skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, I'm being completely serious. VPN's are a legitimate service with legitimate uses. Anonymity has merit even if you are 100% legal. I can't imagine someone being convicted of a crime based on only their participation with a VPN service. Sure, you are still trusting a 3rd party to do what it is they say that they will, but I don't see why people care if the government or whoever knows that they use a VPN service. Hell, I use one for work and I don't expect that the government will be knocking on my door because of it.
It's especially strange because if you want to do that, you can Airplay the video to the TV, and not have to deal with a cable from your phone to your TV.
If you want to work on hard problems, strive not to have to solve the same problem twice, to try a new approach or a new tool every time you get a "CRUD" task (however you define it). You'll find that if you continuously push yourself, you'll keep growing and will never feel that the task at hand is boring or too familiar. You'll need to take risks, but without risk there's no reward. Regard every programming task, however simple, as a chance to learn something new.

Corollary: if you find that your job doesn't let you learn (e.g. your boss just wants you to churn out as many web apps in as little time as possible), leave immediately (or better, try talking to the boss first :) ).

However, as ef4 and others have pointed out, the real question for you might be "what are the problems I'd want to spend my life on?" Not all important problems are hard - some may even seem too unsexy to be worth working on, but the impact can be huge.
The amazing thing to me are the comments. There is little disagreement on the existence of rampant cheating, and more about how and why.

Quotes from the comments:

"Harry Lewis can also be part of the problem. He is, along with Bob Scalise and Tom Stemberg, one of the three biggest cheerleaders on campus in favor of lowering academic standards to produce a championship basketball team."

"Not only are "less than As" at Harvard occasionally seen as a sign that the student isn't smart or isn't working hard, but actual As aren't recognized or appreciated that much because they've been set as the status quo. This means that no matter what the grade, students here can feel the need to keep pushing themselves and striving for that elusive recognition and appreciation."

"Here's my thought on why cheating is so widespread here: I think that the motivation is simple, and is rooted in the fact that before coming here, we were among the very best at our high school. Then, when we got here, most of us still wanted to be among the best, to still get all A's while being a leader in extracurriculars, and so on. However, courses here are probably much harder than what we dealt with in high school."

It was also strange seeing Mankiw under the bus. Like or dislike his politics, he is a prolific blogger which generally suggests being in touch. http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/

Again from the comments: "Harry Lewis is correct in stating that students cheat more in classes where they themselves feel "cheated" by the professor. It is baffling and inexcusable that Harvard continues to let Mankiw "teach" Ec 10 which affords him a credential he does not deserve. Talk about lying on your resume."
It is unlikely to be a Java ME VM under this. It is most likely Java SE or CDC.

A comparison, with Android, of VM performance and battery life would be interesting. There might be some "mobilizing" of SE that they got from SavaJe and applied to this.
LFT (the author of the demo and the detailed explanation of the bug) has been doing some pretty amazing hardware/software hacking for a really long time. One look at his YouTube channel and it'll be no surprise to you that he came up with this.
http://www.youtube.com/user/lftkryo
Google hires former Apple marketing guru Guy Kawasaki to save Motorola
You're mistaken. With Tor you are (in theory) anonymous at every leg of the journey. The only connection Tor doesn't encrypt is the connection between the exit node and the server you're connecting to, which is unavoidable. Your ISP can probably tell you're using Tor, but they won't know what you're sending or what its ultimate destination is.

In a little more detail, when connecting through a circuit of Tor routers R1 -> R2 -> R3, the encryption looks something like this.

client <- E1(E2(E3(msg))) -> R1 <- E2(E3(msg)) -> R2 <- E3(msg) -> R3 <- msg -> server

It's not perfect, though. If you can see the traffic between the client and R1 and between R3 and the server and you're being reasonably clever you can probably break Tor's anonymity. (This is what's called an 'end-to-end correlation attack'.)
My Dad died in March 2006 & he would've been 65 tomorrow had he still been alive. Glad you posted this today. His work ethic was similar & inspires me to this day.
NCD, a backtracking asynchronous programming language for network configuration
Gauges are actually pretty terrible interfaces for quickly communicating information in a dashboard.

* hard to scan (insufficient contrast between needle and gauge)
* typically don't show labels/values for boundaries
* typically don't show labels/values for scale/units
* typically don't show labels/values for alert thresholds
* even when labels are present, they are still difficult to read quickly
due to lack of alignment
* when displaying multiple gauges of related metrics, you can't visually
compare them without looking closely

Here's a pretty good overview on dashboard design (PDF, sorry) from Stephen Few that includes a good breakdown of why gauges are terrible:

http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/Whitepapers/Dashboard...

I can highly recommend Stephen Few's books on dashboard design and data visualization--he's much more focused on real-world applications than Tufte.
Thanks, I didn't know any of that.

Just wanted to point out he was talking about cosmic rays with the planet comment. And added the ;) to try and not be a dick about it. Not sure how that worked out.
> "about five teaspoon" should not wreak too much damage

Well, using a little WolframAlpha magic[1][2], it looks like the energy would be equivalent to about 200 grams of TNT. The internet tells me that that's about equivalent to a hand grenade. The internet also tells me that this video is only 50 grams of TNT, but take that with a grain of salt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rE-8o9NDZk

Point is, be wary of scoffing at small amounts of gasoline. That stuff is potent.

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28%28energy+density+of...

[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=851+kJ+to+%CE%BCt
I think that now, perhaps more than ever, America and Americans would benefit from domestic high-speed rail.

As someone who travels occasionally--albeit somewhat infrequently--for both business and pleasure, I share the opinion that flying is not altogether pleasant. From arriving at the airport several hours early, to dealing with TSA, to sitting in the cramped aircraft seating, it's not a stretch to say that it's a somewhat miserable experience. For the amount of money one has to pay for a flight, especially if going to a less popular/metropolitan destination, the experience is very sub par.

Trains, however, are a joy to ride. There is no TSA (or any other form of security theatre), no having to show up several hours early, and the journey itself is pleasant while watching the world pass by outside. Delays are very infrequent. I've personally done some of my best thinking, coding, and writing while on a train.

There is, however, one major problem: trains in America are slow. Slow to the point that driving through Los Angeles (including traffic delays) is still about twice as fast as taking the Amtrak. There is probably some efficiency gain on longer trips, but who wants to sign up for a 72-hour train ride that could easily be a 36-hour drive or, more realistically, a two hour flight for the same cost?

I would welcome a revitalization of the rail industry in this country with open arms, but only if they do it right; after all, as a project that would likely be subsidized with tax dollars, I'd rather not pay for something that one one would use.
They must use the equivalent of ECC for flash memory, I would hope. So the theory is that cosmic rays corrupted multiple bits of radiation-hardened, ECC flash memory? Should they have expected that? Is reverting to a backup computer the best option? How many bits were flipped? Couldn't they have used a flash memory controller with the ability to correct more than 1 bit per word?

Do space missions also have problems with bit flips in cpu cache or cpu registers? How do they deal with that?

[in 2.5Gbit of ram,] The maximum hourly error report from Cassini–Huygens in the first month in space was 3072 single-bit errors [in DRAM] per day during a weak solar flare. If the flight recorders had been designed with EDAC words assembled from widely-separated bits, the number of (uncorrectable) multiple-bit errors should average less than one per year. [1]

If flash memory reliability is one uncorrectable error every X years where X is less than hundreds or thousands (under expected environmental conditions), that doesn't seem like a comforting level of reliability if a failure means several days or weeks of using a backup computer.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory citing http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bitstream/2014/15831/1/00...
Presumably the 200K "defensive uses of guns" includes uses that didn't result in a death.
Can you give an example of its ambiguity? I speak Portuguese but nothing ambiguous is coming to mind at this particular moment.
> Reality check: if your credit card details are visible to a third party - you're not anonymous.

After attending a local security conference last year (Kiwicon), I briefly tried to see how anonymous I could make myself online. In NZ, we're lucky to have anonymous prepaid credit cards -- "Prezzy Cards" -- which our postal service sells.

Turns out that several VPN services (I ended up using hidemyass.com) will accept them. Alongside an anonymous mail service for the actual account, it's pretty straightforward to head to an internet cafe, boot your laptop into something like Tails, and then create a completely anonymous VPN connection.

Not that I'd personally go to that extent, but it's nice to know that you can achieve a reasonable degree of anonymity online.
Functional languages provide the ability to (promote?) write expressions that remind me of this sentence.

Just because you can do without temporaries does not mean you should.
I'd argue that it has not been shown to be effective. We're reaping the fruits of that today: grade inflation, disinterested professors, and new graduates without the jobs that served as the carrots to get them into school in the first place.
Gem Authors: Think About Your Damn Users
Getting started with the Bing translator API
This is by far my favorite YC company.

My wife and I sponsored a heart surgery for a child in Ethiopia with an organization we work with. The child's mother wouldn't let the child travel to get the needed surgery and that child ended up dying. Tragic.

They used the funds for another child, Kidest, and her photo is on our fridge for the same reason.
Even though this is an example, the mobile version with 100% width can be easily achieved in CSS itself by changing "width" to "max-width"
God. If only the US had something like this instead of the stupid everybody go to college, everyone spend years studying vapid idiocy after already wasting years doing the same in high school. I'm not anti-college. I'm anti no choice, one size fits all, we don't care if you actually can do anything as long as you were able to put up with enough wasted time to prove you are not the type to buck the system and maybe cause problems.

And by the way, I do have a degree.
Please note that the article currently links to the old Dolphin website. We have moved to http://dolphin-emu.org/

Sadly we do not control the old domain. A mistake made long ago. Google indexing is hard to beat! (I'm sorry these sentences do not flow well...)
Well you have to consider a lot of innovation with technology and medical research led to this point. This article speaks only of the result of the work, but surely if you dig deeper you would find there are many smart people working on this issue, and I'd gladly lump them into the category of hackers.
The City of Chicago is on Github
Didn't someone show that every single sequence of words buffalo* (buffalo, buffalo buffalo, buffalo buffalo buffalo, ...) is valid?
Mnemonic: his, hers, its. Works for me when memory
and other methods do not.
Actually, Nintendo introduced "Virtual Console" on the Wii system to make money off of these old games you can't buy anymore.
Only if the previous two sentences contain "had written."
How so? The problem comes from having a highly context sensitive grammar, which is hardly something I associate specifically with functional languages; C++ is the usual language that people mock for having an all but Turing complete grammar. I guess the other obvious candidate is Lisp, but that's a different beast all together.
The only difference between what you've described and what is going on in this adaptor is the inclusion of h264 decoding. The use of this is an argument that can be had (personally I think it was a great play on Apple's part, see my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5308345)

The rest of this is ancillary stuff. They aren't decoding h.264 on an ARM core, that's impossible for any significant bit rate, they are doing it with a purpose built bit of hardware, just as the HDMI encoding is done in a purpose built bit of hardware. Incidentally the encoding of HDMI is a mess, the spec is worth a read some time.
Don't worry about the higher level topics like JavaScript, jQuery or Django. Determine a project you'd be passionate about building for yourself and go from there.

You'll naturally start to need some of the higher level topics and you can learn them then. Don't bite them all off at the same time.

For example, build an app that keeps track of your diet*. Do the frontend first, make it all static. Learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery. Those all go together pretty well. Don't worry about anything more than that. No Backbone, no Angular, etc.

Then write the API needed to provide and fill in the data to replace the static data you used above. Then you'll learn Python and Django.

Most of all, take your time. This is a marathon and many of the folks on HN have been doing this stuff for a while. You'll get there.
Still unknown. Could be a bug, could be a race condition in one of the pre/post/start/stop blocks. I haven't seen it since and couldn't get a reliable reproducer. I really didn't want to make this about upstart itself so that people don't get to wrong conclusions.
So it's just something that makes you do good things more?
Passenger Air Service In 1921
It's really more of a case of porting a JSON parser because many working examples of JSON parsers already exist, as do complete sets of test data that your parser must be able to handle. There's really not a lot of original thought that has to go into recreating something that's already well-established elsewhere.
5 minutes wouldn't be enough for me. I've tried it and it was not comfortable.
The C Programming Language takes a similar approach to exposition, and I think that's one of the reasons it's considered such a classic. It was certainly eye-opening for me when I first read it.
Hi there. Just wanted you to know that you shouldn't be embarrassed/ashamed about the stuff that you're putting out there. A lot of people don't want to admit their struggles or often won't post something for fear that someone will consider them stupid, not gifted/insightful, etc... These fears are illogical and usually stem from personal views/beliefs on intelligence.

Especially if you were always ahead of the class in school, and could get away with less studying than your peers, you are prone to this way of thinking. The fact that you cannot grasp something immediately and innately may be disturbing to your brain, and it will easily get overwhelmed by the sheer scale of it all.

Just want to tell you that if you are able to recognize these fears/doubts, and continue what you are doing in spite of them, you will reach your destination. You are still incredibly young. I am 30 and not even to the point where you are, congratulations. You have 6 years to fuck around before we're on even playing ground.

It may sound stupid, but what has helped me deal with overwhelming emotions is the fact that we can only be successful one day at a time. If you have a successful day, then you are on the path to being successful at whatever you're wanting to do. Even if you don't exactly know what it is yet.

Focus on having successful days, and eventually you will look up and be amazed at what you were able to achieve. Also, realize how much time you spend looking for those silver bullets-"Am I reading the right stuff, is there a way to get there faster? Is there a better way?" These are all important to think about, but they can also be used for reasons to do nothing, which is not a good formula for success.

As one successful dev once told me, there are tons of ways to get there. There isn't a better or best path that anyone really knows of. I know this isn't what you want to hear, but it seems to be true. I think a lot of times, worrying about finding the best way to get there is the best form of procrastination. You fool yourself into believing it is better to find a better way than to actually do something. I think the best advice when you come to a point like this is to think of something you want to create and just take some time off to learn how to create it. You may realize along the way that there are certain things that you really don't care about learning for the time being. If you look at all the different responses from HN users, you will see that every response is unique. Some may suit you, but some won't. I think it's really going to be up to you to find what you need and what you don't. The only way to find out is to do the work.

Cheers, and I love the website you created. Keep up the good work and remember to not be too self conscious about the stuff you put out there.
Rather unfortunate for the credibility of Cloudfare as a network provider, but you've got to admire them for their honesty and it'll work out better for them in the end. It's amazing how a few lines of code managed to bring down Cloudfare, they could have told us anything and nobody would have been able to question it; instead they gave us the truth and I really respect that. They didn't blame the intern, they didn't blame their hardware or make an excuse about a power outage. In terms of honesty Cloudfare seems to be leading the way regardless of their public credibility or image being tainted. Very impressive response time and resolution of the issue as well, good job Cloudfare!
In 2030-2050, passenger rail will be obsolete. Self-driving cars will surpass them on every metric. After AI* obsoletes physical safety as an engineering problem, cars will shrink to tiny, weightless pieces of plastic most closely approximating today's motorcycles. And following Jevon's paradox, the massive efficiency gains will push economic driving to extreme speeds. As fast as bullet trains, without the timetables.

*AI from 2013's POV; in 2030 it will be just another dumb algorithm
It's Official: Teens Are Bored With Facebook
Historically I have been a big supporter of trains in the US. Recently, I have decided that the cost may not be worth the benefit if future technology is considered.

The future is going to involve self driving busses, self driving cars, self driving trucks etc.

The primary thing I enjoy about the train is the additional space. Fundmantally, that is the problem with trains too. If they jammed people on a train the way they jam them on a bus, it should drive the profits up. Amtrak sells out a lot of routes in the north east while competing with $20 bus tickets.

In 20 years, self driving busses should replace trains as the up front cost is lower and the market is freer.

I'd argue that any money considered spent on trains should be put to better use.

(Added)

I think it is safe to assume all vehicles will run on electric and batteries in the distant future, further reducing train advantages.
While your example with the routers at your backend is truly problematic, DNS is designed with built-in redundancy and CDNs (which CloudFlare should not really count as) having a world-wide outage (as opposed to "people accessing from New York are currently having issues, as we lost one PoP") is nigh-unto unheard of... can you imagine Akamai (or CDNetworks or EdgeCast or even Amazon) saying "doh, all of our infrastructure everywhere just disappeared"?

The core problem with CloudFlare is that they seem to have a highly-centralized take on what is normally a massively-decentralized solution-space, with large numbers of value-adds they encourage customers to use without making it clear that they treat in a haphazard manner, doing very little testing before deploying pushing-the-envelope features while simultaneously having very little in-house debugging expertise to handle serious issues.

(As a concrete example of that last complaint, Cydia was crippled for an entire day due to ModMyi turning on CloudFlare's "preloader" transformation, which apparently caused many WebKit-based browsers--including both MobileSafari and Cydia--to entirely lock up; CloudFlare seemed to go the entire day without noticing, which I continue to be utterly shocked by, and it was only after I told them how to fix it that they were able to acknowledge the issue.)

http://www.saurik.com/id/14 <- When "Dumb Pipes" Get Too Smart, an extensive analysis of this bug
Just in case there are a few on HN who don't know about the project. Because it reached $20K it will now include Django as well. It looks like it might very well become THE go-to resource for those who want to get into Python for web projects.

I'm certainly a supporter. You have three days to pitch in.
Do you not think that a major government initiative in HSR (which it would require, tax dollars or not) wouldn't come with the standard TSA security theater in tow?
I can't resist mentioning the Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den poem I came across recently. The poet plays with the many tones and many variants of the sound 'sh' in Chinese:

« Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.

Translation:

« Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den »
In a stone den was a poet called Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
At ten o'clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this matter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D...
Maybe I'm missing it, but this doesn't seem applicable to what my sponge program (and joeyh's) are intended to do: to modify a file "in-place".

joeyh's example:

sed "s/root/toor/" /etc/passwd | grep -v joey | sponge /etc/passwd

My example:

sort <foo | sponge foo
"Pure" CSS version: http://codepen.io/tlrobinson/pen/aGvrF

It generates a rule for each percentage value, so it's not very efficient. Only supports integral percentages.