skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The quote is a translation as far as I know. (The only reference to it I can find is in a book translated from Russian about Russia.) So subtle nuances are likely missing.

To me at least; "to make" a fool to see the truth implies that you will try and try until you succeed. This approach is ineffective because a large portion of people are never satisfied. (See: Pretty much any Internet drama or argument.) And if you adopt the attitude of winning every argument, you will almost inevitably flood communication channels with your discourse. (See: Any HN thread where the whole page is a few outlying comments and a majority in a threaded argument about a topic. Or a forum thread that goes on for pages where people argue about something.) Such discourse also costs you time to participate in and prevents you from doing more useful work. (Before writing this comment I could have sworn that Newton wrote a letter to this effect explaining why he stopped publishing his works. But I couldn't source it (I spent around 20 minutes trying.) so I decided that if it exists including this comment will likely make it appear from the depths of the Internet, if it doesn't it doesn't.) There comes a point where the best way to resolve an argument is to either cut it short or not have it.

EDIT: A large portion of this is how one defines the word "fool" if everyone who disagrees with you is a fool in your mind by default, then I doubt you're going to listen to anyone who expresses disagreement. Regardless of weather or not you engage them in conversation.

People as a general rule don't let the people they consider fools change their mind. Unless by proxy when they learn from their actions.
For a random residential cable puller, sure. (there are good electricians who do small scale, but it isn't necessary to do most residential work; it's really more about knowing how to retrofit things in various eras of construction, techniques for opening walls/patching, etc. -- kind of general handyman stuff)

Commercial electricians. power engineers, etc. are quite smart.

To use your analogy, the residential cable puller is like a local street cop, but commercial electricians and power engineers are FBI, SWAT, or lawyers. EEs are judges and legislators. You wouldn't get a comprehensive view of the law by talking to only one.

(I took EE classes in college, although no power classes, and was really glad to know some commercial electricians when doing power systems for datacenters. It was all in unlicensed places, so there were no code/compliance issues, just performance and safety.)
Signor
love and peace adn success
VivaGraph - extendable javascript graph library
When people say 2-factor auth code is broken, it implies there was an issue with the 2-factor authentication code itself.
That would mean things like RSA and other Token based authentication might be at risk. So no 2-factor auth is not broken. Authentication in Google is broken.

-disclaimer: I am the founder of Authy.com.
>Who decides what is disagreement and what is idiocy.

The moderators of the particular community, who else?
> My business is such that external events cause immediate spikes. My traffic might double because Apple released a new firmware, or might go up 10x because someone released a jailbreak without warning me. That capacity requirement quickly trickles down and settles to its original levels over the next two months until it spikes again.

Have you actually had this occur in real life, that you had to spin up new instances during these spikes ? What kind of database configuration were you using such that it could accommodate all those new application server instances, do you also add new database slaves on the fly ?

When this article got at the idea of "sounds good in practice, but never happens in reality", that was my experience too. We were on Postgresql and the notion that we'd just "add 20 instances" when we had a load spike was ridiculous. I'm just curious who is actually doing this, and if they are also using relational databases.
I think TSA here, in subway stations, and abroad (ask foreign travelers what they think of when traveling to the US) is responsible for a great deal of hate culture related to the US.
>> The puzzles are there to watch people think on their feet

Genuinely curious: why do you consider spontaneity an essential trait in a programmer?
If by that you mean the drug company needs to recover development costs plus enough to cover drugs that never made it to market, then... yeah.
Rails 4.0 around the corner
I'm definitely not an expert on AWS, but this almost seems like the same process I had to go through with setting up my servers.

I more or less knew how to structure the app, what software to use. So it came down to:

- Setting up base configuration (users, iptables, etc)

- Setting up web/db specifics

- Setting up automated backups
In the US, it is relatively common to use circuit breakers in new construction but in no way universal - protection at the receptacle is still very common and can be significantly cheaper since only the first receptacle in a series needs to be GFCI type...of course this creates an issue of finding the tripped device for a person unfamiliar with the wiring scheme.
If I remember correctly (been a long time), most compilers would implement many cases of struct return by letting the caller pass the address of a block of (stack) memory to contain the return value. The function can then optimize things to get rid of its local copy, operate directly on the intended target, and the caller doesn't need to perform any copies.
GTar meets Ableton
> It seems that if I stick my finger in the hot socket, there is still a path via me to 0 voltage (the ground)

Over-simplified, but you need a complete circuit. In your example you say that voltage is across you - live at a finger and earth at your feet. But earth is not connected to the circuit, so there's no complete path. That's why the article talks about sticking rods into the Earth to create a ground connection. Now there is a complete circuit. (And this would be across your heart - the current flows through a finger, your arm, your heart, down your leg, and to Earth. This is especially dangerous, and is the reason you see test engineers working with one hand in their pocket. Not having two hands connected to live equipment means it's harder for a voltage across the heart.)

There's another thing to mention though: Imagine wearing rubber boots, on a dry wooden floor, and jabbing a metal rod into the socket. That's still risky, because your body will act like a capacitor and the charge can be fatal.
My only disagreement with this comes in when some kind of censorship is enacted once you pass a certain number of down votes. And no, the fact that you can disable that censorship doesn't ameliorate the issue - the majority will still be unable to see the comment. Reddit is particularly bad at this, as once you hit -2, your comment might as well have never been posted. Any idiot with a bot and a grudge can make anything you do invisible.

FWIW I like the way HN has chosen to handle this. You can't even downvote until you go past a certain karma threshold (eliminates sock puppetry and calling for backup), and even if you are down voted into oblivion, your words are still visible (if a little harder to see).

Now if they'd just lighten up on the hell bans. I've seen a number of valid comments here which were dead on arrival.
You Don’t Need Math Skills To Be A Good Developer But You Do Need Them To Be A Great One
Stop writing code and start automating
In an isolated or ungrounded system there is no electric potential between the socket and ground, so the current has nowhere to go but back into the socket. Therefore, you only get shocked when touching both pins.
Do you absolutely 100% trust the GFCI breaker? They do require a small imbalance to trip, so something bad could happen in that brief time. Or maybe stopped working one day.

But technically yes, ungrounded GFCI will still protect you. Doing it intentionally is a bit like not buckling up because you have 100% faith in your air bags.

For the non electrical people: GFCI works by measuring the current in vs the current out. Normally these should be perfectly equal. But if you drop your hairdryer in the bathtub, maybe 10 amps comes in (through the plug), 9.9 amps goes out (through the plug) and 0.1 amps goes out (through the bathtub, killing you). GFCI notices that 10 != 9.9 and shuts down. The trick is detecting 0.01% differences and shutting it down in milliseconds, fast enough to save someone's life.

GCFI is way more complicated than a ground wire, and you'd be a fool to not have a cheap, passive and redundant safety system.
The Long Nose of Innovation: Diamonds waiting for you to Polish
Don't go overboard. This drug works by suppressing the ability of cancer cells to produce testosterone, which prostate cancer cells need to grow. So it isn't effective against any other type of cancer.

Also, I would bet my last dollar the cancer will eventually find a way around it since cancer cells mutate like crazy. So it's probably a question of adding some time to the patient's life instead of curing or even controlling the disease. And there are side effects.

Don't get me wrong - if I have terminal prostate cancer I'm gonna pop these pills like candy. But it's only going to help men with aggressive prostate cancer that can't be cured with surgery because it's already metastasized.
Indeed, I think it would be a violation of due process to keep people deemed suspicious from flying.

[Edit: I mean to say "travelling" rather than "flying." However I do think there are due process issues there, just not as severe.

The big one is that there has to be a reasonable way to challenge one's inclusion on such a list. This is particularly important where first amendment issues like speech and religion may be considerations.

I don't know that a court will hear that anytime soon. I think to prevail someone would have to go through the administration, not prevail, sue the agency in federal court under the Administrative Procedures Act, and fail under that act, before you could get to the question of what process was due.]
Yep, here is a video from a NOVA special - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeJPBuBEJ50
I love the British design; I've always found two pronged cables wobblier in the socket/not to mention buying-forgetting-rebuying many adapters of course
We literally got buried by all of the outreach and attention due to layering the Disrupt / Kickstarter launch, so sorry about the crazy delay...

The dock is removable, you can pop it out using a flat head screw driver pretty quickly. There's a cavity in the body and we're actually making a small change to the design of how the electronics are integrated into the dock itself instead of the underlying assembly so that if the 30 pin changes we can adapt to it. Another benefit is that through a generic expansion port we could also support other phones / devices.

The ability to dock the phone into the body was a really awesome experience, which is why we did it even with the risk of making people concerned with the form factor dependency. However, the gTar has a USB port so you can hook it up to any device that supports USB hosting. This is possible with most iOS devices with the aid of a camera adapter kit. We might eventually be able to produce such a special cable allowing you to hook it up directly to an iOS device.

The gTar tech was not originally intended to be for iPhone, that was a bit of an unintentional pivot we made when we met with a particular iOS app company we had a lot of respect for and wanted to impress them. Long story short, they weren't impressed but our next investor meeting went much better than those before it.
Hack with us NOW - UI/front-end guy for $10K challenge in progress
We're a team of five building an amazing game for this $10k challenge: compete on iOS/web with FB friends in a real time Q&A challenge based on your social graphs. Think DrawSomething for questions. The singly $10K app challenge is underway and our team has all core components covered but needs someone to help us stitch the UI together. If you're in SF (or any place in this Galaxy) and looking for something cool to join this weekend, ping us at @SinglyAthonGame.

Singly App Challenge: https://singly.com/appchallenge
I recall moving a water dispenser that leaked, as a child, stepping on the wet spot barefoot, and plugging in a two-pronged vacuum cleaner. It was a shock.
I'm not sure I agree that ASI is an "error-correction feature". Die-hard always-semicolon advocates certainly would like to paint it that way, but I think that may be rewriting history a bit.
The problem with bribery is you don't know who you can bribe and who you can't. The TSA screeners I personally know I am pretty sure wouldn't take bribes. There are enough professionally minded individuals in the organization to make that more or less out of the question.

Also my experience is there is a huge difference in per-airport culture just as there is with customs and immigration.

If I was trying to to smuggle a bomb onto a plane, I'd take a more direct approach. I'd apply for a job as a TSO before making any other concrete plans.
For those of us unfamiliar with reddit and /r/askscience in particular can you elaborate?
I see. I usually never let execution continue and log + exit instead, but you're right, an assert is easier in that situation.
The only online community I can think of that this does not apply to is advogato.
The inside stuff folks are afraid to talk about WRT the Kleiner scandal
I don't know anyone in the general public you describe. I know a bunch of people wondering what the hell is going, or worse, don't care.

In fact, the only place I've heard of the "general public" proclaiming "something must be done" is in the media. But the media isn't the actual general public.
Out of curiosity, are you unlikely to use the code because it's C++ or because it comes from Facebook?
Maybe they've changed it, but if you go to bit.ly they do indeed have a "Just want to shorten a link" box at the bottom:

http://bit.ly

Fast fix, looks like all is well.
How is the entire concept flawed just because of a small percentage of employees ? Because that would also mean that every industry that involves someone in a position of power is also flawed.

You will never be able to stop these things from happening. You can just contain and minimize the risk.
Well of course the concept of 2-factor auth is still sound. No inherent flaws in the math or the theory. But this particular implementation is quite broken.
Let's keep in mind that they rejected a $6B buyout while they have constantly dumped shares every chance they get. There is a reasonable chance that they turned down the offer knowing that it would be easier to cover up shady accounting practices in their IPO than it would be during Google due-diligence.
Yep it seems like it has grown quite a bit since I've looked at it last time. I still think a platform like this should be bigger - as in a substantial fraction of school children big. Every child should try playing with something like scratch, just to see whether (s)he might like it and go into programming. When I was a child I went straight from some learning program for children with some graphical macro editor (poor man's hypercard) to VB6 and it led me to what I am now. That's why I think it's really important what toys we give to our children.
By his logic, philosophy must be the best preparation one can get for a career in software engineering.
If I didn't take any criticism, how would I improve? :)

As to the fact that this is my first post here, I've been a lurker for a long time, and finally had something good to post. I've been on reddit and a few developer forums under this username (and interwhos) for much longer.

Thank you for writing this.
Gmail Compose is a Fat Ass
Kinetic Void Hits Kickstarter Goal At The Last Moment
How is this a black vs. white issue? There are plenty of smart people of all races who are unemployed.

Like the article stated, it's due to lack of experience in the job they are applying for, coupled with the skills gap. Employees are asking for more experience than applicants have.

Intelligence is not a factor if they are only looking for experience.
point?
Hi Andrus,

Thanks for the interest in my project! I am glad to hear that there are other developers interested in creating music streaming solutions, but I am not looking to compete with other sites at the moment. This is a personal project, and I don't view it from a business standpoint.
Here is a graph I generated a few weeks ago: we've since had yet another major traffic spike due to the release of Absinthe 2.0 with Rocky Racoon (an untethered jailbreak for iOS 5.1.1) that is actually one of the most intense spikes yet (but am on my iPhone and can't make new graphs).

http://test.saurik.com/hackernews/absinthe.png

I over-allocate the database server for Cydia, but spawn up new web servers on demand. I keep as much of the CPU-intensive work then off the database, store as many static assets as I can on services such as S3, and use distributed queued logging (RELP).

For JailbreakQA's database (where downtime isn't that important) I do an instance stop, change the type of computer it is running on (such as from m1.large to c1.xlarge), start it again, and have a drastically different machine with only a minute of downtime. EC2 is a godsend (for me).
I'm going to take a guess that Valve is hedging their bets on a Windows 8 flop. I think it is very possible that Linux and OS X will become the two dominant desktop platforms over the next 5 years.

Valve can not really enter the mobile marketplace in a meaningful way. Both Microsoft and Apple will likely try to put the squeeze on Valve with their own respective OS marketplaces. (I think neither will successfully be able reproduce Steam's high quality user experience and extras.)
UK Government extends copyright terms on artistic works
A very interesting idea! It's well known that storm create static electricity, but I've never thought of it the other way around. How does electricity shape the weather?

Thunderstorms are a highly complex system and I'm not an expert, so I can only speculate: A storm builds up a high electric potential between the clouds and the ground which results in a lightning strike if it gets strong enough.
Now, what does the existence of grounded power-grids change? It basically makes the ground more conducting which may result in a more evenly distributed ground-charge. As this doesn't change the potential between ground and higher air masses, I don't think it directly influences a storm.

Maybe the weather is influenced by horizontal potential (Air from point A is attracted to differently charged air at point B), but I don't think this effect would be strong enough to notice.

While reading through the article, another idea sprang to my mind: Why don't we use all this electricity? Harnessing power from lighning seems rather impractical (extreme amounts of electcity in one unpredictable instant), but how about building a high tower or just laying a few long, ungrounded cabels an then slowly dischargin a thunderstorm?
I am curious about this especially given their most recent 2012Q1 earnings which were solid and I am assuming from what I have read seemed to address the returns loss and other financial issues from previous quarters.
I feel like I harp on this a lot, but a quick reminder: that's not communism. I know there isn't really a better name for the ideology/policies of the USSR (and other "communist" states) but I think it's worth (repeatedly) pointing out the huge and longstanding misnomer, since they have very few and very tenuous and/or butchered connections to any philosophy of Marx.

These are not atrocities of an ideology, however misinterpreted, these are atrocities of people and of a state.
I will suggest a few alternatives: Winescript, Caffèscript, Browniscript, Shortscript and Rubyscript.
Resumes can be VERY misleading.

We just finished interviews last week and a few people who looked perfect on paper were not even considered after the interviews.

I was one of two interviewers and I only threw softballs.
Let me know if you need an extra programmer hand to help out. I think it will work.
Art and Copy: What Advertising Really is About
I saw the pitch for this ... really awesome idea!
Aren't most of these already within boost or recent C++ standard ? I just took a look at the format and dynamic cases.
This article is painting with far too large a brush. Heroku is not The Cloud, it's just a little piece of it.

When you use Heroku you are paying a premium for the platform. You do this because it saves you sysadmin duties, and you pay a premium in terms of base cost as well as flexibility. Obviously it only makes sense if the platform suits your app.

If you want to manage your servers yourself you will save a ton of money and gain a ton of flexibility. But does this mean you should reject the cloud and order some servers and start shopping for colocation facilities right away? No, you still have dozens of competing choices for how to get your vanilla linux boxen up and running, some of them fall under the purview of "the cloud" and some of them don't. These choices become very interesting based on your specific requirements. Sure raw EC2 is going to charge more than buying your own server, but if you buy reserved instances and factor in the colocation costs it's actually not that much more, and you may have many other reasons to look at it. For instance maybe you push a lot of data to and from S3 and you want it to be fast, or maybe you want to easily put identical deployments in Europe, Asia and South America for your global customers.

Beyond that, the premise that the cloud is somehow a big pain in the ass and owning your own hardware does not really wash. They both can utilize chef/puppet equally well, and being able to programmatically commission hardware is a huge convenience, the learning curve notwithstanding.

I also don't like hosting substantial apps of any kind on Heroku for some of the reasons the OA touches on, but that is not an indictment of cloud hosting in general. This article jumps to conclusions far too hastily and then arrogantly proclaims their generality with the threadbarest of anecdotes.
Fantastic idea! I hadn't thought about that method at all. I've been researching this problem for a long time myself and wound up taking an entirely different approach.
DrawSomething for questions. That's hilarious-- it's the exact same analogy I used when bouncing around ideas for my NLP project last month. We ended up building http://playdeception.com and it worked out really well for the three days we had traffic. If we weren't so busy, we were going to build a "Never have I ever" mobile app where you use FB connect to basically discover new things about your friends. Sounds exactly like what you guys are working on. Good luck! :)
Great comment—and the problem your describing completely true. Still, I think the post is a useful reminder because I've noticed a general deterioration in the HN comments over the past six months or so (and I even wrote a post about that: http://jseliger.com/2012/01/15/commenting-community-deterior... ; see also this discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469453 ).

For me, a comment like this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4034170 exemplifies some of the deterioration. The commenter asks for substantiation of a claim that refers back to the original article that was submitted. If he'd read the article, he'd know that.

Now, it's easy to argue that this is a one-time example, and alone that's true. But I'm noticing these kinds of comments more and more—ones in which people comment without knowing anything, or without reading the original article, or even without closely reading the person who they're replying to.

Unfortunately, I don't have a solution.
That site appears to be the author's own site...