skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The same could be applied in other situations, for example if I go out alone late at night in the wrong part of town whilst displaying my expensive consumer gadgets

This is a great example. I went to a university inside of a major city and at several points during freshmen orientation we were told to be careful about what sort of electronics we display while outside, particularly at night. "Don't wear your expensive headphones while walking around the city, consider buying a case that covers your phone, travel in groups when possible." ..that sort of thing.

I don't think anyone has ever claimed that they were making excuses for muggers.
I have one in a 2-mini shelf in the colo to do OSX Server device management/etc. stuff. It's..interesting. Apple seems to keep changing their remote management tools, and unless you have Kerberos set up, there's no good way to do cut-and-paste long random passwords or anything else through the remote desktop tool (it doesn't work during the secure password input window).

Probably wouldn't recommend this to anyone unless they have a very specific need; a comparable Atom-based Linux server is cheaper, easier to manage, etc. If you need performance, you can get a low-end i7 based server, and if you need ECC, etc., get a low-end Xeon.

The hardware is fine; it's OSX that is lacking.
Yes, this always looks like just "giving safety advice", and yes, similar advice does get offered after other crimes. The difference in the case of rape is the extraordinary range and intrusiveness of such "advice" that all women (and only women) are expected to follow every day to avoid being faulted for negligence if they wind up being a victim. As illustrated by the contradictory example questions in my earlier comment, it's quite common for people to find a way to portray a rape victim as negligent no matter what choices she made.

I completely understand if you're not on board with this perspective right away; it took me a long time, too. But honestly: keep your eyes open from here on out when you read media reports of rape and you will see how universal this "fault the victim" attitude is. Watch for it for a while, and then really do sit down and think hard about it for those five uninterrupted minutes.

Here's an example for starters: media coverage of an 11-year-old girl forcibly gang raped by 18 grown men. You'd like to think they wouldn't have bothered reporting on how she dressed, wouldn't you? http://www.salon.com/2011/03/09/new_york_times_blames_11_yea...
I disagree.

EC2 is inherently unreliable, and so are consumer-grade desktops like Mac Minis.

The strategy in EC2 is to be able to spin up replacements very quickly when your instances fail.

The only strategy for a non-power-redundant, non-RAID, no-IPMI Mac Mini failure is the same, except replacement is measured in minutes or hours instead of seconds. This is huge.
Windows Server has a ton of features not present in the desktop versions. For example IIS running on a Windows 7 desktop is capped at 10 concurrent connections for licensing reasons.

Whereas I could install a desktop distro + apache on my server and serve as many requests as the hardware can physically handle. The only difference would be that default settings would probably not be well optimised for that use case, but some reconfiguration would solve that.
One good test is if they have a decent track record on pushing CVE fixes. Apple tends to hold theirs to about once a quarter unless something is in very common use. They intentionally hold them back so that people don't have to click update too often.
One would think there'd be proper competition because one of the major motivators is going paperless... it's kind of odd that in 2013 there still aren't a lot of easy to use solutions that can store sensitive documents (bills, tax documents etc) that require a great level of privacy and security.
Re-Engineering the way your city works, startup style
"To watch a DVD you need to get around the CSS."

No, you don't. You just need to decode it. What's illegal is leaving it decoded and redistributing it to others.

.

"There is no authorised method to do this on Linux."

One, there doesn't need to be.

Two, of course there is. Have you ever even tried to look?

.

"Thus, anyone watching a DVD on Linux is circumventing an effective rights protection"

Luckily, the Supreme Court, the RIAA, the MPAA, and the current Attorney General of the United States disagree with you, as does a casual familiarity with the law.
> I cant imagine how low the completion rate would be for a whole degree assuming it would consist of somewhere around 20-40 classes

Nowhere near as low as 10^-20 to 10^-40, since completion of each course is most likely extremely not independent (i.e. if someone finishes 4 courses, they are likely to finish 10).
Unix people, AIX had CDE but no one used it, same for Solaris last time I checked it, but it was a couple of years ago.
Using a Domain as a Unique ID
I'm in the market for a couple for installing MySQL Cluster Edition on. I'll probably buy new (for a DOA warranty) and I'm going to skip AppleCare on them - I've had zero failures on the other Minis I've had. I've found that like you said, the used market prices are so strong that unless you're penny-pinching, there's no good reason to buy used.

If there is a discount for buying 3 or more at a time like recuter said above, I may investigate doing that, if it's a steep enough discount. :)

EDIT: Just chatted with Apple sales, and discounts are only for business customers, not individuals. :(
As an academic, this sounds remarkably like what's going on with our own "gamification" of academic publishing, with impact factors, citation counts, h-indices, acceptance rate targets, journal points systems, etc. People do strange things which happen to maximize ("game", as it were) those metrics.
Groupon was always a ponzi like scheme. Once they ran out of suckers (err businesses) their income dropped like a rock. Everyone I know uses Groupons but challenge them on actually visiting the Grouponee again and you hear crickets.
"I don't think that's right. The DMCA forbids circumventing access controls, which would include decrypting a DVD"

I'm not sure where you get the idea that decoding a DVD is a form of circumventing access controls, since as an owner, access is controlled not for you, but for others.

This means you can't redistribute it, not that you can't watch it. Access control means keeping unauthorized people out, not keeping legitimate purchasers out.

Maybe you should ask a lawyer.

.

"At least, that seems to be confirmed by the FAQ at Chilling Effects[1]"

And dis-confirmed by the Supreme Court, the US Attorney General, the RIAA, the MPAA, et cetera.

I bet you can guess who I believe.

.

"an advocacy site, but one run by lawyers"

Lawyers who are ignoring black letter law to make their advocacy site seem important.

.

"What's the source for your understanding of the DMCA?"

Already cited.
If a selected key isn't unique, it's a failure of the data model.
You're right. Several of the tweets included that tag. However, it doesn't seem to me that those tweets were from people who were thinking these shirts are targeting women. If you take a look at the hashtag on Twitter[0], many of them have nothing to do with boycotting an item. Is it safe to assume a person would see that hashtag and use it thinking it isn't specific to sexism? I think so.

I should also clarify that I am in no way arguing that rape is equally a male and female problem. Women deal with rape culture much more than men. My argument is that I don't believe these twitter users were upset because it was targeting women. I think they were upset because rape is a terrible thing to happen to anyone.

[0]: https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=%23NotBuyingIt
Sure, I get the reason. I was using the example to relate to parent's comment.
He isn't in the electric car business. He's on the empire business.
Yes, the reasoning is flawed, but I think the GP is correct about the innovators dilemma that MOOCs pose for traditional higher education. Many universities, behind closed doors, are scared shitless about what's going to happen over the next couple of decades.

The availability of MOOCs only reinforces the feeling that traditional undergraduate education is losing its value. Couple that with tuition costs greatly outstripping income and inflation, and other sources of funding (grants, state support) flat or waning, and it's easy to paint a bleak picture for the future of the traditional undergraduate university.

On the other hand, the genie is out of the bottle. Universities can't pretend that MOOCs don't exist, or they will lose out to others who are investing in them. With near zero marginal cost to scaling, the price (if any) is going to be under huge pressure to stay low.

A dilemma indeed.
I found the list of companies very interesting, particularly it's short length compared to the much larger number of current private startups with valuations north of $1B

Did you expect a secret formula? Examples are all you will ever get for a sample size this small.

Of course here's a foolproof method:

http://longorshortcapital.com/four-simple-steps-to-becoming-...
A more accurate way to say it might be that no individual nation could produce a can of coke so cheaply.
> The carriers claim it is illegal

Also the POTUS, the US Attorney General, and the law.

.

> Is there any case law supporting

Yes.

Neither uninformed skepticism nor demands for us to do your research for you while holding up zero evidence of your own validate your position.

.

> or just the carriers

Seriously, try hitting Google once or twice. This is hard to watch.
I use 1Password with dropbox sync for secure notes.
Creating animated GIFs with ImageMagick & ffmpeg
This information was secured, he just had the ability to use computers on the secure network. People will always be an attack vector, though the military certainly could have implemented more automated alerts on unusual activity.
Is LinkedIn really considered a consumer company?
Also Joel Spolsky's FB profile shows up in Social on right.
If you are going to all the trouble of manufacturing hydrogen, why not just manufacture gasoline instead? You lose a little bit of energy efficiency, but only a little bit, and it's a lot easier to handle gasoline (or another liquid fossil fuel) than hydrogen.

Also, that article is from the year 2000. Muller's changed his mind about a number of things. He has a lot of talks on YouTube ("Physics For Future Presidents" is a fun one to listen to in the background) and I don't remember him promoting hydrogen cars.
Musk's plan in a way serves as a reminder for those of us that tend to overestimate the role luck plays in the personal journey towards entrepreneurial success.

While generally HN users are open minded, no small number have derided the notion that others (perhaps far less capable than Musk), are capable of having a meaningful vision.

Of course having a justified belief and plan is a different approach to the lean startup philosophy. Lean effectively aligns more with the randomness worldview and iteration with an impartiality (or even celebration in some cases) of failure. Whereas OTOH, the visionary approach usually has more confidence in a self-directed path.

Those with this visionary quality (in varying levels of ability), can arrogantly dismiss others too, with behavior that is equally cringe worthy. Moreover, it would be hard to objectively and meaningfully argue either approach is universally "better".

However, perhaps the most significant indiscretion, is not in picking a side that works for you, but rather failing to see that two sides exist at all.
That's not really true. The current version of Windows Server by default has no GUI (and almost no services). It's configured completely from the command line (or if you follow Microsoft's guidance, remotely via powershell remoting).

I certainly wouldn't recommend any shops currently using Linux servers to switch them out, but Windows Server has come a ridiculously long way from being super sucky to being a good server operating system.
Not sure I disagree with SEO on "Stack Overflow" who is googling for that term?

Practically any technical question I've searched for has resulted in a stack overflow (or super user) #1 result. I'd say they are doing a pretty good job, even if they don't do all the old school SEO stuff
Create a conference presentation using LaTeX
>or, y'know, not living 40 miles from your place of work while commuting by car.

In most American places, it's illegal to build sufficiently dense housing to make it plausible for most people to live within walking or biking distance of their place of work (see Matt Yglesias's book The Rent is Too Damn High for more on this subject). While I agree with your point about not living 40 miles from your workplace, it's simply not possible in most of the U.S. for most people to commute by a means other than cars.
And you do this when you have 10 different steps and each one of those steps should also have an error case. And you do this for 100s of resources and you have callback hell.

If you start seeing do1() do2().. or cb1(), cb2() and so on function that is the "hell" everyone is talking about. Of course you should name your functions better -- but that's not the point. Logically you might not need an extra function but you are forced to add it because of the way your framework forced you to handle IO.
You still need to correctly merge the records for aggregate reporting.

If you use UUIDs, this is easy. If you used SERIAL, you now need a scheme to intelligently merge records. Not hard when everything is in a single table. A bit tougher when you have a wholly or partly normalised schema, because now you need to come up with correct renumbering schemes for every single table which has another table holding a foreign key into it.

I can tell you from personal experience that this is not fun.

v1 UUIDs are "guaranteed" to be unique, modulo people fiddling with your MAC addresses. v4 UUIDs are random keys and the odds of collision are so infinitesimal that it's worthless to fuss about it. v4s also have the nice property that they can double as nonces, but the sucky problem that they are not that great for indexes.

Then there's stuff like replaying logs reliably on multiple machines, blah blah blah. Every instance of 186360 is indistinguishable from every other instance of 186360. So you will need additional logic to keep them straight.

But take this uuid:

69c8e822-83b0-11e2-a6a5-001f5bfffe14

The odds that this has been created anywhere else, at any point, is as good as zero. You're more likely to have an integer key collision due to cosmic radiation flipping some bits.

So no special merging / field-source tracking logic is required.
i agree.. had a great experience playing TF on Linux.. works really well on Linux Mint
Musk is an idealist; he sees himself spearheading an EV revolution of sorts, and you can't have a revolution without appealing to the masses.
That must be new. It's been a few years since I've used windows server.
I like a mix of both and I like freedom. I want to leave from 10am to 2pm and work at home if I feel like it, without having people judge me for it.
If you want UUIDs to double as a nonce (I use them this way), then you will need to use v4 UUIDs and yes, they are basically impossible to index because they should be normally distributed across a very large range of possibilities.

If you want incrementing UUIDs, use v1 UUIDs, which are based MAC address + a timestamp. These change in a predictable way and are more indexable.
It's really not a great example, though there are obviously similarities. Rather than repeating myself at length, I'll just suggest that you read my response to the parent post.

This stuff is complicated, and I know that it took me an awfully long time to begin figuring it out (or to even accept that there was something I needed to figure out). I used to say things that sounded a lot like your comment here.

I don't anymore. Give it some time, and some thought.
Deals that large usually come with a "breakup fee" on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars, precisely for this reason.
Also found the list interesting and thought there was an opportunity to dive into those companies to look for commonalities in their business model, strategy, technology stack, UI/UX, etc etc.

While there is no secret formula or nor was one expected, several hundred words to say $1B companies require hard work, have awesome teams and founders and take some time to build felt more than a bit underwhelming.
> This is just not something that happens in real life.

You never change code in real life? You don't always know what functions are going to be async up-front. They might become async later, 4 levels down, when someone decides to do some IO. What happens then? Exactly. You have to ripple that code all the way up to the top of the API.
How costly is extracting lithium from seawater?
Oracle and SQL Server can't do this either.

Most databases are, by default, row stores. Moving columns around on disk kinda sucks in such situations, and there's no need to when you can specify results in any order by naming fields.

You name fields in your queries, right? Right?
Why Do We Trust Amazon?
Your nitpicking is correct. I don't think it changes the big picture, though, so it's kinda impotent nitpicking for nitpicking's sake.

If I were to be pedantic about every little detail, I would end up with unified theory of the universe.

But since you brought it up: MOOC will also dramatically alter how we look at higher ed.

For historical reasons, my CS department emerged from EE department, since electronics existed before computers. As a result, I had to take courses in analog electronics, semi-conductors and what not. Out of 5 years of study, about 3 were relevant to CS.

I hated those courses, they proved to be useless in my programming career and yet, I had no choice.

At the same time I couldn't have taken a course in Greek history, even if I also liked Greek history (Spartans, those buff, semi-naked men!) in addition to programming.

The future will not be like that. The future of higher ed will be à la carte.

People will no longer get a major in CS, they'll take whatever courses they like and think are useful in finding employment.

It's happening already - Udacity already made a big deal (rightfully so) about people who found employment at good companies after completing merely few courses.

(as an aside, the rarely spoken truth about programming is that you don't really need education; I don't credit my university with teaching me much about what's actually relevant to real-life programming)
Don't you think it would help in protecting the perceived exclusivity of the Tesla brand? I don't think it'd be a good move overall, but I could see some justifications based on potential brand dilution.
That's what transactions are for. you realize the mistake, type ROLLBACK, and move on.

Oh yeah, you're using a toy database aren't you.
Nah, I think Heroku is pretty principled. There's no amount of money you can pay them to get working load balancing or multi-region reliability.
Unless, you know, you want to be in the #1 spot on a Google search.
Standard (Adjective):
Used or accepted as normal or average.

12px was very readable for a very long time. FYI, screen resolutions weren't always as good as they are now.

In fact, if you go further back in time, many "webmasters" (what we called ourselves because you young'uns decided you were "engineers" of usability) even gasp used 11px. Oh the days of the CRT... good times... good times.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/Element/keygen

> The HTML keygen element exists to facilitate generation of key material, and submission of the public key as part of an HTML form. This mechanism is designed for use with Web-based certificate management systems. It is expected that the keygen element will be used in an HTML form along with other information needed to construct a certificate request, and that the result of the process will be a signed certificate.
Haskell patterns ad nauseam
You know what? If you're listening to over FORTY HOURS of Pandora per month, they deserve to be tossed a buck.

edit: Glad to see the snarky title changed.
I disagree thoroughly. I've been to both Harvard and CMU, and assisted classes at the latter. CMU SCS undergrads work much harder than Harvard undergrads, and their work is more honest.

Actually, CMU students are perhaps a bit too isolated. This leads to some academic stratification, because the smart kids hang out with one another. There is less support and camaraderie. Lots of promising students struggle at SCS and drop out. The attrition rate, not cheating, is actually the primary academic concern.

Harvard is at the other extreme. The stratification isn't academic, it's social (via finals clubs and such.) Everyone collaborates. There are two common practices I find especially distasteful. Harvard has a very long, class-free study period right before exams. Also, Harvard provides students with Adderall at no cost with essentially no questions asked. A lot of students blow off the assignments then cram with loads of amphetamines. They're smart, so they succeed, but they don't really learn anything.
So they're rolling back to their old payment structure? Sounds good, I was fine paying $0.99 sometimes when I went over.
They last very long, the only thing you lose with time is capacity. When the battery reaches a capacity that is no longer useful for use in a car, the battery is sold to utilities. One use case would be to buffer the energy from renewable sources like solar or wind and release it when theres higher demand. Its a low-scale solution to the biggest problem of the energy spot market: charge is highly perishable. Use it or lose it.
I think you want what I want, which is some way to marry Scheme and Rust.
DTrace Toolkit
I'd put money on them using a lot of Linux like most sane data center operators do.
Yeah, Gui-less was an option on Server 2008, but not the default. The default for 2012 is what they call "server core" (no GUI, no desktop services).

I was surprised when I took a look at Windows Server recently. I'd sort of mentally written it off a decade ago, but Microsoft has done a commendable amount of work in improving it.

Again, I don't think there's anything about it that I'd tell current Linux admins to swap out their servers for (even ignoring the license costs), but they've improved Windows Server enough that I no longer recommend that existing folks abandon it.

Also, for what it's worth, Powershell is quite possibly the best thing Microsoft has come up with in 20 years. Yes, it's embarrassing that it took that long to get Windows command-line administration to what Unix people have been doing since the 70's, but they've implemented it in a genuinely smart way.
I think I've had Oracle blow up on multiple AS statements, so that's one place where Postgres would come out well in front.

Basically WITH-AS lets you declared temporary named subqueries. That is, a pretty stock standard programming technique -- give a name to a fiddly expression to simplify subsequent code. Very useful.

Oracle has lots of annoyances though. No SERIAL or IDENTITY type. Having to write the same boilerplate sequence/insert trigger/update trigger over and over and over is very tedious and a recipe for subtle errors when you forget one of them or mess it up.

No boolean type in SQL. I don't even know what to say about that.
I used to be really, really into MySQL, but since getting into Postgres I've come around to preferring it. They're both good.. but anecdotally Postgres is more developer friendly and generally easier to deal with in production. Postgres also comes with features that blow MySQL away in terms of flexibility and letting you do truly cool stuff. One example: Advanced query optimization with partial or reverse indexes.
Part of this may be that collaboration is encouraged on almost all problem sets, and problems sets are designed with that in mind. Often, there's not much to actually "cheat" on, and this leads to a healthier attitude of learning together.