skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The filesystem is annoying but not a deal breaker for me. The biggest problem is that it's a "unixy" filesystem, but it's (by default) case insensitive. You can format it to be case sensitive, but there are some apps that break; a major example in the past was the Adobe suite.

When I was doing web development, I used my Mac because it basically had the good parts of Linux and Windows for what I was doing. Both Ruby and Python work great, and http://pow.cx/ makes Rails development really nice when you're working on multiple projects. On the flip side, I could use Photoshop when I needed to without needing a VM or dual-boot.

Linux is a way better ruby environment than Windows is, and Windows is a way better environment when you're dealing with clients (Word docs/PPT, PSDs, etc). OSX is kind of the sweet spot in the middle.

Now that I'm doing more DSP and embedded type work, I still use the Macbook occasionally, but most of the work is done on a dual-booting Windows/Linux Lenovo. Linux for writing code (arm-gcc-none-eabi) and Windows for CAD.
1988 Interview with Nick Cave
Like you I relate a lot with being a 'Jack of all trades', and what might have been a blessing if we had born some centuries ago, is nowadays a curse.
Depends. One of the reasons Fog Creek shifted to products was that their consulting just dried up. The way it appeared to them was that the time to land new contracts was getting longer and longer. Eventually they realized there were no new contracts.
Man your blog post brought back so many memories. I went through just about the same learning path, and in 2012 as well. Like you I'd done CS in HS and taken one class in college, but couldn't build anything real if my life depended on it.

To me what really made me transition is their WebDev course In all seriousness, though, is their CS253 the greatest course ever or is it the greatest course ever?! Huffman was just brilliant in providing a nice framework with which to think about development. After I took that course, it was if Googling my way through problems and learning from the available resources on the internet became that much easier, because now I could see how all of these little parts fit into a broader context.

That's one thing that definitely disappointed me about how Udacity has grown. That course taught by Huffman was so good in that he explained so much of the theory and reasoning, and not just tools. Peter Norvig's advanced Python course is another one of their offerings which feel very similar. Lately, though, I think their courses have resembled much more what you find on CodeAcademy or places like that: A lot more focused on tools, content, etc., and less so on the broader picture.
Why not use optional chaining? https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Swift/...
The maybe monad is good way to deal with computations that may fail. Here is a Swift walkthrough http://www.mokacoding.com/blog/functor-applicative-monads-in...
One of the reasons for the relative expense is the heavily-subsidised corn (and a few other) industries which pretty much all goes to animal feed.

That being said, my food costs were easily cut in half when I went vegan (and now, they are about 1/4 after some fine tuning of some other recipes) - I mostly get protein from chickpeas, kidney beans and lentils - which are all super-cheap compared to meat. I also eat a fair bit of tofu (which is very low in fibre and which is also very cheap compared to meat). Tempeh is another option, but I don't tend to make it often. We generally cook a big batch of food at the beginning of the week - which means time to prepare is amortized nicely (and frying tofu is very quick also)

I will admit that processed vegan meat-alternatives do tend to be more expensive than their animal derived counterparts, and not the healthiest - so I tend to avoid them - most of the expense is due to small production runs and limited quantity - and the extra processing.
I really don't like the idea of targeting all Tor users, but as far as I can tell, that's not what this is. For this to work, wouldn't the FBI have to have provided a list of hidden services they were interested in to CMU? Based on Tor's description of the traffic confirmation attack, an encoded version of a specific hidden service has to be injected: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-security-advisory-relay...

Isn't it plausible they could have received a warrant for each of those hidden services?

They probably didn't, but targeting specific services isn't that abhorrent to me, especially the ones engaged in highly unethical behavior (child porn, theft, scams). I don't think drug markets should be illegal, but that's a separate issue entirely.
I wouldn't put it on the resume either. I would instead just build something at work or after work using the skill I have. If someone asked me how I manage to write a simple chatbot I would say I learned it from Coursera and the Internet.
Great article by Moxie, thanks for sharing.

> If I absolutely have to frame my choices as an either-or, I’ll choose power vs. people.

I would not have expected him to say that.
Then you'd know it's not that the evidence presented at trial would remain sealed but that he wouldn't even be able to present it.
Apple no longer requires a paid developer license to install apps on your personal device [0].

I agree it will be interesting to see what develops, given it is possible for anyone with a Mac to install whatever they like, now.

[0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4952820/test-ios-app-on-d...
David dumetz and his money grubbing family used this wonder program to ruin endless devices .put fake social sites up and put my family's info on the web.Diane dumetz u knw I know all ur lieing to disability .wat ur husband makes .play time is over.
It's not theoretically undetectable, just very hard to detect, to the point that we haven't yet been able to do it. This article suggests that finally, we may be able to see it other than via gravitational effects.

For a long time I also subscribed to the idea that the missing matter was better explained by faulty math, somewhere, but as our observations get better it's looking more and more like there's really something there, that behaves independently and differently than the matter we know.
"But isn't it more likely that regular courts, with all their rules about conflict of interest and judges that aren't paid their salary by one side of the dispute are a little more likely to be the fairer ones?"

In my experience, no ;-)

Also, they are paid by one side of the dispute - you pay judges salaries ;-)
In a lot of states, they are directly elected, too.
There have already been four different proposals made to fix this (BIP 100, 101, 102, 103) and the miners shot them down.

Remember that the miners profit from increased competition and tx fees on small block sizes, and they control the block size.

It's more probable that banks will use some other system than ACH before bitcoin block size is ever increased.
"And from the second, let's grab this quote: "A striking 75 percent of customers who compared their arbitration process to their civil litigation process indicated that arbitration was “very unfair” or “somewhat unfair” compared to court."
"

I would bet literally exact same number of people think court sucks and is unfair when they lose, too ;-)

Heck, nearly 100% of losers in divorce cases i saw my ex-wife handle thought the process was biased, unfair, and blah blah blah.

I mean, i didn't need a study to tell me that most people who lose when they think they are right blame the process instead of their rightness ;-)
CS253 all the way. I still have Steve Huffman's "pretty neat, huh?" echoing in my brain. Whenever anyone asks me "how can I learn to build web applications", it's the first place I point them. He even goes over basic crypto and security, yet doesn't oversell what he's teaching. Just perfect.

I agree that the Udacity classes available today just don't measure up, sadly.
Thunderbolt 3 includes official support for external GPU docks. Intel's reasoning for not allowing them sooner was due to hot-plugging issues but they could be spinning it around.

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9331/intel-announces-thunderbo...
Sure, but they still need to lookup the name.
Apple Plans Peer-To-Peer Payment Service
Oh not this nonsense.

Yes, Government surveillance is a problem. That doesn't make data protection law worthless.

It's thanks to the Data Protection Directive that you can force Facebook to hand over the data it's secretly collecting on you despite not using it, for example.
Very nice. μTorrent has long been riddled with ad's (with sound for gates sake!) and Deluge feels a little slow and bulky on my machine. This looks like a lighter alternative.
Netstorm was an underrated Gem. Have you seen much like it since?
I'm quite aware of what the arbitration act requires/allows.

Here's, let's take a look at what you claim won't be admissible:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/9/10

(a) In any of the following cases the United States court in and for the district wherein the award was made may make an order vacating the award upon the application of any party to the arbitration—

...

(2) where there was evident partiality or corruption in the arbitrators, or either of them;

..

So, i guess you don't think this means what it says?
I don't question that the effect is there.

I just wonder if it isn't a side effect of some other (not understood) aspect of the universe rather than the result of the behaviour of some particle.

To illustrate, gravity per se doesn't exist, it's the outcome of the bending of space towards mass. So it's effect is real but it's not because some sort of gravitional particle is acting.
They do when they become businessmen like Gates and Ellison.
Seems like there's a reasonably good chance that we'll see a tool to automate this process—an "installer for apps".

I guess Apple would likely respond by one or both of (a) putting up more roadblocks to getting developer accounts or (b) further restricting what apps can do at a technical level through more sophisticated sandboxes, making the delta in allowed functionality between an app in the App Store and a sideloaded app smaller and smaller.
I'm curious about this point from the article:

> And alternative syntaxes (Lisps without parens) have faultered since they sacrifice some of Lisp's power that seasoned users aren't willing to part with.

Could Elixer be an example of one of these Lisps without parens? [1] Can anyone give an example of what kinds of Lisp powers are sacrificed in a syntax where the parens are implicit rather than explicit? I can't think of anything off the top of my head.

It seems to me that Parinfer, when working as intended, almost turns a regular Lisp into one of these parenless Lisps, by performing parens manipulation for us, which in turn allows us to treat whatever Lisp we're working with as if it was a parenless Lisp.

[1]: https://blog.8thlight.com/patrick-gombert/2013/11/26/lispy-e...
I interviewed at this place -- comically bad.

They're all clearly drinking the koolaid around a fire of VC money -- their CEO's ties to Google and resume will let them raise whatever funds they desire, but the people I talked to seemed elitist and really concerned about everything but the end product. We'll be talking about a "unicorn" failing in 2017 when they burn through this $105M...
Does anyone know the cancel/return rate?
'generalist' + leadership skills = manager

'generalist' without leadership skills = yes man
Yeah CS253 definitely is the greatest class ever. The problem with web development is that to even make a hello world page there are like 10 completely different and unrelated technologies you need to know. So you can know a little Python, a little HTML, and some js, but if you've never used a web framework or SQL then you're out of luck. CS253 really combines all these technologies, getting you just far enough into each of them that you can make something that actually works — and then be able to understand (albeit with difficulty at first) the rest of the documentation on your own.
I've bought several courses on Udemy (which hosts some awesome content), and am part way through my second Udacity nanodegree. These sites seem to serve slightly different purposes:

- Udacity: help you get a job in a new field

- Udemy: help you learn a new set of techniques, that can help with what you're currently trying to do (e.g. in your current job)
Mountain View moves forward with 9,100-unit housing option next to Google
I like the message, but I also think it cuts both ways.

Take Chicago for example. When I moved to Chicago five years ago, Wicker Park was the "hipster" neighborhood, where many of the exciting cultural events (at least for people in my age group, young 20 somethings) were happening. By the next year, Wicker Park had become too trendy and gentrified, and all the hipsters moved further west to Logan Square. Today Logan Square is too upscale, and the hipsters have moved south into Pilsen, forcing many of the local hispanic families out of the neighborhood because of rising prices. Now there are organic juice bars sprouting up in Pilsen and the gentrification process is starting anew.

This is almost exactly the pattern described in the article, except it's the people who want authentic communities that are causing the problem! It's a catch-22: if you don't like your community you can try to go elsewhere, but a few years after you do you will hate your vapid community again. In this case it's the drive for culture that causes monoculture. Once something is seen as authentic people flock to it and it becomes trite. How can you deal with that?
See the talk given in January http://frohoff.github.io/appseccali-marshalling-pickles/
In-N-Out sues DoorDash for delivering its burgers
Mail Security Service Alert Email – MailShark
The damage may be real, but "the problem of damage" is not. If my (theoretical) AirBnB guests damaged something I'm on the hook as if I damaged it myself. I don't get a free pass, so there's no externality. My strata organization can fine me for noise, wether caused by a party or an unruly tenant.

Even the way you present it is as if users of AirBnB are ripping everyone off ("consequences of his actions..."). It's just taken for granted.

And anyways, scapegoating is about the picking of a specific person to suffer for the crimes of the many. Singling out one person for something many people are doing is pretty unkind even if the thing is bad, which is debatable in this case.
San Francisco's Biggest-Ever Concrete Foundation
My Venmo cashout transfers take <24h if I do them during business hours. Not instant, but not several days.

How does the rest of the world manage instant transfers? I thought the ACH method was still in use not because we're technologically slow (see: High Frequency Trading) but because it saves a huge amount of coordination to sum up net inter-bank transfers at the end of the day rather than constantly shuffling money around due to the fact that the net is often very small.
They'd better be planning to allow no garages and parking spaces for those homes, making them walk, bike, and public transportation only. Shoreline Blvd is already gridlocked during commute hours, and every single resident will have to take (or cross) Shoreline to go much of anywhere.

It's a bit ironic considering that Mtn. View is the city than banished Home Depot from the old Emporium land due to traffic catastrophization by opponents... which will cost the city millions of dollars in its share of sales tax revenue.

A senior-care facility was built there instead.
https://cubistramblings.wordpress.com/2015/11/10/weblogic-vu...
Everything else aside, if $1MM is all it takes to unmask a Tor user, we have bigger problems than CMU.
>Quid-pro-quo: the undeniable biological, evolutionary instinct to receive something (money) for a rendered service/product (software) simply cannot be deemed criminal.

FSF/Stallman in way claims that charging for software is criminal or even unethical.

The whole point of Free Software is to give and preserve rights for end users, rights which enable end users to do what they want with the software they recieve, like examining it to make sure it doesn't do anything bad (for the user), modifying it to do what the end user wants, copy it, etc.

Now obviously this makes it incompatible with the traditional way of commercial software, which is proprietary distribution of binaries, which often also comes with DRM schemes further limiting what the end user can do with said software, and worst case, exploiting the end user by enganging in hidden or poorly-disclosed unwanted actions (spyware, rootkits etc).
Every time I read about monads I feel stupid, but it's not always for the same reason. Sometimes it's because I don't understand it. Other times it's because I'm pretty sure I do understand it but I can't see what the big deal is.
So now, instead of knowing why my access request failed, I just know that it did fail somehow, somewhere. The Null Object Pattern is barely better than runtime null pointer exception; instead of throwing an exception I'm tricking my client into thinking everything is fine.
It's very unlikely to have been socially accepted, or why would it have been newsworthy at the time? http://www.snopes.com/photos/people/mailingchildren.asp
I'm in a similar boat. I've been a software engineer for 15 years, but I'm able to learn new languages and tools by watching videos on 2X speed on Udemy. It's much harder to find good quality videos on Youtube. I'm happy to pay the $10-20
Terrorism and related issues escalate security concerns in 2015
I've heard that it's a much more refined version of the strange loop idea presented in GEB, although now that I think of it, it was probably the author who claimed that.
I'm a freelancer and I've had happily clients pay me through PayPal, Venmo, Dwolla and other services.

But if I were a landlord, I'd sadly ask for a check too. A lot of U.S. jurisdictions require a landlord not to accept rent in certain circumstances from a tenant he's trying to evict.

It's well established how to do this with a check: don't cash it, and possibly send it back to the sender certified mail. I wouldn't want to risk paying my lawyer to establish a precedent for what that looks like through a new payment system.
Were you around in 2001? I ask, because after Y2K and the dot com bust a lot of people struggle a long time to find work.
I'd like to point out that this is effectively VPNing your child on a USPS port.
I don't understand why deleting Facebook is difficult. It may be the easiest way to opt out. It's no more difficult than abandoning corporate media. You don't need it. Connect with real people who you care about in the real world.
I would like to add some extra information, to prove that above post is rubbish (I was shopping inside China):

- number of packages

Courier costs ~ 1.5USD, and on top of that, for 11-11 you need small amount to get it for free. As a result, I have around ~30 packages coming to me, from which 5-6 six are from Xiaomi. That's thanks to free delivery, instead of preparing what I want and bundling shopping together I just got multiple packages - and orders.

Number of delivery people:

- for singles days there are horror stories of what's happening in centers. Even thought it's against the law (I think), guys are paid for number of delivered packages, so for workers it's a gold time to work. Last year some of them were working 22 hours a day just to have a huge influx of cash

- Alibaba had tents inside office where people were sleeping. That one just for fun, not related to above :)

Overall, if his work related research is equal in quality to the one he had for this post, that's a very nice sign of not to follow him.
I don't like "engines" like Defold. Because to me that's not an engine. That's a framework. You have few methods exposed like draw/update, some convenience classes and that's about it. It's so comparable to LÖVE (https://love2d.org/) that literally the only difference seems to be a GUI to work with.

Meaning you have to write everything else, yourself.

I wonder if there are other actual 2D engines out there like Grid (http://www.planimeter.org/grid/), or Polycode (http://polycode.org/). Engines that actually take care of networking, predefined game callbacks, resource management, and multiplayer, like the big boys (Unreal, Unity, Source).
Android on your Desktop, is that even Possible?
"In Australia, you can make a free transfer entirely from web/app and it will be received, often the next day."

In the UK or China, it's minutes/hours, as long as you do the transfer before a certain time.
My favourite recent addition to Git Rev News is the developer spotlight interviews.

This edition's spotlight on Matthieu Moy is really interesting, as he talks about some of the changes he has helped implement in git, particularly in the user interface.

Q: How did you start getting involved with Git?

A: My first non-trivial contribution to free software was on version-control, before Git existed. I got involved in GNU Arch, then its fork Bazaar 1.x. And then GNU Arch and Bazaar 1.x died, and I moved on to something else. At the same time, I started teaching version-control, hated centralized systems enough to migrate to Git. Teaching Git in 2009 was a funny experience: the tool was starting to get a decent user-interface, but was lacking a lot of polishing. One of my favorite examples is what happens when you push to a remote that has commits that you don't have locally. Initially, users were getting a message like:

! [rejected] master -> master (non-fast-forward)

I wrote a rather straightforward patch to change it to:

! [rejected] master -> master (non-fast-forward)
To prevent you from losing history, non-fast-forward updates were rejected.
Merge the remote changes before pushing again.
See 'non-fast forward' section of 'git push --help' for details.

The students went from "Huh?" to "Wow, a 3-lines long message, that's long. What shall I do now (given that reading the actual doc is not an option)?". Then, I added an explicit mention of "git pull" in the message, and the situation became manageable for most students. Many of my contributions to Git follow this principle: see what users have difficulties with, and try to improve the tool to help them. In many cases, a staightforward patch to improve the error message was sufficient: in case of error, explain what's going on to the user, and give the way out ("did you mean: ...?" or "use ... to ...").
I prefer credit unions too and take loans through them when possible.

But my primary checking and money management accounts (business and personal) are with a major national bank. For cash flow, access, and generally moving money around it's hard to beat the convenience.
In three more years it'd be appropriate for you to get your own apartment and a job. I'd certainly hope someone was capable of traveling by plane at 15.

I think people are a little over-protective these days...
Access requires the cooperation of 7 individuals, all of whom must be present for a Root Signing Ceremony to take place:

The Ceremony Administrator

An Internal Witness

The Credentials Safe Controller

The Hardware Safe Controller

Crypto Officer #1

Crypto Officer #2

Crypto Officer #3

Fascinating. What's the signing ceremony for .IO look like?
.COM? .NET? .CO.UK? .COM.AU?
Jack Bauer maybe not, but I sure as hell would like to see S.H.I.E.L.D.
I agree. Perhaps it makes the code look cleaner on the outside, but ultimately it makes it harder to maintain. Also, optionals have loads of features (ex: chaining) to make your code much cleaner, though the author doesn't go into that.

It's a neat idea but I don't think it's as good as optionals.
How long ago did you interview? There have been some pretty big changes internally and things should have improved quite a bit over the past year or so.