skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are bell curves of pretty much every human characteristic. When someone is at the far end of the bell curve in a way that negatively effects their interaction with the majority of humans that are in the bulk of the bell curve, we call it a disease. In the case of depression, deviations from the norm in that characteristic have a chemical basis. It's not victim blaming to point this out.

That doesn't mean we don't need to be sensitive to people with circumstances that deviate from the norm. At the same time, our expectations of how we should treat people are calibrated to the typical responses of people in the bulk of that bell curve. It is regrettable but not necessarily wrong when those expectations conflict with the needs of someone who lies outside that region of normalcy. We owe everyone common decency, but we don't necessarily owe anyone uncommon decency.
It's a shame the buttons are in JPEG form. I can barely see past the artifacts.

EDIT: Incidentally, I got 8. There were only 9 services that I have ever used, so I don't think that's too bad. Are there really that many people who have used all of those services?
Create custom CSS themes with Rails
Instead of meditating, you should exercise without headphones on. You get more benefit for the time spent.
http://www.codero.com/small-business-services/email-hosting/
Kickstarter Stats
You're apparently the one who doesn't understand how statistics/probability works. You're correct about his chance of dying once, but there's also a chance of dying twice, a chance of dying 3 times, etc. The expected value of the number of times he would die is 5000(1/1000), or 5.

If you replaced "deaths" in your post with "coin flips", this becomes obvious. I'll repeat your post with some different numbers so you can see how absurd your argument is.

If you have a 1/2 chance of flipping heads and you flip 10 coins, you won't get 5 heads.

You will have 1-(1/2)^10 of flipping heads, that [sic] 99.902%. That's not 1. So you won't get 5 heads.

See how that doesn't make sense?

Now, obviously a real person can't die more than once, but if you think he was mistaken about that then his supposed error has more to do with biology than statistics. Any reasonable reader would understand that it was just his rhetorical way of describing a large number of independent statistical events. If it helps, think of it as a population of 5000 equally-careless people taking 1 shower each, not a single person taking 5000.
Maybe 90% of the web that gets posted to HN, but it's probably only 8% of what gets posted to HN, and some tiny fraction of a percent of the entire web. For those of us who remember the pain of wrestling with web app design a decade ago, Bootstrap is a boon and tools like it will hopefully raise the common denominator! :)
>The issue was reported to RubyGems multiple times and they did nothing.

Er, there would have been trouble on that end too ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5139583
Wouldn't whitelisting conforming input be a better approach? I realize it may be more difficult, but wouldn't that be more secure?

Edit: I'm genuinely interested - I always try and whitelist things when I'm building software. Although I have next to no background when it comes to security in particular.
Venmo Touch: In-app payments with one tap
Link to Drepper's article: http://lwn.net/Articles/250967/

Also informative reading: "A Memory Allocator" http://gee.cs.oswego.edu/dl/html/malloc.html
In Racket, they use the alignment of the memory blocks:

* The even integer numbers are pointers.

* The odd integers represent fixnums (small integers) (n <---> 2*n+1).

With this representation the calculations with fixnums are quite fast because they don't need unboxing.
I've been looking for a good book on how to get started with meditation. Does anyone have any recommendations?
So if I had told you at Christmas three salient facts:

+ Some objects are unsafe to instantiate if you don't pick all values you initialize them with very carefully.

+ YAML can instantiate objects from any class.

+ Rails uses YAML, in a lot of ways.

You might have said "Yes, I am aware of all these three things. Do you have anything important to tell me?" Now, if I demonstrate to you working PoC code which combines those three into remote code execution, the substantial work involved in producing that PoC code -- finding the vulnerable classes which ship with Rails, demonstrating how to get data from where the user controls it into the far-inside-the-framework bits where Rails might actually evaluate YAML, etc etc -- immediately starts suggesting lots of other fun ways to use variants of that trick.
Thanks, yes, our climbing staff at camp is skilled at teaching correct climbing technique. I use this example to help 10-yr-olds understand why they cannot climb a random rock face during a hike.
That actually sounds pretty effective, and would get around a lot of the inefficiencies I've had in the past with remote workers.

Curious, is it just a window with all the other video feeds that you keep in the background? Or a thumbnail version of to the side? Or a second monitor? I'm curious as to the difference between it being always visible, or something you have to pull up.
Solution: a bathtub. I have some combination bathtub + shower so I sit down and wash myself -- it doesn't take longer and I can fall (since I am already at floor height.
500Startups opens applications for Spring 2013 batch
> 1. Something's broken. What part of the code is broken? (perhaps 5 minutes tops?)

Ah, if I could only be so lucky.
Aye, an executive assistant is someone with a significant ability in logistics and possibly accounting, as well as someone who understands what each part of the company does and who understand the industry to the point where they are able to keep things moving along while the big bosses concentrate on their jobs.

An EA also has to have very good people skills, including that hard one of "how to say no and make people want to listen to you"

Someone who can do all that isn't a dime a dozen.
That's a really good video -- I saw it linked in the aftermath of Aaron. It's worth the 52 minutes to watch it.
In the derivatives world, there's a saying for trying to bet against highly unlikely events with catastrophic risk for small gains: "picking up nickels in front of a steamroller." The issue is when you pick up enough nickels and watch for the steamrollers vigilantly first few times, you grow complacent and think that you are the master of nickel pickers and steamrollers are slow mofo's. You try to pick more nickels and linger longer in front of incoming steamrollers.

See debacle of Long Term Capital Management. Options trader take profit/loss as soon as a humble target is hit. It's as in life, the biggest loss is the complete loss of your physical capital which takes you out permanently of the game. Gamblers focus on the potential profits and get high on how their luck evaded fate in one nick of time, traders focus on preservation of capital.
At a certain point, getting access to enough good team members requires remote. I.e. a game company starting in Idaho might find it hard to hire local game developers but they could be a force to be reckoned with with a few remote employees and a standard engine like Unity.

Remote work and offices create opportunity. They also focus on product, look at 37signals and how they remote. Would that company even exist as they do without remote work? Remote working is freeing and opens up all sorts of competitive advantages.
This article repeats the statistic that "Across all industries and occupations, full-time female workers earned 78 cents to every dollar a man earned in 2010."

That's phrased misleadingly. The truth is the median wage for full-time female workers is 78 cents of the median wage for full-time male workers. The difference in phrasing is important. Statistics are hard.

The explanation is given in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwogDPh-Sow

When you compare workers with equal experience, equal education, and equal training, the pay gap pretty much disappears. This claim can be correlated with laws against gender discrimination. It's illegal to pay women less than men for the same work.

If the "78 cents" statistic was true as phrased above, most women would have grounds to sue for gender discrimination. Since those lawsuits aren't wide-spread, the discrimination isn't wide-spread either.
I returned the Surface I bought. I hardly ever return things.

I thought the screen too tall when web surfing in portrait mode. And I had an overall "meh" feel towards the hardware that I knew would have me leaving it in the drawer, collecting dust.

--

Sent from my iPad
One other comment.

If anyone watches the tv show NCIS, you'll notice that while others use smartphones, Gibbs uses what looks to be a ruggedized no-name flip-phone. Maybe a Motorola government model.

While the character is portrayed as a luddite, it's more likely the character persona sticks with the things which he knows works.
Well this site is just awesome, can't even scroll down.
A similar thing can be done in Backbone by having a bare bones instance of the Event class that all other views and objects can listen and trigger events on. Postal probably does a lot more than this, but if you are already using backbone this is a simple way of decreasing coupling with very low overhead.
The CDC has keeps statistics on how people in the USA die http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm

Looking at the 2011 prelims "Accidents (unintentional injuries)" comes in at #5 with 122,777 deaths and Intentional self-harm (suicide) is at #10 with 38,285. Assault (homicide) is no longer in the top 15.

Also, Assault (homicide) by discharge of firearms is 11,101 with all other Assault (homicide) totaling 4,852. To give some context to the Assault (homicide) numbers, "Accidental poisoning and exposure to noxious substances" totals 33,554 deaths or about 3x the Assault (homicide) firearm number or 2x the total.

Looking at the stats and what kills us, we spend a lot of time looking at the stuff that is actually going down versus the stuff that is increasing.
Show HN:1099 Tax Software Took 2 Years to Launch Becuz IRS Negotiations
The post has been updated for your viewing pleasure. Thanks for the tip and thanks for reading.
Is there no hardened version of Psych which lets you either disable object deserialization, or whitelist classes? That would seem like the safest option right now to guard against coming vulnerabilities in Rails in this regard.
And neither sense of 'dutch' impacts our subconscious in any way that can be rationalized. At some point it becomes a single ideogram: dutchcourage, which is void of any PC baggage.
I find status meetings become:

1. The managers way of finding out what is going on instead of seeing git, running latest code.

2. A way of giving developers bi-polar disorder as they either happen to have just checked in a working piece of code (up) or are still ploughing through on what they said they would do yesterday (down).

It can be good - but only when it requires execution not thought.

My solutions:

1. A selenium / CLI recorder. We make changes to a piece of code - which is covered by ten tests. You fill in the bug report and the recorder does video grab of the selenium web broswer doing the ten tests. Then anyone who is non technical can see what the actually results are - on Youtube!

I heard of some "developer lead development" in a job ad - I think it was Sky. The idea was github like I suppose - devs think "what we really need is" and go do it.

The boss effectively has a veto not a driver. The boss becomes a government.
Online Ads are More Dangerous Than Porn, Cisco Says
I think the "war room" solution is often a symptom of generalized poor management. And bad project management drives away experienced staff.

The open office plan is a nightmare for tech work IMO.
Rounded corner group
I had to style a group of inline elements with rounded corners at each corner, of course, but also at corners of last full line elements. Not easy to explain, I know, but look at the result and you'll understand.
There is a Sass mixin if you like it.
To see the code, click on "Edit this pen" in the bottom left corner.
Nice, but I feel I should point out that there are faster ways to multiply matrices than the naive O(n^3). I think we're down to O(n^2.3something). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_multiplication#Algorithm...
42Floors (YC W12) Raises $12.3M Led By NEA
Sheesh, talk about a hostile reading experience. Dismiss the overlay:

document.getElementById("overlay").style.display="none";
Similar story here. Bought and mined about ~100BTC when it was around 5$/BTC and sold @ 10-15. I converted some to physical coins from https://www.casascius.com/ and keep those on my desk. I guess I should put them somewhere less obvious. Haha
Speaking to the first portion of your complaint, I remember coming across that particular feature of YAML years ago, and being surprised at how odd it was that it was present. I shrugged it off because (at the time), I considered YAML to be something that simply would not enter the serialize / deserialize phase of incoming requests. Ignorance of all the frameworks actions on my part, and further ignorance to not think of the security effects of that particular feature, certainly. I would presume that I am not the only in that situation.

You're definitely right that the security reports should be handled better. I hope that this whole situation results in a better security culture in the Ruby community.

Regarding your tone ("intellectually dishonest", "trained monkey", "systemic engineering incompetence pervades an entire language community"), it's a bit of hyperbole and active trolling. You are certainly right in many of your points, and you are certainly coming off as a jerk. It may not be as cathartic for you, but I'd suggest toning it down to "reasonable human being" level in the future.
* I'm willing to bet that most of those studies looked at what happens when you take some "on-site" positions and simply hand them to remote team members.*

You'd lose that bet. There are a variety of different methodologies and areas studied.

Companies that embrace remoteness from the start (like GitHub) seem to be doing fine, precisely because they treat remoteness as an asses, not a minor concession someone had to make to workers.

Again - not trying to argue at all that people cannot be fantastically successful as a distributed team.

What I am saying is that every single piece of research I can find says that colocated teams are more effective. This is... interesting... to me.
DataShop: data repository and analysis service for learning science community
The referenced study answers all of that: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~sillito/cpsc-601.23/readings/...
Ultra-runner Tony Krupicka has written on this sort of "active meditation" (http://www.runnersworld.com/rt-columns/alone). Of course, running in, say, downtown NYC is going be a very different experience (mentally) than running up Green Mountain in Boulder in the dead of winter.
LightArrow Announces Upcoming Sync Enhancements to LifeTopix App
As much as I was a fan of developing Ruby apps, I was constantly shocked by the lack of engineering, security concern, stability of API, basically serious software engineering within the community.

It would be good if all this was a clarion call to the Ruby community to improve things holistically, rather than the current trend of band-aid fixes they seem to apply.
> You might have said "Yes, I am aware of all these three things.

An experienced engineer ought to have said "this is a perfect storm, and it is wrong that YAML can instantiate objects from any class, and there will be a vulnerability here".

The reason such an engineer ought to say this is because 1) In general terms, it should be self-evident that any system built on riding the edge of risk will fail, and 2) We have countless examples over decades of this exact issue occurring repeatedly.

If you need a PoC to understand the severity of such an issue, you do not have the proper engineering mindset to be writing secure code. This was a lesson much of the industry learned in the 90s, where it was necessary to provide a PoC before many developers would take action on an issue.
Countdown of Life: How much time do you have left?
Evasi0n Jailbreak 6.x Tool Ready For Windows And Mac
I'm willing to bet that Jared Diamond understands statistics. He just understands that most of the people reading his article don't. The inaccuracy doesn't affect the article so it's better to be more clear than completely inaccurate.
I'm in the middle of the book right now, the author goes to great pains to point out that there is no value judgment being passed on what is better, who is more advanced (in the moral, judgmental sense), or who is right.

But at the end of the day, it is a study of how some parts of the world - particularly Europe - came to technologically, and subsequently politically/economically dominate everyone else. I don't think this is an unfair thing to say, and it implies no Euro- or Amero-centrism.
I'm not sure of the best way to go about it, but if all the dependency gems are also on Github, a script might be able to pull the SHAs from the right version of each dependency and return the proper entries for a Gemfile.
I find that the people who supposedly want everyone to work on site will always make exceptions if it means getting an employee they really want. You know that if <Insert your favorite programming blogger here> offered to work for you, but only if they could work from home, you'd probably make an exception. If the person who's been your rock star coder for the past couple years needed to move away for family reasons, but would be willing to stay on if they could work remotely, you would make an exception. The side effect is that you are now telling all the regular people who show up to the office every day that they are not as valuable as Mr. Works Remotely. How do you justify having potential new hires relocate to work for you when they find out some special people don't have to go through that?
Cool, all sounds useful, so you have no issue asking for the user's permission to do this?

Because it's still not technically necessary for the functioning of whatever it is that the user is trying to do on your particular site.

These are all fine business reasons but (AFAICT) the entire intent of the law is that business reasons are not good enough to track people without their explicit knowledge and permission that that is what you're doing.

(yes of course they fouled up on the coding and execution of the law, bureaucrats were involved)
It's not just the permanent "loading" overlay that makes it feel hostile. I feel genuinely uncomfortable reading that website; nothing stays still, the content is jammed in the corner and the scrolling physics have been messed with.

It's somehow the epitome of claustrophobic design and interaction.
Launch Party: A Crowdfunding Revolution Ignites the Next Space Race
It would have been sooner if 8 bit PNG with alpha transparency had been implemented in Photoshop like in Fireworks.
The article seems to have some factual inconsistencies. He cites the NY Times saying anti-cocaine legislation had started to appear in 1903, "By 1903, [then-manager of Coca-Cola Asa Griggs] Candler had bowed to white fears (and a wave of anti-narcotics legislation), removing the cocaine and adding more sugar and caffeine."

Then in the next sentence he says cocaine wasn't illegal until 1914, "Hale's account of the role of racism and social injustice in Coca-Cola's removal of coca is corroborated by the attitudes that the shaped subsequent U.S. cocaine regulation movement. Cocaine wasn't even illegal until 1914 -- 11 years after Coca-Cola's change"

Maybe the federal legislation was 1914, but as the NY TImes states, local and state legislation predates that. For example, California banned non-prescription sales of cocaine 1907. It is a bit slimy on the author's part to conflate the racism of the anti-cocaine movement with Coke's removal of cocaine without some substantiation.
Researchers solve biological mystery and boost artificial intelligence
"Pundits often make the argument that 'surely with all that personal data, Facebook must be able to do something.' A great many startups have launched in the hope that if only they get enough data about their users, they’ll find a way to make money from it. But looking at the history of Facebook and related companies like Google, there’s little to back that up."

Most pithy way of describing the dangers posed by the advertising industry companies like Facebook and Google.
congrads
Whitelisting is what Rails did to get around the mass assignment issue. It was solved for awhile, it just was not the default configuration setting.

Whitelisting is what the rubygems folks are doing to work around this problem until a better implementation is put in-place in the YAML parser.

Generally, it is a better solution but it is more difficult and can break a lot of dependencies if not implemented correctly.
He posted this at the bottom of the article: http://f.cl.ly/items/3j041B2P2v0n0h1G251W/buttons-vertical.p...
That'slleaving money on the table. Keeping margins high gives you room and bank to go lower when needed.
Then how do you explain the many happy teams I see working in exactly that environment, and how do you explain the research?

(Part of the confusion may be that "war room" and "open plan" are not synonyms. The former only includes people actively working on the project. This is not the environment where you have the sales guy yapping on the phone.)
> long periods of uninterrupted concentration is exactly when the vast majority of productive work is performed in any given software project.

That's only true in some projects, and perhaps not even the majority.

It seems like a very developer-centric perspective. But there are a lot of projects where the real value comes not from the actual programming, but in how everything is tied together, in the prioritizing, in consistency, in common understanding, with continuous improvements that deliver what's actually needed. The programming may be relatively trivial, but good management and teamwork is highly complex, and you need smart employees who are all able to see the big picture and keep on top of it.

This is a very common scenario (more common, in my experience), and whether you're local or remote makes a huge difference.
Nope, nothing happens. Should've said I used Chrome :)
Had iPhones for years. Started working from home (solo) and found it ridiculous to spend ~$100 a month for basically a few hours of talk time and ~250Mb of bandwidth (I was always on wifi).

Added up the lifetime cost of the phone (based upon a two year contract) and ditched it. I bought a 3G iPad Mini (which has no contracts) and Skype. I simply toss it in the bag when I am away for long durations. If there isn't wifi, I buy one month of cell service ad-hoc ($30). Nearly everyone I text has an iOS device, so I can use iMessage or FaceTime. If not, I can call them up via Skype.

I actually enjoy being disconnected when I am out of the house around town.
I liked Mindfulness in plain english (http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html) and The miracle of mindfulness (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Miracle_of_Mindfulness). Both have easy approaches and stick to the basics.
Sorry, text and sarcasm don't always play nicely. I've had sheevaplugs and before that NSLU2s, and a couple of more exotic ARM boards too.

I was more just wondering why this was written at all, because 'how to plug in a USB enclosure' and 'basic samba config' are topics that are so well covered already that it seems odd anyone would write more about them. Adding 'on the Raspberry Pi' seems to be enough for people to consider it novel these days, and I start to wonder if the 'on the Raspberry Pi' crowd realize that the Pi really is just another linux computer.

Note that I'm not saying this is a bad little tutorial.