skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the reason it's worth going beyond "blessing" to "privilege" is that some things aren't really "luck" in the sense of some sort of randomly distributed boon. Some are part of self-sustaining systems.

As a straight white guy, I have a hard time saying "Gosh, I'm so lucky to be white." But it has absolutely been an advantage for me.

I don't know that I feel guilty for that, exactly. But I do feel an obligation to use my power responsibly. And if I fail to do that, then I hope I have friends kind and smart enough to call me on it. And that is when I'd feel guilty.
Well true, but still, 72k in sfba and seattle is really different
Absolutely correct, my crude estimate is an upper bound.

The Ford Model T sold for $850 in 1909 ($2012 21,390), $550 in 1913 (12,580), and $440 in 1915 (9,640) [1].

Also, noting that the Ford Model T was on sale in 1909 (t=31) I revise my original estimate down to 2025 (t=22). Assuming 2% CPI inflation that means {$2025: 27,670; 16,270; 12,720}.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T#Price
Who's Afraid Of The Big, Bad Hacker?
OK. Where do we go from here?
Mainland Chinese Traders Milking Hong Kong for All Its Worth
Iphone 5 y Blackberry z10 las smartphones con más radiaciones
articleak – Solution to closed-access publication
Privilege is a technical term. In this sense, he is using it correctly.
> physics eliminate the possibility of free will

Go do some physics - then come back to me.

> why are you even bothering to tell us this?

I don't know. There really isn't any point to it. I'm not here to convince you.

> taking any action in life

I'm programmed to take actions - 4 billion years of evolution tends to do that.

> self-perceived intellectual superiority and ability to transcend it all recognized.

Never said I was smarter than anyone. Just said that people were wrong. There is a difference.
My first computer had DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on it.

I was a Norton Commander user, however I do not have such fond memories of it. Yes it was more efficient than navigating and doing stuff at the raw command line, but that's only because the command-line in DOS and Windows completely sucks in all ways imaginable.

Nowadays my command-line only feels limiting whenever I want thumbnails on my files ... like when searching for a PDF, or rearranging my photos folder. In such instances NC would be useless anyway.
In this case privilege is a technical term. He is using it correctly.

You may not be intending to come across this way, but as one white guy to another, a common way people avoid recognizing these sorts of privileges and avoid discussing social inequity is to quibble about little details. Like, say, the definition of a word.
I think you may be missing most interesting point of article which is about the cognitive limits of enhancing skill through deliberate practice.

There was an academic paper a few years back "The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance" ( a nice summary here - http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3881908748/tldr-summary-the...). The paper breaks down 3 types of activity: work, play and deliberate practice. Work is exercising skills you already know; Play is creativity, fun, exploration; Deliberate practice is building a skill - where expertise is achieved through focused training in a particular skill. The article suggests there is evidence that it takes about 10yrs to acheive expert status in a skill. Malcom Gladwell introduced a similar topic through pop-sci writing "Outliers" - suggesting there was evidence that becoming an expert required 10k hrs of practice.

To me, practice requires the absolute most concentration - unlike 'work', with 'deliberate practice', by definition, you can't supplement skill with experience for efficiency.. to learn you have to evolve skill from more experiences. And I believe thats why the linked articuled a 'cognitive limit' of 4 hours by way of a violinist practicing in spurts of 2x2hrs=4hrs per day.

The last paragraph in the article talks about "four hours of intense concentration per day", and I'm not sure I buy that abstraction because "concentrating" and "training" are 2 different things. The author (and interviewee) is inferring that concentration is the constraint, but I'd suggest its more likely learning/trainability speed constraint.

So, a different interpretation, but I may be agreeing with you own observations. I think deliberate practice shows an upper bound for cognitive limit - but in the sense of new patterns being formed in the brain. I don't think deliberate practice necessarily shows the upper bound for concentration based on the information presented.
With riches from billion-dollar startups, some anxiety
Bypass Three Network Tethering Block
JFDI.Asia unveils 8 teams for first Bootcamp in 2013; each gets USD 20k
This looks to have resolved it for us as well. Thank you.
Dear Microsoft, The Web Is No Longer Good Enough; Windows RT Needs Apps And Fast
How about the water container is transparent, and is actually used. Like a buffer containing water from the pipe. As it's used it get refilled.
Thanks. I work with Node most of the day. Also, NPM offers many advantages: easy distribution, easy inclusion of 3rd party libraries, and simple standardized way of adding executables to a user's path.
I can see this being extremely useful for someone just getting into web development that needs a free place to host some stuff.

I recently started using Github as my blogging plaform. I just created a repo called 'thoughts' which has a bunch of markdown files inside.

When I create a new 'post' I just share the link to the markdown file on twitter/g+.

I can imagine someone using this feature in a similar way. A super lightweight, quick, and easy way to share some content.

Sometimes just getting the content out is far more important than having a nice website or url.
How are you updating your master branch? Are you just doing a 'git aws.push'?

I'm reading that causes a little bit of downtime and AWS' recommendation for zero downtime is to create a new environment and then switch the CNAME to point to the new environment once it is ready... Seems like a little bit of an ordeal for pushing out changes.

Thoughts?
Wow, what a story. Thank you for sharing it. I always had some notion of the depressing realities I'd have faced if I stuck around on the island – but your testimony takes it to a new level.

It's amazing. Education really is the silver bullet. And computers are the most revolutionary education tool ever devised. Way to climb out of a tough spot, my fellow boricua.
I don't think much of this article.

Its only references are links out to other news articles, the rest is just ropey opinion.

This is effectively an advert for his services and he's doing his best to scare people, although he doesn't appear to know what he's talking about.

"Most hackers are simply greedy."

Says who? Is there a survey of Hackers in which they listed their motivations? I would to have a look.

"HTML 5, the latest version of the HTML standard, allows users to personalize their browsing experience, and lets businesses build browser-based applications. But reducing the layers of technology between the browser and internal systems removes obstacles for would-be hackers. As businesses make greater use of popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, hackers can gain access to personal data that can be used for phishing or other "social engineering" attacks. And there's also the potential for corporate networks to be infected by malware from social networking sites."

Honestly, this paragraph is just a train wreck and sounds like something written by a grade-schooler. It's a mish-mash of unrelated sentences that might sound scary to an ill-informed employee, but contains zero substance.

Zero meaningful advice given at the end, to carry on the theme, just a link to his company.

I didn't realise Readwrite would publish such a lazy effort.

"Here's some buzzwords, some hazy definitions, and a few general misunderstandings - all in a 20 minutes rush job.
Please give my company advertising space and traffic."
I didn't even know SeatGeek had an API. Just added their event listings to one of my side projects.

Serendipity.
This is getting frustrating. Physics being at the beginning of the causal chain does not invalidate latter sections of the chain. If "A → B → C", pointing out "A → B" does not make "B → C" false.

A = physics

B = individual values and behavior (aka "algorithm")

C = outcome
It very much depends on your target audience.

We’re in the web hosting business and whenever we try to be a bit more progressive, people start yelling at us that their IE 4-using customers in rural Mongolia can’t SSL-surf their shop. When it comes to mail, IIRC some business phones were behind too.

OTOH iOS 6 support TLS 1.2, so if you’re just building a REST API for your own apps, you can go wild.
You already can. Shell redirection just connects file descriptors - they don't need to be text files.

Maybe what you mean, is you want a terminal that can display a number of well-know content-types, negotiate with an upstream process for the content, receive that as a stream of bytes, for display to the user. :)
seems fixed.
You can get the best of both worlds by making it so that your user (has to?) also set a password when they finish logging in via facebook the first time.

This way, if facebook ever down (or removes their services), you have an _out_ for your users to login via the traditional username/password.
GoDaddy Super Bowl Nerd Kiss Ad Boosts Company To Biggest Sales Day Ever: Report
While it's commonly bandied about that it's easy to build a nuclear weapon, and I don't dispute that, I think those sorts of claims are contingent on having a pretty wide range in the amount of fissile material you have at your disposal. "Straightforward" bomb designs can be achieved by being willing to start with a lot more than needed U-235/Pu-239.

I would assume that the US has very few of the ancient "enough fissile material to go critical trivially" sorts of bombs. The miniaturization of atomic weapons to fit into, among other things, ICBM warhead nose cones, likely came about by using smaller quantities of fissile material with much higher precision explosives, timings, and pit shapes to push that smaller nuclear pit into supercriticality. Instead of a soccer-ball of dozens of explosive lenses like the Fat Man, you've got maybe two or three lenses tops. Less moving parts, smaller overall bomb, but much much more timing sensitive.

So if tampering or failing the PAL blows out an EEPROM with the detonation timings on it, you've got a chunk of fissile material that's likely not enough by itself to construct a working nuclear bomb without 30-40 years of superpower-levels-of-funded R&D into materials sciences, precision machining of nasty stuff like beryllium, slapper detonators, so on and so forth.

Most of the gigantic TOP500 supercomputer clusters we've built over the years at national laboratories are likely used towards simulating whether the pits, even in their current configurations, are decaying in a reliable way that the weapons still function if needed. Reprocessing a single given pit into a new weapon is quite possibly an even harder problem.

Now, if you can steal a whole cache of nuclear weapons, then it gets a lot more feasible, since you can probably make one "easy" bomb out of a few hard ones, and either way you have nasty dirty-bomb potential, but I think if you had the capacity to build a working nuclear weapon out of a modern warhead, you probably already have them to begin with.
Getting hit by lightning or winning the lottery happens orders of magnitude less often than getting a concussion in soccer. Don't be disingenuous.
http://imgur.com/V5LD0EB
I agree that it may be unrealistic to expect fully functioning products out of a three day hackathon, but I am continually impressed by the amount that people accomplish in such a short period of time. Extreme time constraints can often be a useful tool to break conventional thinking and prompt disruptive solutions.

Here's two suggestions that might produce a more focused outcome and reduce wasted effort:

1) Engage key stakeholders throughout the hackathon - so that a deeper understanding of their problems is reflected in the hacked solutions

2) Offer an "overtime" session for those who are interested in working with the stakeholder over an extended period (a few weeks or possibly months) to refine the solution
LaunchpadLA Application Deadline Nears, As Class Graduates
French press, anyone?
It's common to find serial number generators posted online. I just googled "protools serials" and found one. The algorithms to generate them are reverse engineered and published. That's not a very sexy hack but for a dude selling software "fallen off a truck" is how they would do it. However, protools uses a dongle system now (a hard USB key) so I'm not sure that would work, but the serial gen method would apply for other audio products.

But I question the premise here. A box of protools already has the serial to activate it. Do you know they track the boxes and can label them as stolen? The cost to protools to make an individual box of software is probably less than a dollar.
What I like best about this post is the underlying message you can almost miss. Yeah the hackathons are important; we should save them; software engineers need a place to get collaborative together; and making "simply pretty" apps isn't all that awesome. The message getting to me, however, is that software engineers may not be all that great at requirements gathering. We work out improvements to almost every part of our workflow all of the time (e.g. new languages, ides, postures, etc.), but when was the last innovation for requirements gathering?

If there's a major bottleneck in the process, it's probably the disconnect between client and developer. Not that I'm saying this is an easy problem. It certainly isn't. Perhaps we need a bit more focus on this issue than how to create nicer interfaces, though.
> 3.13 Do not program "defensively" suggests that the programmer should allow functions to crash if given unhandled input types. This does not work in most other programming languages to create a fault tolerant application.

Incidentally, this applies to languages with exceptions as well. The hardest to catch bugs are when bad behaviour is hidden inside a too general try/catch.

> Not to trap exits, again Erlang specific.

Yes.
> So far, the Go team decided to go for approach #1.

Except where they personally really wanted parametric polymorphic collections so they baked them as special case into the runtime, of course (map, chan, …)
I thank you for pointing this out. I was not in a position where I could do so credibly.
Gold was traded in spot commodity markets long before GLD came along, yet there is demand for GLD apart from gold. Similarly, demand for Bitcoin on BTC exchanges is constrained by (1) trust issues regarding the exchanges, (2) the energy it takes to connect to those exchanges, and (3) fund mandates limiting their assets to listed securities.

(1) Counterparty risk. The probability of the U.S. equities clearing system collapsing is infintesimal compared to the odds of (a) a dick at Mt Gox running away with the money, (b) a dick hacking Mt Gox and running away with the money, or (c) any number of technical or personnel problems that could limit the ability of a customer to withdraw their funds in a timely manner. This is still my #1 concern regarding setting up a Bitcoin market making operation.

(2) Barriers to entry. Everyone in finance is already plugged into the majour stock exchanges. Connecting to a new exchange involves investments of time and technology.

(3) Mandates. Many funds are required to trade only listed products).

A Bitcoin ETP would require active hedging in the Bitcoin spot markets. Thus, think of the ETP as a liquidity gate. I do not believe the BTC markets are ready for the flood gates yet.
3D-Printed Human Embryonic Stem Cells Created for First Time
Google, and other healthy thriving large companies, love competition. When you already know you're the best in the world, you view competition the way Usain Bolt looks at Tyson Gay. "Come on, bring the noise. All you'll do is help me to beat my own world record, and I like that. So do your worst!"

Note I don't actually know that Usain Bolt feels that way, but many top athletes do (especially in "world record" type sports like racing). And of course this is my personal assessment of the situation, not the position of my employer, etc etc.
I cook bacon in the toaster oven all the time... it's the best way. As long as your toaster oven can maintain 425F / 215C constant temperature (rather than having the element on permanently) you end up with beautiful moist but cooked bacon without it being crispy and burnt.
How to Use Content Marketing
Right up until the underlying platform decides it needs a different model to support its business needs.

It really seems like there should be a middle ground: my ideas get published while ensuring your business survives. Right now, the two are independent functions.
How to Build a $100M Company
I wonder if Facebook stores it's password in clear-text, since you can login with either 'Password' or 'password', does it hash the first character and the rest into 2 different hashes? If not, we have a our passwords in readable form in their database that have huge privacy and security issues.
HTML5 is a still a joke for AAA game development.

The only place I see it ever take off is for indie games or small prototypes to gain a distributor contract.
You did ask for wanted. I'd imagine you'd end up on this list first.

I think you're assuming that due process and judicial process are the same thing, but I don't agree with this.
Räumung
Räumung wien , Räumung
Zufriedenheit unserer Kunden liegt und sehr am Herzen, drum sind wir immer stets bemüht dies auch zu erreichen. Eine Räumung bedeutet immer eine Vertrauenssache, ganz Gleich ob Ihre Räumung in Wien statt findet oder Ihre Räumung woanders vorgenommen wird – wir sind für alle unsere Kunden im Bezug auf Räumungen da!
Agreed, but I don't think any of those are due process.
Non-threaded discussions are simply broken. They visually combine multiple conversations into a linear thread. Since threaded discussions came about in the mid-2000s it is apparent that linear discussions are simply inferior. They are cacophony.
You don't even have to make them set a password when they first register - just verify their email address and handle setting a password though the usual forgotten-password flow if you ever need to.
> It is popular because there is an observed structural power imbalance

Right, this is the premise of the siege mentality, but you haven't actually established it. I have not observed any "structural power imbalance" in favor of sexual harassment. I've observed that sexual harassment happens, but that's no more than you can say about any other socially unacceptable behavior.

Since this is the central premise of your argument, it is curious that you assume it as a given without even attempting to establish it. I wonder if you've even consciously questioned it yourself.
Completely misunderstood the product. Its a mistake to compare the Surface pro with iPad. The right device to compare with is the MacBook air. both of them have the same capability and are in the same class.

Expected better from you Anand
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~jignesh/publ/underattack.pdf
Partly because I'm too dumb to cure cancer. ;)

But I do take your point. And I am pleased to make your acquaintance, I enjoy your comments.
Or they just make everything lower- or uppercase before checking it against the encrypted version.
They hash it once and save it to the database. When logging in, they generate three hashes (if I remember correctly) and compare it to the hash in the database. If any match, it logs you in.

Edit: Here's a post on the matter http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-passwords-are-no...
I don't subtlety works on the target demographics.
> Oh man, this tugs on all sorts of sentimental DOS strings. Especially that first phrase about people under 30 not knowing what DOS is.

Not only that, youth generation seems not able to separate the distintion between programming languages and their implementations.

They all think a strong type language (a la Pascal/Ada) with GC needs can only exist in a VM, dynamic languages (a la Lisp) cannot be compiled to native code or C like languages are always compiled to native code.

I tend to think we were able to grasp these subjects much better.
Who is this device for? It's a poor tablet due to its lackluster touch eco system, battery life, size, and weight. And it's a mediocre laptop that can't stay upright on an actual person's lap, and has a relatively small display for a computer that is meant to be placed on a flat surface. Furthermore, the pre-loaded software takes up 41 GB of HD space, making the more expensive $999 option the only feasible choice.

I don't get it. Why not spend that $999 buying a budget laptop that can outperform the Surface Pro, and an inexpensive tablet like a Nexus 7/10 or iPad mini? Design is about making compromises. Unfortunately for Microsoft, they chose the wrong ones.
Interesting to see how technology is being religionized by hackers. Smirk
Hard to calculate, but personally, I would gladly trade all my karma points for some shares of Dropbox.
But a lot of the defaults in the bourne shell and various posix utilities are wrong. One example: space as a field separator is clearly the wrong default, since it's nearly impossible to not find file-names with spaces in them these days.
In tunisia, it's 6000$/year.
Great, finally a place for all my to-be-closed-on-arrival stack overflow question I never dared to asked there.
looks nice. how come you never posted it here?
Just give everyone a training course for using the machine.
Yes -- that would explain why hitting "reply all" was the focus of the controversy.
Who types URLs or looks at them? If you write URLs in an email, print them on a business card, put them on a poster, say them in a conversation, or basically need anybody who isn't already using a web browser to go to your page, you type URLs and look at them (or hear them). Hearing is the worst offender.

- Hey there, you should check out this really cool site/post/app/thing!

- That sounds nice, where should I go?

- You go to uh.. googledrive dot com slash host slash zero capital B ehh... forget it.

There is a reason that facebook gave their users vanity URLs, and twitter user URLs are so minimalist, and people pay millions for domain names. A shorter URL is more useful and hence more valuable.

Having the option to point your own domain at the folder would be really nice, actually, and put this on the same tier as Github Pages and S3.
You've hit a nerve touching on the hidden stories of Silicon Valley which may never get told. (But should.)

It's 10:33pm, and I'm just getting back home in San Francisco after spending the day working in San Jose, driving down 101 in the morning, coding, and then driving back after working out at the immense 24 Hour Super Sport off Zanker Road. It's been 7 years since I've really worked back in the South Bay, now making my living building iOS apps. I first got here in 1997 working on building EDA tools as part of the silicon ecosystem that is mostly gone now, punctuated by the different signs on the same buildings you see driving along 101.

Different signs. It can be overwhelming to think about all the changes in Silicon Valley since the mid-1970's, about all the stories of the different people here who contributed to that change, with Moore's law the only thing keeping and driving us together.

As an example I like to relate, most lay people at best see those past efforts distilled and watered-down in the form of their smartphones today. For those of us who've been at this for a while, we can see the full panoply of life in Silicon Valley embedded in these things.