skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm hesitant about building a Chinese Wall between accredited experts and the broader society, and I regret a bit about even mentioning the bloggers' professions in my ancestral comment. Their posts, after all, speak for themselves.

But for whatever reason, right now there's a giant gap of approach in how "amateurs" on both sides approach science. I guess what I'd like is amateurs who are actually interested in the science engaging with and contributing to expert discussion.

Not merely for the sake of amateurs, but for the sake of the expert scientific discourse itself. Science has no sides except reality; but if you have a situation where one political side vociferously attacks you while another political side defends you, it's psychologically very easy to forget that and your role as a scientist.
Aside,

sed -n /re/p

is grep. sed's default is to print every line at the end of the script, -n says not to. Larry Wall rightly had perl(1) inherit -n along with perl's -p.
You can have the best of both worlds (quick and dirty):

http://jsfiddle.net/UMfAy/1/

<body>
<form>
<div class="cool-label">
<label for="name">name</label>
<input id="name" type="text" placeholder="John Doe" />
</div>
<div class="cool-label">
<label for="email">email</label>
<input id="email" type="text" placeholder="john@doe.com" />
</div>
</form>
</body>

body {
background: #eee;
}

form {
width: 250px;
margin: auto;
margin-top: 50px;
}

.cool-label {
border: 1px dotted rgba(0,0,0,.3);
background: #fff;
margin-bottom: 10px;
width: 100%;
}

.cool-label label {
width: 60px;
display: inline-block;
text-align: right;
float: left;
height: 100%;
margin-top: 5px;
}

.cool-label input {
border: none;
background: transparent;
width: 175px; /* 250-70-5 padding */
padding: 5px;
padding-left: 70px;
margin-left: -60px;
}
.cool-label input:focus {
background: rgba(0,130,255,.1);
outline: none;
}
Doubt how good it is compared to Pixate which has fabulous Playground demo app in AppStore.
... hitting people with a very big stick without giving them any chance to dodge.

Isn't that part of the strategy?
Well the drama maybe fascinating but it is not productive or helpful to any cause other than giving hackers a bad name, a fact I think many miss.
tens of thousands sounds like a made-up number
Ask HN: What a are good questions for a first meeting with a startup lawyer
I managed to get some time with a few startup lawyers in NYC (Wigins, Reitler, Goodwin Procter). I'm at the very beginning of my project with few real customers, no revenue, no incorporation and no outside capital. What questions would solicit meaningful answers for a startup at this stage?
There could be many reasons, not the least of which is that the hosting provider would be providing the installation and updates for the user.

So, they are paying for it by people who are presumably more experienced.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not excusing any of the mistakes. Just pointing out how normal people could get screwed over, even if they are using a "professional service" and paying for it.
The TLS RFC (5246) specifically states that this exists:

This leaves a small timing channel, since MAC performance depends to some extent on the size of the data fragment, but it is not believed to be large enough to be exploitable, due to the large block size of existing MACs and the small size of the timing signal.

So I guess you're right, they're just showing that a known theoretical attack is not quite as theoretical as thought.
Used to know a slightly odd, hyperactive kid in high school who used to randomly 'head-tap' my friends and I on the shoulder (with his forehead). Every once in a while we turned it into a bit of a game where you tried not to let the other head tap your shoulder. It's basically tag but arms-free (or maybe 'thumb wars' works as an analogy, for its dodgy nature)...and you can only give chase or escape by walking fast, no running.

Coincidentally or not, we were also ultimate frisbee players in middle school. And there were pogs, of course.
Someone's bought up keywords and created ads for them. This is not Google being racist but some advertiser trying to narrow in on a particular demographic that they think will be profitable.

Sadly, as the researcher purchased that information, I think it's working.
The video learning site "lynda" has a really good set of videos on this: "Web Accessibility Principles" and "Improving SEO Using Accessibility Techniques."

Essentially they teach you to build web-sites for disabled users and at the same time for search engines. The gist is that search engines really ARE disabled themselves, they're somewhat blind and dumb.

So you really start to think about how information is presented on your site for more than just the fully-able users and when you look at "tricks" like putting labels within the placeholder element you immediately/instinctively know it is going to cause problems (for SEO and disabled users alike).

Worth checking out if you're interested in this topic and have a "lynda" account.
Also I guess people are more likely to either be "careful" or to adapt their behavior successfully if there's one woman on a 5 person team and one or more of the guys are in some way sexist or inappropriate, than if it's a casual interaction with someone at a coffeeshop or conference.

I don't know how I feel about the "Beards of Experience" thing. I guess I'd be annoyed if it were a permanent branding of the site, but as a one-off short campaign, I'm I think I'm fine with it. It does only focus on a specific group (I assume it is "unix neckbeards vs. hipster/corporate/suave designer developers", ignoring women entirely), but for a short marketing message, it's probably better to strongly appeal to a subset vs. be "meh" for everyone. It's not on its face offensive, which would be bad even if 5-10% of people were seriously offended and 50% were approving, just narrowly scoped. But it's obviously bad if that kind of exclusion is the default across the whole industry all the time.
what is amazon's edge going forward

Not needing to travel to a store to buy items that I could wait 1-2 days for delivery on.
What about accusing the guy of being a rapist and a pedophile?
I haven't said anything about responsibility, I was just poking at your contradictions. Inaction is not action. It's failure to act. By even using that word you've conceded the point.

Speak plainly. If you think there's a positive duty to speak out, make a case for that. Don't equivocate and say inaction is action. You can't build your case on contradictions and be taken seriously among rational folk. Nor does it work to get huffy and antagonistic whenever you are questioned.
So in the scenario (read my post) amazon has to charge sales tax.

Have you been to Costco? I daresay their customer service blows away amazon
Social Skills Bootcamp
I'm completely overwhelmed by security topics, so please pardon this stupid question. But could you expound on this part:

But ultimately, the conditions necessary for this type attack are not generally realistic, and I don't believe it should be characterized as a real risk.

Shouldn't it be possible to factor out the network jitters? I'm reminded of this post by Nate Lawson about Keyczar.

http://rdist.root.org/2009/05/28/timing-attack-in-google-key...

Is this attack unrealistic because taking enough samples to factor out the jitters would be very obvious to an administrator? Or is it exceedingly unlikely that a public network will ever have low enough latency to perform this sort of timing attack on this particular vector? Or am I misunderstanding your point entirely?

I really appreciate your taking the time to explain this stuff to people like me! Its fascinating.
Hopefully DataConnections will also be used for video an audio so that encrypted connections can be used.
Are CDs really priced based on supply of the CD?

In my experience, the market appears to have established an approximate range of fair prices for CDs in general, that does not appear to be based on how many copies have been pressed.

Obviously there are some major variations if too few copies were made and the publisher refuses to make more to meet demand (putting the CD "out of print"), or if many more were made than people want to buy and retailers need to clear out inventory.

But in general, if an artist produces a new CD, they could press 5 copies or 50,000 copies, and I would expect the selling price to be somewhere in that $10-$20 range or so, not because of the number of copies of that particular CD, but because of what the market expects CDs to cost.
You're going to have to spell it out for us morons. How on Earth could DRM help the average person?
Just because naive libertarian polemicists use an argument doesn't make that argument incorrect.

>>>It is a libertarian tactic of assuming that anything the government does they don't like is use of violence, except for government protection of artificial property rights which is somehow usually magically exempt.

In my experience, libertarians universally agree with me when I say "artificial property rights are completely protected and propped up by the government's threat of violence". It is their favorite part of the how governments operate, because they do not recognize the benefits of collectivism (socialism, communism, prisoners dilemma, tragedy of the commons).

Notice how I have not told you anything about my personal political views.
Using Microsoft as an example and conflating TBTF with antitrust is just weird. The solution proposed wouldn't be specific to the kinds of firms that get "bailouts".

"To big to fail" is a euphemism, it has nothing to do with the literal size of the firm. It's a rationale for paying blackmail. If the firms really were so big that allowing them to collapse would somehow create (rather than merely marking the beginning of) an economic disaster, that in no way prevents making an example of the people who are in a position of responsibility, by, for example, letting them know that next year's performance bonus will be paid in the form of time off their prison sentence.
I'm in the same boat as you brother, college was my biggest mistake. And, much like you, every job I've had since college no one cared that I even went to college, they just cared if I could do the job/saw my portfolio and hired me. I've never been turned down for a job I wanted.
I went to RIT in the 90s. My total student debt was something like $17k. In my case I felt it was worth it, but if faced with $140k in debt for the same education, I would seriously have my doubts and probably would have considered alternatives.
I think a lot of your distaste came from choosing SE as a major. RIT is one of those schools where you have to be especially proactive in extracting value from your education. The bureaucracy there has no compunction about useless majors, irrelevant classes, shallow professors -- things one may encounter if they just go with the flow. It's a sort of roulette wheel. I would've advised you to switch to CS, and start taking liberal arts classes with notable well-reviewed professors. A good professor can turn you on to the most inane subject; they exist but it's improbable you'll land in their class by just throwing the dice. The first floor of GCCIS is a vocational degree mill that feeds into the local donor corporations and those liberal arts requirements you took are literally filter classes. I sympathize with you not sticking it out, considering the costs involved.
Careful with those two sets of data. One includes Hispanic or Latino separated and the other does not. Hispanic or Latino is a larger minority than the black population.

Targeted advertising is nothing new. Do you think you will see the same advertising on BET as you will on TCM? They are going to use what data is on hand to focus ads. Most ads don't really accurately target most people, but enough do to keep them advertising. If it did not work then they would not do it.

Most ads on Facebook want me to get an MBA online.... I already have one, but they have to work with the data they have available.
I wouldn't call that right.

Plus it will hurt your SEO. All the search engine sees is some form fields and little else.
I'm continually disappointed by the non-proliferation of webapps. The iPhone has hooks enabling you to make it fullscreen, have an app icon, work offline, even control the colour of the status bar... but no-one knows how to use them. And Android doesn't even support them- I thought Google was supposed to be a friend of the web?!
Thank you for the link. The conclusions seem to me to be accurately relayed by the first article, and my priors were accurate. There is still not a statement that I see of what the desired outcome should be.

Let me go ahead and spell out what I mean. Should the Google search results give the exact same % of results for each race? Should it accurately reflect the % of searches? Should it accurately reflect the % of ads put in? (Those are all 3 very different things.) If so, should Google tweak the percentage of those ads? If so, in what manner? If a combination, which combination?

The implication in the conclusion is that first one, but in that case, why does that one override the others? Might in fact be racist to hide the incidence of these searches, based on race? A case could be made for that, after all.

These are rich and interesting questions, and it does not simply go without saying what the desired outcome is.
(Proper link is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation )

And from that same page, "better for whom?"

It takes great care to attempt to apply knowledge from one domain to another domain. Humans are great at seeing patterns and making analogies, but no matter how many times you say "technology is evolving," that won't make it adhere to the Hardy-Weinberg principle[0]. Attempts to actually implement these analogies tend to be problematic[1].

The US justice system, on the federal and state level, has a wide array of checks against it that (nominally) protect people from state abuse. This is necessary because of the vast power imbalance between a nation-state and a private individual. In this case, it's probably far better to have a 10:1 false negative:false positive ratio. The more false positives, the more potential for abuse.

Conventions and the hacker community do not have the power of nation-states. There's no reason to apply the same very stringent and very necessary restrictions that we apply on nation-states to DefCon. DefCon cannot hurt you the same way the US government can.

So, who is this better for? Certainly not the women attacked: they're left with few options, little sympathy, and copious amounts of victim blaming and denial (as the current top comment indicates). It's far better for the abusers -- especially when the potential for system abuse is far less, because conventions and other hacker/tech events are not nation-states.

If we're going to solve this (or any) problem, we need to look past platitudes and into quantified, measured thought towards a solution. This might very well be naming and shaming likely perpetrators, especially when the evidence is more convincing than a few twitter posts two years ago. We might get more false positives, but we have to contrast this with the current status quo of simply denying any justice to the people actually being harassed for their gender. Personally, I think the cost-benefit is overwhelmingly in favor of excluding more maybe/maybe-not abusive men from our communities, if it results in half the human population being allowed to add their talent to the collective pool.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy%E2%80%93Weinberg_princip...
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20070818124133/http://www.greythu...
Special Report: How Starbucks avoids UK taxes
I have a terrible confession to make. I can't bring myself to be too excited about this, yet. I can already make a video chat from my Linux box running either Firefox or Chrome to my mother running IE. What, exactly, are the benefits of this?
> does optimising sort times still matter?

Yes, not all new computers are fast (calculators, cars, µC, etc).
Do conferences really need to post a rule that "spamming the forum with fake porn pictures is inappropriate"?

I do grant though, that a lot of people seem to be missing some education on how to deal with other human beings. I don't think conference rules would be the best place to get the message across, though. Wondering if there should be courses in high school...
The PHP ecosystem has some really awful defaults which is why it's developed such a bad name for itself. It may be that many of these are there to accommodate misconfigured web hosts, but this behavior has a way of self-perpetuating.

Example: PHP 5.5 will be running for the next billion years because when mysql_query is finally put to rest in newer versions all those applications that depend on it will fall over. Thus, a legacy version of PHP will be supported by hosts, bugs, security holes and all.

"You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain..."

PHP crossed the line from hero long ago.
I wish I could be there!
If you actually read TFA, you will notice that Sarah Parmenter is consistently using gender neutral pronouns to refer to the person(s) who put online those pictures and male pronouns for the guys wrote her inappropriate messages. That is very conscious use of language.

Put that in contrast to the person who is calling somebody who is stating that the perpetrator might have been one (sic) female a ""conspiracy theorist"" and talks about "obvious truth".
This was posted almost a week ago - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5135883
A number of people pirating apps are people who don't have the App Store available in their countries, and some others are children and young teenagers who don't have their own money to buy things online (with parents who aren't interested in helping them buy games).
5. FTP is not a deployment tool.
Clojure's way has been generalized into a nice standard called edn (extensible data notation): https://github.com/edn-format/edn I wish this was as commonplace as json and xml...
Nice work ralph
I think the complaint is that such ads discriminate against black people who are being searched for, not people doing the searching.
Actually, not really. It's all HTML 5 video elements on the page, so this is all you need:

.mirrored { transform: scaleX(-1); }

And you can make a button to add/remove that class as needed.

However, I do hope the implementations are consistent as to which way it flips the video.
From Social Gaming to Gamifying Enterprise Web Applications
The End Is Not Nigh For Colleges
I don't think college was your biggest mistake. College is just an experience, and unfortunately sometimes it doesn't work out for some, you in particular. Your biggest mistake was not to quit when it was very clear that it didn't work out for you. Instead of quitting, you let that bad experience chew you up and spit you out.

You hit bottom.

The better story to tell here, IMO, is that when you hit bottom somehow you found inspirations to bounce back and became successful. This is really the story you are telling, and it's a good story.
The advertiser claims they're using a generic name list and applying all their templates uniformly across the board.

They're professional liars, so take it with a grain of salt.
Connect to Human Networks To Find Breakout Opportunities
At least for scripts that are on github, it seems like this could be potentially tackled by creating a robot that submits pull requests for such scripts, changing the options passed from short to long. For people fine with the change, they could just merge the PR, and for those that don't like it, people still have a long-option version of the script they can check out in the PR.

I've not written a github robot, though, this is just based on my vague understanding from the robots already out there (whitespace, .gitignore, etc), so please correct me if this isn't actually feasible. :)
A look inside the Final Fantasy VII game engine
What about this solution: http://stackoverflow.com/a/1755802

Have labels, but hide them with css.
Yup, that's awful.
It is as obviously a deflection fallacy as your "with us or against us" argument is a false choice fallacy. That is the point I was trying to make.

Regardless, I'll not be demonized just because I happen to be a man in an industry that is heavily male dominated. I am a good person, I should not have to argue that point, and I certainly do not need to write another aimless anecdotal editorial on an issue I have no personal experience with.
There is a difference between supporting scientists as individuals or supporting their individual claims and supporting the scientific methods and the institutions involved in the practice of science.

As someone without the knowledge, time or intellect to critique climate science in depth, I don't 'support' the scientific consensus & IPPC reports vs the WUTW blog because I personally support the scientists involved. I do it because I have a certain level of trust in the ability of scientific processes (and the institutions that enforce/practice them) to provide us with better understanding of the world. It's the same reason I'm prepared to fly in a plane even though I don't have the physics or engineering qualifications or knowledge to asses whether it will stay in the air.

Also, what I think you are trying to say without really saying it is that people without scientific degrees should be able to critique science. I'm sure nearly everybody involved in climate science is fine with that, so long as you are prepared to publish your data and methods and face the scrutiny of peer review (finding a journal that will publish doctored graphs, fabricated citations and grossly misused statistical methods is probably the real challenge: even Medical Hypotheses is peer reviewed now…).
Hack Your Mind: 26 Health Experiments You Might Not Know About
This is obviously not the same thing, because society as a whole has spent hundreds of years constructing systems for training and qualifying people as professional scientists with areas of expertise. When people without scientific training support scientists, they are supporting, and are supported by, these systems.

When people without scientific training attack scientists--without having gone through similar training and evaluation--then it's not surprising they would be met with suspicion.
Better Living Through Bacteria
Oh, you mean people who trust the expertise of the people who have devoted their entire working life to, you know, being an expert on a particular field of knowledge?

Question: Do you ever run into customers who know nothing about software, and are demanding a capability that doesn't exist? Sometimes these customers will argue, and tell you that you are wrong, despite the fact that you have orders of magnitude more knowledge on the subject than they do. I call these people arrogant fools.
The title on this one is better without context.
Changing it is easy. Adding options is an easy way to avoid choices.

But Jabbles' point still remains: It's a hard choice to make.
Glad you're here; I'd like to ask you a question.

It wasn't the right choice then, but (putting aside all issues of debt) do you think you'd get more out of it now? Or in a decade? I really enjoyed university, got a lot out of it, but I'm getting even more pleasure out of taking another degree part-time now around my job and the thought of taking three or four years off now purely to study and learn and mentally play is much more enticing than the first time round.

Maybe it's just because I'm older, maybe it's because I've been working for a decade, maybe some other set of reasons, but I think I'd get a great deal more out of it now than I did then (which is not to say I didn't get a lot out of it; I did, but I'd get more now).
Haha. I received a call from her about her computer running really slow. I walked in and noticed that device sitting on her desk next to her PC tower... Do you think it is messing with her machine?
What sort of security is in place - e.g. what's stopping a pop-up ad from logging keystrokes and sending them to a remote endpoint?