skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What credit card company allows a chargeback after more than 180 days? The only one I can find that does that in any circumstance is Master Card, and they only do that for "interruption of service" on prorated services.
Don't use PayPal for pre-orders.
> ... freedom to maintain your vision unbeholden to shareholders and 3rd parties.

Aye, there's the rub. Many of us want that freedom, but it's rare. Powerful people are generally quite beholden to third parties.

The president of the US can't do whatever he wants; neither can the CEO of Google.

In order to make our dreams real, we must communicate them in common language to stakeholders, a process which may flatten them and drain their magic.
New Features in Rackspace Cloud Servers: Key Pairs and Manual Disk Partitioning
Not true. "Playing the man" is a concrete reference to knowing what this person will react to. Hand history reveals a lot, but body language, timing, etc all get involved as well.
Human-Machine Trust Failures
- Demon Firesage isn't particularly weak to fire. And what does it matter? You don't need a fire weapon to kill him. You also don't need to parry Gwyn to beat him, so why does it need to be spelled out? Although there is often a message by the door that says Try Parrying.

The game isn't really about trying a bunch of stuff until you find the "right" way to beat an area. If you think your best bet is to go everywhere and pick up every item, then you don't have a very good understanding of the character building mechanics. Of course the game does not go out of its way to explain its mechanics, and whether that is genius or bad design is up to you I guess. There are plenty of other games that hand-hold and don't have the time investment requirement of Dark Souls. I feel like Dark Souls respects the player much more than those games, because you truly do have the freedom to make your own choices.
Since we've got a bunch of awesome gearheads commenting, can someone tell me why manual transmission is so easy to stall out? Particularly between say 1st and 2nd (although I'm sure it's got nothing to do with the actual gears). Just curious.

...aside from obvious commentary of my abilities driving manual ;)
The home page has a complicated algorithm that seems to take many variables into account to determine the 'hottest' / 'best new' stories (including measures to punish cheating etc.).

As far as I can see the 'best' page seems to simply take all articles submitted in the past ~3 days or so, sort them according to the number of points, and show the top 30 in that order.

Of course, the 'best' page works only thanks to the upvotes articles get (mainly) on the home page.
Well there you have it. And a classic fence post error. =)
Light Agile Development
Well said. My most important development as a programmer has been my skill in reading other people's code. I've noticed that I think a lot less code is 'bad' nowadays. A lot of the time, it's not how I'd write it if it were me, but that's not the same as it being shit.
Here's Why We Work Eight Hours a Day
'Desirable' usernames are, technically speaking, as close to irrelevant to privacy as you can get. Your behavior with an account is what matters for privacy, not the account name. [1]

Yet the article is entirely about the account names and only somewhat in passing about the sorts of lessons the author hopes her daughter learns about "how (not) to conduct yourself online".

And without those lessons... you can 'protect' facebook.com/janeannsmith all you want, but if your daughter makes privacy-eroding mistakes with reddit.com/u/sparklepony2031 -- those can be trivially connected to facebook.com/janeannsmith the second you hand over the 'keys' to that account.

That's the whole point about the loss of privacy online. Once the accounts are associated to you, those associations last forever and follow you immediately and irrevocably anywhere else an account becomes associated to you.

[1] sure, sure -- using your real name as a username is Bad For Privacy, but the author wasn't talking about janeannsmith vs sparklepony2031. They were talking about janeannsmith vs jane-ann-smith and janeannsmith vs janineannsmith -- should jane ann smith have turned out to be the name of a porn star or third world dictator or some such.

Frankly, as far as privacy goes via name conflicts, you're better off being named Mike Johnson and having lots of collisions, even if some are negative, than having some unique name that doesn't have an online association yet. Some plausible deniability is better than none.

However, for branding, the opposite is true. Which, again, underscores how the author's behavior seems to be much more about branding than privacy.
Ask HN: Can Machine Learning be self taught?
If yes, then what are the resources if someone is trying to learn Machine Learning all by himself/herself?

The Coursera class on Machine Learning taught by Andrew Ng should be a good starting point but will that be enough to land the job?

Most of the Job Description about the position of Machine Leaning/Data Scientist looks for someone who has done Phd/Masters in Computer Science/Statistics/Maths/Physics. Wondering which company will hire someone who is self taught.
That's the thing, isn't it? I've just charged up my battery, so I know I have 200 miles in my "tank." And it's 170 miles to the next Supercharger. So when we spot a billboard in the distance advertising some awesome spectacle and the kids say, "Can we go there, Dad?" I have to determine whether it's more than 15 miles off course. 'Cause if it is, then no, we can't go there. Unless someone wants to push the car.

To be fair, it probably took a while before gas stations sprouted up like mushrooms all over the vast, heaving bosom of America too, and I do wish nothing but success for Musk and Tesla. Want to see that infrastructure get built quickly, because in the next 5 years or so, I'm going to be in the market for a new car, and I'd love for it to be one of those affordable electrics with a 200+ mile range.
You must be an absolutely miserable person. I'm terribly sorry.
Grading 1000 code submissions per day would be challenging. What is trying to suggest, though, was that many of those 1000 would not submit code.
Exactly the analogy I went with.

"Everyone is a shit driver" claims almost universally come from terrible drivers: When you have no situational awareness and aren't actively predicting the behaviors of drivers around you, and you don't have confident control of the tools at your disposal, every move that other drivers make seems dangerous and scary, needing panicked reactionary responses. Every trip is a perilous journey with tales of imminent death.

I honestly feel the same about people who walk around declaring all code shit. People who aren't competent with their development tools, can't naturally trace code and truly understand functionality, and can't adapt to different styles and era of code tend to be the ones, in my experience, that declare all code shit.
Yeah but the services systemd links to cannot be symlinks.
Accidental Journalism: Tracking Game Industry Layoffs with GameJobWatch.com
I'll take that as a no since you haven't responded.
The program doesn't need to know priors, if you make sure the priors for the test set are close to the same as the ones for the training set :)
Charging comes at no additional cost.
OMG! I am really tired of turining everything into a romance story with a romantic jingle in the background.

-What does a bar of chocolate have to do with any kind of design? A chocolate bar is a chocolate bar made for one thing, to be eaten!. Why would it be a piece of design? What would it look great with any of my accessories?

Someone should stop adverts made out of their contexts for the sake of keeping us sane..
That's gambling addiction in a nutshell.
Shameless plug - if you're looking to quickly prototype a 2D canvas-based game, you might be interested in trying out my open source game engine.

https://github.com/superjoe30/chem/
Two Plus Two Equals Two Or Four?
Why would you bet that?

We have a broad understanding of how to structure and write software. These ideas have been collected together in books. I refer to books like Code Complete, Debugging the Development Process, Clean Code, Refactoring, Programming Pearls, Beautiful Code, and so on. Then there are the language specific books. I don't believe you can craft well written C++ without reading Scott Meyers' books (or having absorbed the same knowledge from others), for example. Even the much maligned Design Patterns, which has been turned into the truly dreadful design by pattern, helps us to think about how to structure code.

I can't type it all in a post. But we are talking about modularity and extensibility. Decoupled code, so you can make changes here that don't break something over there, and so you can easily move code from one project to another. Well commented code - where 'well' means the author takes the use of the code into account - some deeply internal function named ComputeAverageSalary probably doesn't need much in the way of extra comments, anda top level api call to a framework being used by thousands needs a lot of documentation. Well structured code. The if statements make sense. They are not deeply nested. logic is not duplicated, or contradicted when it is nested, because that always leaves you scratching your head as to the purpose of the author(s), and clueless as to how to add code.

So, back to the question, why would you bet that? I've opened plenty of 15 year old code that is good to beautiful. This is not an arbitrary judgement of "oh, OO good/bad", nor an reactionary "it wasn't written by me, so it must be bad".

I do consider myself a pretty clean programmer, but I learned it by observing the code of others, reading a lot of books, and relentlessly applying a critical eye on everything I write and others write. All borne not on some arbitrary judgement, but from recognition of how quickly/slowly I can grok a piece of code, how easy it is to find and fix bugs, how easy to add features, and so on. In some code bases that is all fairly straightforward, and in others it is impossible - any fix or change has so many side effects that you need to add 50 if statements strewn about 50 files, in code already filled with if statements, and your if statement break about 15 undocumented assumptions about the behavior of the tightly coupled code.... that, my friends, is shit.
If you ever get asked a question phrased this way by someone not in the software industry you should probably not respond by saying "Hmm, technically they don't 'get' anything, well OK technically they GET lots of things, but the software is actually physically only on our servers and provided to them on a software as a service model, which means..." When people not in the software industry talk about downloading Gmail just smile and nod -- you don't understand their job, either

Ummm, maybe. I understand that you are paraphrasing and the actual conversation was probably more definitive, but the question as you phrased it may have actually been, "So if you go out of business the people will still actually have what they bought, right? We're not going to get a lot of angry customers wanting charge-backs...."
Two points:

1) This is (fixed) limit Hold'em; you can't suddenly go all-in.

2) You ask how you could trust the machine. It would be trivial to keep track of all hands played and show that in the situations like the one you describe, the computer only makes a full house the expected ~9% of the times.
It's a straight up bad design. It's the logo of a massive company, there is no room for emotion or being "bitter". They have a lot of man power, and produced this, it's sub par. It's not pleasing to the eye, it's sharp and 3d-ish. You'd get something better by throwing $500 towards 99 designs.

A logo should look great on a massive banner as well as my tiny retina screen. Right now, when it's smaller, the bevels and shadows/jaggedness of the logo are very off putting, not something I'm pleased to look at.
Emotional Persistence or Logical Persistence
Had you tried Nagios and Puppet/Chef when you started developing these?

The logging tool is the only one I'm not sure about, if you're parsing 1200 events a second. I'm not familiar enough with Orion to understand why it was insufficient.

Would you say these in-house tools are primarily about integrating / presenting the data, or are there custom parts doing more heavy lifting too?
These are all excellent reasons to have a review process and refuse to do business with certain customers. Nothing in there justifies the theft of a risky account's existing earnings.

PayPal's habit when shutting down an account is not just to stop doing business, but to keep all the money earned by the merchant and never speak to them again.
Show HN: I launched a project management app for Freelancers (like Basecamp)
I loves this kind of graphical information.
If your more curious, here is a really old video with a really good explanation on differentials:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F40ZBDAG8-o
School != School. Shop around before you reinvent.

I've studied the Dutch regulatory model of schooling quite thoroughly since the early 1990s, when I first learned about it. Few Americans have the pervasive power to shop for different varieties of schools that all Dutch parents have by the Constitution of the Netherlands.

http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED316478
Is it actually possible to mathematically solve those games? Suppose player Alice bets $100; how does player Bob judge that bet? As a strong hand or as a bluff? Any software program will have to model what's inside the head of its opponent, and we know way too little of that to do that.

Moreover, if we could, the opponent may choose a different strategy. It may be like a game with nontransitive dice: if you figure out which dice I use, you can beat me, but if I figure out that you figured that out, I can pick different dice and beat you (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontransitive_dice)

I think it is possible to write software that statistically beats any opponent, but proving that it does is way harder.
Oh, I am sure PayPal are doing what they believe to be in their best interests. However, I think you overestimate their competence. The people we spoke with on the phone didn't even know what Open Source software is, let alone have an understanding of the risks involved. They were just following procedure.
Product management hacks when you have limited resources
For me, the tell-tale sign is a demonstrated lack of understanding of type theory. Like calling toString on string objects. Or even worse, calling parseInt on a string that was created by calling toString on an integer!

Also, comments-used-as-source-control. If I see one more gigantic block of code commented out with a set of initials and a date "this was removed by/on". Use the source control to do that, dammit.
Why Estimations Regularly Off
They are atomic, they are not isolated. Those are two different properties. The "A" vs the "I" in ACID. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID

Edit: Actually, they are isolated in the sense of ACID, doesn't matter what order you do to operations, the answer will be the same. But not isolated the way you want isolated described.
You've lost me. Why would a consumer ever bother with BTC? Especially if both ends of the transaction are paying fees, spreads and paying for an escrow service.

Also, does the merchant set your prices in BTC, and change prices a few times per week as the exchange rate fluctuates? Or are the prices in USD?
But I am not sure they are that different in ramifications.

In Citizens United, the ACLU did not take a line which said that for-profit or not-for-profit was relevant so I don't think you can rationalize the line they advocated in retrospect based on facts they argued were irrelevant.

There is a huge issue in anti-discrimination law (regarding the Elaine Photography case) regarding speech as discrimination, and I don't think you can waive away the issues so lightly. Certainly if photography is insufficiently expressive to warrant first amendment protection, I wonder why it is covered under copyright law.... I usually suggest supposing that instead of outright refusing service, if the wedding photographer placed a slogan and logo on every wedding photo along with terms of service that forbid the customer from ever removing it, and which was unfriendly to same-sex couples, (for example "One man. One woman. One holy marriage." emphasizing a religious dimension regarding marriage, and the belief that it is between one man and one woman) if this would be protected. It is clearly political speech in a commercial setting, and it is also clearly discriminatory (in the sense that it would effectively deny same-sex couples a right to enjoyment of their photographs).

If the ACLU is going to take a line that says that speech that is socially harmful is unprotected, maybe they should agree that restrictions on pornography should be up to the legislature if the legislature can show evidence of social harm, but of course they don't. They seem to hold that speech is good, especially political speech, unless it discriminates in ways they don't like, but that is hardly a robust defence of free speech there. The fundamental test of free speech is not whether the accepted viewpoints can be freely accepted, but quite frankly whether the Neonazis can march at Skokie or whether a cake decorator or photographer is going to be compelled to endorse a political message that he or she disagrees deeply with merely because it is a part of a commercial transaction. It is the unpopular views which must be protected.

So I don't think you can have perfect nondiscrimination in a commercial service without saying there is no free speech in the commercial sphere, which is where the case ends up on a collision course with Citizens United and why I wonder if the ACLU draws the line at speech by corporations that gets in the way of their other causes..... (BTW I have a relative, now deceased, who was kicked out of the ACLU for defending first amendment rights more than the ACLU was comfortable with in the 1950's-- he was defending the rights of Communists. They did apologize much later. I would point out that the ACLU has not been exactly a shining beacon of support for the 1st Amendment consistently and this is nothing new.)

Getting back to the EFF, I think they have an easier time because their focus is narrower and so they don't have the issues which get the ACLU (at least arguably correctly) labelled as inconsistent. For this reason, I think that of the two organizations, the EFF is by far the more needed one right now.
This also seems like something you could get fired for. You are not just disrespecting your teammate's judgement but also your boss's judgement in hiring your teammate. Therefore you are not a team player and maybe shouldn't be on the team.
An opponent who knows what's in your hand and bets based on that knowledge is not terribly hard to detect. The way to make it hard to detect is to have it not make bets based on knowledge of your hand.
Excellent answer.

In the case of mass merchants where the risk profile of their business model is low (i.e they are not crowd funding or pre sales receivers of funds from end users), the paypal model works well for everyone. Risk is equally distributed between paypal and the merchant (since their risk of going bankrupt is less and not binary) and the end consumer continues to enjoy 0% risk.

But in a crowd funding (or any VC) model, the end consumer is 'donating' / 'contributing' to a project because they a) they love the product/concept b) they trust the project team c) they are feeling generous d) willing to take a gamble e) all of the above. And inherently, the reason they are participating indicates that 'they are willing to take some or all of the risk' . The problem here is that the current paypal model is unable to take advantage of their 'willingness/promise of sharing the risk', and hence not having/needing to be so draconian towards such crowd funding to cover their own behind. Probably there is no such model currently anywhere.

It is quite possible that these end customers who were willing to bet/gamble, in the end when a crowd funded project fails, having realized that they don't have to take the risk after-all, are probably more than willing to take advantage of the system (bank chargebacks) to recover their contributions. But what if there were a model where we hold them to their willingness to "bet/gamble/take the risk" decision and only be a completely/mostly passive middlemen entity that only facilitates the transaction , like an eschrow account model (but where the funds go the intended beneficiary right away , if that is what the donaters want ).

Can paypal not build such a model where they can legally get confirmation/indemnification from end consumers/contributors to be willing to accept the risk completely/mostly upon themselves (or deal directly with merchant and indemnify paypal) if the project goes kaput? Or is the banking chargeback model so deeply ingrained, complex and inflexible that it cannot be molded in any way to achieve this purpose?

What if there were a banking/credit card concept of "funds that are not eligible for chargeback per customer's decision", and only such funds are used to pay to crowdfunding campaigns etc?
> all except his own, of course.

yeah, if you're going to talk bad about anyone's code, start with your own. not even the things you wrote a few months ago, but like even today, writing xml schemas for a rest api, the whole time i'm thinking about all the ways the decisions i'm making are going to come back and bite me in the ass. not because i'm inexperienced but because i've written and worked with schemas and specs for interprocess communication before and know that any changes to the schema will require edits to multiple codebases and the time and effort to make some of those changes can be frightening.

i guess this is what fred brooks calls "the second system effect." it'll probably turn out that there's some other more terrible problem with the current system that i'm not even seeing because i'm overly concerned about the communication protocol on top and not the databases underneath or concurrency off to the side somewhere.

how many systems of some particular type does one have to build before not writing shit on the first pass? because, like, yes, the code freely available to anyone with a quick `apt-get source` is often of much higher quality than some things hidden in multinational corporations' private repos. so everyone can have some idea of what good code looks like now, but i am personally finding creating much more difficult than verifying and fear that it's going to take a lot of time to narrow that gap.

is it really necessary to work on like 8 processors before doing what someone like ivan godard does? maybe just 4 or 5 projects (which translates into about a decade, mind you) is enough before the "i'm fucking shit up" jitters pass for any particular type of system?
"We don't really like the idea of cloud hosted monitoring"
Can you elaborate on the reasons?
I don't understand how the machine can change the style of its play if: "Casino commissions, however, mandate that a gaming machine cannot change its playing style in response to particular opponents."

Yet the article states that the machine has multiple personalities (passive, aggressive, etc) and will sometimes throw hands.
There is a problem with relying on setImmediate() in your channel implementation:

1. httpGet...

2. setImmediate() in a tight loop using 100% CPU until httpGet() returns

...

I'd rather not burn ~100% CPU for what could be a couple of seconds waiting for a slow web server (even if we're nicely burning it).