skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does anyone have any resources pertaining to how people react to generous grandfathering? Like say you release a free service, then make it paid, but give everyone who signed up while it was free a 1 year loyalty bonus, can anyone give their experiences or link to others who have successfully/unsuccessfully tried this?
Tracking down a leak in Ruby's EventMachine
I agree with goldfeld on this, there is this barrier with every language that many people get stuck on. In Java it's Cat cat = new Cat(), in C it's *fu, in Perl it's s/win/fail, in Assembly it's Assemlby, in C# it's LINQ, etc. But once you manage to get over the first or second hurdle, your perspective on technology widens and you are ready to take on more hurdles.
Exactly, rationalization is one of the most effective and powerful technics in fighting all kinds of phobias, neurosis, panic attacks, etc. Once you know what is really going on, why do you feel that way and what is causing it, it's instantly much easier to deal with the problem.
Someone upvote this so more people can see it and reply
Google experiments with no navigation bar on all its sites
What Enlightenment Means [pdf]
Physicists Increasingly Confident They've Found the Higgs Boson
The API Pipes, From Resource to Last Mile
> the one-way plan isn't to send a ship-full of people with suicide pills

Maybe I got caught up in the ridiculousness of the article's sensational tone, but even so there is no technical reason to actually plan on never having return flights. This relates directly to your other statement:

As I wrote in the parent comment, the presence of water on Mars allows for the production of rocket fuel on site. This ties in to where I mentioned extended infrastructure such as a space elevator and a Moon base, because those too will make trips back and forth economical (instead of scraping everything together for a singular "by the skin of our teeth" mission like this one).

I wrote about these points for a reason ;)
I was under the impression that symbolism was a construct of fiction, used by the author to make larger overarching points via the use of more tangible agents.

It's confusing when writers apply this concept to the real world; it seems like they push the notion that there's some great narrative in the real world.
I've been thinking this exact same trend ever since I saw Hinton's move to Google, but I didn't have the historic background to make these comparisons. Really nice job.
Probably lost among the billion other reasons people hate airlines.
Maybe because the price is utterly absurd for something that costs nothing to provide and should be free?

Or because you can just run the browser yourself, press print screen or View SOurce and have the same result, non programmatically?

Or because you can use Selenium WebDriver and achieve the same result programmatically, and also support IE and Firefox?

You know, not all ideas are actually useful, especially as paid services, and this is one that isn't.
Burp Intruder is the fuzzer inside of Burp. All the Burp-like tools let you capture requests your browser sends, edit them, and replay them. Burp Intruder lets you take a captured request and set up rules to send hundreds or thousands of variant requests.

I am weird among Matasanos (and ex-Matasanos :|) in that I live inside of Burp Intruder; I use it instead of Repeater. Why replay a request once when I can replay it 1000 times? So for me, non-crippled Intruder isn't optional.

I wish Burp didn't have a Scanner. I might pay $25 more for a branded version of Burp that specifically didn't have that feature, so I could reassure clients I wasn't ever using it.
Well, i assume they at least run a database query for giggles. I mean 10$ for a database query...SELECT Cash FROM USERS WHERE USERGULLIBILITY > 5 GO
There's my 10$.
There Will Be JavaScript
Hi there Stefan.

I'm in a similar situation as you are, even though my journey to get there has been a bit different. I recognize the feeling you have of being a "looser" and I'm also looking for change.

I left my day job 5 years ago to pursue my dream of starting something of my own in the it-business. 18 months of hard work later I had failed, but still managed to get picked up by another startup, where I have been working since. It has been a good journey but this weekend I took the decision to start another chapter of my life and try to make something of my own again.

The funny thing is that I have actually been planning on moving to Switzerland at the same time too. Have been there many times and I just love it there. Feels like my life is to short not to be where I want to be, and not doing the things I want to do, so why not change it all at once? :)

I consider myself pretty proficient in programming and got some experience with startups, so maybe we could exchange some ideas and knowledge?
My email is intesa@hush.com, just drop me a line if you want to someone to talk to on mail, skype or even meet up for a coffee next time I'm in Switzerland.

Tschuss!
Huh, yeah, I've never seen anyone use intruder like that. I might use it once every other engagement, whereas I use repeater 24/7.
As a math professor, I was enthusiastic when I read this short piece in Math Horizons, and promptly put it on my office door. The metaphor is a great hook, is well carried out, and leaves the reader with a pretty much spot-on idea of what math research is all about. I am delighted to see it reach a wider audience on the web.
Also, if I'm justifying Burp to a non-security person, part of the reason why is that Intruder would allow me to do all sorts of wacky integration and stress tests without having to write fiddley code. A rule-based request generator is a pretty useful tool for the box.
You could just as easily say TCP/IP in reality is just hype to disguise electrical and optical signaling, and prevents the user from appreciating all that goes into transmitting data, gives them a inflated sense of what's possible in the universe, and is about out sourcing data transmissions, false senses of reliability etc.

Additionally the argument that "no interface" means you won't be able to troubleshoot something is an overly literal interpretation of the age old concept. As though "no interface" is not just a design ideal, which may not always be possible, but rather a movement to force round pegs into square holes. A more forward thinking point of view would be what innovation can be made in these areas, vs. looking backwards at how things used to work.
Show HN: a lexer, parser, interpreter and web runtime (np, a 5-weekend project)
Many frequent travelers don't check bags anyway. The most frequent travelers have elite status on an airline that might allow them to check bags for free.
I wonder if they tested that after logging in. Maybe it doesn't make sense to offer the other services if you are not logged in?
I go through some form of that feeling everyday and have found that listening to that voice that keeps telling you how much you suck will only make things much worse. I have yet to solve the problem of regularly getting seduced by the idea that i am hopelessly untalented, which makes me feel entitled to laze around and waste whatever is left of my life. But it gets more powerful with each day that i waste.
They can't reopen the banks without limiting the amount of money people can withdraw. Thus the death spiral of the entire worldwide financial system begins.
Bookmark one of them and wait. For some reason, the comment spam bots tend to hit them.

I suspect it's either clueless spam submissions that screw up, or it's some funky magic in the backend. Either way, I have yet to see a real person do this.
How lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success
I actually think it would be better without the navbar.

Google is my homepage, but when I want to go to Google Drive or Gmail, I type "drive" or "mail" into Chrome's search bar. I think the Chrome-OS-like menu would be better than the navbar. If they do remove it, they should at least make a point to maintain a page with links to all their services.
Biologically inspired modular neural networks (Virginia Tech)
A native method for binding methods has existed for a long time and is called just that:

f = obj.doSomething.bind(obj);

Wrapping functions like in the example is different and is very common among cargo cultists
Probably this is one area where an oil embargo would be more helpful in combination with removal of the government. An external power could enforce an embargo against oil unless a substantial percentage was spent on domestic infrastructure and programs, vs. funneled into a dictator's personal accounts.

"Oil for food" in Iraq in the 1990s was a horrible fiasco, but there have been cases where natural resource wealth hasn't been strictly a curse.

For ongoing security and government assistance, probably the only entity able to credibly do anything in EG is the AU, which has become a lot more credible in the past 5-10 years.
as long as it's disclosed

On the site for this thing it says it's "100% transparent for the users", which is the exact opposite.
Nice one.

Just 1-2 things I miss:
- how can I mark an article read/unread?
- could I delete an entire folder?
- is there a limit on the number of feeds it can handle (I tried to import from reader, and I miss some feeds/folders)
Read the rationale from the authors:

http://www.artisopensource.net/2013/03/17/incautious-porn-a-...
Has some nice aspects, but that secondary nav is horrible in almost every way.
>Making any of the world's poorest countries richer in general, or making any of the world's most oppressed countries freer in general, is [...] a much tougher and more interesting problem, a problem more worthy of a gnarly man willing to risk his life

Involving yourself in foreign politics is no substitute for going to Mars. Even if you magically turn Zimbabwe into a political and economic clone of Alabama, the overall capabilities and prospects of mankind remain substantially the same. Successful manned flight that expands our species to another planet is much more admirable and worthwhile from this point of view.
Great read, particularly relevant to my weekend spent debugging a Core Audio granular synthesis engine. It was definitely of the 'my code is haunted, that's the only explanation' variety -- audio files that were discarded were still faintly audible in the background. I read that article, sat down at my computer, stepped through my code in the debugger again and realized that I was setting my audio stream format to 2 channels/interleaved whilst converting to a mono stream. So, whenever I filled the buffer with a new audio file, my file-length parameter was incorrect, and some bytes were never freed. Because the files are all close to same length, I never noticed the issue before. It only surfaced when I parameterized the 'grain duration' in the engine. The irony is that just yesterday a friend was asking about getting started in Core Audio and the advice I offered was to spend a lot of time learning about Audio Stream Basic Descriptions, because they're usually the cause of most problems.
> Suddenly the big problem in my life wasn't that I was such a loser, it was that I was inclined to think that I was such a loser

That sounds familiar. I had the same problem, and I know several others who have that problem too. None of them are losers, they just listen too much to their thoughts: "Every day, 95% of us have thoughts with depressive, anxious or obsessive content. So why isn't 95% of us mental patients? The explanation is simple: Everybody has crazy thoughts, but not everybody believes in them."[1] When fully realizing that, things change dramatically.

ACT has been very good to me. Let me recommend a book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Happiness-Trap-Based-revolutionary-m...

[1] "Tankevirus" by Hanne H. Brorson (unfortunately only available in Norwegian.)
As someone in a very similar situation to OP, and someone who is about to move to another country precisely for the reasons you cite, I can't agree with you more. Just deciding to move has made me a lot more motivated. Granted, I don't realy know what I'm going to find, but at least I'm fighting this thing head-on.
Searchpath: Great search for your web site
I agree I didn't take this as a severely depressed person. Just someone who wants to change. Kudos and good luck I say. Work hard, be good to people and good things will come.
Failing in chrome:

java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 1
at np.LibRequest.parseCookies(LibRequest.java:37)
at np.LibRequest.<init>(LibRequest.java:26)
at np.Interpreter.initRootContext(Interpreter.java:94)
at np.Interpreter.run(Interpreter.java:115)
at np.Interpreter.load(Interpreter.java:142)
at npfcgi.handleRequest(npfcgi.java:60)
at npfcgi.main(npfcgi.java:107)
How about factoring your A-type requests and B-type requests into two separate apps?

Oh, wait, Heroku already tells you to do this: the B-type requests are why they introduced "workers." Heroku's recommendation has always been that you're supposed to write your "app servers" to serve A-type requests directly, while asynchronously queuing your B-type requests to be consumed by workers. You then either poll the app server for the completion state of the long requests, or have the worker queue a return-value paired to the request-ID, that the app server can dequeue and return along with the next request. (Erlang's process-inbox-based message-passing semantics, basically.)

To put it another way, it's the old adage of "don't do long calculations on the UI thread." In this case we have a Service-Oriented Architecture, so we've got a UI service--but we still don't want it to block. By default, Heroku basically exposes Unix platform semantics; unless you wrap those with Node or Erlang, you have to deal with how Unix does SOA: multiple daemons, and passing messages over sockets. Heroku could "intelligent-route" all they want, but there's no level of magic that can overcome applications designed in ignorance of how concurrent SOA architecture works on the platform you're designing for.
Everyone is a potential employee, investor, customer or journalist.
Jesus. Just got into the import queue...

> There are 41600 users in the import queue ahead of you.

I bet they're happy right now.
The application is for building extractors and connectors, which then get published to our platform so you can query using our web service.
It would be amazing to have an entity, sort of like the US military crossed with the Red Cross, which just went into conflict zones or repressive regimes to provide infrastructure of government (power, water, education, transportation, law enforcement, security for civilians, etc.). Capable of defending itself, but not taking sides other than providing that infrastructure to everyone. Nominally this is the UN's mission in some countries, but it doesn't really do it.

Satellite TV (Al Jazeera and western sitcoms) largely accomplished this for information in the greater Islamic world. Doing the same for non-information goods would require actual infrastructure on the ground, though.
As a citizen of a so called third-world country, your post is extremely condescending.
See my edit regarding the "dark side". You are generally right, but there is at least one example that turned out well despite occasionally taking advantage of illicit maneuvers.
Three "m" words: mystery meat menus.
+1 for slides 18, 51, and, best of all, 54. Great presentation :)
Of course I managed to cause a fatal error just after posting the link here... ;)

Anyway, the tutorial demo server should work now.
I added a donate button!
I did just that with LiberWriter.com (people who got in at an earlier set of prices got to keep them) and people were generally very happy and positive about it.
I think that ml people should take a look at the AGI field. I also think that more powerful techniques, specialized hardware like qualcomms baby Brain corporation are building, and/or large peer computing networks will make general intelligence accessible for small groups or individuals In fewer than twenty years.
Alright, that sounds feasible, albeit being on an entirely different scale.
I spent the last year in Bangladesh and indeed it did have an effect on my interest in going to Mars. So thanks for also making the connection.

Literally on the one hand I want to say "sign me up!" and yet on the other hand, after my experience living in isolation and without so many comforts in Bangladesh, I do worry I'd regret giving up on so much to move to Mars.

Alienation, isolating, and the lack of comforts give you a lot of time to think, and it's easy to think you've made a mistake. I wouldn't want to be haunted by that feeling. On the other hand, to explore red martian rocks on the edge of human civilization... it has a romantic appeal.

When romantic appeal and "the real thing" meet, sometimes it's not all happy.
That Wikipedia article is wrong in all sorts of ways. It was pretty good the last time I seen it, but clearly someone has been editing it who doesn't actually USE Plan 9.

"To implement [NAT], a union directory can be created, overlaying the [gateway]'s /net directory tree with its own /net"

"Implement NAT"? Sorry, but exportfs doesn't contain any special-case code that says "oh, someone is accessing /net! Better switch on the NAT code!".

There's no actual translation of addresses, it isn't NAT. Plan 9 does have a NAT implementation but it's closed source.

And their example of a bind is horrible. They've got that LONG path into Inferno's "chroot". Inferno isn't part of standard Plan 9, and there aren't many paths in Plan 9 that are anywhere near as long as that. So it's misleading on two counts. If you must have a /bin example of a bind, a better one would be Acme binding its Acme-specific binaries and scripts onto /bin.

I'm really, really going to have clean that article up. It doesn't even have anything about how Plan 9 gets modularity without dynamic linking. Securely.

I like that they added an "Impact" section.
Deliberate practice is all about pushing yourself outside your current comfort zone. In programming, that might mean things like learning a language such as Haskell, or making a DSL. Solving problems completely different than the ones you usually solve or trying completely different methods. Solving problems you think of as "hard".

Or even better, try to solve problems you think of as tedious in ways that are not tedious. I always find it strange that so many programmers complain about boring grunt work. There is a perfect opportunity there to invent tools that optimize and speed up this boring grunt work. The next level is to make those tools work in a way that is usable and intuitive for other programmers. The end result is worth gold (or glory, depending on what you're after)

Good practice is all about doing hard things. Doing the same things that you can already do perfectly (both in music and programming) leads to no improvement. Doing things you consider hard leads to amazingly quick improvement.

Musicians that concentrate on practicing only the hard and unpolished parts of their performance are more effective than the ones that practice both the easy and the hard parts. Those musicians that have found a way to "modularize" their practice and split it to the tiniest most focused bits are the most successful ones. (This is not easy because beyond a certain point the flow of the music is lost)

In programming we must do both the easy and the hard parts, but we can turn the easy parts into hard by writing code to make them even easier or to completely eliminate them.
I am 44 years old, I ended up on disability in 2003 and haven't worked a job ever since. I have two degrees one in computer science and one in business management. I earned the later after I was disabled and graduated with honors. I suffer from schizo-affective disorder and when I developed that mental illness I lost 95% of my friends and family who basically abandoned me, and wrote me off as a loser and failure. I lost my job and my career was basically ruined as well.

I learned over 37 different programming languages over 30 years of my life, and most if not all are obsolete. Like Turbo Pascal, FORTRAN, COBOL, ADA, 8086 Assembly Language, JCL/JECL, etc. Yes I worked with a variety of different operating systems and computers. Even mainframes and minicomputers as well as many old 8 bit microcomputers, etc.

Pointers, basically some modern languages did away with them. It seems one has to learn how computer memory works to figure out how to use a pointer, and for that one has to learn how a computer works. But if they can eliminate pointers and direct access in modern languages then more people can learn how to program. Many programmers forgot to set their pointers and ended up with a null pointer that may have been set to the address of 0 (system memory) or may have been set to some random address that happened to be in the memory the location of the pointer is stored at. Basically a pointer holds a memory address to a block of memory that data is being stored at. But it seems to be too complex for most people to understand. Back in my days in learning Pascal and Pre-ANSI C it was required to learn.

Anyway don't feel like you are a loser or a failure, just learn from your mistakes and failures and then keep trying until you get better. That is how we human beings learn. It is how we learned to walk as infants. We fell down a lot, had to crawl first, but basically we put one foot in front of the other and learned how to keep our balance and walk. But we don't remember all the times trying to walk that we failed and made mistakes.

Startups are like that too, I want to share a link to a blog. Some flag it as offtopic because it talks about mental illnesses and technology and startups, yet when others post those same things it makes the front page. This post in the blog is about losers and why there are no losers: http://fakemdc.blogspot.com/2013/02/there-are-no-losers-just...

Steve Jobs suffered failures and mistakes and it cost him his job at Apple in 1985. But he didn't give up, he kept trying and trying and learning from mistakes and failures. Many people did the same thing.

If you want to talk about it, my email is orionblastar@gmail.com
>> Somehow, I did get back into it a few years later, but I never really became proficient at it. Again, I was good at learning the basics, reading code, messing around with code snippets on the command line. But I never built anything of value.

> Stop reading code. Stop messing around. Find something that needs to be built (preferably by someone other than yourself). Then build it. Trust yourself and trust the process of building. You will learn what you need when you need it. I promise.

>> I don't have too much time left. My 20ies are gone.

> Bullshit. I didn't do my first startup until I was 32. Stop thinking like that. If you're a programmer, your prime is still 20 years ahead of you. (Believe me, I know.)

The single biggest thing I got out of this. Thanks for your $0.02 edw519.
Ryan - I'm on the Epidemiological Modeling team funded personally by BillG. I concur that the skillset required to solve problems on our planet (eradicating infectious diseases in our case) is completely different than those required for inter-galactic exploration. Perhaps the only overlap would be Mathematics, but that's the foundation for pretty much everything.

Shantanu - You're right. Simply throwing money cannot solve global issues and no single person including Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett combined have the monetary resources at their disposal to tackle even 5% of global issues. However, they're the right kind of people to take on sociological challenges and eradicating diseases because there's a lot more to the problem than that. For instance, bureaucracy, corruption, beliefs, natural causes, etc. I was really surprised (shouldn't have been) to learn that a significant portion of their funds are allocated for dealing with corrupt governments for our mission to globally eradicate diseases like Polio, Malaria, HIV, TB, etc. With my limited experience in that realm, I can state that the problem is definitely way more complex than it appears at the surface (and I think you get that as well).