skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the author is running afoul of a very common problem (albeit he seems to be slightly more aware of it than most): "Ease of Use" and "Ease of Learning" are two different, and often incompatible goals. He praises the command line utilities as offering productivity improvements of an order of magnitude or more, but then castigates is for not having changed in half a century.

His description of the 2 cultures of computing is also interesting because he clearly understands that computer programming is literally the use of language to instruct the computer. He feels the complexity is incidental because it is not directly related to the problem that he wants to solve, but he completely ignores the necessity of learning the language.

The command line is a general purpose instrument with an intentionally broad interface. I think it is disingenuous to assume that one could build purpose built tools that do what you want, before you even know what it is you want. The complexity is specifically to afford the flexibility to do whatever you might want to do in the future. It hasn't changed (much) for 50 years because nobody has found a better way to do it.

Feel free to improve the state of the art ;-)
Ah, we just have a channel called "recipes" which we post links to. Search works pretty well to find them.

Admission: my wife is pregnant, so she really only wants me to make one thing. http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/corn-and-lobste...
I'm in my fourth year of a computer science degree, and there are students graduating with me in a few months who have never written code outside of eclipse.

They've even had us 'deploy' a website with filezilla. It obviously works well enough for the size of projects we were dealing with, but I can't help but be a little put off by how unfamiliar/uncomfortable most people (in most of my classes) are with the command line.
Woman Poisons own daughters withpesticide
I haven't pushed it on any family-members yet, but "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" does a pretty good job building up from the basics, although my eyes started to glaze over a bit when it came to some of the circuit-diagrams.
For free accounts, I believe only the latest 10k messages are searchable. For $6 pp/month you can fully searchable unlimited messages.

Also Slack gives you $25 in credit for each person you add.
Which is weird. The volume has greatly increased in China, but we've never trusted their published numbers before. This is yet another China-driven rally - beware of the sudden drops we know very well from the painful past!
> before we could get into any Python I had to explain all kinds of things I took for granted ...

It's possible to start writing Python without really knowing any of the things you list with an IDE like PyCharm -- which is probably a similar environment to the one they used for Java in "Computer Science."
The only surprising thing is the timing. My guess is that this has to do with all the attention from the Economist. The fundamentals of the Bitcoin economy have been developing at a solid pace for more than a year— they've been swelling for months.
Also is predicated on the notion that Nader voters would have went for Gore. That's hilarious. Do these people actually know true leftists? I bet he even thinks if Sanders doesn't win (likely) that we would vote for Hillary.

Never going to happen.
Unapologetic by Bama Boy Buck
Setting up an LLC, or even a traditional corporation, doesn't grant you complete immunity from liability. That's especially true if you're a "single member LLC" or the sole stockholder in a corporation. I'm pretty sure it's even more true if you organize the legal entity for the sole purpose of trying to shuck liability for something you knew in advance was dodgy. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil

OTOH, there is a difference between "unethical" and "illegal". But in my opinion, if you don't have a definite answer on where your idea falls on that spectrum, there are only two reasonable choices:

1. Drop it and move on to another idea.

2. Spend the money up-front to consult with a lawyer and find out exactly what the risks are and how to best protect yourself.

But that's just me...
I like the idea. I find blocking websites with my host file being the best tool for protecting myself against distraction.

It would be pretty neat if this was a website that I could point my blocked domains to
I've heard good things about uBlock Origin, but I don't use it myself; I instead use the MVPS Hosts File.

Info page: http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

Raw file: http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt

ZIP: http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.zip

It's periodically updated with the hostnames of all servers currently known to serve ads (almost all ad companies are locked to using hostnames, they for some/whatever reason don't use IPs).

I see no ads. When I do, I redownload the file, and I'm all set again. It's great.

This also blocks things like Google Analytics, which I personally appreciate too. If you want to track me, your web server has an access log somewhere, and if you want a second-by-second breakdown of my activity, distill a set of functions into your site's existing (hopefully well-optimized) JS codebase.

Remember, there are things ad servers cannot do because they're pushing a product designed to serve millions of customers, not integrate with every single site architecture.

I just thought of this, too - keep in mind that these are advertising companies we're talking about here. Their job is to sell product, and their second-layer job above that is to sell their own viability. I fear that our gullibility to being sold acid rainbows has started to go too far.
> In a similar vein, if one were so inclined, how hard would it be to make a modern city come to a grinding halt

I wonder if the technique described at the link below would still work?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berners_Street_hoax
It's not a great question, but it's actually pretty telling if you're hiring for an admin type position. It's bizarrely, unfortunately easy to find people with five years professional experience managing unix systems who have never actually installed a system, because they were on a team and their role was chief log inspector or something. Somebody running their own server has presumably, at least the once, done the whole song and dance from start to finish.
I don't quite understand the need for that level of security. Surely the cases where being able to elaborately go into the BIOS and change such settings will lead to infections is miniscule. It's certainly worth the tradeoff of not relying on an external entity for verification of what's "good".
This is a valid point. Learning the command line has a time and a place but it's almost entirely separated from doing computer science work at a "higher" level. Draining cognitive power to learn an unrelated technology is at best a necessary evil. It's compounded by the fact that the command line is full of tools that are inherently hard to use, because they're designed not to be terse, not user friendly. Can you tell me what all the flags of `tar -xvzf` do? Do you think you would ever discover that combination on your own from reading the man pages? I certainly wouldn't have, and I'm comfortable with the command line. `man tar` is a nightmare. (Also, bash is a lesson in language design failure).

Of course the command line makes many things easier. Carving up history with git is much faster on the command line, once you really grasp it. Most build processes require some command-line fu these days. Etc. I still see his point that it's a hindrance to early learning.

However, I don't know the ideal solution. Making a full OSX install wizard is obviously more work than writing a shell script. Maybe the best middle ground is Homebrew packages. `brew install ___` is usually only one command and usually works without problems.
The trouble is, those comparisons might be relatively cheap compared to a DOM update, but they still aren't free. Even with an efficient overall algorithm and with all the multiples having a key property set to minimise unnecessary changes, if you're dealing with hundreds of components in your page that need rendering at any given time and that rendering in turn relies on significant conditional logic or derived information, those comparisons to see what rendering is needed (or, if you prefer, to determine whether re-rendering is needed) start to add up.
Great work Moxie and all the folks at Whisper Systems!

I was actually in the middle of re-writing a lesson on mobile phone security for activists in the field that I am giving in about an hour when I saw the new blog post. Never have I been so glad to be scrapping parts of a presentation and lesson plan at the last minute. There will be another 20 vulnerable human rights defenders in the field using Signal by the end of the day :)
Amazon's Press Release -->
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=pe_2270130_15413393...
It's not about the particulars of this protocol. It's about the statement "bandwidth is super cheap". I would have called it super-oblivious first-world thinking but that statement is absurd anywhere on a mobile connection.
Will you comply with the recall?
I don't know details of this case, but in general the police don't have a duty to act in specific circumstances. They're more for our overall well being:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-pol...

At the risk of being "someone is wrong on the Internet"[1], I'd venture that the police did not face disciplinary action.

[1] https://xkcd.com/386/
Her "coming out" is not applicable to my life (and presumably not yours) as I'm a very casual social-media user (also, I guess, an old man at 42), so at some level I can see how it seems trivial. And the clickbaity, overly dramatic headline here (reused from teen vogue... which I'm not familiar with but I'll guess is not heralded as a literary journal of merit) doesn't help sell the story too much.

But I know enough young people to realize that the social media "like"-fueled bubble she was apparently living in is not unique to her and is surprisingly pervasive/scary among a lot of people her age (even those who aren't "internet famous"). Given that, I totally respect her realizing how superficial it can all be, realizing how misleadingly disconnected from real-life it can be and stepping back and telling her story of what seems like a real social media obsession so that others might step back as well and rethink how they deal with social media.

Nobel prize worthy? No. Of course not. But brave within the context of her life. So kudos, Essena O'Neill, Australian girl I've never heard of but who may have a useful message for others.
Leave the country, you'll do much better in that area.
Thank you neilellis! its been a long time in the making..
>Every machine in existence has a command line interface.

No they don't. Embedded computers do not have command lines, for example. Embedded computers don't give a shit about text. Most computers do not accept commands at all. As for those who do, some don't accept it in text form, for example gaming consoles or punch-card antiquities.

Command lines are the consequence of keyboards, and whenever you see a computer on which a keyboard cannot be attached or emulated (phones) then you're looking at a computer without a command line.
> Can you tell me what all the flags of `tar -xvzf`
Yes.

x: extract

v: verbose

z: zip (or unzip) archive

f: file name to follow.

> Do you think you would ever discover that combination on your own from reading the man pages?

Yes. Turns out, I wanted to tar up my nodejs directory, but omit the `node_modules` folder.

> Of course the command line makes many things easier.

Exactly. I'm not a high level computer scientist, but I imagine, being able to easily deal with files and data would help things out quite a bit. So there while it can be painful to learn bash, it's something that pays off heaps in the long run. My opinion.
I feel like it would work better if it took you to something like a shock website ;)
And hopefully it makes the students less likely to half-ass the build and command line steps in the apps that they write later.
I really find this off-putting.

The same things he labels as "bullshittery" are those things that meant when I got into CS, I didn't have to hold a soldering iron, enter the CHS triplet from a hard drive's label into the BIOS, or write code in an assembler.

Other people's work, their "bullshittery" relieved me of a lot of tedious work that they DID do when it was their turn.

What makes their stuff "bullshittery" is that they did not write their code or even design it to carry out my wishes. They did it to carry out their designs. And what they wrote did not DWTheyWanted perfectly, because they were human. But they gave at least some thought to what others would do with their work. And that calls for a bit more respect.

I am right now learning Android app development. Are Intents and Activities bullshit?
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[0] Including Jade, Jinja2, STPL

[1] Including LESS, Stylus, Sass

[2] Including CoffeeScript, jQuery, and too many libraries to count

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[5] Not a fan, but if it gets the job done!

[6] Minimal experience, but able to use comfortably
Keeping up with the Karumes
Does anything similar exist for Chrome? AFAIK, default Chrome won't let you disable autocomplete in the address bar.
Evidently it's due to the MMM Ponzi Scheme: http://www.dailytradingprofits.com/5063/is-bitcoin-being-pum...

Nobody knows for sure how big of an impact it's having, but it's likely not a coincidence.
The 32032 instruction set was wonderful to generate code for. There were a few early bugs (if a floating point instruction crossed a page boundary, and a page fault was triggered, hilarity would ensue), but those were ironed out well before the chip was abandoned.
True, I actually haven't. I only use SB for new release nowadays (streaming covers most old stuff) so maybe that's why.
> "Without even knowing much about the protocol"

> "I am almost positive that it's bandwidth requirements are well below even a relatively light modern webpage and likely well within 2G range."

I'm pretty sure this this is almost certainly the least, or at least within range of, quite likely the least definitive statement I might have ever read (or at least one of the lesser definitive of statements I've read within the past year, or at least the last few months, or so).
You can ask about all that stuff, but at the end of the day, you're almost certainly not going to get stock with any kind of liquidation preference yourself, and your stock is almost certainly going to be at risk of dilution in a way that you can't control or even effect.

If the company raises 12 more rounds of funding before going public, you might wind up going from owning, say, 2% of the company, to owning .000000000000012% of the company.

The thing is, there's just really no way to know what will happen. I say "value the stock at $0 and if it turns into more than that one day, consider it 'found money'".
This is interesting, but many of these problems are sufficiently complex in their own right. Isn't this a bit of a jack of all trades type deal?
Hackers Win $1M Bounty for Remotely Hacking iOS 9 iPhone
So much diversity, and potential from individuals with disabilities. It's a shame its difficult for them to find jobs.
> >> behavioural correction requires a certain percentage of individuals to bring and succeed in their cases

> No it doesn't.

It is necessary for class proceedings to induce behavioural modification, which is what we are talking about here. There are other means to bring about behavioural correction, but that was beyond the scope of my comments.

> Both the extensive use of the class form and punitive damages (or close substitutes) are virtually unique to the United States.

At least a dozen states have class procedures, but you may be right on punitive damages. Canada is quite close, but punitive measures are handed out sparingly.

>> Ad hoc regulation by an entrepreneurial plaintiff's bar acting without meaningful client input is not the not the only effective means to regulate businesses.

I partially agree; class proceedings are a poor substitute for regulation. However, a few points. First, in tandem with victim compensation and reduced litigation costs, some argue the behavioural modification aspect from financial consequence can act as a check-and-balance that requires no arbitrary intervention by the government to correct and prevent wrongdoing.

Second, class action are procedural in nature and the substance of the case must be founded on existing laws – often common law torts, but sometimes regulatory or administrative. The cost of enforcement via a class proceeding is relieved from the public purse, and no additional rights are conferred on victims by way of a class proceeding – only the vehicle for exercising those rights is modified.

Third, regulators are often not as aligned with victims as plaintiff lawyers in class proceedings. It is not unheard of, and in some places quite common, for regulators to be hired by the very institutions they are charged with regulating.

Moreover, one can gauge the effectiveness of the class proceeding in behavioural modification by observing the broad resistance to it, namely the widespread introduction of arbitration clauses. Perhaps not the behaviour it was intended to modify, but that itself speaks to the point.

> On the contrary, plenty of countries arguably do a better job without the use of them at all.

I tend to agree, depending on the circumstances, but it is a hotly contested point.
Things that HN defends: AirBNB allowing fraudulent listings.

Things that HN bans: calling the AirBNB founder slightly mean names, because his company made you a victim of fraud and didn't care.

You're a joke, dang. A fucking joke.
IBM Releases Insights for Weather Service – REST API for Weather Company Data
SecondMarket is involved in that space in some fashion.

I know almost nothing about that world though, so I can't do much more than point you at the Wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SecondMarket
Social media “Badge Bragging” offers cybercriminals a new way to launch attacks
> nobody has found a better way to do it.

People have found a better way to do it! It's just that research software ignores the better way because it's mostly "proof of concept", once the paper is out, who cares who uses it, that's not my department.

The incentive is to publish, not to create usable software. In fact, spending the time to make your software usable is wasted - no funding committee, no tenure committee, no supervisor cares.

Here are some of my "command line bullshittery" problems I run into in bioinformatics:

- There's no Makefile, just .cc files, you have to figure out how it was compiled. 90% of the times a simple "gcc" won't cut it.

- There is a Makefile but the flags are all outdated and there's no ./configure to get flags for your system

- There is a Makefile, but it depends on old versions and doesn't say so. The new versions don't work. (samtools v1.0 changed the API and there's a ton of software (BioDB::Sam) out there that assumes a pre-v1.0 API, so you have to override the system-wide installation, great "fun" if you're on a cluster where each node has its own environment and you have no root)

- the software depends on other research software that doesn't exist anymore (google-fu to find a forgotten dusty tar.gz somewhere)

- It's a binary, but it gives you empty output if you have a typo in your flags (Just last week with Blast2Go: if you use "annot" instead of "-annot" it won't complain, you just get empty output)

- it depends on environment variables but it doesn't tell you so, it just crashes when it tries to run a dependency program using $PROGRAM_ROOT/bin/program (even better: MAKER doesn't crash, you just have one error line in about a million lines of STDOUT, chances are you don't realize that it had problems in the first place)

- program depends on loading data from disk using MySQL but MySQL wasn't compiled with local-infile=1

I'm sure I've wasted about half of my PhD's time finding out about highly program-specific problems that don't appear anywhere else. It has made me a somewhat proficient debugger but that is lifetime that I could have spent on analyzing actual results & writing papers, things that are actually helpful in my career.
Sometimes I think progress is defined as the reduction in the number of things we need to understand to accomplish any given task.
Java (along with XCode) is unique in that there are nicely-packaged IDEs that let you do professional-level coding just by downloading one program.

My first professional experience was in Java. I worked for a year for a startup, working on 3-4 different programs and doing the entire UI for their product. After 2 days trying to compile things with Notepad, one of the other devs suggested "Go use JBuilder, we have a site license", and I never looked back. I didn't have to touch the command-line once. I would hit "Run program" and my program would run. I'd select "Add library JAR" by right-clicking on the project file and selecting the library. I could check out files from the VCS with the SourceSafe plugin just by right-clicking on a file and selecting a menu item.

Then I got to college, and, as some unpaid volunteer work, tried to rewrite a quickly-growing Harry Potter fansite as a database-backed PHP webapp. And in the course of getting that to work, I had to learn all these crazy UNIX commands. I had to learn about CVS (this was before Subversion and git) and how its command-line worked. I had to learn vi, because that's what I had to edit files on the server. I had to learn how to unpack tarballs. I had to learn ssh and scp because our server-admin guy was like "No way in hell am I opening up telnet on this box." I had to learn Apache configs and PHP.ini and all sorts of other magic incantations.

I'm really glad I learned them - my Linux & vim skills have actually aged better than my Java skills have, and I use vim & UNIX commands every day now. But damn, it was a lot of bullshit when I just wanted to get some text up on a website.
> I suppose you could invent a GUI that lets you click on the opcodes and memory addresses you want to execute but that's bordering on silly.

Makes me think of the Altair 8800 front panel...
What is a lens in this context?
War in Weed Country
p.s. there's no guideline for saying things that are honest and truthful.

Brian Chesky's actions are those of a sociopathic asshole. I'm legitimately curious if he is what he appears to be (and pg just loves him because he made pg rich); or if he's somehow NOT the heartless, sociopathic asshole that he has always appeared to be, for the entire duration of his awful, awful company.

It would be endlessly fascinating if he was a super-good-hearted, kind, positive person who managed to be amazingly evil and awful through some form of naivete.