skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Episode three million of "People With Money Are Somehow Still Surprised The Bay Area Is Weird".

See also: the Priceonomics blog post that was shocked to discover that hippy street kids in Golden Gate Park are pretty content with their lives.

Next up: "Sex Parties? Isn't that dangerous?"
Why Candy Crush Saga is taking over the world
Esp for this crowd.
When you want to make a configuration change to your servers, and they aren't already in a "known state", why would you think any tool could put them into a known state? When a computer has a virus, say, you don't think it's been put into a "known state" after the anti-virus program gets done with it; the virus may have done any number of things you might be unaware of, altered any number of data or configuration files in subtle ways that the tool doesn't look for, but implicitly relies upon.

Example: what if, say, one of the provisioning requirements is "make sure this gem is installed", but on one of the servers /etc/gemrc has "install: --no-rdoc --no-ri" in it? Now on one server, the docs are missing, while everywhere else they're available. That sort of thing.

If you're already running on an IaaS like EC2, I think there's a simpler, better way: rather than trying to get "unknown state" to "known state", why not use the simplest known state of all--unprovisioned? Write an imperative script that reinitializes a freshly-provisioned IaaS node to your known state, and then do a rolling reprovision, terminating old nodes and provisioning new ones.

An equivalent comparison[1]: would you feel safe running an automated script that would SSH into a production machine and "git pull" a checked-out repo sitting on it, from whatever state it happens to be sitting at, up to refs/heads/master, so as to deploy code from it? Could you guarantee that that repo hadn't been moved to some state where refs/heads/master isn't a fast-forward commit? Or would you rather do a fresh "git clone"?

---

[1] A contrived comparison, though; although the former option is unreliable, the latter is terribly inefficient, and they're both horrible for keeping a .git directory inside of a directory that might very well be web-accessible.
I suspect we know an overlapping set of people, and there are definitely some regular (once a week?) pot smokers in the set of productive engineers I know in the Bay Area, and a much larger number of occasional (monthly?) smokers.

The real pot fiends are usually vesting in place or in boring ops/admin jobs at tech companies (uh, Yahoo!), but even at startup parties there is a moderate amount of pot on the weekends.
The Path to Programming Greatness
> Generally, you should only use threads if the following is true: - Sharing memory between threads is not an issue.

Here's the problem. Threads are really useful only if you can share memory between threads. If you can't share memory, you're usually better off using many processes.

Threads in Python (ie. CPython) can still be useful for I/O multiplexing or executing native code in background worker threads via FFI and releasing the GIL while doing so. For I/O multiplexing, there are better options than Python threads (select/poll/kqueue/epoll system calls and frameworks like twisted that use them).

In most applications, threads probably should not be used in CPython/CRuby code as they provide little performance gain compared to the complexity and overhead they add.
> If I could design society, I would remove the dock and in all court cases have two identical sides of the room ...

But that already exists -- it's called civil law. Contrast with criminal law:

In criminal law, the state has an interest and brings charges against a defendant, the sides are called "prosecution" and "defense", the standard for judgment is "beyond a reasonable doubt", and the outcomes include incarceration and (in some countries) execution.

In civil law, the state has no interest, the offenses aren't called crimes, the two sides have equal standing and are called "petitioner" and "respondent" (the names change in different locales), the standard for judgment is "preponderance of evidence", and the outcome is usually a monetary payment. Incarceration isn't possible.

> There's no defendant and victim, just two opposing stories and a trial to establish reasonable fact.

This already exists, but it's not suitable for all cases. Any time the state has an interest, the rules change, and the word "crime" begins to be heard.
It’s is not, it isn’t ain’t, and it’s it’s, not its, if you mean it is. If you don’t, it’s its. Then too, it’s hers. It isn’t her’s. It isn’t our’s either. It’s ours, and likewise yours and theirs.

—Oxford University Press, Edpress News
Very little. I just source a small number of real configuration files from the ~/.bash/ directory:

https://github.com/skx/dotfiles/tree/master/.bash
>But I wonder what else, what does he think of web application development, etc?

He doesn't.
EFF isn't that large (I work there). It takes on cases in exactly the same way as ACLU does, for impact on the law.

It was involved in the Swartz case, but mostly as a resource to help people find other criminal defence lawyers. Lots of people got caught up in the investigation, and they couldn't all be represented by the same firm.
OP here. Apologies for the fact that it's quite a lengthy write-up, but since we went through this we'd be glad to offer help to anyone who asks. The open source mapping world really is quite confusing at first, so maybe such an overview will be helpful to someone trying to wrap their head around the subject.
And... Doesn't release the source of which...
Ironic is one way of putting it... :)
I'm not saying I don't like the Facebook gift product. I tried it out a few times, and you're right - they nailed it. The virtual card and slow reveal as the user clicks through (then it shows up unwrapped on the wall, etc) is awesome and a great end-to-end addition to the site.

What I really hate is that because this great new feature makes money, as opposed to the previous goal of driving growth, engagement, what have you, it is pushed first and foremost and hides many more useful features behind additional clicks to first say "No, I don't want to buy a gift". For example, the one-click write-on-everyone-whos-birthday-it-is-in-one-dialogue feature was unbelievably useful. Now you have to click twice for each person to write on their wall (once on the thing that says "Buy a gift", then once on "Write on their timeline").
World map of international law
Sorry but lxml with ETree will handle any amount of broken html you throw at it. Add in XPath and I find lxml to be a far superior, and more memory efficent, option.

Source: former professional web scraper.
Ask HN: Are there any effective measures against DDoS attacks?
The company who I work for has taken on a lot of new business lately and while, thankfully, we've never been a target of any attacks before now, I'm a little concerned that we might not escape indefinitely. As a large portion of our business is online and due to our business becoming more and more high profile in recent years, I'd like to have some kind of disaster recover plan in place for DDoS attacks (even if the IT director and/or CEO dismisses any contingencies I recommend, I wouldn't be doing me job right if I didn't at least investigate this potential).

So I'm basically just looking for some advice in any hardware recommendations and ways to react when such an attack is under way.
(Throwaway)

"[...] as none of them ever seemed to talk about having drug experiences [...]"

These are your work colleagues for goodness's sake, when would that sort of thing come up?
Why would they bother? Script-kiddie is just playing the numbers, any machine with a slightly non-default configuration is not worth the effort.

Disabling password authentication is better for "real" security, but doesn't stop those dictionary attacks spamming your logfile. (I still feel there should be better solutions to that problem than changing the port though)
Article title: "Scientists discover a way around Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle"

Translation: "Scientists locate experimental setup where Heisenberg's uncertainty principle doesn't apply."

If the author of the article actually understood the physics and could be persuaded to avoid sensationalism, the headline might reflect reality.
Salt is wonderful.
dude im over new york.
i'm over this all
we can choose to be the new wave.
<3
There's another official rate rate you can check out. The "real" unemployment rate, which measures everybody considered unemployed plus a lot of others who are falling through the cracks. It's called the U-6 unemployment. The government publishes this data in the same monthly report as all the other official employment numbers, and anybody can find it on the Internet. In the US the U-6 unemployment is [b]16.2%[/b] and counting. You could also just count the "Americans-on-Food-Stamps"number. It's 46 Million.
Pipe and Joint is building new world--SZYMS
Thank you

People often consider ssh keys to be a panacea and to think of passwords as outdated
Imagine how long it would take to scan every port between 1 and 65535 on millions of machines.

Versus how long it would take to just try port 22 on millions of machines.

It wouldn't stop a determined hacker for more than a few minutes, but it will reduce the number of automated attacks on ssh essentially to zero.
> I assigned my Build Succeeded to a WAV file of Darth Vader saying "All Too Easy" and my Build Failed to a WAV file of Han Solo saying "I got a bad feeling about this."

That would get very annoying very quickly
In my experience (that is, anecdotally) i'd say the rate of pot use in Silicon Valley (that is, the tech community) is lower than average. I've seen one startup where employees openly smoked pot in the office, and i've seen pot smoked at parties etc. and a handful of friends smoke every now and then, but it isn't anything near how prevalent pot smoking is in other parts of the USA and the world.

The big one is smart drugs - Modafinil/Provigil and Nuvegil. I met a sales rep at a party who told me the bay area was one of the highest selling areas for Modafinil. That is a bit better than anecdotal evidence that there is something there. On top of that I know[0] that a lot of users are importing it from India using online stores.

There are then the pharma stimulants, adderall and ritalin, spread out through the colleges, where usage rates are high. I knew one person who couldn't wait for each years batch of interns to show up at his company because he knew at least some would have a connect to get Adderall.

Then you get the standard illegal class A stimulants, which I don't think are used any more or less in the tech community than in most other communities of similar social-economic standing (that is to say, quiet a bit).

[0] Techcrunch wrote about Modafinil in 2008, I was at TC at the time:

http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/15/how-many-of-our-startup-exe...

There were a lot of interesting follow-up comments and conversations after it was published, least not the intro to the sales exec.
Puppet/chef are certainly worth it for 3 machines. If it's an important machine they're worth it for even 1 machine (so that you have a disaster recovery procedure).
s/Blackberry/BlackBerry/
My First Programming Job in 1981, and How It Shaped My Career
The singularity is coming: the day google translate can correctly make that translation.
Why isn't it suitable? You say that the 'rules change' when it's criminal, but that's only because those are the rules we've got. There's no reason that we couldn't make all trials use the civil approach.

If Sarah wants to accuse Bob of rape, she petitions a court and has to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it happened. If Bob denies it then automatically an opposite trial of false accusation runs at the same time. If Sarah has evidence that Bob raped her, perhaps the testimony of police detectives, Bob looses both cases and goes to prison. If there's not enough evidence, both sides loose. If it becomes clear that Bob definitely did not rape her, Sarah looses both cases, including the false accusation case, and goes to prison.

At the moment Bob would have to make a separate trial for defamation or whatever. I think it should be rolled into one.

In the case of murder, or treason, or grafatti of public property or whatever, it would be the state accusing. If it turns out that it was a malicious false accusation then the police or prosecutors would be liable.
There is a cartoon in every human. Which cartoon do you feel in you?
I feel Noddy in me :)
> absurdities: Genders for non-gendered things is one example.

This. I never understood how e.g. Spanish speakers think that a door is female or a clock is male. I mean, it's not like there are any body parts you can examine for a definitive answer, or clothing and mannerisms which let you make a pretty good guess...I never really got a satisfactory answer other than "it's usually -o or -a, but not always; really, you just have to memorize it." Seriously...WTF?

> diacritical marks

Other European languages love them. To me as an English speaker, they look like misplaced inkspots or dirt on my monitor. I never had any class in school or college that taught what they mean [1]. I blithely type "fiancee," "naive" and "Geiger-Muller," since I don't want to get out Character Map or whatever the Linux equivalent is [2], and I'm not really sure which marks to use or where to put them. I pretty much pretend they don't exist, unless they cause compiler errors [3], in which case I terminate them with extreme prejudice.

[1] I did once learn that an overline (a line above a character; I don't know if that's actually what it's called) means a long vowel sound, and an upside-down e means schwa. I haven't seen either of these used outside dictionary pronunciation keys.

[2] In my current operating system, Linux Mint, I don't even know how to get those characters other than copy-and-pasting the Unicode text somebody else has put on a webpage, or spending an hour or two sitting down with the RFC's that specify UTF-8 encoding and a hex editor. The only reason I know on Windows is that I eventually stumbled on Character Map by curiously exploring all the menus. This may give you a clue how often I deal with international text

[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5316875
>but... scripts would take much longer to execute than in puppet.

You can bootstrap 0mq and run them over that instead. That's much faster.
Striking the right balance is tough. As I'm mostly around in and around startups, I can tell though that the ability to manage is just as important if not more important than technical skills. At meetups, I see hordes of ex-CTO's now being much happier in still highly paid specialist roles. Management isn't for everyone, and it's also not much for me. When we were growing, I had to do it, but with more talented folks coming on board I noticed that I'm 4 times as productive with a product manager by my side who's really good in empathy, motivation, keeping track and following up. Those skills are often distributed in counter-balance to high IQ and creativity and I've come to value them a lot.
> In my experience (that is, anecdotally) i'd say the rate of pot use in Silicon Valley is lower than average.

For an average of all Californians, probably true. For an average of the entire country, probably false.
This is great news. Haxe is an excellent language that extremely cross-platform with a fast compiler. NME gives a Flash like runtime on most of these platforms. In fact, it took less than 48 hours to port NME for the BlackBerry PlayBook. Definitely a project worthy of continued financial support.
You are right, this is a better path

But sometimes, and especially for servers that will be delivered to the customer afterwards, it's not practical to use a configuration management tool.

Also, millions of servers were deployed before Chef/Puppet appeared. You can't tell they did wrong.

Also, Chef/Puppet type solutions may be overkill for some tasks, fabric takes care of the easier cases for example.
Voting for Ansible or Puppet here.

http://ansible.cc/

https://puppetlabs.com/
The entire wealth and resources of the federal government when wielded by a prosecutor against an individual is truly terrifying, and not surprisingly abused constantly.

Those powers are meant to go after "well armored" entities like organized crime and "well entrenched" corporations, bankers, wallstreet, etc. to protect the people of the state from what they could not individually protect themselves against.

But going after individuals guarantees wins which helps the victory scoreboard and political careers. Going after entities that have armies of lawyers and boatloads of cash is far less profitable and far more risky.
Thank you very much for your honest, elaborate reply!
Lockerdome Closes Series A Round - "Fastest Growing Sports Site In World"
TNW article in english: http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2013/03/04/blurred-navision-...
Unless it's immediately distributed as dividend or used for acquisition, the money would be subject to US corporate taxes.

Microsoft actually borrows in the US http://www.smartmoney.com/invest/bonds/what-s-behind-microso... as it's not in shareholders' best interests to initiate a money transfer to a US account.
> Putting anything but ASCII in source code will give everyone who ever tries to build the code endless nightmares of toolchain breakage.

Only if you use garbage tools.
The argument with security research is how do you responsibly deal with the knowledge when people aren't listening? Well, in this case starting a fire to prove there's smoke wasn't the best decision. It takes a lot to admit you were wrong publicly and offer a mea culpa, and a lot to not get disheartened and stop researching. Kudos Egor, I'm sure I'm not the only person watching your work with interest.
Rewrites happen even with PHP, once it becomes clear that their product is creaky, slow, and no one good is willing to maintain it. (To be clear, I'm sure PHP is appropriate for many situations, but I have seen people trying to dig themselves out of a slow PHP framework, and a better PHP framework isn't evaluated to be as worthwhile as moving to a different platform.) As much as some managerial types try to deny it, tools end up having an effect on the product. The skilled people they hire are often right when they try telling them that the tools aren't appropriate for the job. At least if they're experienced and provide a reasonable, fair analysis.

Tools present tradeoffs. Advantages and disadvantages. Haskell can be very problematic for a business, unless you know how to deal with its disadvantages, or aren't affected by them.
That is not the case at all. I'm not saying that we shouldn't give the opportunity to learn programming to everybody, I'm saying that trying to get everybody to learn programming (which, in the ideal case, the end goal would be pretty much everybody on the entire planet learns to program when they were young) may not be all good.

Just like we shouldn't force everybody to learn English. People who can speak English may think quite differently from people who can only speak Korean or Chinese or German, and I don't think it's good to try to get everybody on the planet to learn to speak English. Part of it may be cultural, as with learning languages (programming languages included) you are inevitably exposed to the culture.
Cryptography in .NET : Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)
Yes, I agree, I was just giving an example of how an additional layer can help protect against automated attacks, even for highly-secure services like SSH.

I also agree that SSH is less likely to have flaws than most VPN software. But on a properly configured bastion host, by-passing the VPN would just put you in a position where you can attack SSH. You would still need to by-pass SSH to access production servers.
Australia signs EU Cybercrime Convention
So tax competition is necessarily a bad thing? As to discernable benefit, you know better than I do but presumably the Irish are free to determine their own tax code and have arranged it to their advantage? If not, why not?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_prit...

does not indicate 'no discernable advantage' to me.
You could try Cloudflare?

http://avgjoegeek.net/cloudflare-review/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/eliseackerman/2012/02/29/how-clo...

(I'm not affiliated in any way with these guys, and I'm aware they just had an outage while updating the server code to defend against a DDOS attack, but they seem good! )
Thanks a lot for the traduction. This summary has been added to tldr.io, see here http://tldr.io/tldrs/5134660e28b6ae385b0000de/microsoft-owes...
(By the way, those people obtained their own wealth largely by hiring what they say they want.)

practicing what was called "the mushroom theory of management." It was an old expression, used in many other corners of corporate America. The Eclipse Group's managers defined it as follows: "Put 'em in the dark, feed 'em shit, and watch 'em grow."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_management
For an analogy, the best way to stop a big flood is with a dam, and services like Cloudflare provide an upstream (i.e. DNS) dam mitigating DDOS.

Without such an upstream service and short of building an extensive infrastructure yourself, you basically have to batten down the hatches and have a server (plus preceding switches etc.) that can handle a large amount of traffic.

I think there are other services, but Cloudflare is the most prominent and is used by sites like 4Chan to avert DDOS.
I love etckeeper, but the use of a configuration management system (puppet/chef/salt...) tends to reduce its usefulness.
Brainport seems to be the most useful kind of sensory technology available. Giving you the ability to 'see' all kinds of different inputs, such as radar, sonar, UV, vision, balance, etc.

The only problem is that it requires your tongue. And your tongue is where you talk and eat. Once we can overcome this problem, there are huge implications.
Reputation management in the age of the world-wide web
If you give someone a job that is not their forte, the odds are they may be really good at it, or not.

Well, Jesus is a carpenter, Peter was a fisherman, Bill Gates is an economist, Steve Jobs is a marketing guy. See the pattern here?
Encryption is not relevant when prosecutors can subpoena all your electronic equipment and find every single trace, log files, historical messages, etc.

But agree, the real lesson to take away if you ever find yourself in a similar situation is: don't ask, don't talk, don't write.

Sadly, Aaron was right in trying to avoid any conversation about the case, even with loved ones. The only way to "win" is not to play.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_proces... works well passing immutable object graphs back and forth. Passing by value (copying everything) has a cost, and serializing everything down to byte streams across a pipe is even more expensive, especially if you don't know which portions of the object graph will and won't be needed for a given call (an optimization which imposes tight coupling on details about the code you're calling). If I'm not calling untrusted code, and not planning to divide the work across many machines, I'd prefer to avoid needless process boundaries.
I never said people should not learn basic logic. What I said/meant was that learning to program may shift how people approach problems, in a way that favors logical thinking, which may not be ideal for everybody. Programmers tend to approach and react to issues/problems with reasoning, but for some people (maybe some artists for example), they may prefer to be more emotional and irrational.

In my opinion, programming is not as simple of other forms of knowledge such as color theory. Knowing color theory doesn't mean you can paint well, just as knowing the syntax of a language doesn't mean you can write good programs. Programming is more about a way of thinking, and my entire point was that this way of thinking may not be beneficial/desirable to everybody in society.