skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These days not being able to sit still is considered a medical problem, when the truth is that it's just boys being boys. In fact, probably those who are bored more easily are engaged at the difficult to solve problems and games. When I was a kid, I was told my attention span was short and that I had ADD, but in truth it was that I was bored. Given a difficult programming problem, for example, such as learning Win32 for example, I could spend hours working on it because it became a puzzle. Kids that think creatively are probably easily bored by conventional attention getters. They like solving problems.
View the article on one page. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/0...
What If Developers Took Steroids?
> That's the result when the BS job class fully decides who does "menial tasks"

Because there's a confusion between the need to dis-incentivise BS work hours (as pointed elsewhere, it's more about BS hours than BS jobs, few jobs are 0% or 100% BS), and the need for a bureaucratic body determining what is BS and what isn't. The former is sorely needed, the latter would quickly turn into a disaster, as illustrated by Adams and many real-life regulation bodies.

The difference between the two is the same as between natural selection and eugenics: the later always fails because you can't effectively prevent metrics from being gamed.
Let me elaborate. Anyone who has participated in the math education of a child, or remembers being one, has heard the compliant "But I'm just going to use a calculator! Why do I have to learn this!"

Currently, the answer is "if you want to get into college / learn more advanced things, you have to learn to do this, all by hand."

The answer should be "Well, if you want to get into college, you're going to have to learn how to program that calculator yourself. So you need to understand how to do what it does, or you can't tell it what to do".

The difference is huge.
How hard can it be to add Persona?
One of the biggest problems with Twitter security is the aspect of revocation of app access in the event of, say, a compromised password.

In cases like that, you need some kind of panic button to eliminate all threats, instead of having to go through every single app and delete their access to be safe.
Sorry if this question sounds dumb to US people, but wasn't "obamacare" supposed to fix exactly that?
A much smaller number of people can learn to drive like a professional driver, speak another language fluently, or be a restaurant chef. Coding isn't isn't really different from those other activities: you should learn the basics, because it will help your life, and leave the complex stuff to professionals.
The end of Restaurant Tipping?
Even 10 seconds a day only amounts to ~0.01% discrepancy. In this article they're reporting up to 7% if I'm reading it correctly.

EDIT:
7% of a day is just over 1h40m.
The above comment is correct, according to the guidelines.

It's probably not worth complaining anymore though, this site really turned a corner with the NSA stuff.
This is a link to the transcript of the speech. If you'd prefer to listen (or watch) the talk the recording is available on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btlgQs0UDxY
You just forget reading and writing. A few centuries ago most of the people couldn't read and write, and it was not clear that it was a good idea to extend that knowledge to everyone.

"But people who can do any of the above proficiently have many doors and options open to them that others don't. And those who can do it at least a little bit can at least have some awareness for when they hire someone to do it for them."
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I really enjoyed this piece. Very thought provoking. I only have one issue and that is the question of what causes pointless jobs.

Graeber suggests this was a decision by the ruling class, collectively, to push us to work harder and keep us from being the competition. To some extent there is some support for that. One of Hilaire Belloc's complaints about the early welfare state was that it would effectively chain people to corporate work.

But I don't think it is the whole or even the primary driver. One of the most interesting books I think one can read is "The Collapse of Complex Civilizations" by Joseph Tainter (another anthropology professor) who suggests that the rise of these sorts of paper pushing jobs is caused not by a desire to keep the poor poor and dependent on work (something early Capitalists like Adam Smith advocated outright) but as an overall measure of complexity. These are coordination jobs. They have become at once pointless and necessary.

Take for example Graeber's example of corporate lawyers. These jobs are needed because we have seen an explosion in the complexity of corporate law. Corporate lawyers thus effectively pilot a corporation through hazardous legal waters (with the officers still nominally at the helm). The job is BS. The job is necessary because we had problems and passed laws, and now everyone needs corporate lawyers.

Interestingly Graeber's view is much more optimistic than Tainter's. If Graeber is right the world will hum along with or without these complexity-related jobs. But if Tainter is right then we are nearing a danger zone where we risk societal collapse when the complexity becomes one level too high. I hope Graeber is right, but in my heart I fear and believe that Tainter is.
Very cool to see my co-worker's pet project front and center on HN when I wake up :) Matt's also working on an Android app for Goread at the moment, which is also open source: https://github.com/mjibson/goread-android/
The parent poster said that the US should not detain journalists as journalists could dig up all sorts of nasty secrets.

"Don't do this or I will harm your reputation" is blackmail. Not really a moral thing to be talking about doing.
For most of history there were not big companies allocating capital, and for most of history it was nearly impossible for most people to obtain capital to start or grow their own business.

Put another way--the modern financial system was created for a reason. The author supposes that it was a big conspiracy theory to give us all shitty jobs, but in counter I would point out that it has likely never been easier for people to start or grow businesses than it is today.
Bitcoin – to tax or not to tax?
Perhaps learning to code shouldn't be required for the general populace, but maybe it should be in higher education, perhaps just for a scientific degree?
I assume you'll enjoy the five chapters on human systems, inspired by "Systemantics": http://www.draftymanor.com/bart/systems1.htm
New Technique May Revolutionize How Things Are Made
Isn't Google focusing too much on the US?
Rising seas .. due to fish farms?
Mind-Control Helicopters and the Healing Power of Poop (5 medical breakthroughs)
>The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger
Trust me, I don't cook competently, but I live alone and can get food done when needed. We don't all have to be professionals at something but we need to understand it especially when our lives depend on it. Take medicine for example, I'm also not a doctor but that didn't stop my school from forcing me to learn biology (which I loved btw) and I think we should all know things about the world when we deal with them on a daily basis. I also didn't major in electronics but I still know better than showering and cleaning the innards on the hair dryer with water while it is plugged in.

It is the mentality of imperative knowledge that should be considered when talking about teaching programming. Not the idea that all people should know how to compile Linux.
15 years? you need to be more ambitious.

i paid off my home in less than 7 years (small condo, under 200k) in my early 30's.

i had a friend do the same thing, except his house cost a bit more.

the key is living below your means. you don't buy the biggest house you can afford, because you probably don't need that extra space anyway.

for anyone with a decent job and some discipline, it's possible. finding the job is the easy part...
Tweets sent by apps(ie Foursquare checkins) are usually easily detected by regular users. Those are the ones being ignored by users, sort of like banner ad blindness.
The Revenge of the Nerds and Why We Are All Getting Dumber
Looks like you are right. The ssh-keygen manpage reports: The possible values are 'rsa1' for protocol version 1 and 'rsa' or 'dsa' for protocol version 2.
> We need better democracies.

Yes. But for that we need better people
If you guys really into Scala, I really recommend trying Finagle (https://github.com/twitter/finagle). It was also created by Twitter. It was a lightweight HTTP server and client for Scala. It's my favorite. With just a "single" line of code, you can create an HTTP server in Scala.

I usually combine it with Rogue (https://github.com/foursquare/rogue), an "ORM"-like for MongoDB. I used Finagle and Rogue to build a fast and lightweight REST API.
The same thing happened in Germany. The top level guys were tried at Nuremberg, but Nazi 'middle management' ruled West Germany for decades after the war. This, in turn, was an important motivation for the formation of the Rote Armee Fraktion.

Western liberal democracy often forgets (or pretends to forget) that history is a thing, and that people have memoeries. There are many more instances where Western foreign policy (often initiated by the US, supported by Europe) was beneficial to us in the short term, while having negative long term consequences. The CIA calls it 'blowback'. The last century in the Middle East and South and Central America is riddled with it. And then people turn around and ask 'why do they hate us?'.

I despair.
What under-bidding means is: offering a cheaper price (in this case by accepting third-world wages). In other words, humans are working for less money than it would cost to automate. This will become less successful as the cost to automate goes down and automation tech gets more capable.
Dealing with Travis CI console output
Since last year in Russia it is illegal for more than 3 people to gather for any kind of public activity unless according request was sanctioned in written form by local authorities.
I'm not going to get any "OMG new stuff" love for this, but we are currently in the process of integrating with Worldpay. We are using their "hosted payment page", which works pretty much the same as Paypal in that you redirect the user to them to enter their card details. However unlike Paypal (who we currently use) you can fully customise the pages, so it can match your site and appear pretty seamless. They also provide a full merchant integration, but we didn't want to have to deal with the full PCI compliance thing.

The main reasons why we chose them are:

a) None of the shiny new providers (we tried Braintree and Paymill) would accept us as we are a travel booking service.

b) Their rates were better than anyone else we looked at.

If you are taking a large volume of payments you may want to consider switching to them. However for a small startup probably not, as we have to pay a fairly large monthly fee on top of transaction fees (but overall it works out cheaper).

EDIT: Also regarding currency conversion costs we accept payments in USD, EUR and GBP and have bank accounts in all three.
Magento MarketPlace
Online Marketplace withIn Magento E-commerce Platform .
soldiers do not belong in that group. they generally do significant good just as a sitting deterrent. much more than yet another mediocre web developer. how their political masters choose to use them however ...
Only a small number of people might be coding competently currently, but that doesn't mean only a small number CAN.

There is nothing special about programming; like learning a language, it is very possible to become competent, and anybody who is not mentally delayed can do so - it just takes effort. If you can code competently well done, but don't think yourself special.
Programming is problem solving. Fine, don't learn how to code, but how about learning how to solve problems? And learning how to code is certainly something that can assist in learning how to problem solve.
Organizing books by expiration date
Politicians make unions and "bullshit jobs" possible by creating the incentives for companies to hire people they don't need. Unions then make it impossible to get rid of the deadwood. In the case of pure government jobs we're doubly damned.. they create bullshit jobs for paper pushers and then governmentt unions make sure those jobs exist for as close to forever as they possibly can. It's not conspiracy, it's stupidity.
You can have home, land, and installation of home on land for about 25K, if you're willing to settle for small values of each. Ebay has cheap land in rural places. You can buy a new manufactured home for less than 20K: https://www.factoryexpomobilehomes.com/micro.asp . You can get ten years' supply of basic food for probably $3000, depending on exactly what you get, from Costco: http://www.costco.com/emergency-kits-supplies.html . After property taxes and septic installation and other miscellaneous niceties, if you round up to 36K, that's basically $250 a month that you'd need to clear after taxes.

Edit: for 10 years; I'm assuming you'll have to replace such a cheap home after 10 years, but if not, the amortized cost is considerably lower.
I'm more in favor of everyone learning CS theory (primarily logic really and anything else would just be icing on the cake), which would be a more transferable and honestly useful skill.

As it is, the most states try to bake learning how to write formal logic proofs into geometry and they do it fairly poorly.
Actually, girls can have ADHD too (I should know--I am one, and I've been diagnosed.) Also, as someone who's been diagnosed with ADHD, saying "boys being boys" is not only untrue, but also dismissive of what IS actually a medical problem for some of us.

I wrote a blog post about ADHD called "Why I Feel Like A Failure, Even Though On the Outside, I'm A Success..." I think it might resonate with many here:
(http://www.erica.biz/2012/failure-success/)

I would ask that you please not be dismissive or stereotypical of what is a real medical issue that some of us have had to deal with our entire lives.
Thanks. I'm currently paying the price for my foolish decision to self-host wordpress. In the process of trying to fix.
If you think sales & marketing are a zero sum gimmick, you must not have encountered middle management. The fact that we pay these baby sitters so much money compounds our "need" for them.
I increasingly find little novel in programming technologies (at least those that make their way out of the academic research labs into the hands of real-world developers). I've already learned enough languages and frameworks and libraries that most new programming tools I encounter I can quickly size up as, "Oh, this is just like X only with A instead of B".

In short, the more of this sort of stuff you learn, the easier it tends to get to learn yet more. You might find some study of formal programming language theory useful, as being able to refer to language constructs by name could make it easier to categorize and compare & contrast them in your mind.
...they'd be able to keep the pace with business people on cocaine (e.g. the finance industry)
I use gameknot.com. Good for correspondence style chess games. Lots of people too.
For a quick second i thought this was a review of the new movie
My belief is that in a functional language like JS, you shouldn't couple data with operations on itself. As a result, all you'd ever have is non-trivial getters and setters. You see this with map like constructs in Erlang. You'd have a function that takes a map and does stuff.
A higher percentage mentions of JavaScript without jQuery in 2013 than previously:
http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring-trends/?comp...
WOW. Facebook is proving their scuminess once more. It's $500. Pay the guy you cheap asshat b-tards.
The Core of 'Mind and Cosmos'
A bit of the trick and appeal to animated gif is no sound (at all) and (typically) low cruft: it's the 'money shot', looped. no padding, no channel begging, optimized for download speed, no buffering, no pop-ups, no ads, no captions, etc.

I wouldn't mistake its prevalence as evidence of any failing of <video>. When people -want- video, they know how to post, embed or share it. While geeks care about plug-in-free video, the people sharing animated gifs do not.
Graphic Artist uses GIMP to Visualize KSR’s Red Mars
Sorry, I don't intend to cast aspersions on your upbringing, but why does class availability matter at all to this discussion? Myself, and everyone in the small group of middle school kids at my school who were interested, learned programming from books. Our school was extraordinarily poor, so the whole notion of CS classes was laughable.
Germany: Bitcoin is legal – just don’t try paying your taxes with it
I think it is a prudent move for a bootstrapped startup. You just don't blow out 1,200 EUR / year, when you don't have any revenue incoming. Solve the problem at hand (i.e. accept payments) in a way that is best RIGHT NOW.

There are so many ways to mitigate this decision later on. I know at least two companies who changed their payment processor in the course of their lifetime.
"He said he would respond by writing reports "much more aggressively than before" and would publish "many more documents".
"I have lots of documents about the way the secret services operate in England. Now my focus will be there as well," he added.
"I think they are going to regret what they did."

- Does it sound like he is now reporting impartially or is he clearly a participant in the game with revenge on his mind?
Recent versions of SSH (6.1p1 on Ubuntu 13.04) support ECDSA, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_Curve_DSA

Unfortunately, gnome-keyring-daemon can't deal with those keys...grrr.
My experience was that by the time I found someone that actually taught something "computer", I already knew more than they did. This was the rule until I was about halfway through college.
Have a link to the original description?

Apostol explained it with linear algebra, which made sense, but seems pretty magical in terms of how you'd notice sine waves make an orthogonal basis in the first place.
> Let's adopt GMOs! It's from the guys that brought us Thalidomide!

This is IMHO a really major reason for opposition to GMOs: people do not trust the "establishment" in general anymore.

I actually hear someone say once: "if it comes from a big company, it's about fucking you over or taking your money." People have a sense that they are serfs and that overtop of them are a bunch of feudal lords rubbing their hands together and cackling about new ways to impoverish, poison, or otherwise stick a boot in their face.

This perception has many bases, but ultimately I think it's an emotional reaction to the contemptuous treatment that the public receives by way of the political class and the PR industry. When you talk "down" to people and treat them like idiots, it foments contempt. This contempt is expressed through distrust and suspicion.

And there are certainly people who fit the "cackling feudal monster" stereotype. I don't believe they are in the majority, but there are enough of them to create a bad impression. Keep in mind that human beings give excessive weight to negative examples. If you walk through a neighborhood and someone mugs you, you will forever consign it to a status as a "bad neighborhood" even though 99.99% of the neighborhood's residents would never do that. The same goes for elite deviance. A single Bernie Madoff creates the same perceptive effect as an entire ruling class made up of Bernie Madoffs.
If large numbers of American citizens support drone strikes, that probably reflects more upon the hegemonic control of its media and the failures and biases of its various educational institutions than on the population itself. To put it bluntly, there is no democracy without an educated and informed population, and the US population cannot be honestly characterized as educated and informed.
David Miranda's detention can be justified
Log4r for Ruby on Rails: Scalable and Robust Logging for Web Applications
No, the actions being speculated were about the possibility of retaliation if the government pisses off the wrong journalists too much. For there to be blackmail, someone would need to make a threat in advance.
In fact that could be one of the reasons behind the revelations/leaks coming out in bite-size doses. To counter the short public memory, instead of a big dump of the information with short shelf-life, a drip feed of revelations/news on abuses and overreaches would help keep the issues in line of sight and would help cementing public opinion.

People may not be up in arms and shouting in streets now, but once the public opinion takes root in the mind, it would be hard to change come election no matter who promises what.
Timeboxing made easy
Dividing work into:

1. stuff people would do for free, for patriotism, for fun, or for kudos

2. stuff it takes economic coercion to make people do

I can't offhand think of any #2 that couldn't in principle either be automated away, or harmlessly abandoned.
As a quick fix, just grab the source from the Google cache and throw up a static HTML file.
Even the much maligned craigslist has a viewport, no?
Maybe not domain[1] specific languages, but recursive logic is cleansing for the mind.

[1] if by 'learning to code' they mean 'call a few ad-hoc libraries to process and format strings into <foo> concrete syntax' then I'd say it's domain specific and it's useless outside the current trend.
I like Rob Crilly's writing, and he raises an important point.

The problem isn't the detention itself, which could be argued for. The real problem is the legislation that allows such wide-ranging reasons for detention itself.
From a practical standpoint, I really wish everyone was taught enough programming to know how to automate basic manipulation of text data. I see way too many people editing long lists of data by hand, when there are much better ways to go about it (even Excel works great for this kind of stuff).

Just knowing this setup below can let you do some really power automation of manual tasks and can save you a lot of time.

Example template in Python:

import csv
with open('mydata.csv', 'r') as csvfile:
reader = csv.reader(csvfile, delimiter=',', quotechar='"')
for row in reader:
# Data manipulation here
Why are Good Business Plans So Rare These Days?
I think he uses institutional analysis, and rejects conspiracy theory. So even if you replace everyone in them, institutions should pretty much function the same as before.

Whereas conspiracy theorists focus more on individuals with black mustaches, and advocate toppling them. They don't go deep into institutional change.

So, for example from this article: "if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else." This institutional reality occurs even if you and I are in that 1%.

Even when Adam Smith uses the term "conspiracy", it can still really be institutional analysis: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." Here, he just means normal planning which people are institutionally incentivized to do. We don't call it a "conspiracy" when a corporation's executives plan how to increase profits.