skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
U.S. context: In aggregate the "last generation(s)" chose to spend their money abroad and on themselves (e.g. foreign-produced consumer goods), rather than on the next generation (e.g. infrastructure, education, living wage, healthcare). Witness the result.

Certain sectors of the economy are doing well. The aggregate economy is tanking.

Individuals will find their way, more or less effectively. The lauded "U.S.A." may well not remain what their parents envisioned -- probably quite often really in turn that generation's parents' vision assumed whole by those children and presumed, without much critical thought, to somehow be "inviolate", no matter their (those children, the current generation's parents) own personal actions.
"the way we are eating now is poorly aligned with our biology"

This statement seems unambiguously true. More than half of the population is overweight, we suffer from chronic diseases that don't afflict hunter gatherers, and there are clinical studies supporting the harmful effects of processed sugar.

It doesn't follow, from the statement you highlighted, that paleo is the answer. We'd need evidence in support of that particular answer to the problem.

But there clearly is a problem. We're not meant to eat the way we are eating - the evidence is all around us.

The flowering of fad diets is an attempt to deal with this. It has its flaws and incorrect theories, like all experiments.

You're also using an ad hominem fallacy. You say that a diet is wrong, because the reasons for it are wrong. But that isn't evidence about the diet itself. You should address whether the diet works.

Edit: parent post deleted. Well, now I just look irrelevant.
What Jamie Wong did at Khan Academy
Virtually everything we do to help secure applications is extraordinary; it's hard to suggest that a standard of care over security that isn't even consistently practiced by banks and by the military could bind on the developers of photo sharing applications.

Providers are held to a higher standard because the means of securing their product/service are within their control.
The standard of care is very context-specific. Photo sharing applications will not be held to the same standards as banks or the military any more than mom-and-pop delis are held to the same security standards as JFK airport or Dodgers stadium.

This all not to mention the explicit waiver of liability that accompanies virtually every product or software service offered in the US.

This is why liability waivers are now standard issue, so that liability for simple negligence is no longer an issue. But note that such waivers do not absolve the developer of liability for gross (i.e., intentional or pervasive) negligence.
How To Become A Top WordPress Developer In An Ocean Of "Experts"
I do think that at this point code being shipped by people who consider themselves professionals should be free of the types of common types of problems (SQL Injection, buffer overflows, integer overflows, etc...) There is no real excuse for having one in this day and age. I am less convinced that legal liability will cause a meaningful decrease in vulnerabilities. I do think that, like healthcare, the liability would cause less to get done by more people. Developers would evolve techniques for passing the buck on down to someone else.

If legislation was used the big boys (Microsoft, Google, Oracle, etc...) would unintentionally shape it in a way where startups would have most of the liability for not having "adequate security procedures" like having your own security team, certain tools, etc... And that would be bad in the long run.
Prismatic is an awesome service. I've really enjoyed using it for the past few months. It's nice to see a mobile application so I can be just as obsessed with it on the go.

However, I agree with rabidsnail, I think the multitude of unique gestures are too much for most users to take in and there are some odd choices like pull to refresh even though the concept seems to be an infinite list, and jumping to titles which makes the scrolling seem jerky.

Still, the core functionality is there and I will definitely use the app on a daily (if not hourly) basis.

Great job!
I know this is slightly off topic and I apologize but I'm rather obsessed with the topic at the moment.

First, vegan isn't a necessarily a moral choice. I'm vegan and my primary reason for being so is for one animal: me.

Second, the China Study shows overwhelming evidence that animal-based foods are terrible for you. I'm no expert in the field of nutrition but it seems to me the paleo diet falls straight into the animal food based diet category and therefore into the greatly increases your risk of multiple kinds of diseases category.

(If anyone knows of any real criticism of the China Study, I'd like to read it. All I can find boils down to "I like me therefore it's good for me")
Yes, but only if you want all software development to move offshore.
I 'fixed' this: create a shell script that pings your router every 30 seconds and add it to your launchagents. It forces the wifi to stay alive. Let me know if you'd like me to post more on how to do this. I've had this problem since Lion and my wifi hasn't dropped for months now.
If human beings composed said genes, ie. through a splice or more involved process, then said composition is indeed a product of man because it was brought about through deliberate human effort and did not exist before. There are many ethical concerns with patented genes, but whether or not artificial gene composition are products of man seems pretty clear to me.

By way of analogy, rock formations occur naturally, but when a person deliberately carves or arranges the rocks, as in a primitive building or in a statue, it becomes artificial, even if it resembles something that could appear in nature. The same logic would apply here. The problem, as I see it, is that we might end up patenting real people's genes and that could lead to real trouble.
There was definitely some wifi drivers problem in the original Lion. I wrote a fairly popular blog post summarizing reported solutions to the wifi problem in Lion and what solved it for me: http://thoughts.maayank.com/2011/08/wireless-problems-with-m...

I wrote it a long time ago, but maybe it will still give you (or others) leads to a solution. FWIW I haven't had any major wifi problems since the first or second Lion update.
Getting the exact text as you typed it is just an upward flick away with Fleksy.
During the 19th Century, U.S. railroads relied primarily on debt issues to finance their growth. This policy contributed to major financial crises (www.biu.ac.il/soc/ec/wp/16-01/16-01.pdf)

Is that what you mean - or derivatives?
Quibbling about the exact source of inflation is irrelevant unless you want to claim that people are not buying cars or houses because they are buying health care instead.

And that is clearly not the case. According to government statistics [1], nearly one-third of those lacking health care coverage in the United States are young adults. The unemployment rate among this cohort is over 15 percent, and much higher if one looks at U6. And those who are employed are collecting lower wages which are not offset by higher benefits: less than 25 percent of young workers are provided health insurance through their jobs as compared with over 57 percent for the rest of the labor force.

Put simply, breaking down aggregate statistics into demographic chunks gives a much better picture of what is really happening. Younger works have it really hard these days. Older (employed) people are still doing OK and they are the ones pulling up the aggregate income figures. But for young people -- the focus of this article -- the data supports Thaumaturgy's argument that younger people these days are simply poorer.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/16/pf/health-care-young-adults/...
The case for metadata - Niall Ferguson's mistake
Stepping away from the analogy....

I'm not convinced that normal people care at all about the addition of a few characters in a URL that gives away what tech stack its working on.
The sad thing is that it takes just as long as before when it checks for new software... I was really hoping they would speed things up a bit.
I think our culture has evolved this as a defence against shills. If positive low-content comments ("I just had a great experience with x") were an accepted and normal thing to post, pretty soon we'd fill up with astroturfers. If you're posting in support of something, you have to go into depth about what made it good.

I think this is good; HN is optimized for signal/noise even at the cost of missing out on some content. It would be better to have a culture that frowned on shallow criticisms (“Why don’t you have X, Y, or Z?” and “Why would you waste your time on that? 12 things like that already exist!”, as the article puts it).

Above all HN (to me) is the antitwitter; it's a place for serious, in-depth discussion. I wonder whether a minimum of 161 characters would lead to better posts.
> Take a screenshot of this comment as witness, but I'm serious about refunding anyone who ends up not being able to raise their client rates.

Some advice -- you really, really don't want to do this. You don't need to guarantee results to sell a worthwhile book, and IMHO you shouldn't.

Here's why:

1. Let's say you have a profit margin of 20% on your book overall -- printing costs, promotion, etc. versus income.

2. Let's also say that 80% of your book's readers do increase their client base as you claim.

3. The problem is that the remaining 20% can take you at your word, demand a refund, explain that the book was lost in a fire, and succeed in wiping out your profit.

4. Worse, someone might say your claim moved your book from the category of an ordinary caveat-emptor purchase, to a guarantee of success, and demand consequential damages. Very bad, and you made it possible.

It works like this: Because of the First Amendment, an author can say virtually anything in a book -- anything. But when you make a claim about a book's contents to motivate sales, you short-circuit First Amendment protections -- you turn your book from a freely expressed opinion, to a method with a guaranteed outcome. Very bad idea.

> Paying for stuff that doesn't deliver value is dumb.

Not as dumb as making an unnecessary claim that has a potentially disastrous outcome.

Just my opinion, expressed in words, with no guarantees.
In principle, their professional duties could in some way preclude trolling. In practice, we'd have to get a bunch of lawyers to agree to pass on a crapton of money. But still, it may or may not be easier than getting politicians to pass on a crapton of donations to get the laws themselves changed...
Ask HN: Freelancers with enterprise work; Finding contacts?
I'm a freelancer working on a long-term contract where I do a lot of enterprise and backend systems work. I can sort paint a broad strokes picture of what I've done, but I have no work that I can actually demonstrate.

How do you other enterprise guys get around this kind of problem? Any tips or advice?
Even Our Co-Founder Catfights are Data-Driven
You missed the second part of my assertion about the Stripe CTF, and thus missed my point. The 8 people who got the last Stripe flag are not "uber-hackers". Like I said: you couldn't get a Black Hat talk on the Stripe CTF. There are thousands of people who could get the last Stripe flag. It's a pool of talent that could easily be made to seem large. But ordinary professionals have no access to it.

Similarly, I made a comment downthread about how simple-sounding proscriptions of things like "SQL Injection" break down in the real world; generalist developers feel like they have a sense of what a "reasonable" vulnerability is versus an "unreasonable" vulnerability is, but they don't. Juries aren't dumb† but they aren't skilled in the art either, and so are simply going to end up hostages to expert witnesses.

Given your background, I'm interested to hear how you'd outline liability rules so that software firms could have some chance of building and selling software, in the sure and certain knowledge that someone somewhere can find a way to grievously damage the security of their offering, with some reasonable assurance that they won't get dragged into mid-6-to-low-7-figures legal drama when that happens.

† (I agree HN thinks they are, along with lawmakers, but I don't think that, and I'm generally positive about technology regulation)
Facebook Launches New iOS App
Facebook Speeds Up iPhone and iPad Apps
Along with a Stowaway folding keyboard:

http://danbricklin.com/log/stowaway.htm

People used to be amazed when I showed them how much real work you could get done with a Handspring Visor and a Stowaway keyboard. It kind of amazes me that today we have portable devices that are a thousand times more powerful than the old PalmOS devices, but only feel really useful for consuming media, not creating it. Shows you the importance of input devices in the creative process, I guess.
If one would have to be an idiot to write server sotware (because one would be liable for things beyond her or his control), only idiots will write servers. If this sounds glib, it's only because the suggested regulations here are so utterly insane.
HP posts $8 Billion loss
Great work, incredible idea and very functional MVP. Perhaps you can consider integrating IFTTT to make it even easier to share?

You need a marketing campaign around the concept.

Good luck!
Maybe, it depends. What does the app do? If it's just a photo-sharing application, or a weekend project, then no. There's no expectation for the former to be secure, or for the latter to be a full-fledged product that meets standards.

On the other hand, if it is a file-sharing saas targeting small businesses, the failure to handle SQL injection or store passwords properly would be negligence.
Under the hood: Rebuilding Facebook for iOS
I had no issues in Snow Leopard, but had the dropped Wi-Fi after wake up from sleep on all Lion with my iMac/Atheros chipset and Cisco wireless n router. Had tried downgrading to 10.6.4 Atheros driver, etc, etc, etc, from the apple forums, and nothing worked.

I decided to try something I shouldn't have had to and bought an Airport Extreme.

No more issues. I've since sold the Cisco N router -- that had worked perfectly with every other wifi device in the house, including this same computer before Lion.
Texas judge warns of civil war if Obama is re-elected
A Faster Facebook for iOS
As I recall, IE3 was passable, not laughable. IE4 was better than usable; as much as I clung to my Netscape Communicator 4, it was better than NS's offering.

In fact, another current HN article right now details all that IE4 innovated: http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2012/08/22/the-innovations-of-...

IE3 started Netscape's decline, but it really picked up in the couple years after IE4's release (1998-2000).

All that competition, the proliferation of features, the new ecosystems of dev tools, new jobs as companies saw the Internet taking off with MS's weight behind it, the press about the browser wars, being able to click the desktop "Internet" icon on your new computer and see well-rendered and fast websites... to state that none of that actually grew web usage and that MS just took NS's users 1-for-1 is unbelievable to me.

MS made a better browser and put it in front of everyone's face while simultaneously convincing lots of companies to join the fray. The pie exploded.
Agreed, but before JEE 6 web profile, essentially all before JEE 5 was much much harder to work with. Deploying a basic demo EJB 2 app on some ancient JBoss took our team of "enterprise developers" about two weeks. I'm just saying Scala is nothing exceptionally more complex than many other things that are or were used by so called "enterprise developers".

BTW: on the last training in databases I led we used Scala as a language in which some sample programs were created. The group was not specifically prepared for that. Actually they were even not all Java developers. They had no problems in understanding Scala code and modifying it for the purpose of the excercises.
I hear you. I just started working for a startup, and have a lot more email to deal with, and web forums to monitor.

I've got to work out a plan to deal with it productively. It's important and necessary, but carries a high potential for inefficiency if not managed well.
Well, I would contend the "line" would be "an accredited penetration tester can't break your software", much like a health inspection is "an accredited health and safety inspector can't find anything wrong with your business".

But that opens up a can of worms of who does the accrediting, who pays for them, are they a governmental agency, and perhaps the most overriding thought of "How many users do you have using your software before you're required to get your code inspected".

Which is, obviously, one hell of a rabbit hole to be delving down, and probably a terrible idea. But as seen with a decent amount of companies online recently (LinkedIn and Dropbox come to mind), good security just isn't happening.
What does it mean to have a patent for a gene?
Was responding to the second issue: "The second issue is the inefficiency of entering custom words". On that front Fleksy is the same or faster than the standard iOS keyboard.
Is it just me or is the VMware Store completely broken? I click on any of the Buy links and I just get redirected in a circle back to the front page of the store!?

I'm in New Zealand BTW. Perhaps they have some problems with non-US IP addresses...?
i just finished the devbootcamp program so as a person who was thrown into oo programming with no real cs underpinnings, it is interesting to hear him talk about the social component . it is also pretty interesting to here him talk about making mistakes and the need to just get things done versus optimization.
I think that's the real headline here.
Teaching a computer to negotiate like a person (or at least how to fake it)
Your balance isn't really outside information. In a game like Texas Holdem Poker, your balance is a key factor in how much you bet.

But if we change the game so that "if you flip more than two heads in a row, your chances of flipping a third head are only 10%; if you flip two tails in a row, your chances of flipping a third tail are 90%", the result is the same, the odds turn more negative over time than Game A and you should switch to A after two consecutive flips.
Listen to the people around you? That goes against the anti-echo-chamber advice.
Exactly -- Is the gene mutated, is the question.
The option to turn voice feedback off will be coming in the next update.
"is expected to unveil its new, more colorful logo"

Picture of logo already available in the article.
Star Wars-style hover bike allows riders to float - video
I think ever since the success of flickr, most companies have followed suit when faced with the unavailability of their desired named in the desired tld. Eg: Fiverr.com, Domainr.com ...
Sounds like some lawmakers would like to deny any professional stature to developers other than the right to be sued, as individuals, for their work.

Actually, one of the major features of being a "profession" is that the practitioner is held liable for the quality of their work (as measured against their adherence to pre-established standards). This is why teachers, businessmen, and programmers are not considered "professions": they do not have clearly defined standards for proper work conduct, or liability for their work product.
I understand what you're saying but feel like I must be writing unclearly, because I'm not suggesting that photo sharing apps should be held to the same standard of care as banks, or even that anyone advocating liability believes they will be. What I'm saying is that the standard of care most generalist software developers consider when they think about liability is, contrary to expectations, a standard not consistently applied even in sensitive industries that are intrinsically and demonstrably motivated to defend against security flaws even in the absence of meaningful regulations.
This one's circulated a fair bit on the internet:

http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fal...

The central idea is that the china study showed correlations (sometimes), but not causation, and that it isn't supported by causal evidence.

I haven't read the China Study, or the critique in full, so I don't think I'm qualified to say more.
Amidst all the arguments about whether or not it's due to the economy, the truth is really that all decisions like this are economically based; the real question is whether the trends created and influenced by the economic downturn will persist after the economy recovers.
They will charge the manufacturers who in turn will charge you.
I think one of the weaknesses is in replication - the process of replicating genes is most certainly not a product of man.

So if a rock carved into a primitive statue is mine, and if rock could naturally replicate, split into two, would the second rock which I had no hand in creating, still be my product? And the third?
He is definitely right about the social aspect of software engineering. But I think he sells a lot of the tools short. For example, he brings up things like Monads, Lambda Calculus, and whatnot - but then immediately dismisses them as not affecting what one truly does.

But I think this really misses the point. In our industry it is really easy to disguise oneself as a professional (or even just someone who knows what they are doing), without really knowing much of anything. Meaning, our focus as an industry has been on making the simple things as simple as possible (i.e. scripting/dynamic languages, code generation, frameworks).

But what I see happening in the Haskell space for example (and even further in languages such as Agda) are attempts to distill things down to their elements. To find the true semantics behind a problem. This not only helps by producing cleaner and more readable code, but it also helps with communication.

I really do believe software is a scientific (and mathematical) exercise. The problem is most of industry does not treat it as such, and hence we end up in the mess we are in.
Read Denise Minger's extremely thorough review of The China Study (note, the book and its conclusions by T. Colin Campbell as opposed to the actual China-Cornell-Oxford Project). His cherry-picked evidence is extremely fallible and unsupportable.

Denise is now a fairly central figure in the neo-paleo movement, so she may appear biased, but she started as a vegan whose particular inspection of the book played a big role in her conversion.

(On edit: yes, that link by Graeme.)
You have a similar problem to food addicts (I was/am one). You can't completely abstain, so you have to find strategies. Things that have helped:

Planning: Determine in advance what you will consume and when.

Support: Find others like you that you can use for support (just not on Twitter ;).

Self-empowerment: 12-steps call this your "higher power", but I think that brings too many religious overtones (even though they explicitly say it's not meant to). Regardless, there is a power we have (or are given, if you are religious), but you have to dig for it. The journey is what provides the power.

Good luck!
"Minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation. Debt financed consumption."

You're right that minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation. You're also right that debt financed (a lot of) consumption. But it doesn't follow that those earning minimum wage drove consumption by acquiring debt.

As yummyfajitas links above show, those earning minimum wage are a tiny percentage of overall wage earners. In other words, minimum wage earners aren't going to move the needle much. Double minimum wage (and magically don't have that affect employment levels) and consumption isn't going to go up all that much, simply because there aren't that many people earning minimum wage. For that reason, it is a bit of a silly metric to base an argument on.