skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice write up. Do you think the volatile contractor demand for RoR is because banks, who hire a lot of contractors in London, don't use it? Would be interested to read your take on Python vs Ruby in London contract market.
An indoor tent that circulates warm air around your bed
> I don't think it's as easy as you think.

I've been developing iOS and Mac apps for 8 years so my response is based on that experience.
Save the soil to save the Earth: A Q&A with Ronald Amundson of UC Berkeley
Everything old is new again. Here's how Nmap helps you identify hosts that are easy to attack so you don't have to brute force them:

TCP Sequence Prediction

Systems with poor TCP initial sequence number generation are vulnerable to
blind TCP spoofing attacks. In other words, you can make a full connection to
those systems and send (but not receive) data while spoofing a different
IP address. The target's logs will show the spoofed IP, and you can take
advantage of any trust relationship between them. This attack was all the
rage in the mid-nineties when people commonly used rlogin to allow logins
to their account without any password from trusted IP addresses.
Kevin Mitnick is alleged to have used this attack to break into Tsutomu Shimomura's
computers in December 1994.

The good news is that hardly anyone uses rlogin anymore, and many operating
systems have been fixed to use unpredictable initial sequence numbers
as proposed by RFC 1948. For these reasons, this line is only printed in
verbose mode. Sadly, many vendors still ship vulnerable operating systems
and devices. Even the fixed ones often vary in implementation, which
leaves them valuable for OS detection purposes.
[..]
Further details about sequence tests are provided in the section called
“TCP ISN greatest common divisor (GCD)” [1].

https://nmap.org/book/osdetect-usage.html [1] https://nmap.org/book/osdetect-methods.html#osdetect-gcd

A fun look at sequence number PNRGs of various (old) OSes: http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/newtcp/
Since TCP spoofing is essentially an academic concept at this point --- even if you could do it in milliseconds, it wouldn't be very useful --- I'm not sure the practical baggage or refinements you're talking about are that important.

Also, I think RPF filtering is a little less common than you're implying that it is.
Economically speaking, giving people jobs is far better than tossing 100 million dollars into schools where the students home life is the true source of abandonment in society.

This is a well received economic theory, not a way to save face on taxes by promising to give away money in the future so that I don't have to pay taxes now (Zuck).
At the end of the day it's all hand-wavy bullshit. You don't actually know either of those numbers with exactness if you're in the company, let alone if you only guess by looking at it from the outside.

What this type of analysis turns into is, "I like this company, so I think their LTV would be very high."
My experience with other (commercial) NPR is, that it's better to narrow down your expected search results to those countries you are looking for. The whole EU would be too wide...
http://www.rainymood.com/ might help with that
Its worth noting how well received this was. Fan sentiment seemed very high at the experiment, noting crystal clear quality and minimal buffer time. It was reported that all advertising spots had been sold too.
China Calls Hacking of U.S. Workers’ Data a Crime, Not a State Act
I haven't worked with PHP in quite some time now but I am happy to see its still kicking. Although it does bring back some haunting memories from versions 3 and 4.
The performance increase is what I'm looking forward to most with 7. I can't wait to see how several of my code-heavy WordPress installations do with 7. From the benchmarks I've seen, it's going to be incredible.

Specifically, I'm hoping the page load times will be cut in half.
Exactly, buses and road traffic have higher accident rates than trains (and aircraft) and this has everything to do with how those means of transportation are being operated. Rail and aircraft operators are companies that take responsibility for the lives of a large number of people and that typically have a long term view, as in, they'd like to be in business in half a century or more.

Tourbus operators (not the same as public transport) are responsible for a large number of the road traffic accidents involving buses, public transport involving buses is involved in accidents at a much lower rate. The reasons are: tourbuses tend to go faster, drive much longer distances (exhaustion), drive routes that are less safe to begin with and so on.

The way the rail industry deals with a capacity problem on a line is not to send more trains with a decreased train-to-train spacing but simply to send longer trains.

You can't really make longer buses beyond a certain maximum length due to the fact that the minimum turning radius of roads is a very small fraction of the minimum turning radius of a train.
Anecdotally, they do have some very strong direct/organic traffic based on word of mouth and brand awareness (that doesn't mean zero CAC of course)

I don't know where this derives its data from, but it seems to support it:

http://www.similarweb.com/website/airbnb.com#overview
Clunky ETL: Please correct me if I'm wrong, but what I saw about ETLs in the article "One example we encounter quite often is that Mixpanel stores timestamps in seconds, while Redshift expects timestamps in milliseconds." - that kind of transformations I would much rather run inside BigQuery in a couple seconds than going through a whole pipeline. Other things I could outside, just as what they are doing now - but I didn't see any RS specific advantages for transformations?

Cost: Cost should be way below other solutions - and to prevent problems BigQuery now has cost controls at a user and project levels: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/cost-controls

Thanks for your comments!
I darn the woolen socks my grandma made me. Maybe it's an emotional thing, making socks by hand takes a long time and adding a few minutes for repair so I can continue to use them seems like a small investment.
There are a couple of things about this.

Firstly yes it does happen, it happened at my startup and others that I know.

Secondly, it is an indicator of how inexperienced the team (and management) at the startup are.

Research has shown that knowledge workers spend typically less than 20 hours a week doing actual productive work, and beyond that it's ass in seat time (read Peopleware).

It is somewhat counter intuitive but often (not always) the way to launch (or whatever your goal) is to work less hours not more. My last gig (which required considerable programming skill) only needed me to spend 4-6 hours a day to get a prototype of a truly innovative product.

Most good senior developers don't do more than 40 hour weeks and most good managers + CTOs don't ask for it because they know it hinders, not helps.

Junior devs often do it because they don't know better and inexperienced management encourage it because they think more work hours == more work (flat out wrong).

Finally one of the reasons why this may be the case is it (a)is what startups to (b) looks good to investors.
Do they have no respect for the privacy of the sheep?
Agreed! This is clearly a terrible night's sleep, can't imagine anyone doubting that.
Parent is probably referring to Lenovo's use of the Windows Platform Binary Table, which allows OEMs to put a Windows program in the firmware. Recent versions of Windows will then automatically run this program on each boot. This is apparently intended to allow persistent remote management/anti-theft software.

http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2015/Aug/44

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/lenovo...
Broken deploy, all should be good now.
I usually say police have moved from Serve and Protect to Seek and Destroy. But shoot to kill sounds reasonably like police too.
Yes, quote a blog post from NEARLY FOUR YEARS AGO that mostly consists of "I don't like the way this thing is so therefore it's wrong" + "This is a problem that was fixed in a later iteration of PHP" to justify why PHP 7 is bad.

One thing I like about PHP 7 is that they had an opportunity to say "Fuck BC" and chose to use this version change to obsolete the shitty tutorials that make bad programmers (mysql_*).
> After waking up, I watched a video of two cats fighting and screaming for a couple of minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEvvRfuVk30

That video needs subtitles.
I suppose it's the fact you won't have legislation between you and the state, i.e. you will have mayor powers over the rest of the population (if you ever get any) and whatever that entails.
It takes 1 hour of reading internet memes to become functional at writing internet memes.
> legacy apps that were built in the PHP 5.2 or even PHP 4 days, be afraid. Be very afraid

BS. Most PHP4 code runs just fine, as do PHP5 code. Almost no one used object oriented code in PHP4 days (it was slow!), so the incompatible changes aren't a problem. And all you need to do is to search and replace some function names like mysql_* to mysqli_*. Most old code bases from PHP4 days also didn't rely on frameworks at all and were completely written from scratch or copy&pasted together - actually an advantage in this case.

Upgrading an old Python or Ruby code from 1.x/2.x days is a lot of more work (as it always includes upgrading to a recent framework version) than upgrading from PHP4 or PHP5 to PHP7.
A Short History of Martians
Middle clicking works in the Steam desktop app, at least on Windows. It opens the clicked link in a new window in the foreground.
Had you not added "simple", I'd have had a strong case in point with OpenSSL. OpenSSL has always been at least a bit controversial (i.e., breaking binary compatibility on not just a patch release aka x.y.Z, but a semantic level even lower) and issues have still gone undetected for a long time.
Billions? How credible is that?

Paypal itself says they have just 173 million active customer accounts (https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/about) and they'd have every reason to inflate that number.
How to multiply your user reach by 400% – a case study
The Quantum Reality Paradox
Correct, it's not likely to change at this point. Official release is slated for Dec 3 according to their Twitter[1], so it appears they are getting everything ready to launch.

[1] https://twitter.com/official_php/status/669940548128534528
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I've been away from React for a while and haven't really encountered Redux...is it to replace Flux? Is it worth learning?
I find myself thinking of the uncle in "Withnail and I", who quit acting once he figured out that "I should never play the Dane." So the English-speaking world has its own obsession.
I was a little questioning of why it was 3, but it isn't an unreasonable ratio after some thought: 1 would be borderline absurd, 2 could work but might not work with your operational costs, and 3 should represent a reasonable return on investment.

There is probably a closer, more precise number, but 3 is a decent number to use; if you're looking for businesses that generate a lot of revenue from customers, without spending a lot to acquire them or serve them; it works out.

Otherwise, great article and I will definitely be keeping this in mind in my own project. When I did the math it came out to 8.4, so I've got more wiggle room in the CAC than I thought.
HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive
The feature I'm most excited about is the availability of a simple, sane, and correct CSPRNG:

string random_bytes(int $numBytes);
int random_int(int $min, int $max);

If you want to use this interface in a project that needs to be compatible with PHP 5, there's always https://github.com/paragonie/random_compat
Reminders about the initial criticisms of the Hyperloop plan, which I do not see rebutted anywhere in this article:

* It's riotously expensive, far more so than the white paper indicates; simply building the elevated track overpasses at the costs listed in the white paper would imply a revolution in civil engineering.

* Door-to-door transit times are within the same ballpark as HSR, because it's not possible to terminate Hyperloop tracks downtown in LA or SF; ROW issues put them roughly an hour outside each city.

* Hyperloops will have approximately the same security concerns as airplanes --- they fail more dangerously than normal trains --- and so will have TSA-style security checks, further slowing travel.

* At the speeds Hyperloop advocates claim, there is virtually no tolerance for bends on tracks without inducing nausea.
Parents naming their babies after Instagram photo filters
'Most firms will be using 3D printing'
Somebody in the 19th Century said that the only quotations acceptable in the US Congress were from the Bible and Shakespeare.
CoreOS Steps Up Security for Its Tectonic Container Management Service
"making the world more open and connected"
Scraping JavaScript-Heavy Sites with Python and PhantomJS
Link to original article, http://www.babycenter.com/0_hottest-baby-name-trends-of-2015...
Farmer creates drone tractor
Going off Hubot's sourcecode, I'd guess campfire.
Show HN: Unwrappd.io – Automagically scan any Pinterest page for gift ideas
A specific 80km rail section with a long tunnelled ramp is only built for 250 (which does qualify as high-speed anyway). Germany also has 300km/h rail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfurt–Leipzig/Halle_high-spee...
> It's dumb is what it is.

Steady on there. The author has clearly done a lot of work on this and while your points are valid, that this method of attack isn't new nor practical, he has still learned a very genuine potential vector for attack. Thus it deserves a mature discussion since there will certainly be others who might learn from the author's research.

I'm all for constructive criticisms, but calling his article "dumb" is just unnecessary language. It doesn't contribute anything and yet could discourage authors from publishing future work.
If one wanted to invest in this($100-$1000's - not millions), what entry points would they have?
I'm the creator of Adblock Analytics and the reason I built it is because a lot of websites seem to be struggling with determining how many of their visitors are blocking ads. I'll be around to answer any questions that might pop up and would love to receive feedback - good, bad or otherwise. Thank you!!
Does this make anyone else nervous?
The first thing I did when I arrived on this page was do a page search for 'fractal'. There's always one.
None of these estimates seem to take into account that dumping huge quantities of precious metals on the free market will move the price by a substantial amount. Asteroid mining might only be profitable for a short while...
How to make diamond objects with a laser at room temperature
Not arguing, just saying that for example London continuously offers lots of good php contract opportunities. Day rates are slightly less compared to some other tech (mostly tech used in finance), but still decent. It is still very popular in media, e-commerce, publishing, with digital agencies and in various other fields.
My "cardboard" furniture has solid blocks where screws go. Not wood, but some sort of plywood or something.

I have an ikea bed and rack that is made from wood. Lots of their furniture is regular wood. The cheap ones usually untreated.
Interesting exercise. One can nitpick some of the math and assumptions, but the message is directionally correct.

The problem too many of these so called unicorns have is that there's not much in the way of real fundamentals supporting their lofty valuations. The valuation is largely based on hype. A lot of these companies valued at $1billion + may realistically only have a value of a few million based on their fundamentals.

In once sense that doesn't matter. If you're an early investor in such a unicorn you only need to convince some sucker to buy your shares while the hype is still hot. However, one needs to be a total fool to not understand that in such a game the music always stops playing at some point and someone is left holding a bag full of worthless $#&!.

The early players in this game have long since cashed out and are on a nice beach somewhere. The challenge for today's 'unicorns' is that they're starting to venture into nightmarish territory for businesses... i.e. massively overvalued without the fundamentals to stop a free fall. The number of recent tech IPOs where shares have plunged 50+% shortly after floating (or were forced into a recent big down round) are a strong sign that the market's tolerance for hype-based valuation is disappearing quickly. For those companies in that boat it's quickly going to become a game of put up or shut up. The solid business will survive but the rest will implode or be sold for pennies on the dollar in a fire sale down the line.
It was called flak and was quite effective. The Germans also deployed air to air missiles that were basically rockets with flak warheads on them. See the bomber guns had an effective range of 1000 yards or whatever so if you stood off 1200 yards in your ME-109 and launched rockets that blew up in 1200 yards that worked pretty well.

I've read a couple memoirs of WWII pilots, interesting stuff. I'm pretty sure they're all dead now, whats documented out there is all we'll ever have.

As for effectiveness, well, bomber aircraft losses were tremendous until the end of the war, yet they lost the war anyway. So its hard to say. If you can down 10% of the B-17 per bombing run against ball bearing factories, but still lose the war, was it effective or not? Or looking at the staggering economic and logistics costs of the air war, skipping the air war and focusing on shipping over tanks that don't suck might have ended the war in '44 or earlier, so maybe it was ineffective. Imagine if the winter battle of the bulge never happened because the war was already over by winter rather than lasting till spring. Or maybe no bombing would have meant more hardware would have meant the D-day invasion getting pushed back into the sea Dunkirk II style. Its an evenly balanced enough argument that academics will never lack for discussion topics.
Designing Platforms is designing for Cognitive Capitalism (and that's good)
It looks like the only way this land could be remotely considered a town is its history -- there was once a post office and 40 people living there. That was apparently enough to get its name on the highway sign. But it's not an incorporated entity, and doesn't appear to have any substantial number of historic buildings left standing, so it really is just a piece of property for sale. You couldn't be your own mayor (as the article implies you could do) any more than I could declare myself to be mayor of my house.

On a side note, I was driving through rural South Dakota around ten years or so ago and stopped to eat at a small town diner. I checked out their bulletin board and was floored that someone was selling a house for $10k. So maybe the area could be a good deal for someone looking to get away from it all. :)
I get really annoyed by these sound bites claiming certain numbers of hours. The article does have the caveat "while '100' is an easy-to-remember round number, it's just an approximation", but the realities of that caveat make the title very misleading.

The number of hours required for basic competence is HIGHLY dependent on three key things:

1. The particular activity

2. The abilities of the person

3. How much competence you consider "basic"

I submit that these three factors have so much variance that it makes any kind of N-hour rule mostly useless. I know people who can pick up a new programming language very quickly, but would take a long time to achieve basic competence in a new physical activity. Conversely, I know people who can pick up new sports very quickly, but it would take them FAR longer than 100 hours to learn to program with decent competency. (Hell, I think it takes far longer than 100 hours for even a naturally talented non-programmer to learn to program.)

Some activities have straight-up MUCH steeper learning curves than other activities. For example, it takes longer to get good at olympic lifting than it does to get good at running. You might even disagree with that particular example, but if you do, that speaks to the third point of varying definitions of "basic".

The bottom line is that there is no substitute for hours of focused effort. Yes, you want to be aware of techniques that can make your effort achieve better results, but you still have to put in the hours. How many hours? I can't possibly say without knowing a lot more about you, the activity, and what level of competence you're shooting for.
agreed. Just one example of a unicorn would strengthen the case for this metric.
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(our last two hires were from HN)

Senior Python Engineers

MarketInvoice is the VC-backed peer-to-peer fintech platform that’s building the modern backbone of the economy.
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It may have a charter from the state. No idea what entitlements and obligations that brings with it, other than the highway department putting up "Now entering" and "Now leaving" signs.