skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In this business, if you don't re-tool every few years you run a high risk of becoming obsolete during what should be your golden years because that is just about when whatever skills you learned in college may have totally phased out.

It is very easy to feel that you're at the top of the game when you just come out of school and you're learning the latest bleeding-edge software development techniques. You may look at the old dudes like myself and think that we don't know what's going on. But unless you win the lottery or hit the jackpot then you have to keep re-tooling every 3-4 years. You cannot allow yourself to coast for very long. Just think about this - all of the time you've invested in learning whatever it is that you are doing now - you will have to re-do that same amount of effort every few years. It is sad because I think of all the hours I spend programming pascal text-based airline reservation systems. But alas those times are gone, I take from it what I can and move on.

I've been in this for 20 years and it has consistently been about 3-4 years I have to totally re-learn some new skills in order to stay competitive. Even the past few months I've been in the trenches learning backbone.js, require.js, building html5 apps, mobile apps. This stuff didn't exist even 5 years ago, let alone when I came out of school! It's not a major problem for me because I love learning new stuff anyway, but I have seen other people drop out of the industry because they only started in it for the paycheck.
I'll probably be going the VPN route for the Olympics this year. Here in the States NBC has exclusive broadcast rights. During the Beijing games they were testing online streaming for the first time, and it worked great. I could watch whatever I wanted, when I wanted. During the Vancouver games they decided to change things up and block access to most of the content unless you were subscribed to a participating cable or satellite provider. I happened to be house-sitting for my grandmother at the time who did have such a service. I could never get the authentication system to work.

So unless NBC changes its tune, I'll be looking to the BBC to actual provide coverage. Maybe even my friends to the north in Canada. My Canadian friends said the CBC's coverage of the Vancouver games was excellent.
Why would a customer buy from one of them rather than direct from Amazon?
I tried Adderall last year and had a similar reaction. I used it during the week but went off it on weekends. I only did it for two weeks and that was enough for me to know I didn't want it.
I'm not sat there reading the book; I'll look at the table of contents, skim bits that I think might be useful, and then have to make a judgement call.

With Amazon, I get the TOC, I get reviews that tell me whether the book is any good or not (which is better than a gut reaction, for me at least), and if I really want to delve into what's in the book, Google Books usually does a good job of showing me some relevant pages.

I don't have time to read an entire book, nor peruse for 20 minutes. I think the people who are like that are the ones who want bookstores to stay, but those people are a very small minority.
Ah, the tech industry. 45 is old.
The author is not optimistic about the future at the end of his post, but don't digital books solve this problem? They are never sitting around in a warehouse. At the very least, they will change the equation.
Apple’s Failed Attempt At Designing a Video Game Console in 1995
Possibly related: a surprisingly high percentage of entrepreneurs are also dyslexic.
Just wondering, since most reactions from Americans who've never experienced this are usually tame and rational:

Does anybody realize how infuriating and humiliating it is to be refused service because you're from the "wrong" country?

No matter what the economic and legal rationale behind it is, it is just so fundamentally very very wrong to treat potential customers, or even people in general like that.

It pretty much cancels out any argument in favor of copyright: if this is the result of copyright, it's not something we as a society should want.
The IFILB Project. I fell in the lifeboat Project staring Captain Francesco Schettino. Prison dating network.
After Sopa: What Now?
Allow the customer to assign weighted values to who gets the money from their premium service.

Or if it's a streaming service divide it among the artists that were actually listened to.
Samsung Star 3 Duos Price, Samsung Star 3 Duos Dual SIM Touchscreen
Samsung introduced new mobile phone in mobile market as Samsung Star 3 Duos. The Samsung Star 3 is Dual SIM and Touchscreen mobile phone. It is launched with new and latest technological features and specifications. It's features and specifications help to user to use very comfortable and smoothly. It provides like; Dual SIM, Touchscreen, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Micro USB, 3.2 MP Camera, Music player, Video player, Google Talk, Google Maps, Facebook Chat and so many other features and specifications are available in the New Samsung Star 3 Duos Dual SIM Touchscreen Mobile Phone, and all that full features and specifications are available here.
Would love you input whether I left any security holes.

Username/password are never passed back and forth, only the unique hash.

Hash is removed from the database once it’s used, old hashes that haven’t been used can’t be unless the database is hacked, but then you have bigger issues.

All database queries of the hash have been escaped to prevent XSS attacks.
I'd be interested to hear why the GP thought tapering would be worse. It's almost universally the better option.
Explaining Modern Finance And Economics Using Booze And Broke Alcoholics
Physical activity -> exhaustion = improved concentration. Practiced this in college and still to this day. Otherwise, I'm all over the place.
No problem, I have mine on shared hosting at HostGator [http://www.hostgator.com/shared.shtml]. I'm currently using the Business Plan since I need the SSL for another site I run, but their Baby Plan is plenty good at $10/month. Plus, it always helps to have your own web server available in case you want to host any other sites.
Or low end consumer GPUs which can do over half a billion hashes/sec.
That's great advice, thanks.
Parents should really take note of the studies and conclusions in this article. As someone diagnosed with ADHD who has tried numerous medications (Adderall regular and XR, Vyvanse, Strattera, Focalin, and Wellbutrin) I have to say I would never ever EVER allow a young child of mine to take any of them. I can't even fathom how confusing and damaging the side effects of these medications could be to the fragile psyche of a child -- anxiety, mood swings, depression, sleep loss, etc. I was diagnosed at the age of 23, so I knew my own personality well enough to tell when it was being altered by the medications, but how would a child know this? The answer is simple: they wouldn't, and in many cases they're prescribed additional medications (usually anti-depressants and/or anti-anxiety pills) to deal with it.

I cannot respect any parent who allows their minor child to take these types of psychotropic drugs in any but the most dire of situations. Reading ADHD forums was an absolutely horrifying experience for me: parents list the multiple drugs their children are taking in their signatures as if they're badges of honor.

After 2.5 years of trying various ADHD medications I gave up on them completely and have never looked back. Yes, most of them did have the benefits they promised, but the types of side effects they're capable of producing can absolutely wreak havoc on your emotional well being even in their most mild forms.
Not only digital books, but Print-On-Demand books as well. POD is just-in-time inventory.
It is interesting to note how many of the variables in these equations are no longer relevant when you deal with electronic books.

* «We have 100 widgets in inventory», you have one file copy,

* «a publisher prints 60,000 copies (instead of 80,000)», you still have only one file copy,

* «this book is out of print», files do not go "out of print",

* «dispose of inventory -- i.e., pulp it --», physical books have another counterpart: they are paper that can be sold, this has no parallel for electronic books,

* «competition for rack space», there is no rack space to compete for (there is competition for attention, that that is the same for every sellable thing).
Udacity at least is a VC-backed, for-profit endeavor. They're listed in the portfolio of Charles River Ventures: http://www.crv.com/portfolio
Dealing With Malware & Hacked Sites
Okay, so your site has been hacked. It is a common problem to many webmasters despite of their hard work to protect their sites from being hacked.
Can you tell me a better way to do it?

Right now they only can server certain countries because of license agreements. I don't use spotify because most of the social sites where there are good playlists made up are made of songs unavailable in the U.S. and while yes it is annoying to get that you are in the wrong country message what can you expect the companies to do?

The thing I would pay most to have access to is BBC iplayers video content but because I'm American and licensing for things used in those videos differs here I will never be able to do that.
It is not compatible with Bootstrap.css of Twitter. When both are running, a:hover creates a white underline below the button text and I couldn't really figure out how to get rid of it. Does anyone know?
This is only true for publishers that are making large numbers of hard-back books for an uncertain market.

Trade paperbacks are going print-on-demand, and e-books have overtaken print books in some categories already.

When is the last time you heard anyone boast "I'm in my fifth printing?"

So, while this puts some inefficiency and perverse incentives into part of the publishing industry, the effects of this have been washed out, in most cases, by technological change and changes in the supply chain.
In theory there are no new security implications, since you shouldn't be using MD5 for secure stuff anyway. The writing has been on the wall for MD5 for a while. This is just another interesting nail in the coffin. It's getting easier and easier to do thing with MD5 that you shouldn't be able to do.
#5 is a very good point (although, I'm convinced that we won't fail). You're right, in that, these relationships are very hard to find.
If I am not mistaken the publishing has continued to grow since the orignal writing of this article (1993). Things changed, but it was not killed.
When I was 35 and quit my job to start a start-up, my mother told me not to to do that because I was too old to get another job. Three decades later I'm doing fine.
I've seen this layout on a few sites linked from HN lately, and it only loads about 50% of the time. The other 50% I just get a blank page. Awful.
Requiring much more thought to get the same result is not an advantage.
Speed Up Your Site - (Very Useful Article)
A great point. Our brains parse "no study has found any long-term benefit" as "studies have found no long-term benefit", which is not accurate.
I want to help you learn or practice iOS development
No strings attached.

I have been developing iOS apps professionally for about two years. I have done a very limited amount of training for new iOS developers, and I want to improve my training skills while helping the community.

If you are a programmer who is new to iOS development, or if you've been doing it for a while and need some targeted help on specific techniques or APIs, I would like to help you.

I'll be available most weekday evenings (CST). You can suggest a meeting time on my Tungle (tungle.me/warrenm) and we'll audio chat or video chat with screen sharing (on Google+ Hangouts), depending on the degree of attention you need.

You can also email me directly at wm@warrenmoore.net if you have other questions in advance. But please, don't hesitate to just pick a time and chat with me then.
You might want to use a less fancy font if you want to make sure that your blog is readable for all users. Here's how it looks like on Chrome/Windows:

http://i.imgur.com/D77Ey.png (the a's are especially choppy)

Chrome on Windows uses a different engine for rendering text than Firefox or IE. They're working on a fix: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3523375
still permbanned...

Apple fanboys rule HN
I had always wondered about that, but it seems unlikely an MD5 could ever be spoofed in such a way that would make any sense.

I mean to say, you could find a hash that would match an existing, let say, word document. But that wouldn't be a legit word document or anything - it would likely be some random character string. The chances of changing anything in a meaningful way or adding a payload seems practically impossible to me. Is that a false assumption on my part?
Great suggestion. How would you take into account the entry of a new partner in year 3, for example? Would that new partner just dilute everyone? Can you suggest any good reading on vesting schedules?
Isn't Hibernate SQLAlchemy for Java?
When I first read the title, I assumed this was about Twitter's new country-based censorship[1], which IMHO is a much more egregious attack on a freedom that the internet has made possible (speech) than the availability of for-profit media the OP highlights.

[1] http://blog.twitter.com/2012/01/tweets-still-must-flow.html
Selecting a javascript flow control solution
The default behaviour for todo should be to print the todo list and not help.
Linux Kernel Log: Coming in 3.3 (Part 1) - Networking
Occupier tells what really happened in Oakland
> a lot of problems happening with children are due to the neglect on their parents' (or primary caregivers') side.

That nails the problem but I disagree strongly with your conclusion this is a problem of individual responsibility. Its a social problem which we have to solve as a society by understanding why parents are having problems giving enough attention to their kids. The problems here are far more fundamental and pervasive to blame any individual parents for "failing".

Great video on the topic here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-KqeU8nzn4&feature=youtu...
Retail store fronts don't have any problems that cannot be solved by better margins.

If the publishers valued the service offered by Barnes & Noble, the obvious solution is to grant lower prices to brick-and-mortar bookstores.

According to the article, the whole industry benefits from and depends upon customers being able to physically browse shelves of real books. Perhaps the whole industry should start subsidizing physical bookstores.
The cost per kg currently around $10k, about half what it cost on the shuttle. If you assume a payload mass fraction of 2% and a vehicle mass fraction of 10%, you have a fuel-to-weight ratio of 44:1. So, it takes--switching to English units because milk is in gallons--44 pounds of fuel to launch 1 pound into orbit on current launch vehicles. Fuel is roughly as dense as water and roughly the same cost as milk. So, about 6 gallons of fuel at $3.50/gallon. $21 in fuel for 1 lb of payload, then.

How do you solve this problem? You work on the difference in engineering cost between $21/lb and $5k/lb, say by simplifying systems, building them more robustly so the $30k paper trail that guarantees that the otherwise $700 part will perform exactly as advertised goes away, or aiming for reusability.

Of course, if you did that on a large enough scale, you'd be Elon Musk.
I had 3 hard-drives fail on my home computers, in the last month alone. Are you sure that's where you want your private data to be?
It is a shame that most people are unaware of the efficacy of Homeopathy to treat ADD, ADHD and autism-spectrum disorders. Do some research and you'll see how hundreds of thousands of people have been cured of these ailments using Homeopathy alone.
The key point is that Silicon Valley has changed from a hardware hub to a software hub. This isn't about programmers who haven't kept their skills relevant. It's more about hardware design engineers and manufacturing personnel whose jobs have left the area (and the country).
I have taken Concerta for about 3 years and it helped a great deal in getting more organized. I periodically go without it, which is getting easier and easier with time (I guess because I have been able to structure life better). Eventually I will probably quit completely.

There is a danger in throwing pills at a common problem. But there is also a danger in dismissing medication as part of a solution. People for who Concerta/Ritalin didn't work often bash these drugs as dangerous or evil.
I wouldn't mind so much if they buy from Amazon, as I said, they could offer affiliate links. I am more interested in the curation that a small bookshop provides.
If you're unemployed (and wanting that situation to change) you need to pivot. If you've had ten years being a manager at BigCorp, maybe you'd better sharpen up your coding skills, or you B.A. skills. If you've been coding something nobody uses anymore, time to switch areas.

It bothers me that we treat unemployment as somehow a failure of the system. As if economies only exist to provide jobs for everybody, whether those jobs make sense or not. It's much more the situation that the world economy is evolving. All of us had better get our asses in gear and catch up. Spend more time getting experience and learning strategies you can put on a resume and less time taking silly courses and waiting for the tooth fairy to come along. I am very sorry that our education system is completely out of whack with what we actually need. There area lot of folks with great credentials who are lining up to create "jobs" programs that will have very poor results. But if I'm an unemployed person, I can't help any of that. The only thing I can do is to take responsibility, keep busy, and start my personal marketing/sales machine.

I said that in a pretty cranky fashion because there's another point that's missing in a lot of this discussion: I find as I get older my tolerance for bullshit decreases. The first time you work for a bad PM who is destroying the project you kind of buckle down, maybe struggle along, but generally put up with it. After all, you have nothing in your life experience to give you context. But after a while, it seems to be a lot more important to tell people they are wrong -- nicely, of course -- than to spend six months on a death march. I find that these conversations require a level of trust that younger folks have difficulty giving older folks, and vice-versa. You either become too "grumpy" or you become so passive as to be not worth a damn.

In many teams I have seen older workers tell the team that they have these worries that are being unaddressed. In each case, it was way too easy for the team to say "Old Jim is just a grumpy old guy, cranky and he has a bad attitude" than it was to meet Jim half-way and go forward. I think there is a real and measurable communication problem in technology teams between age groups. I'm not sure what the magic bullet is going to be. Or if there is one.
Learn new tools every few years.

Focus on learning tool-agnostic things like how to build abstractions, working well in a team, coding processes, run-time complexity, and tool-agnostic concepts like closures/monads/etc.
Startup don't have to be about new technology, the have to be about new business concept.

NASA is no startup!
If you want more fonts to choose from on Ubuntu, you can download the fonts using Mercurial as described here:

http://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/

As a nice twist I tested and found that if you place your googlefontdirectory in $HOME/.fonts then the gnome-tweak-tool will scan and pick up the fonts, even in Unity!
The key point with tech is age matters little.

If you have the skills, you'll have no trouble getting work.

Yes, ageism is a slight problem of course, as with every profession, but programming is more a meritocracy than most other professions. Keep the skills sharp and relevant and you'll have few worries.
I like this, but i wonder if there's a way to tie this to a Google/Facebook/Twitter account? I'm much more likely to already be logged into one of those devices on my phone...
Afraid so - I love Apple devices, but Photo Stream is completely unusable to me. Why should I take up all that precious mobile device space with many copies of my Photos - of which I have thousands to begin with?
If you have 10 photos and clueless about how to upload them - perhaps it's something that would be neat for you...
Ask HN: How do I start freelancing?
I'm a web developer and I have been trying to get a freelance gig for the past few weeks, but it seems nobody wants to hire someone without a decent portfolio. My portfolio consists of two projects, both about 100 LOC.

Is it necessary to invest some time in building an impressive app of my own or is it possible to find someone who'll hire me despite the fact that I have almost nothing to show?
Has anybody ever calculated the "carbon footprint" and other environmental issues of paper vrs digital delivery of reading material?
Nope. The Outer Space Treaty forbids many things, but does not forbid anti-satellite weapons, especially if those weapons are not based on orbit. In fact, the Outer Space Treaty does not even forbid conventional weapons in orbit. It basically only bans WMDs in space, and forbids military use of other celestial bodies (nothing about space itself).

Anti-satellite weapons were largely held in check by technical issues, cost, as well as avoiding escalation/arms race. The recent weapons test are an example of that. Once you start actively developing these weapons again, everyone else who can will follow to protect their interests. Both of their spins are largely for PR, not legal/treaty reasons.
No, both are for-profit. This caused a bit of a stir among their fellow academics.
After a while, people get into their groove and don't want to get out. If the groove became a dead end in hiring, then they are in trouble when they next look for work.

It shows up with older people because as you get more experienced (ie, older), you have a better change of having found your groove.

I think continual learning is the only way to avoid this problem.

edit:

Also, after you've seen a few crunches for no good reason, you just don't want to be all eager beaver and work overtime without having a sound reason up front. So I think that turns off employers as well... rather pay someone cheap who works overtime than the expensive guy who laughs at the hopeless schedule.
Why was this downvoted? Margins are a relevant topic when discussing the survival of a business, and a "tragedy of the commons" is relevant when discussing the failure of a segment of business upon which all the others depend.
33 myself and it has crossed my mind.

My guess based on what I've seen in my little bit of the world is that experience and skillset count more than age but you have to have both, hence I need to modernise my skillset in a few places sooner rather than later.
It is. The MD5 preimage attacks support arbitrary (non-common) prefixes and arbitrary common suffixes. With complex file format like a word document, it's easy enough to put a binary blob at the end of the file that doesn't affect how it looks to the user, and the content before that point can be whatever you want (as long as it's the same binary length, which is also easy enough to arrange).
Often the path to a discovery is not direct. Facebook stumbled upon social search several years after putting up college yearbook profiles online first...

So I like 7, building a database of biology but to tackle that head on would be impractical (financially). That is the end goal that we have at my startup, but we are starting out by helping labs manage their reagent and chemical inventories first. Sounds mundane but the eventual goal is to get to a crowd-sourced global database for biology. Remains to be seen how it pans out.

My point is that such lists of top X ideas can be useful but often the biggest challenge is plotting the trajectory. And often the path is not a straight line.