skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I have read a lot about Upton Sinclair but never heard the criticism that his novel was unrealistic. References?

Try this summary:

http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/of-meat-and-myth

A few paragraphs relevant to what you just wrote:

historians with an ideological axe to grind against the market usually ignore an authoritative 1906 report of the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Animal Husbandry. Its investigators provided a point-by-point refutation of the worst of Sinclair’s allegations, some of which they labeled as “willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact,” “atrocious exaggeration,” and “not at all characteristic.”

Instead, some of these same historians dwell on the Neill-Reynolds Report of the same year because it at least tentatively supported Sinclair. It turns out that neither Neill nor Reynolds had any experience in the meat-packing business and spent a grand total of two and a half weeks in the spring of 1906 investigating and preparing what turned out to be a carelessly written report with predetermined conclusions. Gabriel Kolko, a socialist but nonetheless a historian with a respect for facts, dismisses Sinclair as a propagandist and assails Neill and Reynolds as “two inexperienced Washington bureaucrats who freely admitted they knew nothing” of the meat-packing process. Their own subsequent testimony revealed that they had gone to Chicago with the intention of finding fault with industry practices so as to get a new inspection law passed.

According to the popular myth, there were no government inspectors before Congress acted in response to The Jungle, and the greedy meat packers fought federal inspection all the way. The truth is that not only did government inspection exist, but meat packers themselves supported it and were in the forefront of the effort to extend it so as to ensnare their smaller, unregulated competitors.

Oh, and the fact that to you "it's not far fetched to believe" something does not constitute evidence for it. :-)
Most web analytics come from the client as well, not the server. But they do have the browser sandbox around them limiting what they can access.

Given the popularity of mobile and browser sandboxes, it seems increasingly likely that we're going to end up with a sandbox model and opt-in permissions for all apps, at least on consumer OSes. Not sure if this is a good or bad thing. I suppose there are pros and cons.
You should really check out CodeHS -- http://codehs.com

It's focused on providing a strong fundamental background to absolute beginners, so they learn not just how to write a program but how to write a good program. We teach good programming style, variable and function naming, commenting your code.

Part of the curriculum is reading other peoples' code and critiquing it. Students learn to think like a programmer, not just follow instructions.

Right now, most of our content is a bit more basic than your recommended path to mastery, but it's all the steps to get you there. You can't underestimate the difficulty of understanding the difference between if and while for a beginner. Or the idea of parameters and return values, things that people with experience often take for granted.

also, feel free to email me if you want to learn more. zach@codehs.com
If I remember correctly Brendan Eich was originally promised that he could build Self for Netscape, but later due to various reasons had to change the syntax and all that.

Also the popularity of javascript in the geekdom is in my recollection fairly recent phenomenon. It became interesting only after ajax, before that it was a leper like php.
I feel like this is useful information for much more than just people involved in work. Specifically, as PhD students, my partner and I (and pretty much all of our colleagues) often face burnout, and are always looking for ways to combat it.

I quite like the sound of most things in this article, and think I will try to adopt some of the principles to my study and see if they will help. Specifically, I need to get back into fiction, because that really did help when I read lots a few months ago. Also, evening walks sounds like a beautiful way to wind down.

Does anybody else here have other advice on ways to combat burnout during a PhD? I (and every other student) would be most interested to hear.
Raygun.io adds support for Node.js error reporting
Indeed. For your own good, don't do this: http://palace-dci.sourceforge.net/images/electronics.jpg

Amazingly, I never had a single incident with that parallel port->breadboard+transistors+relays->lights setup from my high school days.
Nor has any project been "saved" by not mixing tabs and spaces in the source code, but it's really a good idea to not do that.

Frankly if I "git log -p" and your diffs aren't clean and to the point, that's a code smell (maybe a developer smell?). If you are sloppy and inattentive in your commits, that probably carries over to your code as well. There's more to the code than just the latest version--history is important.
Y'know what, I disagree. It's not misleading. Social Engineering _is_ an attack, as far as I am concerned, and honestly when he mentions that it's Social Engineering in the third sentence of the article itself, I don't find it misleading at all.

To the guy who did it: Bloody well done. I agree with guyhelm, it's overkill, and we all know that's the best kind of kill ;)

Social engineering is actually quite scary, especially when put together with targeted attacks against the individual. It's a one-two punch that is very hard to defend against.

I wish the Uni's here in Brisbane would do stuff like that! Well done again, and I'm quite jealous!
I agree. I would have liked if the author had provided some ways to learn about these topics.

So then, what is the best website or video series to learn these topics? Wikipedia has a nice list of course, but I'm wondering if anyone here has found a particularly great resource they think their fellow HN members would find valuable?

I wonder somewhat humorously, if CodeSchool created a class to teach these topics, would the author's point be invalidated?
>> As for the rest, honestly, that just tells me I wouldn't want to work for you.

So we agree on something.

>>"If you want to know what Google's views are, i'm happy to tell you, otherwise, the world would generally be a better place if people would stop having to add disclaimers all over the place when having normal discussions "

A lawyer that twisted in a pretzel over some useless technicality (we'll send it to the person/s that requested it vs posting it online) is now a phony champion of straight talking. Wow!

They are two reasons why people should disclose their affiliations: one, so we know what's behind the words. If a company gives you a paycheck and you defend them or bash their competitors, people have to take that in consideration. Only in Google Land are bought opinions more important, or "ads are just more answers."

And then there's company policy. Google would fire you in a heartbeat if you caused them harm, make no mistake. But apparently you know "Google's positions" so go right ahead.

But frankly, if I could blacklist you, I would. Just for not disclosing that Google is your employer as you defended their "doing the right thing".
USS Triton, needed high speed to shadow carrier groups
Granular Software Estimation is a Myth
Everything I like about FireFox (gestures, tabbed browsing, a reasonable bookmark manager), Opera did first. I used Opera for years back when it flat killed Netscape and IE for features and standards compliance. I only left once FireFox implemented all of the same features I had come to rely on in Opera, PLUS developing its growing add-on ecosystem.

Gimmicky? Marginal? Not in the least. Sure, Opera, as a foreign, small, scrappy little software company wasn't able to knock off the behemoths of MSIE, Google/Chrome and Netscape-cum-Mozilla. But so what? The fact that they've been ahead of the feature curve as long as they have and are still in the fight is, to me, pretty dang amazing and quietly one of the most surprising stories in software in the last 15 years.

I've always been a fan of that resilient little Norwegian shop, and I'm sorry to see them (or, more than likely, their lawyers) get dragged into the unseemly world of lawsuits and recrimination. Hopefully this will resolve itself more amicably than it has started.

EDIT: I don't mean to be snarky or mean, but this bit made me SOL (snort out loud):

"..another slightly incompatible rendering engine?"

Opera's earliest claim to fame, back in the godawful days of the real incompatibility wars, was its near-religious adherence to W3 standards. A lot of web developers in the late nineties/early oughts would use Opera as the benchmark browser, and then resolve various quirks-mode issues from there. If it worked in Opera, you could be reasonable sure the problem wasn't with your code, but with a quirk that you were about to have to fork your code on, for Netscape or IE.
Awesome! :) \m/
>> Again, the parent i responded to implied Google has some affirmative obligation to place the source code on the internet. They don't.

He never said that. He said:
As soon as they sold their first device it was required by the Linux kernel GPL2 license to release the kernel source code.

RELEASE to a person or to 5 billion, online or papyrus is the same. Technically and all. For a guy that clings to a word and tries to write a book on its meaning, you sure screwed up.
Since you asked about an explanation: I downvoted you because your post makes no sense whatsoever.
You have a good regiment for burnout.

You can always feel burnout approaching which is usually about 2 weeks before it really happens (waking up and dreading working on the same thing).

Stop what you're doing and do something totally different for a while. For me its working on a vastly different project and spending weekends in the mountains.

This has never failed me yet as I always re-approach the offending project with the same drive I had when starting it.
This is truly impressive in this day and age. I used to write little games like this on the C64.

I do wonder why he is using a tape drive, though. That is taking retrocomputing a step too far. We had a 1541 (IIRC) from day 1 when I first got the C64 back in 1983, four years before the author was born. Tape is too painful; and should be reserved for someone who wants to retrocompute on the VIC-20.

I was trying to explain how delightfully 'tangible' the C64 was the other day - POKE something into memory and bang, stuff happens. It never ceased to amaze me how much improvement could be achieved over the baseline h/w and s/w setup too - order of magnitude faster disk access, 80 columns, etc. etc.
Google Glass and the Future
I suspect it's true in general - it's the one thing that still draws me to /. No point of view doesn't get an impassioned defense thrown at it no matter the individual merit.
Maybe they have a lawyer on retainer in Norway, but I doubt it. I'm sure they'll get one, but it would be strange for a non-profit like Mozilla to have a worldwide legal staff.
Good. But why does Facebook get off scot-free? I feel like their contact-uploading behavior was even more egregious than Path's.

EDIT: I missed when originally reading the post that the fine was for violating COPPA, while the other provisions (privacy assessment every 2 years) are for their privacy violations.
Can someone more familiar with COPPA give a summary of the requirements?
Despite how odd it is that they chose to specifically fine Path, I'm rather stunned to see the U.S. government even somewhat reacting to the startup culture.
I might be able to answer the question in a few hours when I get home.
About a year ago I did the same thing with IE 5.1 for Mac, which was Microsoft's couterpart from this era.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150673019866971....

It had its own set of insane quirks, even worse than Windows IE5. It was the default browser on Mac OS for a long time, until Safari I think.
I have very clear advice for PhD: Agree to work 4 hours a day on your thesis + papers (including reading literature!), and stop. You won't get more done anyways, so enjoy the rest of your day guilt-free. It is a marathon, and the consistent 4-hour days add up. If you miss one day, don't do 8 hours the next day; just do another 4. Don't make more than 4 hours mandatory.
Solar window socket blowing my mind with simplicity
*IE 5.1 for Mac
Paginazione in ordine alfabetico con Drupal - Drupal alphabetical pager
Facebook doesn't allow account creation by under-13s, and is well aware of COPPA.
How the FBI cracked a “sextortion” plot against pro poker players
Whenever I have a problem with Linux, it usually ends like this http://xkcd.com/979/
No rush, I'd love to hear!
Arg stupid typo, fixed, thanks.
Shane Koyczan: "To This Day" ... for the bullied and beautiful
Shane has a fantastic artful delivery as he navigates bullying, depression and suicide in kids and how that shapes us as adults. Amazing talk.
[alt]: http://www.ted.com/talks/shane_koyczan_to_this_day_for_the_bullied_and_beautiful.html
"Back in the year 1999 Microsoft released it's"

its
IBM has a new protocol (and a box) for the Internet of things
This is from february.
The money is almost immaterial, the rest of the consent decree is interesting, since Path is now stuck doing stuff for 20 years.
It can be found here:

http://www.ftc.gov/os/caselist/1223158/130201pathincdo.pdf

The real stuff starts on page 12

There are always little idiosyncrasies in these things, like, for example "Defendant shall provide the initial Assessment by overnight courier (not the U.S. Postal Service) to the Associate Director for Enforcement".

I'm not sure what triggered them to add that, but google searching '"not the U.S. Postal Service" ftc' pulls up a crap load of consent decrees.
Wow, that's sneaky indeed. The writer of the article doesn't seem to realize.

"If extra income didn't matter for well-being, you'd expect the line to flatten. Instead, it steepens."

Yeah, a log scale on the x axis will do that...
Simple answer: Don't get information from kids under 13 unless you have parents permission. You must also have a privacy policy.

Complex answer: How you determine if the person is under 13 and how you get the parents permission can be done a lot of different ways. Some of the most popular is doing a test charge against a credit card number, assuming kids won't have those.
I would just like to point out that I believe the CodeSchool methodology is brilliant. I have tried fizzbuzzing my way through Codecademy, reading books and all sorts. But that is not the way I learn: I am an adult. I need to know context. I need goal oriented learning. Furthermore, I am an audio learner more than a visual learner, and because my memory is not as good as it used to be, I need more of the Kinesthetic.

CodeSchool isn't deep, but it gives me a solid overview of a topic and is good at what it does. I _wish_ there was a site out there that could teach me programming, not from fundamentals like a child, but from overarching context and concepts like an adult.

@zachgallant I will try out http://codehs.com next. Thanks for the rec!
Yes, exactly. And if your team consists of perhaps slightly less tech-oriented people (on our team it's the designers), trying to explain what rebase does and how to use it with its exceptions (the "Few notes though..." part of the article) is a recipe for confusion and broken repos. Which is why our policy is "rebase if you know what you're doing, otherwise merge".
Have you priced LEDs? They'll likely be stolen more frequently than CFLs and at significantly greater cost (they are very distinctive and easily-recognized).

Incandescent bulbs last years; CFLs don't. I save money and time buying incandescents instead of CFLs.
Indigenous Weather Knowledge
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NBip49LJnRs/UUxapwtg5XI/AAAAAAAACm...

After reading this thread how many people would you guess have done that? Fairly good advice but if you wait for everyone to finish the book you'll wait forever. Better educate constructively when needed.
Isn't this exactly the sort of problem public-key cryptography was designed to solve?
seriously, what did she expect?

if you work any kind of helpdesk, inbound call center or even management - your job is to help people fix their problems.

now, does a calm, rational, smart person have a problem? unlikely. something is not working, hard to figure out, etc. the person is frustrated, angry, feels stupid for not figuring out - and now you come into the picture.

it is assymetrical, one side has build up emotions, one hasn't. if you get affected by this, the job is not for you - and it is great to realise this as early as possible to prevent yourself from causing harm to others by being a shitty helpdesk, inbound call center, management person.

i think this assymetry is the prime cause of all the BOFH (http://bofh.ntk.net/BOFH/) behaviors encountered in IT departments. young males wanting to work with machines, but suddenly being forced to interact with and help other humans in an assymetrical, emotional state.
Just saw a link to this while checking the local weather. I think it is amazing that the Bureau of Meteorology is investing in retaining information like this. I have colleagues at uni who are working on making sure that the various stories of different indigenous groups are kept alive in a digital format too.
How obvious!

And yet I missed it :(
In most cases you're correct. It's the worst way to design a website, though. Sure it looks great in photoshop but it's an absolute nightmare trying to translate layer styles and giant background images to HTML/CSS, so the end result is rarely looks the same as the PSD.

There's an extension called CSS Hat[1] which aims to give you matching CSS for photoshop layer styles, though I've found the result is rarely the same same. Getting assets out of photoshop is also a horrible process, thankfully enigma64[2] and slicy[3] help with that.

Oh and if someone was to send me a Sketch[4] file instead of a PSD I'd charge 50% less, it's so much nicer to work with. Hasn't happened yet, though :/

[1] http://csshat.com/

[2] http://getenigma64.com/

[3] http://macrabbit.com/slicy/

[4] http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch/
> Writing code on C64 is not like writing in a text editor or even like BASIC line numbers. You type your code directly into RAM and instructions are being assembled as you type

Um, no. Maybe you do stuff like that. Most C64 devs used assemblers. We stored source on disk and ran assemblers on them.

For the first C64 game I wrote [1] I actually used the Atari Macro assembler since it was pretty well made and supported relatively large programs. Then I'd transfer the result over to the C64 by the joystick ports with some custom cables and software I wrote.

On the next big project we had dev environment that ran inside Super Text [2] on the Apple II and stored source on a networked Corvus HD. Pressing some combination of keys would start a compile directly from inside the editor. I don't remember how we transfer it. (getting old)

[1] http://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/centipede_

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse_Software
wait wait wait, surely putting "You cannot use this website if you are under 13" in their terms of service is enough? I know COPPA is pretty ridiculous but if they require actual proactive enforcement of no under 13s they would literally break the internet.

I thought that there were 2 options with COPPA compliance: Allow <13s to register and have an email sent to their parents IF they select that they are under 13 OR disallow under 13s through a terms of service "Do not register if you are under 13" type clause. Is that not compliant?
Is your disk healthy? That sounds like the behaviour of a dying harddisk (system locks up waiting for disk I/O as the harddisk retries, retries, retries until it finally gives up). Is there nothing in Console.app when this happens?
We've had success with a WeMo and this project: https://github.com/issackelly/wemo which lets you control the WeMo switch from within your local network. A quick python script to query the database for new users followed by calls to on() and off() works great.
The mocking, crotchety tone is Sterling's thing. I appreciate the critique of the scene that I have been working in and around.
Curious, if Path is acquired does the purchaser also acquire the 20 year privacy assessment requirements? Does this make acquisition unlikely?
I built something similar recently to flash a light every time someone buys something on Creative Market (video here https://vine.co/v/bTnnTVmH5eD). I know nothing about mains electricity, so I pulled together an Arduino and a LED with a bit of socket work to get a green light flashing. Once someone completes a sale, a piece of Javascript is requested from a Node.js HTTP server I setup. The server then pings the computer with the Arduino plugged into it over UDP and the client sends a serial response to the Ardunio, flashing the light. It's pretty simple, but it was fun to get all the components together and learn more about hardware development. Since a flash of the LED is requested on every sale and the UDP responds pretty quickly, it acts as a great thermometer during high sales peaks.

I'm now in the process of abstracting the entire thing into a self-contained box that communicates over wifi and uses mains electricity. Hopefully I don't kill myself.
I'm not an expert, but I imagine there's something in there about if you know people under 13 are using your product and they shouldn't be, you have to proactively do something about it. Facebook delete accounts belonging to minors, perhaps Path weren't and this played into it?
Yes, I am actually guilty of using `tig` for a long time too. :-)
At first i didnt get why he didnt have time to finish the first game he planned. Turns out this was a submission to the ludumdare game programming contest where you build a game in 72 hours.
Sorry I must have misunderstood. That is what HTML2PDF engines do. We generate PDFs using our own templates.
Unable to install boto within a virtualenv
Oh calm down. You're not being fooled. These images are falsely colored for a reason. They really complement each other, not the other way around.
I'm not sure what assertion you're claiming is a huge exaggeration? The Federal government claims a 100-mile region in which the border-crossing exceptions to the Constitution apply. The court judgment you cite says that's BS and the government does not have that much leeway. The comment to which I was replying appears to argue that the 100-mile rule is a tradeoff/balance that has survived scrutiny.
Big ole batteries - you'd need them anyway to run systems in the first place, should the reactor be shut down at depth. It looks like something like, say, a Los Angeles class sub can actually run its generator from batteries

"[...]power can be provided from the submarine's battery through the Ship Service Motor Generators (SSMGs)."

This is a problem that the engineers designing nuclear submarines have thought long and hard about - the USS Thresher and all crew were lost in part due to inability to rapidly restart a scrammed reactor.
Great offer!
I completely agree. The only point where I fail at this is when I compare it to the 8 hour days I do once a week as a web developer (unrelated to the PhD). It seems so easy to power through the 8 hours and still feel like you could get more done. Then you go to uni, and if you manage 4 hours, it is a success. I always feel like I should be able to manage 8 hour days at Uni too, but of course it is a different kind of work which stresses different parts of your brain.
Our service has built in charts support. Check out Pagify and let me if it is something you will use?
Or cryptography in general. Doesn't need to be public-key, could just as well be symmetric crypto.
Path gained quite a bit of attention when this happened: https://www.google.com/search?q=path+upload+contacts

And the FTC policing COPPA isn't really new either:
https://www.google.com/search?q=coppa+violation+cases