skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, I don't think he is. Not even a bit. Sure, for us techies there's little difference. For your typical non tech user, each of those 10 steps can cause issues. This does not mean they are a moron, just they don't grok IT.

So many will download the file again each time they run it, or spam click next 20x to install, reading nothing. Or just click the topmost, or largest download GIF - which I pretty much guarantee is not the one they should use. Or install loads over the course of the PC's life, but uninstall nothing, leading to buying iPad or new PC basically because they have 4 printer drivers (pointlessly huge things these days), software for their last 3 phones, 234 screensaver apps the child thought was fun, several anti virus (none from a truly legit source).

For the truly non-techies nothing has changed since the days of a web full of crap adsense 5 pagers. Click a link, click another. Main thing that's changed in 15 years? The link probably isn't blue, or underlined.

The level of blind trust shown towards the web, and downloads is terrifying. "It's on the internet, it must be true."
Estimates can be fairly accurate if they're made for software that's a composition of previously iterated work.

If someone asks for a login system with X,Y,Z and you've done that 1000 times, you can be fairly accurate in stating what it will take to do it 1001 times.

The issue is when a piece of software is custom, and there's no domain expertise available for the custom bit then you cannot accurate estimate how long it will take because the developers will be learning while doing.
So what exactly happens if they go under? All the counterparties are just sht out of luck?
I think that there's plenty of intelligent kids who are able to devote part of their intelligence to noticing the whole lord of the flies going around and figuring that it's better to not raise you hand when teacher asks question (because answering it won't give you anything (besides grade which is useless) and can paint crosshair on your back) and figuring that it's better to be useful to reasonable group so you can hide among them, and figuring whom to hide from and how. I don't think intelligent kids are more maladjusted to average environments. It's just this is much more visible when smart kid is in trouble. When average kid fails to pay attention to their surroundings they are just bullied looser kids. I think there's proportionally more of such people than bullied looser geniuses.

Schools are just not healthy environments. Not only for gifted.
Lo que aprendo mientras emprendo – Parte I
How to start a beautiful personal blog using Medium
There are several different categories of software projects, as you say, the innovative ones might fit your definitions, but I'd argue that most don't.

The most common kind of software projects I've encountered are very straightforward, mostly just CRUD with an interface + business logic, and reporting, or relatively straightforward websites. Those are the "paint the room" type of projects.

There are challenges with those kinds of projects, but they should be reasonably easy to estimate, as long as the team is somewhat familiar with their development tools.

Other kinds of projects ARE more difficult because they have unique or innovative elements (probably the case for a lot of startups). Those might be the "paint a room on Mars" kind of projects.

As an employee, I've encountered the first kind 90% of the time. As a startup founder, I have encountered a lot more unknowns, but I've still found my project reasonable to estimate.
Want to take videos on a Mac? Use this app
I think you are looking for this New York Times article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/opinion/sunday/how-to-rais...
Judge: Google dominance didn’t hurt online maps competitor
Microsoft looks to be retreating from EU antitrust fight against Google
The argument falls flat on its face, because if Vanguard did charge higher fees, they would lose what makes them unique in this space, and money would run away from them. It's an open question of whether or not the Vanguard would make more revenue or not.
Unfortunately, that doesn't change the fact that customers want estimates, and the more complex the project the more they need it for budgeting and scheduling purposes.

In the end, you have a few options for estimating:

1. Estimate the most optimistic scenario, knowing you'll end up using change requests and extensions to deliver (one of the worst options, but if you're responding to a proposal that's what the opposition is assuredly going to be doing);

2. Propose an initial phase to nail down requirements and deliver a schedule using traditional estimation tools (an easier sell if you're an internal team, tough if you're a vendor);

3. Use experience with similar projects to estimate, and then refine your assumptions with the client, using change orders to account for unexpected problems (roughly accurate to the degree of imported ambiguity, but now you have to risk going to war to get your change orders signed off on);

4. Use a top-down estimation model such as function points-based estimation to get in the ballpark, and then add buffer (and pray you aren't going to either lose money or blow the top off the client's budget levels -- or both);

5. Delphi the problem and get a bunch of developers and PMs to estimate the effort, then refine from there (useful for sanity checks, not useful as a real estimation process, yet one of the more common ways small shops build their numbers).

As you say, you can't make risk go away, you can only try to segregate it within your estimation. In my experience, clients really need stability in proposal numbers -- they're often willing to accept a significant embedded risk buffer in a proposal if it means they can limit unexpected costs. Conversely, you should also have a rough idea going into a project of what functionality can be cut and when so you can go/nogo those pieces when necessary.
Fear of a vengeful God may explain humanity’s global expansion
Then start reporting it:

https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/
30 percent of science teachers give misinformation about climate change
There's a tradeoff that seems to be missed in security discussions quite often - the more secure something gets, the less useful it is. At the extreme end, a perfectly secure system is also perfectly useless.

I personally also dislike the direction where things are going. I get that maybe most people don't actually need general-purpose computers, they want glorified web browsers instead. But I'm afraid, given how the market behaves, that this will mean there won't be any non-locked computers available at all, or even if, they won't be able to interoperate with their "dumber" counterparts for general population.
I'm the lead developer of swirl. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.
Thats why I love http://gitxiv.com : arxiv.org papers with open source GitHub archives.
Sometimes it's nice to be, right?
I mostly agree. A site called insideairbnb.com that is clearly not affiliated with the company looks to be simply a muckraker blog about AirBnB.

But, the data does not lie. If they purged somewhere around half of all Full Home listings to make their export look like there were very few landlords that listed multiple properties, then they are manipulating data. One does not "clean up" data to be submitted to the government without providing an explanation for that purge.
Ever talk to a contractor about a home renovation, or even a painter as in this story? If you start questioning why something will take so long, in my experience the usual answer is something like "if you think you know better than me, do it yourself." Especially if they are good at what they do. Most good tradespeople have more work than they can do, and will just walk if they think a customer is going to be a pain in the ass. How often will developers take that approach?
Who was the early employee that argued that Twitter should federate? When they ignored that they went down this inevitable road of world domination or bust. There's no turning back now.

(side note: the fact that I couldn't find the name of the person who argued for this just shows how broken web search is today. When people argue that DuckDuckGo has poor search results I always scratch my head because unless your query is a one syllable common query you will not be able to find it on Google either.)
Print ads sell for a lot more than web ads.
I've got the same dream but about Lispy languages, preferably Common Lisp.

I'm sure more people around here have the same dream about their favorite language :-)
I've read a few comments deriding the complexity of this analysis. However, I think it is worth identifying it as a fact that, noticed or not, there is something of a power struggle in the early stages of the human courtship ritual.

Here, this issue is that of availability. Given that it is sometimes difficult to gauge the desirability of a prospective partner, one metric is how eager they seem to be. If the other replies quickly, this is an indication that they are quite eager, which suggests that they have few encounters, and that therefore few have evaluated this person as attractive. On the contrary, a bit of a lapse before a response suggests that the other feels a bit of indifference toward you, and that therefore the person is likely to have more encounters, and therefore is considered more attractive.

You can be forgiven for wishing for more simplicity, given that relationships in most media are depicted rather one-dimensionally, as the result of unambiguous and mutual attraction. This is not how it tends to work in the real world.
Some people's systems are unable to handle the memory or CPU requirements of newer operating systems. Due to that, they are unlikely to upgrade.

That said, I think the question of how to serve these people is best left up to website operators and the people themselves.
There were many things wrong with how Aziz approached the situation. Firstly, he should NOT have invited her to a big concert right away: concerts/events are a big commitment, time and attention-wise. If he had just met the person, the best thing to do would probably have been to meet for coffee/drinks, get to know each other better and THEN propose going to the concert IN PERSON.

Secondly, there are a lot of factors why people will not text you back. Aziz is basically trying to understand why a girl he hooked up with did not text him back. There can be SO many reasons why; but primarily, she was just not that into him. If she was, then she WOULD have found time. She WOULD have found his attempt to find common ground, to find something they both liked, charming.
Statistics are funny. Both are right I'd say

If the chance of biasing it T>H is 50% and biasing the other way is also 50% then the average is 1/2 (in a Schroedinger's cat kind of way)

At the same time the frequentist is right. p(heads) for the specific coin you're given is not 1/2
https://github.com/Wilfred/ag.el works amazingly on Linux, ag is much faster than grep (and will try to parse .gitignore and similar files to give more relevant results). Might be worth a try on Windows as well?

You can find ag in https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher
How to make OpenGL usage Vulkan like
It's because it's the mobile version has a ?m=1 at the end. I was also wondering why it had a giant logo at the top.
The problem isn't with the requirement for fixed-time, fixed-bid contracts. The problem is that agile methods and tools, and all the advantages they carry, are incompatible with those requirements: You can't start fast with minimal specs. You can't apply what's been learned along the way unless, miraculously, it costs less and takes less time. You can't make changes to suit changing business goals without a major negotiation on change orders. You can't access most of the benefits of agile inside that box.

You CAN, however, find contract developers who have mastered the art of faking agile methods and being buzzword compliant while delivering no feedback that prevents you from having bad ideas implemented in bad ways.

You will also find contractors that will lead you down the garden path. You could call them "half agile." They won't warn you that you are asking for something dumb, or unworkable. They will treat your mistakes as revenue enhancement opportunities and lay on the agile talk pretty thick.

This is why the "no true agile Scotsman" argument is so easy to make: That's not agile. You have the wrong people. You fail at agile. That's an easy case to prove but it isn't very helpful.

Real agile is hard to do and doing it with compromised ingredients, like using low-bid contractors that want to minimize their effort and/or enhance their revenue, that you have stuffed into a fixed-bid box, is agile poison.
AWS adds reference to Zombie Apocalypse in terms of service
Added to POSIX is good, but not sufficient. E.g., there is no reason for Windows to implement a function merely because it's in the POSIX spec. It needs to be in the C spec to actually be viable.

stpncpy is equivalent to strncpy - it NUL-pads dest if the src is shorter than N. Frankly I have never found a use for this behavior. The desired behavior is to simply copy src without additional padding. That is what my proposed strecopy() does, and that's what would be required of a replacement for strlcpy().
Explorable Explanations – creating tools for thinking
Does anyone have a convenient way to convert this to a bind9 config format? I would rather run this for the whole LAN than just one computer at a time.
No, it was a different one, discussed actual people who were in the news as being child prodigies, entered universities years early etc...but from what I remember their conclusion was the something like this, that those kids didn't learn to risk or learn to be creative, they were really just jumping through hoops.

edit: or it could be, not sure any more...
Pretty cool, but I wonder what one could do with it :D
Mr. Jones used to be the chief executive of Myspace, the once-giant social network, but he rejected any comparison between Twitter and that now vastly diminished network.

“For me and for lots of people, Twitter has actual utility to it, and for those people, that’s what will keep it around,” he said.

So instead of figuring an unorthodox way to take it private or set up a donation scheme ala Wikipedia, why not just charge the superusers with tens of thousands of followers, like Mr. Jones, who really do get some tangible benefit from the service?

I also take issue with the author's opening assessment of Twitter:

Twitter is the world’s most important social network.

That might sound like the ravings of an addict, but look at the headlines in every morning’s newspaper and the obsessions of every evening’s cable news broadcast. Just about anything you encounter in the news media these days has some foot in the controversies and conversations occurring on the 140-character network.

We live in a hyperconnected world where every tiny little twitter controversy gets blown massively out of proportion, draining people's time and energy on things that really don't matter in the face of much larger and more important problems. At the end of the day, Twitter is used mainly for entertainment purposes. The author can keep pointing to the Arab Spring, #blacklivesmatter, etc. but the fact remains that revolutions and social movements occurred long before Twitter existed, long before cell phones and computers existed, and that Twitter is not some be-all-end-all enabler that we need to rescue for the betterment of humanity.

If it's really worth $5bn, someone will figure out how to get the service there. If it's really worth $100bn, someone will get it there. Let the market settle things with Twitter.
> There was recently an article here that discussed why extremely academically gifted children rarely become grown-up geniuses and people who move their fields forward. They stated that it's not because they are troubled, most of them are socially well-adjusted, but I can't find that article now for the lie of me.

I didn't see the article in question, but I'd put money on this being an excerpt from Adam Grant's "Originals" as it was released in the past couple of weeks and this is a point made in the opening chapter.
Wouldn't help, Deutsche Bank doesn't have too many retail clients, getting reimbursed for 100.000 Euros of deposits doesn't help the typical corporate client much.

Highly unusual for an investment bank, they acquired Postbank to open up a retail channel, but that is < 5% of the size of Deutsche Bank.
I am not a researcher on the subject, and the material I have heard is primarily in Swedish. http://www.filurum.se/forskning/ list research papers if you are looking for more precise numbers rather than anecdotes, and the site list a few articles in English at the bottom.
>That reminds me of another thing I'd like to tell library writers: please think of your stack traces as somewhat public, because I always end up 40 layers deep trying to debug something and it's just painful.

Unless you're using Spring, of course, then all bets are off. That's the biggest downside of IOC containers, they tend to ruin the usefulness of stack traces and the "step in/step out" functions of the debugger.
Is this it? It was the first hit on HN Search.

http://venomousporridge.com/post/30043951343/is-a-federated-...
Every now and again when I'm really figuratively toked up I go reread the history of Crash Bandicoot and also dream for more Lisp in the games industry (and every other industry). :) But I think Nim is slightly more realistic.
The Daily Mail (and all the tabloids) mastered clickbait avant la lettre; sensationalist headlines, sex scandal combined with moral outrage, 'celebrity' news, occasional gore, noisy patriotism. That's the news the public want to buy.

The Mail's website has some truly masterful product placement. Go to the sidebar of shame and pick one of the "female celebrity wears clothes in public" articles. Embedded in it will be a very detailed and 'helpful' ad for whatever the celebrity is wearing. Those must be worth a fortune.
If regulators are investigating your business, they are already 'taking legal action' against you.

Now regulators can and in many cases often choose to believe that companies act in good faith when they clean up their data profile before handing it to investigators.

Without clear data, regulators can also assume that a company is trying to obscure the truth by throwing everything and the kitchen sink into a data set while internally only using a subset of the data because it knows X part is patently false.
For GNU/Linux also check hostsblock [1]. It's available on aur.

A pi-hole clone notrack [2]

[1] https://gaenserich.github.io/hostsblock/ | [2] https://github.com/quidsup/notrack
To Overcome the Fear of Failure, Fear This Instead
This might be true, but only true until a change in management. Given everything I've seen and read about Netflix, I suspect they have contingency plans and should be able to move to a different infrastructure provider in a few months.
You are probably right but in general ever since texting became a thing I neve call anyone anymore until after I've texted. I don't mean dates I mean everyone. I know this is not objective, I grew up without texts and used to call people all the time. Now though it just seems rude. I might be interrupting, they might be busy, it might be the worst possible time to call, maybe they're driving, maybe they're in a movie and forgot to turn off their phone. With that kind of thinking in my head it feels rude. I first text, ask if it's a good time to call, call.
But quite tame in comparison to Greek media the picturing Merkel with a swastika or the Schäuble cartoon where it was implied he wanted to make soap out of Greek citizens in new concentration camps...
Compiler improvements in Visual Studio 2015 Update 2
This is impressive. Here I am sitting in an office (don't tell my boss) and watching the earth from orbit. And not just a still picture from the past, but an animated view from a few hours ago (then I read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11079097 and wonder if humanity really has come that far...).

BTW the official web page of the satellite is http://himawari8.nict.go.jp/himawari8-image.htm (click the three horizontal bars for a menu, including help).
Lithuanians speak like Indo-Europeans spoke
Kumulos is top pick to replace Parse mBaaS
Awesome to see Kumulos come out on top as best alternative to Parse mBaaS. Thanks for the endorsement Waracle. http://waracle.net/how-to-choose-the-right-backend-as-a-service-baas-platform/
www.kumulos.com
Nope. Attraction is a nice thing to feel, but it's generally more satisfying if you act on it with conscious choice and not feel "forced" to do something just because you feel a certain way.
Padding oracles and the decline of CBC-mode cipher suites
Granted this is true in the case of Amazon, but some conglomerates do not act this way.

Telecom companies regularly try to make rules to ensure those that compete with cash cow voice or cable-TV services have to do so on unfavourable grounds.
Before NASA sent their first drone to Mars they made a lot of predictions, a lot of tests, guessed a lot of things that may get wrong, etc. Do some of their missions still fail? Sure. But the amount of success is much much larger because they didn't just sent a drone there and watched what happened.

So even if all you say is correct it's still worth improving one's estimation skills.
I'm split on this.

RE education, I think this attitude is one of the bigger sources of the problems we have. Nobody expects to get into a car first time in their lives, go through a 2-minute tutorial and drive on the public road. Nobody expects to grok electric saws or soldering irons in 30 seconds. Those are all tools, and tools require some training, or at least reading the manual. Everybody knows that and thus nobody complains.

OTOH, we've created a silly situation with computing where people are expecting to be able to use stuff immediately. They should not. This thing is complicated, and you have to engage your brain. Dumbing software down to create illusion of immediate competency only makes our software worse, and it makes general population stupider.

As for the second point, I agree with building better software and throwing the book at CNET and Lenovo, and any other malware bundler. Seriously, this kind of behaviour should not be allowed in a civilized society.
The point is that wchar_t should be removed entirely. Assume it doesn't exist anymore and use char16_t and char32_t everywhere.
10 years ago you would likely predict numerous national newspapers would stop their print versions but this is the first major casualty we've had in recent history. Given these figures there will soon be more.
I imagine that your pension fund manager would not be happy to take a 50% writeoff on his Twitter position that would ultimately be reflected in your retirement portfolio.

Everyone who owns a share of Twitter is looking for capital gains.
I like the ease with which the shape of a space can be modified and the overall functional nature of the design. Unfortunately, the calculations hung before providing me with the results...or maybe I am just too impatient?

Are the calculations run in the browser or server-side?

About how long should a person expect to wait...and I understand that they could take longer than internet expectations?
Trust me, this is not true. Initiating contact is not only acceptable, but quite often preferred. Generally this approach is just protecting your self-esteem.
Is it time to ditch passwords for apps?
The "Hadley Wickham Universe", yeah, his stuff is awesome. magrittr and rvest are more awesomeness from Hadley that make web scraping a pleasure. [1]

[1] http://blog.rstudio.org/2014/11/24/rvest-easy-web-scraping-w...
So the public aren't looking for 10x returns either? Man.. Missed the days when mom and pops were all in the stock market and you had a chance to buy in on a company when they were still very small.. Seems all the profits already made when a company IPOs