skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The tech industry is not responsible for any of these problems. But it's revealing that through forty years of unimaginable growth, and eleven years of the greatest boom times we've ever seen, we've done nothing to fix them.

This bothers me. This bothers me a lot. There are two problems with this.

First, it's not tech's problem to fix. It's a city-wide problem. Faulting tech for not solving problems that are not tech's to solve is at best dishonest.

Second, this ignores the way that these problems have been codified as unsolvable by the city. For instance, you'll find a lot of support for housing first approaches among the tech community. You'll find virtually zero real support in the city, because that approach requires building housing. We all know how well that goes over. Pretty much any change encounters similar entrenched resistance.

So we wind up with a tech community that finds itself incapable of solving problems for everyone. We cannot contribute to our neighborhoods because our neighbors blow their tops when we try. We do the next best thing - we solve problems for ourselves. It's very far from ideal, but at least we can make ourselves a bit less miserable. We're going to get yelled at either way, so we might as well do so in comfort.

Want to see this change? Start by looking at why we stop caring about the communities we're in. I know I can't be bothered to care about people who have done their best to make me feel unwelcome from day one. "We don't want your kind here" does not move me to empathy - or funding local artists.
I think the point is actually general enough to include every industry: VCs give you enough money to pay people to do R&D / product design until you've got a good enough product that your profits pay for the R&D / product design. In some product industries, this happens by switching to creating a new product (so 3M, GE, etc), and in some this is an endless stream of updates to the existing product (Google, Apple, Intel, etc).

This process can be short circuited by an acquisition, but of course the acquisition is ultimately paid for by past customer profits too.

In the context of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10251676 's assertion that "Drug creation needs to be nationalized, 100% tax funded all the way from researcher to trials to manufacture, and the drugs sold at cost thereafter" which was followed by brixton's reply that "The drugs might end up being cheaper, but there will be much less research for drugs" this remains a very important point: drug R&D folk aren't in it for the VC funding... they're in it for the profit margin. If you remove that light at the end of the tunnel, there are no startups, and the smartest of us go work for the Googles of this world.

(Though FWIW I do think you, refurb, and I are all roughly on the same page if we limit our scope to startups.)
Check these Java interview questions
Bidding for Breaches, Redefining Targeted Attacks
What, no love for Geo? =)
Thanks for the link.

On first glance seems like writing in React is way more verbose and cumbersome than the Blaze equivalent. What are the benefits of going the React route?
Where and how do you store your server passwords?
Well, it's not surprising, but I'm not sure I agree with they psychology that ebooks should be cheaper. Pricing for books is not just a markup over marginal cost. I have this discussion every day in our office - our price is not based on our cost, our price is based on what our customer is willing to pay.

If the price of ebooks has gone up, the publishers are trying to find a balance of maximizing revenues and profit across the every distribution channel, while also taking into account any lost sales due to piracy.

Why should publishers give up rents to readers just because costs have gone down?
Searching for Computer Science: Access and Barriers in U.S. K-12 Education [pdf]
> t's really hard to eat properly, I don't see how it can be done without growing your own.

This attitude is worse than useless, it is actually damaging!!! There is a quite large subset of the population that, once having accepted that belief, will throw their hands in the air and go straight for the frozen dinners.

Cooking simple foods from scratch will take you a long way, even if all/most of the ingredients came from Walmart. Just like walking 15 minutes, twice per day will take you a long way if you do not have time to engage in a more formal training routine. You won't be as healthy as you can be, but at least you'll be ahead of the pack.
This is a severely under-appreciated situation. One has to wonder how many good employees a company misses out on because the traditional style of Silicon Valley capitalism is to be one of the first 20 people in the company or you'll be clawing for scraps like the next 2,000.
I've driven several pickups that require diesel exhaust fluid. It's really not a big deal. If you don't want to pay $3/g for it at Walmart then go to a truck stop where you can get it from a pump for slightly less.
I came to an understanding that the real reason to start investing early has nothing to do with the compound interest theory that is usually provided. It's true but ultimately boring and doesn't really inspire.

The reason you start investing early is so that you get practice investing before you have any real money to lose. All of the dumb stuff I did trying to figure out how the market works, I did when I had a couple thousand dollars. The worst I could do (since I didn't do margin) was lose a couple thousand dollars. Now if I bet wrong on my IRA, I could lose that much for a 1% drop, but I have the confidence and experience to know that 'let it ride' is the right strategy about 90% of the time. The only time I sell is when I get tired of an underperformer, or when I see clear signs of baseless exuberance (eg, an Apple media event is tomorrow) and then I buy back in when people have calmed down.
Fedora 23 beta ready for testing
I think this is a very weak experiment. Players colluding in an experiment, a game at that, where some researchers clearly have a budget to give away is not the same as people colluding to rip off their fellow citizens.

I say this as someone who thinks corruption is rampant and needs to be better addressed.

The game needs to be designed so that someone else gets hurt. For example, there could be a third participant C who rolls the die only once, and the roll is not revealed until the end. Each of the players receive the roll amount any time their roll matches either of the other two players, and double that amount when all three match. In this game design:

- C has no opportunity to cheat.

- The more A and B cheat, the less C gets (unless C happened to roll a six) and given how the cheating went in the original game, likely near nothing.

- If A and B don't cheat, instead of the near 100% success possible though cheating, they will on average match another player 1/3 of the time. They will make less, but C has an equal chance of getting a similar amount of money.

This if off-the-cuff. I'm sure with more thought an even better game can be designed.
The Risk of a Billion Dollar Valuation in Silicon Valley
Why every freelancer should hire at least one person
The technical info is quite hard to find. Had to click on 'buy' to get this:
https://pebble.com/buy-pebble-time-round-smartwatch
Ispanic Women Are Taking Charge Among the Fastest-Growing Homebuying Demographic
It is common sense that plants are bred for their ability to sell, not nutritional value. If a commercial grower had to choose between a fruit with a long shelf life and a nutritious one, which one will he pick?
It's more like comparing a Nokia brickphone to an iPhone.

Different target demographic, but even more rabid fans because nothing else gets close to checking all the same boxes. (Unlike "iPhone vs Android", Nokia is more or less uncontested)
uturn.js - Events for scroll detection change
August 2015 Existing-Home Sales Infographic
In my head, or use .ssh/authorized_keys
The production costs are probably not as different as you think. The variable cost of a hardcover book is in the neighborhood of a few dollars though the exact figure depends on the size of the print run and some of the costs are buried in the cut a distributor usually takes. (As a benchmark, an author-ordered PoD copy of my ~250 page trade paperback from Createspace costs $3.75 before shipping.)

So e-books should be cheaper than physical books, all other things being equal, but the cost difference isn't as much as many assume.
Do you think that VW's CEO would have resigned if this was not the case?
This was a great piece.

It's a bit surprising to me that the page includes a Google Analytics tracker.
What are the personal consequences to you if they're "out".
Being 14 months into the experience, I'd say that you don't have any time for hobbies at first, but you're surprised at how much you don't really care. My family is my passion outside of work. I don't think of taking care of my daughter as work the way I would have thought about babysitting someone else's kid before I became a father.
Depending on how it's used, I find "idiomatic" to be useful. Built into the meaning is that it may not translate to other areas, and most people understand that while it is a useful shorthand to making something succinct and expressive, you fall back to other things when it doesn't match well.
Reverse engineering is different in that a human being unassembles a binary file with some reverse engineering tool to figure out how it works so they can make their own version of it.

For example there are secret API calls that are not documented in Windows or any other software. You can find them by reverse engineering the system files to find the undocumented secret API calls. The WINE project uses the documented API calls and if they reversed engineered Windows they'd find the hidden secret API calls to make it more compatible. But the law forbids that.

Reverse engineering is also used to find vulnerabilities in code and document them.

What the virus scanner or OS does to modify a binary file is not the same as reverse engineering, there is no human doing the work, and the software optimizes or checks the file for problems. I think the modifications are done in memory instead of to the file on the hard drive.
We can put new pathways into plants. Currently our tech allows up to ten genes. Most nutrients could be boosted with 1-2 additional genes (typically over expressing genes the plant already has or adding similar genes from other plants, eg Golden Rice add's beta carotene genes from daffodil), so today we could boost 4-6 nutrients. Over time we'll be able to add more and it will get easier (Eg through synthetic chromosomes). This explanation of how they made golden rice is probably helpful: http://www.goldenrice.org/Content2-How/how1_sci.php

It's not as simple as just putting the first genes into the plant, there is an optimization process needed. The regulatory costs however are at least 10-20 times greater than the development costs.
Diesel engines run with a surplus of air so they only burn the fuel they need to. They don't really generate a lot of heat unless they are under load (relative to gas engines). Just cruising down the highway a diesel will not need much fuel and will run fairly cool.
The nutritional value of plants in their raw state is less interesting than what people actually eat. The original plants require a lot more processing and cooking to turn them into food, which destroys many of the nutrients. For example, crabapples are very sour and have to be boiled to make something edible, blue corn must be ground into flour and cooked. Is that better or worse than eating raw Gala apples or raw or steamed sweet corn?

> The more palatable our fruits and vegetables became, however, the less advantageous they were for our health.

We don't know that. It's possible that breeding more edible plants reduced the need for nutrient-destroying processing, so the net effect was better, not worse nutrition.
His team also reached the World Series in 14 out of 17 years. (All of 1947-1963 except '48, '54, and '59.)
Scientists Reveal Why Amish Children Are Immune to Allergies and Asthma
> This problem probably affects most cities with a large transplant population.

I've been thinking about this a lot mainly because I live in Nashville which is experiencing its own growth challenges with a lot of transplants. I've been here since 2008 (TN since 98) and I'm really only just now being to take "ownership" of the city. Perhaps it's because I'm out of school finally and thinking more long term, but it's tough to consider a city "yours" when you know you're going to be transitioning (potentially) to a new job and a new city.

But since I've got a job here, it seems like it's more appropriate to put more effort into my own hometown. It's tough to get past that mindset that you're only renting the city and somebody else will clean it up. Part of it is there seems to be a stigma against having an opinion about how a city should be without a certain amount of time spent living in the city. This just encourages, in my mind, a bad attitude towards active civic involvement. But it has to be tempered with the understanding that a transplant does have less experience of living in the city.

I don't know where I'm really going with this. Maybe all I'm saying is young people, I think, probably view the city they study in as they do their student housing or an apartment: something they rent and somebody else's problem.
on average, the market beats active managers. that doesn't mean that individual managers can't (or haven't) consistently beat the market.
I agree. It would be great if someone performed a packet sniff to check exactly what data is being sent.

But there seems to be lots of FUD in the comments on this post. If the apps are malicious, I hope someone finds actually evidence
Not sure the context of this question, but I'd be interested in hearing what people do about desktop-deployed applications that need to access a server with authentication (such as a database server).
A better and more accurate model of user behavior is probably in the comment history itself. It might take longer to read than an integer, but it does carry actual context, while a karma score doesn't.

If you have to have karma, you could attach it to comments (so indirectly, rather than directly, to accounts) and get a better overview of a user's behavior from the ratio of upvotes to downvotes. If it's necessary to have privileges like moderation be subject to some kind of test, surely some number of ok comments would be be better as an indicator than than an arbitrary karma limit?

Although given that Hacker News has literally no guidelines for voting, even that might not be a great predictor.
I hope this isn't the trend going forward. I don't get the traditionalist love of paperback books most of the time. Like the sort of people who go on and on about exploring book stores or the smell of new paper. I love my Kindle and I really hope to be able to use it as my primary reading source, its just so convenient, light, portable and unobtrusive (especially with that newer back-light option).

But the price of new ebooks turns me off for sure, I wouldn't buy a new novel for $20+, in ebook, hardcover, paperback or ever really. $10 is the sweet spot for novels and I think Amazon was driving that well for awhile. I'll stick to older novels that are < $10.

Let me also state that paper really does have its merits, at least for now until some smart tablet engineers can solve some problems with the format. I love a comic book as paperback, but that is because I don't think tablets or even color e-ink has quite gotten there yet. I also think technical reference books (like programming guides) are best served in paper. Again, I don't think its easy to flip through pages on a tablet or kindle, but maybe that will be solved some day too.
> you just shipped thousands of people something And now you announce something which makes that look old.

So... just like Apple does every year, not to mention pretty much every other hardware company in existence? The alternative is not to make anything new, which would just be dumb.

> Am i to understand that I wont be getting updates on my Pebble Time in the near future

Well, seeing as Pebble Time is still a brand new product, and I'm still getting regular updates on my original Pebble Steel, which is another generation older, I'm gonna say "no".
Egypt Gives Go-Ahead to Search for Nefertiti's Burial Chamber in King Tut's Tomb
Much of these books you can borrow for free on your kindle from a library though.
It's unlikely that Dropbox, AirBnb etc. are going to liquidate, so I think you're right that liquidation preferences probably aren't as big a factor in the unicorn valuations.

Most of the investors in the unicorns are late stage funds hoping for an IPO. However, it's not true that the preferred stock directly converts to common stock in all cases. My guess is that almost all of these deals involve ratchets, which are definitely driving up the implied valuations. It also means that if the valuation doesn't keep going up, common stock holders take a bath. Take Box's balance sheet pre-ipo as an example.
Logic actually suggests that publishers will optimize prices to benefit themselves - that they are still in business & increasingly profitable many years after their imminent demise was announced seems to suggest that they are not making a total mess of it.
I hope this becomes the norm but I'm a bit wary as IPO conversion provisions [0] may come into play.

[0] https://www.fenwick.com/publications/pages/the-terms-behind-...
Very similar to the way Intel, years ago, rigged its Pentium CPU to excel on certain industry benchmarks.

http://www.classactionrebates.com/settlements/intel-pentium-...
> we want to believe that our attributes aren't predetermined, that we have free will, so we want to believe anything that downplays the role of nature in the nature vs. nurture debate

Who wants to believe this? It seems pretty lop-sided to accuse the "nature"-skeptics (or "nurture"-proponents) of falling prey to confirmation bias, when our history is littered with much more evidence of the atrocities committed by eugenicists.

Even today, it seems that many people who are successful are desperate to find out how much it is their innate destiny, due to genetics. It certainly provides great justification for providing solely for yourself and your offspring instead of for caring for a big social safety net and whatnot.
Sorry if I was unclear. Basically, I meant to say that for Apple Watch owners that I know personally, they're able to get through a 24-hour period, but since the watch would be dead the next day, they charge at night. Which in my opinion makes the watch essentially useless for sleep tracking unless you charge mid-day at the office or something.
Lead Generation Online
This may be what he is talking about: http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-deluged-by-police-demands-to-...

However, from my understand newer versions of iOS no longer give Apple the ability to bypass their own security even if they wanted to. However, Android phones are a totally different story...Google just resets the pass code upon court order.
> The one good side effect is that private investors are taking all of the risk. If there is an adjustment in valuations across the industry, it should not effect the public markets the way it did in 2000.

I'm not so confident about this. One of the reasons the 2000 correction was so dramatic was how interconnected tech revenues had become. Startup A had revenue because startups B and C were customers. When B went under, A started to have trouble. Then A goes under, so C loses their customers who were being paid by A, and so on. Revenues were basically a shell game funded by VCs.

This pattern looks like it's repeating itself. Look at public companies like Facebook and Twitter: huge portions of their ad revenues come from app install ads. It's safe to assume that a lot of those ad buys wouldn't be happening without VC funding. How about IaaS/PaaS providers? Same story. There will still be customers for many of these products if the bubble pops, but how well can these companies handle a rapid reduction in demand? And then there are ripple effects. How will commercial REITs fare? How will consumer spending be effected when people currently earning inflated salaries paid for by VC money suddenly can't find a job?

At this point it's all one big hypothetical, but I would hesitate to assume that a correction will be limited to the private market. The public market has plenty of exposure to the private bubble by proxy.
6 Habits of Highly Productive People
Silicon Valley Data Is the New Wall Street Debt (2012)
Oh, nice! Now I think I want an "Ask HN" for everyone to post their stock-allocation charts. :)
You write OCaml for Red Hat programs that customers use? Or you write OCaml for Red Hat customers' programs? Either way, care to share any examples?
Scheme and OCaml don't have that much in common really (unless you mean derivatives like typed racket, but even then).

OWebl, in spite of its shiny website, is not what I would call "popular". You want to look at opium[1] or ocsigen/eliom [2].

Don't know what you have against OPAM, it's the best language-specific dependency manager I know.

1: https://github.com/rgrinberg/opium
2: http://ocsigen.org/eliom/
I have tried so hard to like Lua, but I prefer 0-indexed arrays and curly braces.
To my taste, Lisp's hierarchical list notation is by far the most natural, intuitive way to represent HTML. I exploited this Lisp feature to create a web server using Scheme and C (a 5-year project).

While my server still works well, it's obvious Node and JS have become predominant tools in the space. I used these tools for my most recent project and while not too difficult to get up to speed, it lacked the elegance and simplicity I preferred.

Eslisp looks promising, surprisingly close to Lisp/Scheme I'm familiar with. I'm thinking that a few changes might make it even closer. For example, one could use "define" instead of "=" to declare bindings, or "begin" instead of "block".

The "this" syntax in macros is reminiscent of the arguments to ER syntax transformers which can be used to operate on elements in macros. Is it possible to simplify it further? Something like (this/evaluate) instead of (. this evaluate)?

Just ideas that pop into mind...

I agree that using s-expr syntax to create macros makes is much better than the elaborate syntax of other JS macro systems. I'm looking forward to learning more and trying it out.

Eslisp looks like it will be excellent.
SUCEFUL: Next Generation ATM Malware
I read this as Mithrandirism and was expecting a balrog or something.
You are correct it emits Lua bytecode and not LuaJIT bytecode. Wasn't there a refactoring of metalua in progress to facilitate porting ? It would be tedious work but there should not be any fundamental blockers.
Those were actually Toyotas.
> Of course, there are other kinds of 'bad code' than just unsafe...

Exactly. Many languages make it hard to be unsafe. But, every language makes it easy to be horrible in one way or another.
And the linked-to comment section is full of FUD as well, in case you were looking for an after-meal fear digestive.
A more authortarian gov as a solution to non-optional 'services'?
When I can find recent books at thrift store prices, I'll be ready to convert.
Volkswagen Just Nuked the Public's Trust in Companies Trying to Save the Planet
I wonder if this would work as a kind of spell check. Associate misspelled and mistyped words with the correct word/spelling.
Book review: “Ghost Fleet”