skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Linux Mint: it's an Ubuntu derivative, and I suspect that Ubuntu/Canonical will one day either be hostile or at least actively unhelpful to derivatives.

Downloads: http://www.linuxmint.com/oldreleases.php

Everything there is an ubuntu derivative, except in the middle there's a debian rolling release edition.

I suppose the mainstream ubuntu derivative will be great for stereotypical "mom's", as long as Ubuntu's eye doesn't turn in that direction.

For more hacker types that want some creature comforts, are the debian versions a good choice? I would expect/hope that some of the multimedia "just works" benefits would be in there. http://www.linuxmint.com/release.php?id=14

Or would I be better off on debian/LXDE, and manage the few packages that I most care about on my own?
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme".

Know your 19th and 20th century history. It's remarkable how little gets communicated throughout a high school education.

A good grasp of recent history really changes your perspective on the world and how people get along with each other.
Basically people scan brainwallets for weak passwords. Kinda obvious but still food for thought.
It was pretty common in classic Mac OS and PalmOS for writing OStype constants. I vaguely remember that for some time gcc did different things with this construct depending on whether target OS was MacOS/PalmOS or anything else.
I'm not sure if anyone else feels this way but I think this information would have been presented way better in a video or an article.

I was hard to connect the meaning between some of the videos and I feel like there was some dialog I was missing. I hope the trend of just releasing slide shows in lieu of articles or videos does not become a trend.
I think your website is amazing, and I am starting to follow your exercises already. I don't think anyone gives this kind of information for free. You need to rethink your marketing strategy
Hacking Google users with Google's GooPass phishing attack - Hacking News
I would think time would be more abundant for poor people.
I actually modified a Bitcoin address tool to generate brain wallets in python specifically for brute forcing week brains.

https://github.com/willwharton/pybrainwallet
I suspect that the highest performance levels come from a group that self organizes around the vision of a leader.
Because the beginning of things is important to understand so you can see the growth an predict what comes next. It also helps to make an honest determination if something has lost its way and not just be resorting to hyperbole.
He says there are many methods which make people rich, but only one "instinct" he knows of (avarice). That doesn't imply he thinks all or even most rich people are avaricious.

The point of the passage is that worshiping success is worthless, and moreover success itself is a pretty meaningless term ("To begin with, of course, there is no such thing as Success. Or, if you like to put it so, there is nothing that is not successful.") If you see this as a short-sighted attempt to say money is evil I think you've missed the point. The problem he's getting at is not money, it is that people spend time dreaming of success instead of doing something of value.
very cool. thanks for sharing
Yes, he basically dismisses self-improvement and wisdom pertaining to the self as inherently mystical, and he also lacks a model where entrepreneurship and/or getting rich is moral and challenging in a way that requires strengths and virtues, not just sufficient greed.
Implementing such a service would be almost trivial; I'm genuinely surprised this is something that people would need.

Register online-mail-form.com, and ask for £5 a year?
I so totally relate to your way of thinking. For me it was Google Cal and Android sync. The droid was simply an extension of the web interface pinging me with things to do and where to go.
>Ironic that this chapter fails to get its own point

You're not making your case very well.

The two passages you excerpt are about useless vagueness in "success" books/articles. You are completely missing the point of the passage about "success in jumping," which is that "success" books and articles of the time (around 1908), are vague pump-you-up bullshit that any idiot could write.

Chesterton never argues that all "rich people are avaricious." Chesterton believes money and prestige are not really worth putting a person's main passion and energy into, which is what the Success books (circa 1908) seem to advocate. This essay is mainly a criticism of particular Success books and the Success idea; it is NOT an essay about getting rich or about limiting beliefs. It is also a criticism of the worship of rich and powerful men.

Chesterton never "declare[s] that limitations of the self are simply not worth considering."

You don't seem to realize that the this essay goes much deeper that criticizing how to be successful, but the very idea of "success" itself.
Read this last summer: http://books.google.ca/books/about/Exploitation.html?id=2eyH...

Thought it was good because it doesn't give a lot of attention to purely economic stuff.
It's called Android;)
>You mean..they changed their marketing speak.

Marketing speak is not allowed to be misleading or flatly untrue (as it was in Heroku's case). This can and has been the basis of successful lawsuits.
These projects seem to do a very poor job of presenting themselves. I spent a good deal of time reading about each and have yet to have a really good grasp of what they are for. They seem to be about maintaining a cluster of hardware servers to run arbitrary services with configuration and fail over.

Do you know of some decent article, blog post, video, whatever that presents these products, what they are good for and a typical use case?
The Time Paradox
History doesn't need to justify itself any more than Literature or Dance does.

But trying to turn it into something it's not -- a way of discovering new facts about the world -- is incredibly dangerous. Most educated people are aware that there are limits of reason, such as situations where the facts are so thin that the only honest answer is "I don't know". They are aware of the limits of science, where there is no practical experiment to falsify a claim and you have to fall back on tentative strategies like Popper's.

But then these people look at history, and see this giant pile of anecdotes, and all the sudden it's the Middle Ages again and we can hermenutic our way to wisdom by staring at it really hard, or as this website puts it, "having repeated experience in historical inquiry". But I don't get it; if there's a heuristic for knowing when trying to solve problems with history is worse than nothing, I've missed it. Until I figure that out I'm going to have to stick with "always", and this webpage doesn't give me a lot of reason to think otherwise.

How can history possibly be harmful? The OP makes the case repeatedly:

"History Helps Us Understand People and Societies", but it doesn't give us any basis for knowing if that understanding is based on broad stereotype or outright lies, or worse yet, someone else's interpretation of history: a game of telephone stretching back to the dawn of communication. Merely becoming an experienced historian so that you're less likely to fall into that trap isn't sufficient; you're starting at worse than zero so you have to assume you've just gotten less terrible until you have some solid reason to think otherwise.

"History Provides Identity." Identity, of course, being an organized system for dehumanizing other people. That history, true or false, is an incredibly powerful tool for doing this does it no favors as something you should voluntarily poison your mind with.

"Studying History Is Essential for Good Citizenship." Here we're getting back around to a better excuse for studying history: If it really is unavoidable, and history is somehow part of us that we cannot destroy, then maybe we need to fill that hunger with a nice pablum like the US civics curriculum. It's a harm minimization strategy, like giving opiate addicts a supply of quality morphine so they don't stick whatever they find on the street into their veins.
Frameworks are also very useful. They can provide a tested database layer that prevents SQL injection, form data validation and escaping, straight-forward MVC structure, and a library of common functions that are well tested and help developers avoid common mistakes.

Ideally, a framework would have some basic elements and then additional components that can be included if required by a project but aren't core to the framework.
> All businesses contribute a small percentage of gross to this program (1%?).

> Businesses contribute 5% of their gross to a national R&D fund

> Businesses pay zero taxes

Technically, the first two invalidates the third as the first two are taxes.
And in some scenarios, it really "is" cheaper to rent. But renting goes against what we've been raised to believe, especially regarding the American dream, our sense of permanence/putting down roots, etc.
I just imagined the size of transactions database after 2-3 years of wide adoption.
How startups make programming challenges that benefit recruiting
>Found a help network for hackers, somehow improve the current situation for crisis/suicide chats or something like that. So what do you think would improve the current situation of (depressed/suicidal) hackers.

I think one of the biggest problems here is that people with suicidal level depression lose all perspective and see the world as void of any possibility of escaping whatever box they feel trapped in. No way out or through, no light at the end of the tunnel, just trapped in a particular emotional state and perception of things. No way forward in life.

One of the best ways to help people through that is for those who have been through it to simply share, in detail, their own experience with it, how and why they felt trapped at the time, and how they made it through, and what ultimately solved it for them.

Simply demonstrate the possibility, with as much concrete detail as possible (which hackers particularly require), that there is a way through (a hack, even), that depression grossly skews your perspective of the world, and things are not as bad as they appear (especially for anyone living in a first world country and among the lucky few fluent in the empowering languages of technology).

Other options would be physically changing people's perspective by organizing some sort of multi-month aid mission to an impoverished country (maybe hook up with Engineers or Doctors Without Borders). Or alternatively a grueling, endorphin-generating Outward Bound type excursion. Anything to jolt people out of their current perspective of their relatively limited existence.

Finally, if it helps you could treat this whole idea as a startup, solving the particular problem of hacker depression. Use lean startup methodology, your hacker problem solving skills and mentality, look for hacks nobody has found yet. Document and blog it all, etc. Who knows where it might lead, but there's certainly an awareness of the problem thanks to high profile hacker suicides lately, and lots of people probably willing to help.
You do realize these two projects were together, right? LibreOffice forked off from OpenOffice in 2010. And for, at the time, good reasons.[1]

[1] imho
As a dedicated untappd user (500 unique beers, way more checkins), what does beerquest offer over untappd? It looks beautiful; clearly a very well put together app, but is there a compelling reason to switch? Either way, great work!
How was your experence with OpenResty btw? It looks like a really interesting project.
Here's one a made a while back. http://horuff.me/static/content/grav/
Cannon Chronicles: A Foolish Plan Indeed
No worries. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. :)
I couldn't keep up with it but http://lift.do/ has a habit streak and motivation by seeing other people keeping on tasks.

Depression comes from not keeping up on tasks and losing your streak. That's when you start questioning yourself and the cycle keeps happening. There is definitely a niche need for a mentoring / motivational network for depressed people. This whole thread, and your last one, plus the momentum that came with them is proof.
I wonder what the best convention for generating secure brainwallets is. They seem much more prone to dictionary attacks if you're not careful. Is inventing words and nonsensical phrases the norm?
> Yes, he basically dismisses self-improvement and wisdom pertaining to the self as inherently mystical.

There are so many things wrong with that statement that I don't know where to begin. Maybe with the question, Where does he say that?
Growing up, I've always had a passion for history. This was inspired by games such as Caesar, Civilization, Age of Empires, Dynasty Warriors, and Pirates. This led me to educate myself on military and geopolitical history. While this makes for interesting conversation, and understanding of foreign policy, and some insights into the nature of leadership and group loyalty, it has become increasingly obvious that it is less useful for understanding humans and organizations and their day-to-day conflicts and pathologies. It is far too high-level and besides, most interactions do not happen under the stresses of anarchy found on the campaign field or international stage. Can anyone recommend any histories that they have found that go into detail about the history of more mundane sorts of events we are likely to find in our lives?

I'll start:
Therac-25: A history of a deadly medical device design error and the organizational failure that accompanied it http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/therac.pdf
Vouchers with artificial limitations on new development drive up prices, becoming a transfer from govt to landlords

Eliminating artificial limitations on new development is the answer.
Hmm....

Could you use sessionStorage to hold a temporary key for decrypting whatever is localStorage?
So basically everything is Hacker News?
I believe these issues were addressed with the release of version 0.2 a few weeks back. The link to the Reddit post on it is below

http://www.reddit.com/r/bitmessage/comments/17muuv/bitmessag...

The updated version 2 is not backwards compatible with the version one because of the problems mentioned.
The Wizards of Vim
Pascal and derivatives (Delphi) indexes from 1, and it has pluses and minuses.

For loops are more natural when indexing from one; for loops in most languages specify inclusive ranges, but indexed containers typically advertise their, rather than their maximum index. You don't notice this much in C and derived languages because the for loop in those languages is more flexible (and more open to abuse).

More concretely, this is a very common idiom in Delphi when dealing with 0-based containers:

for i := 0 to list.Count - 1 do

The '- 1' on the end is ugly. What's needed is a way of expressing a half-closed interval, but that's not common in programming languages (despite it being a great aid to correctly expressing many algorithms concisely).

Let's say you want to insert into the middle of an array, at x, with count elements (and presumed free space at the end). You need to move all the elements from x to the end up one. Let's suppose you have a move(array, fromIndex, toIndex, count) function that can do that. In 0-based languages:

move(array, x, x + 1, count - x)

But you need to adjust it for 1-based languages:

move(array, x, x + 1, count - x + 1)

However, you can mitigate it by changing how the move() function takes its parameters:

move(array, startIndex, endIndex, newIndex)
move(array, x, count, x + 1)

If everyone is consistent, and APIs are designed with 1-based indexing in mind, most of the issues go away. It's when there are mixed styles that things get painful.
I agree. This seemed to be a lazy or "less competent" way of presenting the material.
At home I have often used not fully patched Windows systems and not fully updated Browser/Plugin stacks. Oh and Java and Flash are always activated. This is the Windows 7 dual boot on my laptop. When really bad news arrives (HN, other tech news) I do updates or other precautions like avoiding crappy web sites, MSIE etc.

Until 2 years ago I even had a Windows XP VM with broken update mechanism and IE6 which I used frequently.

And guess what, never something happened. But speaking for me, I will keep Flash and Java activated for another few years. I'm no security expert but my explanation why this works is this: I don't install any toolbar, in fact I have only the bare minimum of Firefox add-ons. (Why don't they allow me to uninstall MS Office Live-Plugin anyway? Or this Ubuntu thing?) I hate to install Software on Windows, and if, I really make sure I understand what I install and how trustable the vendor is.

Two relatives of mine have been infected with some spam bot net thing more than once. Their systems were like 90% patched, but they were vulnerable through Toolbars. (I think in both cases it was the Yahoo Toolbar.)

This is certainly not meant as a general advice, but I guess the lesson is being minimal and careful is as valuable as keeping your system patched. Oh and yes, I do always have an up-to-date Virus scanner.
If you find yourself in a similar predicament next year, SF Beer Week has a searchable schedule that will get you pretty close: http://www.sfbeerweek.org/schedule/#q=pliny
The guys at Untappd have done a great job, but we think this is a large enough market for us too.
I was excited to read about how an "org-less" org could work. Then: "We've grown from three to thirteen employees in about a year, to shrink back to four in about two years." And: "About a year ago, we've filed for the French equivalent of Chapter 11 of Bankruptcy Code."

It's hard for me to have much faith in the author's argument.
Quite a lot of the problem is how we get paid for things on the web. Advertising as the driver limits the scope of what you can do since you need to have anchor for the ads. Micropayments have never really panned out as the fees are still prohibitive[1].

Kickstarter seems to be this in reverse. I come up with an idea and people fund it based on their desire. Instead of rich patron, I have many "poor"[2] patrons. A weekly video program on Kickstarters would drive more than big money prizes.

1) I have seen quite a few grocery stores now putting up the "minimum credit car purchase $10 due to rising fees".

2) poor in the money contributed sense, not a commentary on their personal finances
Well lua doesn't even have an operator for integer division.
I don't know much about this domain, but I wonder if these close approaches make it less likely that the associated orbit is stable over long times?
GoogleClean: Decide What To Share Or What Not To Share With Google.
I'm not saying either of these things. I'm pointing out that separation of powers requires the Supreme Court to respect situations where the Constitution has given other branches primacy. It has never been true that the Supreme Court is the appropriate forum for redress of every possible Constitutional violation. That is to say, it can be simultaneously true that the Executive does something unconstitutional and that it is appropriate for the Supreme Court not to review the action.

The conduct of war is an area in which the Constitution invests the President with primacy. But it's not a black/white issue--it's a spectrum. The more closely a matter touches U.S. soil, the more justification the Supreme Court has for intervening. At one end of the spectrum is the President's conduct with respect to foreigners on foreign soil. The Supreme Court has no business telling the President how to kill Taliban in Afghanistan. At the other end of the spectrum is the President's conduct with respect to Americans on American soil. The Supreme Court must insert itself in such situations, as it did in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), when it declared that the government must give due process to an American citizen captured in Afghanistan being held in Guantanamo.

Between there is where it gets iffy. Hamdi, for reference, hadn't been in the U.S. since he was a child. Yet he was held to have due process rights because he was on U.S. controlled soil (Guantanamo Bay).

The kill list cases have so far all been missing that crucial nexus to U.S. soil. Do you lose all your rights when you step off U.S. soil? No, and the Supreme Court has said so (Reid v. Covert). Do you lose all your rights when you leave the U.S., actively take up arms against it, and evade all attempts to bring you to justice? The Supreme Court is quite prudent not to take up that hairy situation, especially since civil libertarians may very well not like the answer.[1]

[1] It wouldn't be unreasonable or unjustifiable for the Supreme Court to say that U.S. Citizens do retain the right to due process while off U.S. soil, even if they take up arms against the U.S., but that an administrative process is sufficient "process due" in situations where the Citizen refuses to submit himself to judicial process.
In practice, they don't give their own software developers non-production machines except in special circumstances. Most OSX & iOS developers in apple are using apple production hardware.
It's not clear to me why the value of sociology would need to be defended. A good deal of the social graph analysis that's so popular now is built directly on the methods and works of sociologists and social psychologists (Stanley Milgram's small world, Zachary's karate club, etc.) with the big difference between then and now being availability of computational power and data sets.

It seems like a field that has a lot of relevance today, even if perhaps people practice it under different guises.
Getting back in touch with the community to update us on your progress is more than enough. It's great to hear that you have switched doctors, meds, and changed your life style. It's even better to hear you are feeling better. Even improvement that seems marginal are land slide accomplishments. It's a sign that you are on your way, you can see the light, and I hope it gives you hope. It surely gives me hope.

What I don't think you realize is that you have already done so much. That day your story hit the front page the community came together to support one of our own, you. This was huge. What's more is it brought depression to the front of our minds. On that day a few people may have hugged their wives a little tighter, asked their teenages how they have been doing... and actually listen. Not to mention the dozens of people who are also battling depression that would have acted on the advice given to you.

You've done so much, and you are doing so great. You have helped people with your story... even though they may not come forward and say it, I guarantee you did. I can tell you that your story restored my faith in this community, which so often gets caught up in some pretty silly arguments. For this, I thank you.

You've done so much, you've done so great, and you owe us nothing. Just focus on getting better, and hold onto this passion you seem to have for helping people who are in situations similar to yours. It will come in handy...

I could write forever, so I'm going to stop now.. but just one last thing. The world needs more people like you, not less. Hang in there.
> I know this may fall on deaf ears, but couldn't you
> people join forces and create ONE open-source office
> suite

Most people have already joined forces to create one open-source office suite. It's called LibreOffice. As far as I'm aware, the vast majority of developers who used to work on OpenOffice now work on LibreOffice.

OpenOffice is a brand that survives on the fumes in its fuel tank. I still occasionally catch semi-technical people (tech management types etc) recommending OpenOffice, but invariably it's because they haven't heard of LibreOffice and were unaware that it's the default in most distros these days.
Alcibiades: The Biggest Badass in World History