skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lock-outs are tricky to manage. I can flood 50 login requests and have the legitimate user quickly locked out. CAPTCHAs can help but they're annoying and it's cheap to pay people to solve them if necessary.

Forcing a CAPTCHA for a new IP address or when a "you-have-logged-on-from-this-browser-before" cookie added to a lock-out would definitely be an improvement.
Nor will I.

But judging by the past response to privacy issues, there are a lot of people that will complain for a week before jumping headfirst.
Biz Stone on Howard Stern
It would be easy to write a Web browser extension to automatically do the surveys with random choices in order to bypass the surveywall. And as the surveys are anonymous, what if some evil user or competitor deliberately cheat or manipulate the results over net?
What they should do is offer two options: either user-pays at some minimal amount per year (e.g. $5-$10) or advertising-funded where the user can choose to follow certain companies or brands.
Possible you only have that problem during peak hours? I would wager they're just rate limiting by IP or IP pool.
Either you didn't read the article or you missed the point.
You know, you don't necessarily have to put that 3-month job on your resume. Leaving a 3-month gap might be better, YMMV.
As I said in my post, I'd include forums in "social." Facebook has the graph, but you could construct a weaker form of that graph using any of the popular community-focused sites.
that is a long way from the experiment that can show a bozo free stable organization with growing revenue

Agreed, but let's look at it from the other side. Suppose one such experiment did succeed. How significant would that be? (I say very. Because it would change people's thinking about what's possible.)

Also worth pointing out: such an organization wouldn't need to stop growing, just hire at a slower than traditional rate. Seems to me you could grow for a long time before hitting "between 10K and 15K non-sales employees".
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than whether a submarine can swim

Call it what you want, if it works, that's all that matters. Also, presuming that a "thinking" brain must be like a human brain is naive.
Dropbox is a huge security risk for an organization with sensitive IP
This was news not too long ago: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/09/swiss_penknife_ssd/
To each their own. The third point is actually why I prefer SASS. I like meaningful whitespace.
elaborate the point then.
Definitely annoying to have to reset pw frequently but the shorter passwords part can be avoided by using a secure pw db like keepass (keepassX on Mac). Storing the db file on dropbox makes it very convenient. Throwaway pw aside, you really only need to remember 3 pws: db, dropbox, and main email (for convenience). I have many passwords I've never even seen thanks to keepassX.
The word "consciousness" needs to be used very carefully. There is no scientific experiment that anyone can do that would demonstrate anything "experiences" events. In fact, scientifically speaking, you can only be certain that you yourself are experiencing something.

This is of course more of a philosophical area than a scientific one. Do most humans perceive "red" as the same experience? It's not really something that can be tested. Sure, you can measure how sensitive cone cells are to certain wavelengths and compare that among groups, but I'll never know if my red is your blue.

The scientific document itself does a decent job of staying out of the philosophical questions. Science concerns itself with reproducible, testable predictions. Using a word that has strong connotations with philosophy (also words like "qualia") should be discouraged in scientific practice simply due to the controversy it would generate that would detract from further progress. Studies of "synaptic activity patterns" is perhaps a better description.
The website looks nice. You have a lot of text on the first page however. Maybe a 1 minute video explaining it would work. Show some charts with actual return/projections. Sell the dream. Are you doing DFA fund equivalents via ETFs? Maybe you can talk more about how IFA does it (the 12 step plan). Your pricing is way high as well, but that is just my opinion.

Overall, good job.
Absolutely not. After 2500 years, Western philosophy has yet to achieve broad consensus on anything at all. Philosophers don't have a clue what consciousness is - they can barely even describe it without using utterly ambiguous words like "qualia" or "sense datum". The only way we'll ever be able to know anything about consciousness besides what's going on inside our own heads is for us to directly experience what's going on inside someone else's (or some animal's).

Not until the Singularity, basically. I'm not going to hold my breath for that one.
How very positive and encouraging of you. Exactly what our industry needs, elitist developers who don't want to grow the industry. You know, there is a shortage of strong developers available and you were a beginner too at one point.
Might help credibility if his site wasnt down... http://imgur.com/fhK0M
It's really frustrating reading all the negative comments here. What happened to positive support for people in our community? This guy had a passion, worked his butt off and got a good result... I'm sure he'll go on to many more good things in the future. We should applaud and celebrate this, not knock down how he's not a senior developer yet. Congratulations Jeff!!
Yes. "Too long didn't read" is not grammatically correct.
I've been here since 10.2 and IMO the only great releases of OS X were Panther and Snow Leopard, though Panther did begin the whole idiotic metal UI thing. Maybe 10.9 will rock?
The downside protection is driven by acquihires from companies like Twitter, Facebook, Groupon, and others which are paying $1M-$3M per engineer.

All these companies seem to be headed for a dose of some very strong medicine though. Without the acquihire safety net I think the seed stage investment game looks a lot less certain.

Of course, all the traditional investment vehicles look even less appealing lately.
Oauth tokens, consumer keys, nonces, and timestamps are not something you don't already have access to as a user. The token is your authentication proof / API access key, the consumer key is a bit misleadingly named but just identifies the 3rd party, it is public knowledge. The nonce and timestamps are artifacts of authentication and less sensitive than the token.

The real meat is the 3rd party's consumer secret (the secret key that goes with their consumer key.) If you're finding those then someone needs to make a South Park ski instructor meme.
Yes, unprefixed properties should go last. This is because CSS rules lower in a stylesheet have priority. In theory, it's possible for a browser's experimental (prefixed) implementation of a property to behave differently to its stable (unprefixed) implementation, so you'd want the stable property to supersede the experimental one, hence putting it last.

As for capitalisation, it doesn't matter in a CSS stylesheet but it does matter if you work with styles in JavaScript, so it's better to keep them lowercase.
> The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states.

There's no basis for falsification, the claim revolves around denying a negative, there's no testable positive claim, therefore it's not science. And saying "it's official", apart from replacing evidence with authority, adds nothing except to sound like law or politics rather than science.
Bootstrap has restored the joy I used to have in building websites. I can think more about design and what I want to stay instead of cross site compatibility, pixel dimensions, and building responsive designs. Thanks so much to the team at Twitter for putting this out there.
TLDR If you work your ass off you can get a job doing what you love in a relatively short amount of time.

I wasn't claiming that I am an awesome programmer but I got good enough to put myself into a position where I could learn from awesome programmers, on the job, while getting paid.
Why don't your configuration files have service client configs on them?

Does it take two weeks to deploy a build to a production machine or the integration test farm? No. Then why would it take two weeks to pushh the code to a dev machine?
Thanks for the suggestion. It is done in two weeks by of us. So a lot can be improved. This is an app that came from a personal need. The need was to see where my files are in one view. Also, we were seeing that just for backing up we are uploading same file twice in two different storage (like Dropbox and GDrive).
Have you been through Dev Bootcamp? Did you find it immensely useful? Did it help with getting hired?

I ask because it has quite a large upfront cost... perfectly reasonable if it really is that great.
It's true that mathematicians more often deal with proof sketches rather than base formal proofs, but that's just for brevity purposes. I don't think any professional mathematician would argue that their main goal isn't to produce proofs (or things that could be proved, i.e. hypotheses).
You can use OAuth without requiring blessed per-application API keys; it primarily exists so that services can let an application access a user's account without actually having the username and password of that account, and without necessarily having the full permissions of that user.
Internationalizing Your App
I keep an image in my Pinboard that reminds me of this whenever I begin slipping into the fixed mindset. I think it succinctly summarizes Dweck's observations.

http://i.imgur.com/QUsvJ.jpg
The trouble is, the advertisers want exactly those users who would be willing to pay money; they're high-value eyeballs. By allowing their most valuable users to opt-out, they devalue themselves as an advertising venue. Of course, they also decrease the available impressions if a significant number of people opt out, making them a less attractive venue again.
Or provide the five or so editors all. In a Unix shop, emacs, vim, eclipse, acme, and sam, with the popular plugins the current team members use, should satisfy almost everyone to get started.
What about inflation adjusted Standard Oil?
> even simple emotional intelligence tasks ("if I kick my sister it hurts her the same amount as it hurts me when I get kicked") stump them

Thinking back to when I was a kid, this one probably boils down to the "interrupt" aspect of behavior modification. It doesn't matter if the kid intellectually understands the Golden Rule if it doesn't cross his mind in between the time he thinks about kicking his sister and when he actually does it.

I would say it's punishment that remedies this -- you can think about punishment like registering a hardware interrupt that will cause negative emotions to spontaneously activate when the same situation arises in the future.

This is complementary to the child's intellectual understanding of why it's wrong to hit his sister.

Understanding without punishment makes ethics a purely academic exercise rather than something that should be practiced in daily life. Punishment without understanding breeds resentment and/or strange, dysfunctional worldviews.

Disclaimer: I've never had kids, nor have I been closely involved in the raising of younger family members, nor am I an expert in this area. Much depends on the particular individual kids, parents and circumstances. YMMV.
I use this setup on my laptop (mac specific). I have an ssh server listening on port 443 on a linux machine in the basement of some university somewhere.

.ssh/config

Host bouncebox
Port 443

/usr/local/bin/prox

#!/bin/bash

if [ $1 == 'off' ]; then
echo "Disabling Proxy..."
networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxystate "Wi-Fi" off
else
echo "Enabling Proxy on port 12345"
networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxy "Wi-Fi" localhost 12345
fi

Just type `prox; ssh -D 12345 bouncebox`
Even better is naming things as intuitively as possible, and to use explanatory comments where they would be helpful.

Not trying to pick on you, but every time I see someone implying that "naming things better" is a panacea, I want to throw it out there that sometimes, nothing beats a good comment to explain (in natural language) what's going on here.
> If it's your long term dream of fully replicating humans, it would be helpful to read Kant and similar philosophers to have a clear understanding of what consciousness is.

From a scientific perspective, this elevates philosophy beyond anything reasonable. Philosophers have many things to say, but they tend not to be the kind of people who are trained to ask, "Is there an empirical, falsifiable test of my claim?"
I tend to think that the success of "this RoR guy" has more to do with the Brand Equity and Mind Share that Ruby on Rails has amongst Management/Recruitment than anything else really.

It's alot easier to call for Rails devs since it's so ubiquitous at this point; as opposed to, "We need a Python dev with Django/Flask/Webapp2/Pylons/Tornado experience", the Ruby on Rails echo chamber -- because of its "singularity" feeds itself...

Everyone wants Rails guys

Bravo, RoR, bravo.
Account created: 91 days ago

We've been talking a lot lately about the decline of quality commentary on HN, and the increase of negativity and snarkiness. Parent is a great example.

OP, I enjoyed the post and forwarded it on to some friends. Nice work!
This is the most detailed server outage response I have ever seen. Looks like Etsy understand the importance of accountability and I really appreciate the way they wrote the post. A short version for non-technical and short attention span minded people and a longer version for the nerds who like to know the intricacies of big sites like Etsy.
What is MVP in this context, ModelViewPresenter?
There really is no Seed Stage bubble because there is no market mechanism that will force a "correction".

The market will not sustain unending losses. A field in which most investments have a negative expected value will eventually find itself without investments.

It's still not different, this time.
Next time you cross a bridge, realize civil engineering has the same issue.
As a kid, I never saw the point in learning handwriting because the computer could do it so much faster and better.

Today's kids are going to be so different compared to anyone who comes before, they'll be asking "why learn anything when we have Google, Bing, and Wolfram Alpha?"
Isn't Postgresql on EC2 called Heroku?
Statwing is doing it right: it is super easy to navigate to their home page from the blog, by clicking on their prominent logo, which brings you directly to their main page.
Microsoft's Bing chooses partnerships over acquisitions in battle over local
My fallback example of overcoming something I thought I never would is playing an F chord on a guitar. Sure, a lot of people can play this easily, but just knowing that there was a time when I thought this was beyond my reach to now being able to play it as well as a C, A, G, E, D, etc chord is a constant reminder to stay in the growth mindset.
Thanks for the input! I had been thinking about a video, but for now text is far easier to display in a half-decent fashion (design is not my strong suit haha).

What would your thoughts be on pricing? I had been thinking I could sell it on pure savings vs. 1.5% of assets that a fin advisor might charge. I'm open to suggestions.

I'm not doing anything re: DFA equivalents at the moment - I allow the user to select allowable asset classes, and then they pick a target allocation from a list. I have pre-calculated efficient frontiers for all permutations of the allowable asset classes using reverse portfolio optimization.
Leaving your Job
minimum viable product (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product)
I remember playing video games with a younger family member before he could read. (I want to say the system in question was a Sega Saturn, but I'm not one hundred percent sure about this.) He didn't know what the menus said, but he knew exactly which options he wanted and how to move through several menu screens.

I was impressed.

Moral of the story: A halfway decent interactive interface can work wonders for a kid's ability to unleash his mind.
As a foreigner I'm surprised that this is shown on fox news. GOP minus Ron Paul's tea party branch are pro war on drugs aren't they? So fox news is actually more diverse than I thought. If their viewership is as diverse, there might still be hope..
> Anyway, Edwards’s theory is that ‘bad’ drawers don’t look at the thing itself and draw its shape, they translate reality into abstract concepts first and then draw what that concept visually looks like.

This is so true.

By squinting one of your eyes (looking through only one eye) you can approximate the 'upside down' effect pretty remarkably.

Drawing is all about the relation of shapes to each other. Portrait drawing is too - but has the additional constraint of very little tolerance for off-by-one errors. Everyone is particularly attuned to facial recognition - lines that are off by even a millimeter or a fraction of an inch (by position or more generally - the angle) - you notice that. It is the difference between a portrait that looks like someone, a portrait that looks like someone else (but not her).

If you want to get better in portrait drawing and don't have the luxury of a live model posing for you, don't draw from pictures. Draw from live TV (like a newscast where the poses are relatively static but still fluid).

I've been taking a progression of art classes for just over a year now. A year is actually a long time in art class world. Really enjoying the escape from coding. It rocks because you lose yourself (like when you are on a focused coding tear). Have gotten much better yet have still so far to go. Have plateaued many times.

In my Portrait Drawing class, the thing that stopped me most was trying to draw what I thought the eye/nose looked like and actually drawing what it looks like. My internal model of what the eye/nose looks like is flawed because I lack experience. As an aside, if you look at other people's portraits of the model - there is usually part of the portrait that resembles them.

The professor was amazing. She could take a blank piece of paper and in 15 min. create the person's portrait, capture their essence. If she worked on it more and more, it got even better. But she got the basic essence in a very short time. She didn't make mistakes in positioning - like most of us in class did (we did get better by the end of the course) - to draw fast - you need to draw very accurately and with confidence. Mistakes can be corrected, up to a point.

If you don't draw the eye as it really looks, you can easily end up with something that looks like an egyptian mummy. There is a very clear orbital socket that needs to be shaded/drawn - without that the eye isn't an eye. Shading is so, so important.

Adding the little stuff to your drawing - like adding a little more shading to the half/side of the pupil that is on the dark side (away from the light) makes a difference. By itself, it doesn't add up, but it makes it look better - when adding all the other little stuff.

Now, drawing in public (e.g. someone's portrait for money in 15 min.) is a whole different ballgame. At least, starting with a controlled environment (precise teacher feedback) is a start. I believe the key is to have the basics down (and basically do a Mr. Potato Head from your experience drawing the basics)
> "It's better to assume everything has a consciousness until you can prove it doesn't"

This contradicts the "null hypothesis", on which science depends. Without the null hypothesis (the assumption that a claim is false until there's evidence that it's true), the gates are thrown open -- Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster and alien visitations are assumed to be true until proven false, and proving them false would require proof of a negative, an impossible evidentiary burden.

The null hypothesis exists for a reason -- and among other things it's how we distinguish science from philosophy.
Bravo, and if you keep working your ass off you will be an awesome programmer.

I did the same thing, by the way, though it was ages ago, so no Github or anything like that. The only thing I'd change, looking back, is that having got that first job I allowed myself to get stuck. I was doing one kind of work using one set of tools and even though I got good at it and made money at it, it constrained me mentally. A lot of programmers fall into this trap. It's insidious because you don't know you've fallen into it. Something ends up having to shock you out of it and that is not a good place to be. Perhaps if I had studied CS I would have started out with a broader sense of the field. In the end it took quite an effort to maneuver my boat into larger (and deeper) streams.
In the last paragraph, you said a dog is not conscious. How do you define conscious here? Why do you think it isn't?

I define conscious as 'having qualia'. I see red, but also, I notice the 'redness of red'. One may consider this a sort of reflexive/recursive self awareness. I am thinking, so I know I am thinking about thinking.

I am interested to hear why you believe a dog is not conscious.

In my opinion, a positive test may be if a dog can count to infinity. Successor functions in mathematics might be an indicator of the presence of the recursive thinking necessary to conceptualise constructions such as "the redness of red" or "thinking about thinking", and these are necessary to understand the infinity of the natural number line. So 1 == S(0), 2 == S(S(0)), 3 == S(S(S(0))) and so on.
Google's blog is on blogspot, and looks just as bad. EC2's main website is professionally organized.
Also, Facebook is obligated to provide the results of a privacy audit to the FTC for the next 20 years.
> In fact, scientifically speaking, you can only be certain that you yourself are experiencing something.

I ask someone 'you know the redness of red', they nod knowingly. Thus I know they have experiences.
Right, because you never see bad code in java applications... StringReflectionFactoryInterfaceBean()

If you follow a couple of the OP's points (read a ton, write a ton, talk with people more experienced than you) you can write in basically any language for almost any application.

Read/Do/Talk, isn't that basically what school is, anyway?
You could ask a well-programmed robot the same question and it would also nod. What makes something "experience" something?
Having a copy that you can access locally is great, but there are advantages to having it online.

First, it means you can navigate to it by googling "bootstrap 2.0 documentation". If you are using five JavaScript libraries, it can be annoying to have to find the folder for documentation for each library.

Also, you might not even have the documentation locally. Another developer might have set things up and they might not have checked the documentation into version control.
ok then. I guess the party pooper comments come from a different view on what is learning to program, and that different view comes from a different experience. Many people forget that today self-learning is much easier than, say, 12 years ago; yet knowing theory on 'how stuff works' is no less important than back then. Good luck on your job.
I'm guessing my blog couldn't handle front-page HN traffic either. Yeah, it's easy enough to fix and I can think of a dozen different ways to do it in under an hour, but as the OP said in another comment, the site gets so little traffic it was never a concern. Same with mine.

Ironic? Yes. Damages credibility? Nope.
I haven't been through as a student, although I know many students would say it was worth it. I've watched two classes graduate, and I'm impressed with the curriculum.

90% of Dev Bootcamp's previous class got offers of $80k/year, compared to a college education where 50% of graduates will be underemployed or jobless. The $12k tuition feels too low if it's certain that you'll get 6x the return in the first year.