY

— http://www.worldcat.org/wcpa/servlet/org.oclc.lac.ui.DialABo...

I was part of an early ISP (1993 - 1997). There was this kind of "insolent" free speech vs. fumbling authoritarian quashing all the time.

Our ISP policy: Don't like what you have to say, but will defend your right to say it. And we, not teens but in our twenties, thought this new power for the individual voices was indeed "hilarious" — and awesome.

I often miss the truly self-published pre-ad-driven ecosystem days of $19/month for a dial up modem and your own web site.

// As it happens, in addition to offering both web hosting and shell, I also invented dynamic DNS, with connection event driven mapping from Portmasters to a custom DNS host, to point your username.isp.com to your own dynamic dialup IP address so you could host whatever website you wanted on your own box, not ours.
Any plans to support ASIO?
Nips 2015 Accepted Papers
You can find a csv with titles, authors, and affiliations here: http://jatwood.org/blog/nips-2015-accepted.html
I notice this with social games especially. The whole levelling, achievement and overblown rewards system is designed to give a dopamine kick regularly, up until you need to pay to proceed. It's almost like a drug. In fact, that's how cocaine works.

With ADHD, it's even worse. The mind craves stimulation as there's a distinct lack of dopamine in an area of the brain. Games amongst other things give this area nice kick, which is why we see hyper focus.
The degree to which kids get fucked with before they're even allowed to enter society necessitates people like that exist. Working at a school isn't exactly esteemed. You were both smart enough to see through the situation and to... Not work at a school. We just keep putting the wrong people in the right place to exacerbate a negative feedback loop.
>> As Nick Lane, a biochemist from University College London, once wrote, “More than being the first to see this unimagined world of animalcules, he was the first even to think of looking.”

I very much doubt that. To achieve what he did, Van Leeuwenhoek would have needed to: have technical skill; be literate and sufficiently educated; have connections to get published; have access to material resources; have lived in a time of exploration; have lived in a place of freedom of expression; be of the required gender and race; have sufficient free time; and surely a certain amount of luck.

How many others would likely have already considered - perhaps even tried - to look for tiny living things, yet lacked one or more prerequisites from the (incomplete) list above? Nick Lane cannot be refuted, yet this quotation almost certainly does a disservice to the truth. Good and bad ideas are everywhere all the time; Van Leeuwenhoek deserves credit, but only for his execution.
+1

When I click a link and see no content, most often I close the tab and forget about it. Is it really that hard to display simple content without JS nowadays?
I only used C# for a few months, a few years ago, but I immediately loved the language. I wasn't thrilled about the documentation (Why aren't return types listed in [1]?), VS (OK, vim key bindings made more bearable), or just dealing with the MS ecosystem in general, but I loved the language.

It felt like everything Java was suppose to be, but is failing at.

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.string%28v=v...
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10111645 (54 points, 11 days ago, 36 comments)
oh come on.

It's 2015, not 1999. If you don't have javascript enabled, do you honestly expect to be able to read half of the internet?
You can also play words from previous days by going to the leaderboard, selecting another day at the top, then clicking "play this word"
I'm surprised the author didn't submit this patch back to the Linux ARM architecture maintainers - it seems entirely apropos.
For privacy and security I do the same. Requiring javascript to just view a blog article is insane.
Oracle laying off its Java evangelists
I'm not in the US, but I used to have a hosting/redirect service in the 90s and got plenty of takedown requests. Most often just because someone didn't like the content.
Day of the Tentacle was one of the games I was crazy about as a teen. What a lovely game!
Brand new retro motorcycles
Don't be ridiculous.

There's something to be said for supporting accessibility, and I completely endorse that, but if you turn javascript off because you want to, don't complain when you can't read or use a modern website.

The web uses javascript. Get used to it.
This article to me is about depression not alcohol addiction as the author points out -

> The absence of alcohol revealed that my “dark soul” was the manifestation of a decades-long depression. Booze had masked its diagnosis while also egging it on.

They to me are more talking about binge drinking.

I'm not sure an addict can just go to one AA meeting and stop. Sure it's possible, but to me they didn't sound like an addict, more self destructive.
There's something extra-satisfying about debugging a debug facility. Nice detective work.
Ownership Story: Why I'll Never Buy a Gas Car Again
Snake oil salespeople jumped into moocs and have pushed their ascendancy back by years. They, presently-generally work great for a specific set of people, but don't yield sufficiently effective results for broad groups. Check out the research thus far. It's not as engaging and lacks the habit-forming that drives people to complete and compete for high marks in areas which aren't in alignment with the interests of the student.

For mature learners focusing on a topic of interest, great. For young learners build a general foundation, not so much. Now, it's a different conversation to cover curriculum, but that's not of MOOC's concern.

And, to wit, "adults not recollecting fond experiences" is double-edged. There are few other times in people's lives where they are essentially forced to rub shoulders with such a cross-section of their culture. These experiences do afford experience in cross-pollination which have positive benefits as much as they cause angst for participants. If parents are able to shield their kids from "others" a certain solipsism is a consequence. During formative years, there is a value to broad cultural experience that should be balanced with providing a safe and nurturing environment for the primary task of learning.
Lovely, Germany invites people, but demands other countries to take care of their guests. Social support for immigrants in Germany is higher then median salary in many EU regions.
I achieve the same effect regularly with hgview /path/to/file
you can watch how the file changes commit by commit.
Surely there's something similar for git?
http://www.hgview.org/
>> I honestly think this keeps things more productive
> So you're just going to ignore the fact that the article notes studies proving the opposite?

I went back and reread the article. It's just one study as far as I know. This one involving 170 something people in the US:
http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/72/4/775/

How was it done ? What was the control group ? How did they choose the members ? Are these some college students as in so many psychological studies ? Does it compare to real world companies hiring people that match the company culture and are professional enough to cooperate in most conditions ?

The more I think about it the more it fels very fluffy and hard to take for granted.
For me, the utility of reading some random blog post that requires JS is far less than the potential consequences of enabling JS for every random blog post, given that most browser exploits require JS.

As such, when the only reason that a site requires JS to be readable is sloppy coding, yes, I call them out on it.

I enable JS only for things that require it for a good reason, and where I am reasonably sure that they won't be exploited. Doing a fancy fade-in on load (which, by the way, can easily be done accessibly) is not a good reason, and I am not reasonably sure that some random blog won't be exploited.
Could use this

https://www.wordsapi.com
I respect your suggestion as therapy is an extremely important part of tackling any issue of mind. I do feel, however, treatment should be physician led, especially since there could be a physical issue that both the OP and a therapist may not pick up on. It doesn't seem likely but then again: I'm no physician.

Books, as I've recommended else where, such as Feeling Good by David Burns can also help. Of all the self-help books available, ones based in science and backed with research will help best.

I hope all comments here give you a new way forward and some hope. The best thing to help yourself is to avidly research as much as you can about mood, treatment, advice and strategies so you become your own expert of the problem you face.

Of all indicators of a successful outcome in psychiatric treatment, deep insight into the problem is a big one. After all, a problem thoroughly understood is half the problem solved.
"modern website"

The text is in plain format in the source file. What does the JS add besides actually showing the text. Nothing.

In 1999 the Web had aligned text, fonts, and hyperlinks. In 2015 we need JS to do this!?
It could be that the wine was used to cook, not drink. Just guessing :)
I find it rather... ironic, shall I say, when CSS actively hurts the readability of a site.

This being one of those cases.
Yes, or at least a discussion on why this instruction is not supported (might be just a slip-up or have a bigger underlying reason)
We had a lot of fun with net send at my all laptop school. IIRC there was even a shared address book file with everyone's hostname. It didn't bother the admins, but understandably the teachers.
Spring Boot Performance Tips
Haha, I did the same thing (with net send, which I'd forgotten all about till you said it) when our school got its first network - around 98 or so. I rigged up a QBasic program to use net send to create a school wide chatroom of sorts (I think I used it to sync a filename on a network share rather than send the actual chat though). Never got caught but they managed to disable the functionality and that was that. It's ridiculous how mad they all got about it though.
Actually, you don't need the master password to recover. Reusing master hash (MASTER_PUB_HEX) works just fine.

https://gist.github.com/aexaey/3646bb438f8712cbadf5/revision...

Scroll to the third change from the top - stupid github doesn't allow (an obvious) way to make a direct link to a particular gist's revision.
Thanks for posting this.

I have a sibling that's dealt with anxiety attacks like this for 10 years now, and always had a difficult time understanding what the experience was like until recently he told me "it feels like I'm physically going to die." If nothing else this seems like it will help me sympathize what he's going through.
Of course these things are fixable but not with an over the air software update. Getting your car fixed, especially if it takes a day or more is a problem I wouldn't want to deal with.
Agreed.

As I said: it's a trivial fix.
What RSA key size to use for an SSL certificate
> It's sort of silly that there is no machine-parseable usage spec for common Unix commands

man pages can qualify for a usage spec. Projects like explainshell.com[1] parse these quite successfully.

[1]http://explainshell.com
The Crayon Initiative
Outrageous that they'd bring European solidarity into this. /s
"4096 bit handshakes are indeed significantly slower in terms of CPU usage than 2048 bit handshakes."

I bet they are even slower on mobile devices.
That is not true.

First, Germany has a problem with social support even for Germans, Hartz 4 is horribly low and injust. Financial social support is one of the problems currently with the immigrants: It is basically non-existant. No EU region has a lower median salary than this.

Second, Immigrants are not guests, they are immigrants or fugitives, and possibly supposed to stay.

Third, Germany demands nothing new from other countries. It is EU law that they shall be registered in the countries where they arrive, and it is new and a helping offer to allow those fugitives to continue onwards to Germany. Otherwise they would have to stay in the country they arrived in. Given the tone of your comment, I doubt you would prefer that option.
In 1997 many people were still asking "What is the internet exactly?"

People are still asking that now, to be fair. But the Web was certainly well into the public consciousness in North America by 1997.
What exactly is the purpose of logging all unhandled breakpoint instructions encountered in user-mode code to the syslog, and then continuing...? On Windows, a breakpoint instruction encountered outside of a debugger causes the standard error dialog to appear, and if you choose not to attach a debugger, the process terminates. IMHO that's more reasonable behaviour, as breakpoint instructions shouldn't appear in code that's not being debugged (either by a debugger or itself, as is sometimes the case like the author does here.)

because unprivileged user-space code is able to force the kernel to waste a lot of time printing messages, slowing the whole system down

User code can do that already, or even just run in an infinite loop.
No jQuery! http://codepen.io/tomhodgins/pen/vOqaVa

if you want grids its easy enough to just build exactly what you want, trying to use grid systems is harder than building them.
Great Python Book on Python – Intermediate Python
Also... What 16 year olds weren't allowed to watch The Simpsons in 1997? I mean, yeah when it came out and I was 9 in like 1989 maybe it was edgy... But 1997 it was prime time. South Park was a little edgy in 1997, but not The Simpsons.
US Open: Drone crashes into stands
Love the idea. I imagine the tree could be more organic and interesting though. Lots of animations have beautiful growing trees, maybe I'm thinking of Braid?
I gotta say that EdX and Coursera are amazing - so many things to learn (often for free, but even the paid courses are relatively cheap). Stuff that is better than what our best schools/colleges/unis provide. I'm really grateful for what they're doing.
Nobody much really wants voluntary unemployment. Not for extended periods, anyway.

Funny thing to say on a site where so many people chose a more challenging life exactly because they didn't want to be employees.

Few people want to be idle. That doesn't in any way imply they all want to be employed. There are many ways in which people enjoy living besides being employed - volunteering, studying, researching, exploring, creating art, developing a non-commercially-viable craft or skill, traveling, founding startups and other organizations, the list is endless.

B) Involuntary unemployment still exists with UBI meaning you still get most of that unhappiness.

When you don't need to pay anything to offer a job, there's absolutely no reason for most businesses not to accept anyone. Only unpleasant jobs that few people want to do will still have to be well remunerated - as it should be.

It's not like we're short on useful work even if we are flooded with bullshit jobs and unemployment. We just have a really wasteful allocation of labor.

Which is a great practical point in my favor. The State is one of the greatest sources of bullshit jobs; there's no reason to assume the new guaranteed jobs would be better allocated.

A job guarantee isn't forcing anybody to do anything and it isn't imposed on anybody. It's an offer of a job to anybody who wants one.

If people can't survived without a job, they are forced to get one. If society can easily avoid that but chooses not to for BS moralist reasons, the people advocating for that are forcing others to have jobs.

Economic policies that enforce idleness are only going to contribute to that.

The idea that there is only a choice between idleness and employment is one of the BS parts of the moralism I was referring to.