skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you can get a few hundred people to move with you, there are a bunch of towns with very, very small populations. Can see a list here: http://www.city-data.com/smallTowns.html

not sure how easy it is for outsiders to buy any land in these tiny population cities.

I am not sure why they don't list towns with fewer than 200 people. Anybody know where to get that data ?

There are even some small counties: http://www.davickservices.com/america's_100_lonliest_countie...
Would you estimate the percentage of Web 2.0 Silicon Valley engineers that have been able to cash out anything significant (let's say > 1 year market salary) at greater than .1%?
I remember the fateful announcement of MIT choosing X-Windows over NeWS. It seemed obvious that NeWS was the more elegant solution, but lost out over what was apparently a mix of political and technical reasons. What a huge fork in the road that was.
What do you mean by exploiting or owning a postscript printer? By its nature you send it programs expressed in a Turing complete language, and it executes them.

The Blue Book is a nice PostScript tutorial:

http://www-cdf.fnal.gov/offline/PostScript/BLUEBOOK.PDF
The employee pool is typically small compared to the entire pot.
Flexibility? I don't own a car, and haven't for the last decade (and only had a car for maybe a year of my life). This year, I've been driven in a car about four times in > 170 days. So let me talk about flexibility.

Think about how much a car costs to buy and own (purchasing, upkeep, insurance, gas, parking, storage) - then put a price on that in hours you work a year. I bet it's a lot! Maybe weeks out of every year. Now, think of not having to work those days, because you don't have car, and those expenses do not apply to you.

What would you do with all this time you know have? So many things! I can't even imagine what to do first!

Cars enable convenience, not flexibility. But it comes at a huge price: a financial price, an environmental price, and a huge price on the standard of living in the negative direction - not just for people living in fancy cities: the oil field worker, the car factory worker, the people living in third world countries mining some of those conflict materials you all need. There's no free lunch.

You can argue about a single car, and how much convenient it is for the individual, but we're talking about something we've produced in the hundreds of millions. There's huge effects of this invention.

You know what happens to cars and cities? People live far away from their jobs. Then they talk about their hellish commute. And how much gas costs. And how their neighborhood is boring. And how there's not parking. And how the car needs to go into the shop. And on and on and on. These may all be transparent to you, but without a car, I hear it all the time, and I'm happy - so very happy to be off that spinning wheel.

Having lived in Europe a little while (had to do something with all that free time!), intelligent, forward-thinking people, living in cities without cars, because these cities were designed before cars. Other options are created, like public transportation system (and bike sharing schemes) that don't have whatever stigma they have in the states.

I don't know for this topic if I'm willing to trade "flexibility" for a massive amount of complexity.
> ISP competition is important, but I see this as a symptom, not a cause. Fix the root problem, and people might start caring about ISP choice. Once renters care about ISP choice, big landlords will fall into line

Depends on where you live. In NYC, Verizon promised to provide fiber to the entire city several years back (and there is currently a massive legal dispute with the city because they've fallen incredibly short of delivering on that)[0]. It's particularly apalling because Verizon didn't even have to build out most of the fiber - the city already had a dark fiber network covering large portions of the city.

I'm one of the unlucky ones. Verizon has fiber running right in front of my building - other buildings on the block already have Fios. However, Verizon refuses to provide Internet to my building unless they can also provide TV service as well[1]. The landlord has given Time Warner Cable the exclusive rights to provide TV service in my building, so that means that I'm stuck with only one choice, even though it's technically a "competitive" market.

So, this issue is both a symptom and an exacerbating cause pf ISP non-competition. At least in NYC, exclusivity agreements make it much easier for the local monopolies[2] to pretend that they aren't blocking competition, when in reality they've carefully drawn lines around their territories and have a "gentleman's agreement" not to encroach on each others'.

If landlords didn't (or couldn't) receive kickbacks like these, it'd be much harder for them to maintain this illusion.

[0] http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20150713/BLOGS04/150719...

[1] This is not hypothetical; I've called up their offices more than once and confirmed that this is the blocking step before they schedule a date to hook up the building.

[2] TWC, Comcast, and Optimum have exclusivity rights to buildings all across the city.
I think that, because at some point there was a doctor, therefore the free market will make doctors just fine. Ignoring that medicine is one of the least free markets in the US (and even less outside the US) as irrelevant. From education (college subsidies, loans), public financing of med schools, public financing of post med school education, etc. Not to mention who actually pays for all that medical treatment. Or just random free market magic argle bargle.
If the machine is on the Internet, it needs security updates. Let's take that as an inviolate law of nature:

If the machine is on the Internet, it needs security updates

This isn't a proprietary vs. open source thing, this is a "level of effort" thing. Microsoft right now, if they discover a security bug, has to create a patch for:

* Windows XP SP2 (thanks to all those "extended support" buyers; the US Navy has purchased support through June 8, 2017, they are not the only ones)

* Windows Vista (yup; also "extended support" for another year)

* Windows 7

* Windows 8

* Windows 8.1

* Windows 10

Why does that matter?

* It requires (up to) 6 times the development time to develop a fix for the bug

* It requires 6 times the QA time

* It makes Microsoft far less responsive to bug reports because of the time required to come up with a fix

* It makes Microsoft set the bar higher on what bugs are "fixable" because of the cost of coming up with a fix

It makes life difficult for everybody, and it wastes a ton of time Microsoft could instead be spending making their product better instead of constantly digging-around in 17-year-old code.

Let's say you're Ubuntu, you're all open source-y and have that warm fuzzy feeling. You want people to use their 10 year old OS installs, no problem. Let's be generous and only include the long-term support versions, because I want to save on typing:

* Dapper Drake

* Hardy Heron

* Lucid Lynx

* Precise Pangolin

* Trusty Tahr

* Xenial Xerus

That's also six versions you have to update every time a security fix comes in. (Potentially) 6 times the code to create the fix, definitely 6 times the QA time, etc. All the same problems Microsoft has, but this time in your open source dreamland.

That's a huge, huge, waste of effort that could go towards actually making the OS better.
I have no problem with that, all infinite sequences of coin tosses have probability zero. The question is whether a infinite sequence of all heads is an obtainable outcome which would be an counterexample to the statement that the relative frequency converges to 0.5 in the limit.
How does one size fits all fit cultural diversity?

So the parents want schools easily reachable on safe side street sidewalks, the recent grads want those sidewalk accessible zones to be bars and all night dance clubs. Some people go out every night to drink (probably a bad idea) and want the local bar. Other people want an enormous plot of parkland to drop the country fair and other activities on the weekends only for their "going out". Some regions have a tradition of scarcely larger than one room churches, others have a tradition of megachurches. Others have mosques or temples, how do you make the Buddhists, the tiny church Baptists, and the megachurch prosperity gospel people all happy?

How about history? People who lived in high crime area will prefer a police station to a public library. People who lived in the country will prefer a park over a shopping area. People who recreationally shop will want shops for the sake of shops even in a time of Amazon and UPS delivery. Or worse, they'll demand the little shops, then not shop there.

Some cultures don't see education and learning as very important or worth funding... just put a small dumpy school in the giant park reserved for it? Everyone has to say they love the arts, as a rounding error nobody goes, so do you build a concert hall for the symphony that no one listens to, or not?

How about hobbies and social clubs. Do you zone the freemasons temple and the model railroad club like a church? Or force that stuff into the basement of commercial areas so the sidewalks aren't rolled up and put away at 5:30pm every night?

How do you handle social signalling vs real life? Like you need XYZ to be socially acceptable, but real world requires ABC instead. Do you build for XYZ to get funding but no one lives there, or build ABC and be hated but people fight to move in? Hardly the first time in the history of humanity where what people say and what they want diverge.

The midwest has an interesting zoning solution to loud and obnoxious industry of which we have a lot (although more automation and fewer employees every year) and lack of parking, and thats taking advantage of border zones and raised highways. My retired mom lives a block from the border of a shopping mall, sounds awful according to "I hate cars" people, but its actually incredibly walkable, calm, quiet almost all the time, perfect for both pedestrians and car owners.

You can even run into psychological issues. Do you ban introverts by banning residential border fences to force people to interact even when they just want to chill? You could zone mandatory front porch onto residential to encourage porch culture in summer evenings. Or if the locals are the type you don't want associating, maybe ban porches and decks if they're just going to cause trouble and crime and noise and get arrested.
New and improved CryptXXX ransomware rakes in $45,000 in 3 weeks
GitHub is eating Jira
Houses are comfier to live in than apartments?
Uh...how?

Windows 10 advertises Microsoft products, and 3rd party products, and is the first step into being suckered into Microsoft's foray into a paid subscription OS.

Sounds like a great metaphor. Let us "upgrade" you to make more money from you.
I think he meant for the tutorial :P
I've been in the room where the CEO said, in not so many words, "fuck the former employees who exercised their options. They aren't here."

No one gives a shit. Sometimes it works out well.

You also won't be told when they take on a funding round with priority, even though all their prior rounds were funding with no priority. Personally experienced that one.

If the industry wants employees to value their options above zero, give the employees legal protection that would enable them to do so. Otherwise it's VC firms getting butthurt that people aren't accepting their scrip as real money.
> And those on the short end of the stick currently are likely to get more than their fair share of that suffering.

Consider a simple thought experiment in punitive game theory.

Consider person A (non-wealthy) and B (wealthy). If person A wants to punish person B and has the opportunity to do so at cost X to themselves, while inflicting cost 10X on person B, it makes sense for them to do so. It is essentially a bargaining advantage - in fact, this sort of punitive bargaining technique is really the only leverage the less wealthy have against the capitalist class.

This whole principle lay behind the formation of unions, because while the punitive bargaining power of one person is meaningless, when a good portion of your work force refuses to work, you are suffering real losses and are forced to negotiate.

This is the logic behind letting the system burn and I think Brexit actually confirmed this theory much better than back-of-the-envelope game theory ever could.

In just a few days, the British elite lost how much of its wealth, compared to the bottom half of the population?

> Bad as things are, they'd have to be a lot worse for "let it burn" to be an appropriate response.

This is completely subjective and a matter of perspective. It also depends on how long-term your view is. The optimal strategy here is not as clear as it may seem.
5 great biometric alternatives to password
The problem with this lifecycle assumption is that there is no way to opt out.

I have a "metro" style SSH application, and windows regularly decides it should close it, which kills my active SSH sessions.

I understand that they removed the ability to opt-out to force developers to change to a more appropriate model, but there are cases where a task cannot be suspended (because, for example, it's interacting with another computer). Having to re-log-in to my ssh session the 4th or 5th time in an hour is absolutely infuriating.
I found a website once advertising "have a conversation with me or my chatbot, and try to guess who it is".

My counterparty quickly made some bizarre grammatical errors, prompting me to guess "chatbot" and be rewarded with a screen saying "No, you fool! See, telling the difference is harder than you think!"

Telling the difference between a robot and a human pretending to be that robot is apparently viewed as a Turing test, but it isn't actually the same thing.

Similarly, there's a Turing test that's run every year with very strict rules on what you can and can't say to the other side. This defeats the idea of the test (while making the event less nonsensical, in that the rules allow for people to misidentify chatbots some of the time).

I guess my point is, your point (a) is an artifact of a certain culture that's trying to appropriate the concept of a Turing test so that they can declare they've beaten it. Point (b) is better.
I think one of the points Adam repeatedly mentions in the article is that a contract in itself isn't really transparent. I get exactly what you are saying, it makes logical sense from the perspective of someone who knows what's going on, but in all of these discussions my thoughts are on the young naive person signing up for a deal they don't fully understand.

I think stock options should be valued at zero. In an a-will employment state you, and with a typical contract, you can get fired at any random day and if you don't have enough money to exercise your vested options within 90 days, they're gone. I don't consider that reliable.

In regards to the parent comment of yours, I think if it was stated as "proactively answer" vs "answer" it'd be less arguable.
>Why is it okay that my iOS and Android devices essentially require an update several times a year but not my PC OS?

Who said it was?
People of Ireland speaking here:

-Want to stay in the EU?

-Want to trade in the Eurozone?

-Enjoy low corporate tax rate of 12.5%? Pro-business government?

-Enjoy friendly, well educated, English speaking, Pro-American people, good beer, decent music, nice quality of life, low crime and safe green natural environment? (Look how much fun even our soccer fans are http://www.irishexaminer.com/euro2016/euro2016-banter/10-rea...)

Invest in Ireland -> http://www.idaireland.com
This has been a public service announcement from the country next door. #irelandlovesyou :)
Maybe the low resource usage on your work machines is actually a bug in your setup?

Honestly though, GP's setup looks pretty ordinary. It's probably a Chrome implementation bug, and the library author didn't put enough hacks into his product to work around the brokenness of the browser platforms.
There are lots of things you could do on the Alto and on the Star that one cannot still do today.

For example being able to do systems programming on memory safe languages, Mesa and Cedar, using a live coding environment, with embedded objects and a rich REPL, which even did suggestions for typos.
If the EULA is nullified (MS didn't hold up their end of the bargain/terms), that won't matter.
other main page will load without throwing an enable JS blanket

I expect clean minimalist doc pages from system dev

You're in luck. The documents that are being discussed work without javascript enabled.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/api/index

Click on "System"

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/api/System

Scroll down and click on "Array"

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/api/system.arra...

Scroll down and click on "OverflowException"

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/api/system.over...

etc... all without javascript.
I have not read beyond the head line(which is revolting), and I can guess the contents. This is new low for Washington Post, BREXIT has 72% turn-out and 4-point spread win. If you are going to bash UK, the so-called most favored ally in Europe as loser, then congrats.

Washington Post rank and file are certainly not winners, but they are doing a excellent job for the agenda of their Overlord.
This seemed interesting because I am working on visual story structure diagramming software (looking for beta users btw), but I wasn't very impressed with their results. Basically the only interesting conclusion I could see was "stories need emotional movement", e.g. there were no examples where things were happy or sad and continued at the same level throughout the events of the story.

I couldn't tell if this could even identify the stories shape from their sentiment graph -- e.g. if you fed it "Cinderella" could it identify the "Rags to Riches" plot that they identify?

It would be neat to see if you could extract and identify plot points -- deaths, fights, breakups, betrayals, (maybe with some of those newfangled neural network thinggies) and look for patterns there.

Still, it's encouraging to see people working on this. Maybe the results seem basic because this field is still unstudied. I expect software tools for storytelling to change a lot in the coming years with all the exciting new work in natural language processing and machine learning.
Most option plans are employee unfriendly. And "This incredibly employee-hostile clause will force us to be more honest with employees, which makes it employee-friendly" leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It might work as long as the original founders are in control. They will be in control ten years later, right? Right?
So does using an OS that respects the user's right to choose, and doesn't rely on trickery to change users to a more commercially friendly platform.
And he's father-in-law to Marc Andreessen, making it all look like some Texas oil family.
Ever since the launch of 10 Microsoft's methodology seems to be all about analytics.
Add a way to manage blocking issues.

My company uses GitHub Enterprise and this was one of the major factors for us to migrate away from GitHub Issues to other platform (Phabricator). GitHub Issues works fine for tracking issues, but once the project has 30 people working on it, it's really hard to keep track of where things are.

Yes, you can just comment on the issue saying "Blocked by #123" but this is one way tracking (even when GitHub happily notify other issue that it was mentioned). Once #123 is closed, the issues blocked by it isn't becoming any more visible that it could now be worked on unless the person looking to work on the blocked issue also keep track of #123, or person closing #123 kind enough to notify the blocking task.

Having a proper blocking issue tracking also reduce the mental workload when someone ask "what's the status of this issue?" Trying to remember why an issue created 3 months ago couldn't be done isn't fun (even when you can re-read comments).
Markets figure these things out in favor of what makes money. There is no guarantee that what does get figured out is of any benefit to the people living there.
If anyone like to see a clone of B, check this : https://github.com/Blecki/DCPUB
Well, if we're going pie-in-the-sky, my perfect city:
1. Scales traffic by distance from downtown, IE:
a. Autobahn type speeds outside of city limits (90+mph)
b. Expressway speeds connecting major sections of the city with dedicated public transport (45-80mph)
c. Bicycle/small car speeds connecting (15-30mph) local districts
d. Walking to specific destinations within an area
2. Automated solutions for each speed (examples)
a. Dedicated city to city rail. Hyperloop.
b. Express vehicles stopping at major sections running on a loop. Subway, Monorail, Taxi Service.
c. Small, single-person vehicles.
d. Walking or people-mover type vehicles

All moving of people/products would be a matter of scaling up and down within your range. Each range would only allow that class of transport (so, no cars/taxis in a walking area, no walking in an expressway area)

I could probably spend days listing the problems this would solve, but some examples:

1. Practically eliminate pedestrain->traffic interactions that lead to accidents and annoyances
2. Eliminate parking problems
3. Improve general health (walking in local areas) and much less (if any) road-rage type issues
4. Improve product delivery times (assuming we could get distribution networks to work together)
5. Improve the appearance of the city (no roads in/by your parks)
6. Improve the appearance of homes (only sidewalks go to homes!)
7. Improve the mobility/freedom of individuals (no need to buy a car/get a license, simply find the right public transport)
8. Instant tourist attraction as everyone will want to come see/experience this new type of living

Again, I could go on. It seems to me that designing transportation is the primary issue, branching out into all others.
I thought I was to infer from the parent commenter that the fun is learning to write Postscript documents to send to a program and use vulnerabilities in Ghostscript, and that would be useful in compromising a printer itself.

For example, if I want to DoS a printer, I send it a corrupt job, with intentionally nasty PS directives. I have seen people do that.

But what if we take it a step further? I want print jobs stored on the printer, with potentially sensitive info. Do HP printers at the software level use Ghostscript on some models, and I can use known parsing problems to get gs to dump memory, or file system info, that I can later find through Embedded JetDirect admin web server or other means? Can I use it gain root and then make reverse shells? I know some modern printers run embedded Linux, but that's all I know.

Again, I am interested to know if ghostscript is just a known Postscript platform generally or it is also used in printer themselves, is a useful exploit vector, and I am ignorant.

Either way, I am ignorant. I am new to this domain and wish to learn more. Sorry for the dumb questions.

(Also have the Blue Book in my list of lazy/bored reading materials.)
This is exactly what I am going through right now. It's been 5 months and I don't have any recollection of my first month.

I'm in the middle of a high profile project which goes to UAT in two weeks, and I know it is slated to fail. There's just too many issues.

I have been working 85+ hours every week constantly for the past ~5 months. Being an Immigrant ( H1B) makes it more difficult. All I do these days is code for 15+ hours everyday with an impending weight hanging over my head constantly that I'll be made a scapegoat if the project fails.

I've started to lookout for opportunities, and since it's September, the number of companies offering jobs in my domain are _very_ less.

What did you do when things like these happened?
[edit: we should be back up now, please comment on further errors]