skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just because there will be replacements for most of Google Reader's functionality, that doesn't make sunsetting GR with 3 months notice any less of a dick move.

"There have been far too many HN articles on how evil Google is for canceling a free service, how this product cancellation is a symbol, how Google should never have given anything to anyone if they were going to cancel it later."

If a large company starts giving away a service that one would normally expect to pay for, and if it puts its marketing muscle into getting everyone to use the service instead of alternatives, it has responsibility towards those users for quite some time to come, having killed the market for others.

Now dozens of developers of RSS clients have to scramble to replace the GR backend that everyone is using. For example, Aaronbretthorst sent out an email today about the client he's working on:

"To be honest, I never intended to announce my project this week. I started working on Viafeeds on February 11th, and expected that I'd have at least six months to get it working and well-polished before Google shut down Reader. Unfortunately, things didn't work out the way I expected, and I've been forced to accelerate my timetable. This is due, in no small part, to the fact that I was an avid Reader user, and want to make sure that I have a product at least as good to use on my iPhone, iPad and desktop before it shuts down on July 1st."
This guide is exactly what I've been looking for, thanks Cody. Been on the receiving end of some very talented pentesters, and really want to learn more about how on earth they find the things they do.

Want to make sure I catch your future editions, do you have anything I can sign up for notification? Can't find an RSS feed on your blog.
Not my favorite line from the Tao Te Ching, but a good one nonetheless. I think my actual favorite is the very first verse, where he explains that the entire book is a lie (in a sense). I love that so much.
I learned alone at Hackernews and codeacademy/treehouse tons of stuff.Which i used in a project.
You can do it too...
If they make the menu hoverable (at least on desktop) then their other products are still only a click away.

This makes more sense actually because it means more searches from Google's main homepage, because there are less options to navigate away.

It also makes the page less cluttered and gives the user 2 distinct set of actions:
1) Perform a search
2) Use a popup menu to navigate to a different product
You could use it to benchmark (it might be useful for that in cases where what you were benchmarking wasn't raw request handling speed, or the performance of simple SQL queries, but rather some backend event that would only be tickled by a particular pattern of requests), but the real thing it does that I think ab doesn't do is collect all the responses and allow you to compare them.

(It's actually not great at doing those comparisons, but I don't have a better alternative).

Burp costs money, but it costs so little money relative to its value that if you think it's expensive, I'm going to suggest you're doing something wrong with your bill rate.
I recently found https://thimble.webmaker.org/ which seems pretty cool. I don't know if it's the best, but it's seems pretty good for beginners.
But the part you curated you can export and take with you.
- The "leader" seems to cycle from one character to the next faster than it advances from cell to cell.

- The "random" groups don't look random at all to me. More like there's a series of "standing" characters left behind by the light-green leader, and behind that there's a stream of "running" characters advancing at a different rate. We only see the running characters through gaps in the standing characters, and only in cells that the leader has already visited.
How safe are bank deposits in northern coutries? Germany, uk?
Smug US/UK commentators have now been shouting for 3+ years about how incredibly stupid the EU is, how the Euro will break up in two weeks... But why is the Euro up 16% against the USD and 23.3% against the UK pound over the last 10 years? Why are German bond yields lower than the US bond yields, and why do some stable eurozone countries still possess a triple AAA rating by all credit agencies, in opposition to the US?

Considering the population, Cyprus is more like a middle-size city than a country. It joined the EU in 2004 and the Eurozone in 2008 - their problems are much older than that. Other than for humanitary reasons, the EU shouldn't and doesn't really care if they go under. If panicked investos withdraw their money they shall - smarter investors will pick up their holdings and realize gains; the doomsayers will end up as losers, like the US hedge funds ala Paulson betting against the EU the last years.
I cloned Zach Holman's (holman) dot files implementation[1]. Mine [2] is basically Ian's torn apart and put back together (so i could understand it). It consists of symlinked rc files, and env and private_env files which get run at login / profile boots. The private env stuff (passwords, api keys, etc) are cloned from my home server or from encrypted Dropbox folder (still figuring out how I want to handle that)

1: https://github.com/holman/dotfiles

2: https://github.com/pfarrell/dotfiles
Steubenville Rape Guilty Verdict: The Case that Social Media Won
Just do it. Get started, make a move. Thinking and reading advice about it on HN won't get you anywhere without action. You are not a loser, but you've got to stop thinking and start doing. (I've been there, hence the tip)
I dunno, it seems like so much heat and light is wasted in America trying to 'figure out' health care. There are lots of countries that have figured out health care. Just study the best practice and put together a viable system.

If you want the absolute best return in units of health care per dollar spent then the New Zealand system was the most efficient last time I looked.
The US government's interest in intervention is not "fix things for the residents" but "US interests" (which, during the cold war, essentially just meant opposition to the USSR and some basing rights or access to resources). Admittedly even by that metric, most of the US interventions have been failures.

There are a few cases where US/NATO intervention has been sort of helpful. Panama is probably better now that we got rid of Noriega, although we put him there in the first place. The Balkans at least didn't turn into a pan-European or WW3. French intervention in Mali seems at least not to be making things worse, and while they went into Rwanda late, they did at least settle things down. Australian forces actually did a lot of good in PNG/ET from what I've read, although I don't know too much about it.
I think what makes Hinton surprising is that he has a long established academic lab and so many current top researchers went through that lab. Yann LeCun (ANNs/Deep Learning), Chris Williams, (GPs), Carl Rasmussen (GPs), Peter Dayan (NeuroScince and TD-Learning), Sam Roweis (RIP).
As you note, industrial research labs (with Nobel prize winning researchers) have been around at IBM, NEC, and ATT Bell etc.
One thing that I think about, is what happens to the quality of research as top folks who have an established record of producing new researchers are pulled from that role?
Also not sure about startups having anything to do with with making technology real. Is Google still a startup?
I think that's a valid point. Clearly the Silicon Valley firms delivering ads are building in metrics and tracking.

However, my point was that this would not matter if one had capabilities at hand to control what information your own machine sends out about you for these ad trackers to capture. What Washington and Hollywood are doing is passing laws together that prevent this.

There are situations where I am perfectly happy letting a company have information about me, on which it makes profits, but that I feel on balance is in my interests. (For example personalization algorithms in some services I feel provide me with added value). There are plenty of situations where I do not want this. When I have the option to disengage with services that track me in ways I don't want to, and thereby reduce my surveillable footprint I am fine with Silicon Valley doing its thing. When I don't have such options because Hollywood has lobbied to ban computers which don't identify their owner clearly to all in the foodchain, and by extension the government - and when I have no idea about the security of my own machine thereby undermining my own crypto choices, that's a fundamental undermining of my liberties.

Silicon Valley firms may deliver services to Hollywood and DC but ultimately both of those are more powerful in the decision making hierarchy than is the tech sector.
Thanks for explaining. I think it's important to note that any perceived-consensus in some random-thread doesn't mean much - it's not necessarily a real consensus or conclusion, and in any case the actual site managers have their own ideas about how things should work. (And, while they clearly welcome some input, they also seem to frown upon most meta-discussion, complaint threads, coordinated-voting-pacts, and lobbying-polls.)

Personally, the occasional posts of Wikipedia articles and PG essays (even repeats when related to current topics) are valuable to me. I think it'd be a misuse of the 'flag' to suppress these. Of course anyone is free to misuse their click-power like that... I just don't want anyone to misleadingly claim that's a consensus norm, with the vague assertion "we already decided this". That seems like a rhetorical trick.
You know what's even better? In the Cyprus example, bond investors in the banks (who don't have government insurance) are being completely protected from losses). Small depositors (who do have government insurance) are having 6.75% of their savings calculated. That's entirely contrary to the policy you quoted.

It's hard to really get your head around how wrong headed this decision is.
The Losers of Prague's Drug Liberalization
This is a great idea, and I hadn't heard of any of the competitors others have pointed out (including UK-built happytables). It seems like penetration of these services isn't great yet, because I rarely come across a restaurant website that isn't terrible - PDF menus, contact details and little else. Hopefully that's a sign that this is a huge untapped market, and not that websites don't make much difference to restaurants' livelihoods.
Perhaps not the collapse of all banking, but it could well be remembered as the first direct cause of the EU breaking up into separate countries/areas again.
You can't export the content of the feeds (EDIT: using Google Takeout, that is.) Oftentimes, GR is the only one that still has a copy of an older article. What use is it to know I've starred an article if I can't read it anymore?

(To remedy this, I've been using Reeder to export all my starred items to both Instapaper and Evernote. But no thanks to Google.)
I'm probably going to set up a mailing list soon, but if you drop me an email at cody.brocious@gmail.com I'll make sure to let you know when I put out the others. Glad you found it useful!

Oh, also, follow me on twitter, as I'll certainly link it there. https://twitter.com/daeken
Techcrunch is influential now? :P
Hey I made this myself, what do you think about it?
http://www.hdplist.com
The big question is,
Is this my only chance to get to Mars?
Or am I young enough to get artificially longer life, to get round trip to mars? Or do I die before it is possible?
Can I live on Mars long enough for round trips to get frequent? Is science advanced enough to keep me live after getting back(c'mon, I am piece of history then, first ones on Mars, of course they are going to keep me alive if they can)?

What are you betting on?
I made this primarily because I wanted to learn more about writing an interpreter and I also wanted to experiment a little with the decisions that go into language design - so it turned out not like a "normal" C-like, but hopefully still recognizable. To my surprise, making decisions about how scope should work was actually the hardest part.

I can only recommend that every hacker does this at least once in their lifetime, it's been a real eye-opener for me in respect to problems I don't usually think too much about.

That said, feedback or questions are very welcome :)
but but but....

"socialized medicine"

"communism"

"free private enterprise"

etc.
vito, this was a great writeup, thanks. I've got stock MySQL running with multi-master replication (with an additional off-network slave for local backups); I've been looking at Percona recently and looking for a better clustering setup.

You don't really mention what kind of production environment these are set up in. What's the load like, how big/small are your clusters, any pitfalls you've run into?
I was more in 2009, still, it has probably taken a lot of work and a lot of time so the design became dated in the process ...
> Burp costs money, but it costs so little money relative to its value that if you think it's expensive, I'm going to suggest you're doing something wrong with your bill rate.

Couldn't agree enough. Even if this is something you do as a hobby, Burp will more than pay for itself in a single bug bounty payout.
This (registration required) appears to be what happened http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f890566a-8f24-11e2-a39b-00144feabd...
Hey I made this on thursday, what do you think about it? http://www.hdplist.com
Would you like to work with me on it? Currently it's pretty simple, but works.
Distributed systems building is not a precondition to big data ML. Most of those systems have been built and commoditized...to such an extent that the difference between having one and not boils down to a command line flag.
I routinely run ML algos in local mode on my mac on a small dataset. Once its up to snuff, I turn off the--local flag, and it now runs on giant MR clusters over terabytes of data. I personally have not done any changes other than turning off the local flag.
They don't charge the people that count. When I worked for an airline, we were told to just ignore complaints from customers who flew less than several thousand miles per year.
Definitely not.

The confiscation is 6.75% on small accounts (mostly EU savers and pensioners) who are covered by deposit insurance, and 9.9% on large accounts (yes, a lot of which is Russian money). Overall it will collect a total of around €6B.

If you wanted to get €6B from just the accounts that aren't covered by deposit insurance you'd need to confiscate around 30%. So, basically, the EU had a choice of either taking 30% from the (mostly Russian) wealthy and 0% from the poor and middle class (a lot of whom are pensioners), or taking 9.9% and 6.75%, and they went with the latter.

If anything, this entire debacle is an effort to protect Russian (and Cypriot) oligarchs at the expense of ordinary people. As a bonus, it also makes bank runs, the collapse of the EU financial system, and the destruction of the eurozone much more likely.

Very odd.
Sure. Mail sent.
I think you are misinformed about arbitrage. Arbitrage involves taking advantage of a price difference between two different markets. In the US for equities, there is a national best bid and offer which means that the prices stay in line. (Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_best_bid_and_offer)

If someone in the US first wants to sell a stock for as low as $95 (places a resting ask order at $95), and then someone else comes in and is willing to buy the stock for up to $105 (places a bid at $105), their orders will match, and the transaction will occur at $95. They won't just sit around waiting for some arbitrageur to come around.

Let's say there is an arbitrage between an index fund etf and its component companies such that you can buy all the components for $99, and sell the etf for $100. In this case who is the poor real market participant who gets screwed by the arbitraguer? If the "real market participant" got his order filled, he will be happy.

"Today the number of market participants & electronic transactions make trades near perfect; The utility of arbitrage trades vanished almost completely."

I think you are confusing cause and effect. The reason why the markets are indeed much more efficient these days is because of the existants of many more people engaged in arbitrage. This is something you should be happy about. Those algoritms that pick up the scraps significantly decrease the cost of investing for everyday people huge amounts of invested pension and retirement fund wealth.
While I don't deal with enterprise sales, I do security consulting for the enterprise, and one thing I do is never lower my prices. Instead, I'll just add additional value over top, e.g. an extra day of consulting. Yes, it has the same effect for me, but it doesn't get my clients in the habit of paying me less money.
The fact that gold is so useless is what makes it so perfect as a sink for deferred wealth.
Savers do not infringe on anyone else. If savers decided to hoard farm land...then farm produce would go up. Bakeries...same effect. Note I'm not arguing against investment but there is a difference between investment and saving. Saving is trying to maintain purchasing power that you have earned today and want to spend in the future. Investment is the deployment of your capital at some risk in order to possibly earn a return. Your prescriptions are all investments. I'm not a skilled businessman/investor - I'm a coder that just wants to defer my purchasing power that I earned today
.
What the savers currently do is hoard currency. The thirst for currency encourages and enables large amounts of debt to be written (as debt is the largest producer of currency via bank loans) which leads to cheap credit which leads to malinvestment.

In my comment history you will see a rather long entry I reposted from ZeroHedge. It's worth a read if you want to understand this argument some more.
I actually dislike the navbar.

I can't count how many times I've wanted to search for news about something, typed in my search, and hit "news" from the navbar rather than the results bar thus erasing my search term. Why do I have two ways to get news?
it looks quite nice. Great work, guys !
I'm thinking about Vim's redesign. It must be done, what do you think :D
That wasn't about Google Voice. That's regarding free calling via Google Voice from the GMail/GTalk interface.
My solution above (naming functions) is one solution to the problem.

Wrapping ambiguous objects or arrays is another:

f 1, 2, {
foo: "bla"
bar: "bla"
}, (error, result) ->
# do something with result

For a series of function parameters, the leading comma is another:

f.asyncMap (item) ->
foo item
, (error, result) ->
# do something with result
pinboard.in is always an interesting example. It started at a really low one-time sign-up fee, which grows as more users sign up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=702914.

It used to be something like a dollar on launch. Wonder how it follows inflation, though.
Your advice is rainbows, ponies and nice and all but he's not asking "should I start programming", hes asking more along the lines of "should I start a career in programming".

Two completely different paths, getting into this profession or any technical profession, where you just can't do it on a whim is going to be a challenge at any age.

I've been a senior developer for a long time, and I keep reading this bullshit on HN about "hey, no coding skills, start a internet startup!" and "I'm in marketing and I started a wordpress blog about hacking and now I'm an entrepreneur". You want to get into coding, listen to the real coders, PERIOD.
On Chrome Canary, I get no navbar whether I'm signed in or not.
hehe :P
I still choose Ubuntu as my server's distro :P
Ex-Matasano chiming in! ;-)

I've been demonstrating web app security topics for the Intro to Security course at Brown University this semester. I've used Burp almost exclusively. I've even had the students use the free version of Burp for labs. I don't know that the functionality / price tradeoff would make sense for them even if they were full time freelancers: they use Repeater and Proxy more than any other tools.

That being said, any time someone complains about it being too expensive I point out that a single vulnerability found as part of a security bug bounty program (ie: Google, Facebook, Mozilla, etc) nets you more than the cost of a license.
AGI has cool ideas, and is in some sense the "right" theoretical framework for AI, but it's not clear that it gives any kind of practical path forward for AI research. The main problem is that its basic idea -- an AI performing Bayesian inference over a hypothesis class of all potential environment-generating computer programs, with a Kolmogorov complexity prior -- is wildly uncomputable, so to make it practical we'd need to find simple, computable approximations that work on real problems. But this is basically what modern ML research is already trying to do -- finding models that are complex enough to capture interesting structure in the world, but still simple enough for efficient inference to be practical.
overflow-hiddened: http://jsfiddle.net/muV99/1/
Who is the best VP of Engineering in SF?
The title here is misleading, maybe deliberately to provoke interest? The article presents research that natural talents without "deliberate practice" are unlikely to result in great success in any field. Common sense, to me, that consistent, daily practice and focus on improvement are needed for top performance.
> But why is the Euro up 16% against the USD and 23.3% against the UK pound over the last 10 years?

You think it is something other than supply and demand? The Fed and BoE can print; The ECB cannot. The result (which is related to printing) you failed to quote: Greek deflation.

It's not complicated.
Have you ever read transcripts from the Loebner Prize Competition, a Turing (con)test they hold each year? Machines keep getting funnier.

http://www.worldsbestchatbot.com/Competition_Transcripts
Frankly it does look way better without the navbar. I never understood this move by Google of making that bar black; I guess there was some discussion internally along the lines of "yes, it looks like crap, but we have the data here and it shows people are engaging with the navbar 240% more than before!".
Amix vimrc does pretty goob job at making it work cross platforms. https://github.com/amix/vimrc, you guys should check this out.
Any idea why he's doing this stuff only primarily by e-mail? It'd be great if this stuff was online like in a blog or whatnot.

I'd like to take the time and look over the crypto challenges.
> historical feed data

Google caches the entire history of an RSS feed from the moment it entered their database. This is in many cases unique, irreplaceable data that's going to have to be systematically extracted over the next few months, because I seriously doubt Google will release the entire data dump.
This touches on an interesting human behavior; the difference between $0.00 and $0.01 is huge, much larger than $0.01 to $0.02, or even $0.01 to $0.99 - this is talked about (among other interesting topics) in the book "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictably_irrational

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X68dm92HVI
by which time (2050s-2060s) we will have machine brains that are orders of magnitude smarter than human ones (!)

that's a fascinating yet chilling thought (granted, orders of magnitudes dumber than those future thoughts of the machines)