skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What are the obstacles to learning on your own?
There’s never been more great content available for free (or at very low cost) to teach yourself anything you’d ever want to know (the MVC JS framework of the week, Mandarin, string theory, string instruments, juggling) BUT the fact is we don’t learn everything we’d want to know.

Why is that?

Sean (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=SnootyMonkey) and I are passionate self-learners, and we struggle with this too. We have ideas (and prototypes) for a couple solutions that might go a long way towards helping self-learners overcome their obstacles, but we want to validate that we’re on the right track.

If you regularly try to learn stuff on your own we’d love to learn about your learning routine and obstacles. What makes it hard to start learning something new? What slows you down? What makes it harder than it should be? What makes you give up when you do?

If you only have a moment for us, leave a comment here.

If you have up to 5 minutes, please take our very short survey here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1UXZygDbvjSyDhWpUxYPMUN-_7F01svwRuHU3bKMNAKc/viewform

If you have more than 5 minutes, we’d love to chat with you over Skype / Google Hangout / phone call / smoke signals / face-to-face (you can tell us you’re willing at the end of the survey).

Thanks! Happy learning.
I just tried this with a doc file, and the buzz was nearly instantaneous, within seconds -- 3 buzzes total.

Certainly it's automated.

Paranoid part of me says it's NSA keyword scanning. I feel a little insane suggesting that, but it's certainly conceivable these days.

The other possibility is Dropbox is indexing the files for search?

Anyway, using Dropbox unecrypted is a terrible idea. EncFS has user-friendly frontends like Boxcryptor.
Ask HN: Who on HN is based in/from Singapore?
#midnightcuriosity

Say hi and maybe a little on what you do!
Damien scares me a bit, despite that you could probably earn money making a teddybear looking like him and sell to kids. :-)

When he talks, you get the feeling it are thoughts that should not be thought; like going crazy from seeing Cthulhu.
Also, if you're in one of those areas, check yourself thoroughly for those tiny deer ticks every twelve hours. If you find one, pull it off without squeezing its abdomen. That'll greatly reduce the chance of transmittal.

The problem is seeing the little buggers.
Nastiness appeals to some because it's

- Rare

- Sensational (treat someone well and nobody notices, treat someone badly and it will be news somewhere)

- A facet of pure human freedom: you can hate jerks, but you can't reconcile the desire to silence them with the desire for freedom of speech

- An easy way to fake confidence and power; diplomacy is better than the stick, but the stick requires less effort and planning

- A shield against attacks from other people: when you're known as someone who won't spare any effort to put other people down, they will be less confident in counter attacking you for fear of what could happen if you're caught

- An easy way to make something happen when you don't have much power or you don't want to be punished: for whatever reason, you're obsessed with the idea of killing someone or making them suffer. What do you do—anonymous, borderline legal psychological manipulation until they kill or maim themselves, or a physical crime?

I think there's a conundrum: should we talk more about trolls and their victims so people can avoid falling for their attacks and keep trolls from doing them—giving them airtime and feeding into their desire for attention and repercussions, or do we ignore them so they don't get rewarded with popularity and more power, but keep people in the dark about them and leave their actions unpunished?

> Immediately, there was a call in the tech sector to rally around Auernheimer. Tech pundits predicted that his prosecution would prevent security analysts from exposing vulnerabilities. Lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the group that advocates for internet users and tech companies, jumped in to help with his defense.

> “I have this beef with a lot of organizations, including EFF,” Aurora said. “This is another case where they’re saying, ‘The cases we care about are the ones white men are interested in. We’re less interested in protecting women on the web.’”

You can despise or hate someone and still want justice for them. Someone can be in the wrong on some subject and still be right (or almost right) on another subject. That's why prison rape is unacceptable even if the prisoner is a murderer, for instance. I can't speak for the EFF, but I assume they want to protect the freedom of both people who are victims of trolls and trolls.[1] Freedom is messy.

> There were plenty of techies who criticized Auernheimer and said he was getting his due.
He should get his due where his due is. Punishment by proxy isn't justice. To get him in jail for his attacks as a troll, he should be persecuted for his attacks as a troll, not for an unrelated situation.

[1] At the risk of sounding like an apologist for men who attack women on the web, I should note that men are victims of trolls (male and female) too. So, the division of men as trolls and women as the victims to be protected seems like a facile argument made to defend an otherwise good point.
In the case of foreach, it's simple to be sure, and I'm pretty fine with calling foreach "syntactic sugar". Even something as simple as function composition breaks down a bit in C. You can manage it, but you're either not really using C anymore (writing out machine code in memory and treating it as a function, which is going to be tremendously compiler and architecture specific) or you're not really dealing with C functions anymore (passing around a structure that stores the things to compose, "calling" that function with a separate "apply" function).

Yes, you can ultimately write all of Haskell in C and code at the higher level, exceedingly verbosely, but to say that's "just syntactic sugar" would be absurd - "fundamentally all these languages are Turing equivalent" already encapsulates that observation, there's nothing new the notion of "just syntactic sugar" is adding.

Typically I restrict "just syntactic sugar" for things that are simple transformations that can be done locally. The archetypical example being array syntax in C, which can be described more precisely by a syntactic transformation than a semantic operation:

Given:

char *c = "abcd";
int i = 2;

It turns out that:

a[i] = *(a + i)

but that's equivalent, by commutativity of +, to:

*(i + a)

and so, counter-intuitively if you're thinking of [] as a semantic "array indexing" operation, you get the same results with:

i[a]
This is fantastic. I know a lot of programming languages and I love them all for different reasons, but I think I am most productive and most likely to produce error-free programs in Java. All the verbosity that people hate is a feature to me, I know exactly what my program is doing.

However, I have done 95% of my web development in Ruby due to the Sinatra and Rails frameworks. The developer experience is too good to ignore. I'm hoping this can replace my Sinatra use case ... I don't think the magic of Rails could ever be replicated in Java.
Many XML parsers will resolve external entities by default.
I've not your experience, neither never did go in deep with the core, but what I can tell: if the core is no good, then I'll will say nothing about the plugins.

Wordpress plugins, and the usage they get by (certain kind of) developers, have been my nightmare from the security and performance viewpoints, always I've been involved maintaining wordpress based solutions.

Anyway, wordpress is not the only web application affected by a this kind of bug (serialization, user input, eval, etc) in the late times.
Well, there are several on the ISS.
They are generating PDF for online viewing. Go to your files on dropbox site and click on a .doc file. A preview popup will appear.

Open/LibreOffice with Python bridge is quite handy in converting documents to PDF format and can be run in headless mode (using virtual frame buffer like xvfb) on a server.
> All these operations, except entering text, are available from "normal" mode which is the default mode.

Assertion: vim has modes.

> This is factually incorrect that you need to switch mode to delete something, or save a file.

Assertion: vim doesn't have modes.

Only one of the above claims can be true. Choose which one you want to defend, and delete the other. But don't try to delete it with vim, or we'll be here all day.

In point of fact, if I am entering text, I cannot move the cursor, search for text, save a file, load a file, or a dozen other things, without first switching modes.

I feel like I'm discussing whether there was a literal garden of Eden with a religious True Believer. True Believers famously make claims they haven't bothered to compare to reality before speaking.
Exactly. These threads do nothing but give everybody (involved, or otherwise) a platform on which to pat their own back.
Thumbnail generator is most likely. I'm suprised Libreoffice will allow a GET call to an external website like that though.
This was more or less the argument against women in the armed forces, too. You know, it's not that they're stupid, it's just that they're just too dainty and precious for our rough and tumble profession.
Clickable survey link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1UXZygDbvjSyDhWpUxYPMUN-_7F0...
Meanwhile, women in blue collar environments joke about men staring at their breasts, butts, and whatever else, engage in the same sort of rude banter as men, and are generally accepted as strong and capable. At least that is what I have seen at the railroad where my mother works, where women are not demeaned by their coworkers and do not feel that their work environmental is "hostile." Jokes about body parts are a bit immature but they come with the territory in certain lines of work -- and as long as both male and female anatomy get equal time, I do not think one can make a claim that there is some kind of sexism.
Beware: Your Business Is At The Mercy Of Facebook!

...if you allow yourself to rely entirely on them.
> If you are saying that it's difficult to be an "ideologically pure" open-source programmer and make a living from it, we are not in disagreement.

Yes, that is my point.
I charge more for hours beyond 9-5.
I did this, but using lead. Yes, I was young and stupid. It did work nicely though.

Also, at school, our chemistry teacher heated a rod of glass and asked a boy (who was grabbing an end of the rod in pliers) to run across the room, creating a thin thread of glass.

I don't think they'd do that in schools today, but maybe I'm wrong.
Posted by Lars Knoll, author of KHTML (which was then forked to become WebKit): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML
Since I posted this.. Hi! I'm Sung and I work on One Cent Movement (onecentmovement.org) where we are turning everyday transactions into opportunities to do good and Method (methodnow.com - website revamping) where we digital products/services that people enjoy using.

Looking forward to hearing from you guys!
Cancer: A Computational Disease that AI Can Cure [video]
>Who says women do not have the fortitude to not shower for days and live off cold pizza?

Why is everything always about what people are 'saying'? "Who says girls can't play football." Nobody, in the most exacting, chokingly literal sense. Nonetheless, my lived experiences suggest to me that if I want to start a football team, there are better and worse places to look for teammates. If you think that's a political stance, well, I respectfully disagree.
If all documents are showing as opened within 10 minutes, then surely it is just an anti-duplication automated agent at work.

It could perhaps be from generating a thumbnail... But dedup wouldn't work like that.. I would be very concerned about a dedup algo that requires interpreting the contents of a file, and dedup'ing based on that.
This is interesting. Where can I read about this?
That's quite a loaded question, obviously boobs hold a point of attraction for men as we often like them and you know, they're there, but if you're making an app of you staring at boobs it goes from a fleeting thing to more a situation where you've just turned that lady in an object. That's not super awesome.

Look, I like boobs as much as the next guy, but there's got to be a line where we go from "yay boobs are awesome" to "okay this is a bit creepy".
Start your own sharing economy business with Marketplace as a service
Your thought reminded me of a Ian Langworth's recent quote: "Today, as CTO and co-founder of Artillery, I’m split between infinite freedom and infinite responsibility."[1]

[1] http://firstround.com/article/How-to-Go-From-Google-Engineer...
Woz, Kawasaki, Hertzfeld, Wiggington, Kottke celebrate revival of Twiggy Mac
Very well, maybe they're trying to kill Social Fixer because of their TOS. Right now, it seems like this will be the biggest exposure SF gets in its several years of existence, so not the best possible move...

Advertisers didn't kill adblock, and they won't kill this. How much revenue and resources they lose before they accept this fact and adapt, is up to them.
> Benzodiazepines: Klonopin, Xanax, Ativan

These drugs make people stupid.
Lacks a non-alcoholic option, for programmers who need to do programming.
> Perhaps you mean efficient rather than effective?

Parent said "very effective", I am not sure what it means if not "efficient".

> Though whether it's inefficient in any other sense is, I think, open to question

Indeed, that's exactly what I meant.
Why not? The latest statistics I could find say that about 22 launches per year happen there. At each launch pad there are probably only a fraction of those. But even if the disturbance is approximately 2 minutes long (a slowly rising rocket), that's less than 1 hour per year. I find it hard to believe that wildlife cannot cope with that.
I'd leave as of tomorrow, once you found the job that is directly on track to where you want to be.

Life is too short to be on some deferred plan.
They can write that in their terms & conditions all they like, but it doesn't make it legal or enforceable.
Listen for changes? Or poll for changes?

Wouldn't your way consume a lot of unnecessary CPU?
I totally understand what you mean.

But as a bootstrapped startup, we have to make tradeoffs as our budget is limited. We have to accept invitations gradually today to keep our servers alive. We should be able to accept everybody within a few days at most. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Reddit's up/down votes aren't really transparent, they're obfuscated by (imo reasonable) anti-bot measures. It is open source so it's a transparent enough system, but between that obfuscation and pseudo-anonymous moderators I wouldn't say it really matches the request.

I completely agree by the way that moderation is essential on popular and large websites, and I think Reddit has a great balance.
College students who pull all-nighters do so two reasons:

1. They tend to be terrible at time management and prioritization. They procrastinate until the last minute and then have no choice but to cram.

2. They do it to create a narrative that can protect both their ego and their image. "I failed the exam despite pulling an all-nighter - it was just crazy hard!" sounds a lot better than "I failed the exam because I'm dumb" or "I failed the exam because I didn't start studying until the last minute."
Are you referencing: http://xkcd.com/323/ ?
Structlog: Structured Logging in Python
>I am sure Mayer added far more than that.

Eh, depends on who you ask.
Would be nice if the home page had an example of what the finished product looked like. What's the experience of using one of these narratives?
It's like Code School, but for hardware
Two things. First, what are your career goals? You say you have them, but not knowing what you are trying to do, it's hard to tell whether you are getting ready for it or now. Do you want to build your own startup? Join a large tech company as a developer? A researcher? Do you want to become employee 1 at a startup? Do you want to go into management?

Second, if you are happy with your employer, stick with them, at least until a good opportunity comes along. It's rare to find people you like working with.

In my personal experience, pet projects and general hacking advanced my career much more than any project an employer threw at me. In fact, most of the projects I worked on for an employer were driven by experience I had acquired on my own time: "hey, I think we should build a highly available MySQL cluster over WAN. I have done this before and it'd be perfect for this application" or "hey, I'd can create a small C program to spoof source IP addresses in UDP packets to simplify transitioning from one server to another" or "hey, let's put our entire server configuration into puppet" or "hey, let's package everything into .deb packages". In other words, I play with tech, then bring it to my employer (now client as I am a contractor) and some of it sticks, not the other way around.
I hadn't thought of the load. If it's there because you need to rate-limit users, then I completely understand. Would be ideal to take everyone instantly, but the world isn't always ideal.
Is there a STEM worker shortage?
Much ado about nothing.

If you don't want your cloud storage provider reading the data you give them, then _encrypt_ that data _before_ you upload it.
This is nonsense. I'll have a Jameson on the rocks, please.
Time to reconsider your idea of a company
Thanks for commenting. Does it change anything if I say that I might not be qualified for those jobs right now?
It is against the Facebook TOS, unfortunately shouldn't we be telling him "don't violate Facebook's TOS without expecting repercussions?"
Bootstrap design tool
Bootstrap design tool
Keyword scanning shouldn't resolve images, unless they're using OCR to read any text they have. In that case, they'd be wasting a lot of resources.
Her title is a bit of minutia, and to be fair I believe she does write code. I don't know if she does so professionally, but I'd imagine it's more than enough to be accurately referred to as a programmer in the context of a hackathon.
Broadening definitions on the spot to the point of ridiculousness doesn't do any good either.
It doesn't take that long to shower.
Local IP discovery with HTML5 WebRTC: Security and privacy risk?
Nope, sorry. Isn't up/down-voting moderation by the users though? I guess you could list all up/down-voters and that would be transparent. You'd then have no mods with more power, everyone would use the same transparent up/down-vote?

I'm not convinced that such a website would maintain quality for long, and I can't think of anyone currently trying it.
There's quite a big and famous one in Baltimore that's right in the middle of town and hard to miss. And it's open for tours.

http://www.baltimore.to/ShotTower/photo1.html
Just out of interest:

1) Why, exactly, should this not be on HN?

2) What makes a submission suitable to be on HN?

You've said that you found it interesting. You maybe learned something? Your curiosity isn't piqued - do we still use this process, does anyone anywhere in the world use this process, could it be used for anything, what happens if you use other materials or if the air is hotter or colder, or if we try it on the moon or on Mars or etc etc etc?
That is an entirely inaccurate characterization of Waldo's entire point.

Waldo's trying to describe a state of being. You can argue about whether Waldo really knows what long term depression is really like, but that's separate from learning what it feels like to experience a set of symptoms which he has never previously fallen victim to.

He's not claiming to be an authority or an expert, or to even claim that this some how makes him special. He's claiming that he understands depression better now, having experienced it.
I misunderstood the magnitude. So let's say it's a rigged contest. Do you think people will choose not to apply as a result? Or just accept that it's more for PR than for funding?
In ours tastes are divided - half of the people love it, another half hates it. And yet I bought a full crate last Thursday and there were only two bottles left by Friday.
The author of this post seems to be a friend of the founder: http://blog.threatagent.com/2013/09/whos-that-peeking-in-my-...
drat! you again!
"Happy slap" style video clips with some kind of cryptographic signing?
Python IO Performance
>> this thread has, indeed, been voted off the front page once again. <<

Keep sweeping under the rug, it'll hold lots.
Extremists? Is that what you call anyone who isn't a sexist like you? And what does SRS have to do with anything? I left reddit to get away from the r/mensrights freaks like you so you might want to keep your bullshit there.
> For text editing, mouse is more inefficient than keystrokes

Your evidence for that is provided by the fact that the world eagerly adopted the mouse and abandoned vi/vim and similar programs, based solely on the advantages of modern methods.

Your evidence for that is provided by the fact that I wrote an incremental improvement over vi, one that exploited the existence of control keys but didn't exploit a nonexistent mouse, and, even though it represented no great improvement, I retired on the proceeds at the age of 35. (My program was appropriately eclipsed by better, more advanced programs, that among other things did exploit the mouse.)

> I'm not sure if you're just joking or you're just misinformed.

Wake up and smell the Cappuccino. You are not living in reality.
I work at Flatiron Health and a few of us here would be interested in attending such an event.
The Most Challenging Problems for Entrepreneurs, Designers and Product Managers
Apparently it does make it enforceable as they removed his page. Unfortunately when you're on someones platform you're at their mercy, they can delete your page for some minor infraction and you've got very little recourse.
OSX does have 'protected binaries', which refers to binaries that use encrypted pages[1] that require decryption via an anti-piracy kernel extension (Don't Steal Mac OS.kext). This extension can check that you're running on Apple hardware by checking with the System Management Controller(SMC), which is Mac-specific[2].

In the old days (10.4), hackintosh systems would patch the protected binaries to remove the page encryption/decryption. Over time kernel extensions were developed to replace the functionality of Don't Steal Mac OS.kext (dsmos.kext or AppleDecrypt.kext) without the hardware checks.

The reason you no longer need either of these extensions is because a kernel extension called FakeSMC.kext was developed, which emulates as much of the functionality of the SMC as possible. This includes thermal and fan monitoring as well as the decryption key storage.

In a modern hackintosh setup, you make use of EFI emulation (inc. DSDT support) included in the bootloader (a boot-132 derivative, most likely Chameleon) and the pre-boot loading of emulator kernel extensions like FakeSMC.kext.

[1]: http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter7/binaryprotection/
[2]: http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter7/tpmdrmmyth/
The evolution of driving games in under two minutes
I'd suggest trying a better tequila.
Dropbox uses crocodoc for MS Office file previews in the browser as html and my guess is crocodoc's tech is based on a custom print driver for LibreOffice that converts it into html.
I remember reading that launch sites are often nature reserves because they're launch sites. An exclusion zone enforced by armed guards does wonders for biodiversity.

The artillery training ranges I grew up near to were similarly lush.
The Next Generation Console: AC4's Oceans, Weather & Stabbing
C breeze
The youtube link should be: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYBPotROKC8
Blitz Games Studios shuts down
A #BUCCINASCO LA GARA NAZIONALE DI HANDBIKE
What are the most effective and sneaky backdoor mechanisms you know? I'll be forced to implement a one myself so it better be good.