skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't forget user support. It's not all that uncommon for someone to forget their account, lose a password, or an email address. Circumstantial evidence can support ownership of the account, and let us fix things for them.

There are also errors on our end like account merge bugs, moderation mistakes, dropped/flagged/whatever recovery emails, and so on. Keeping additional historical data can help us recover in those cases.

If you're smart about what you track it's not that much data; we record most changes to user records into a history table (likewise, and for the same reasons on post records). Keeping traffic logs around and queryable forever would be really, really expensive though. We keep some around, but only really recent stuff is easy to query (about 2 days) since that tends to be what's needed when reproducing bugs. I don't even think we have all traffic history, and old stuff would require digging a tape out (if we even move those to tape like we do with DB backups, I honestly don't know; it's never come up).

Moderation is a good reason to keep lots of data around, you're right, but it's not the only one.

Disclaimer: Stack Exchange, Inc. employee.
This is my use case for this too. It would be absolutely perfect for quick and easy web-app remote controls.
Please note that I am jealous of where you work. Everett's is my favourite Oly book in my collection.
Agreed, but I think the problem is that not enough people will see that value to make it a viable product. People accept that they may forget their keys in the ignition - but they fundamentally do not accept that they could make a mistake this catastrophic.
Oops. I must have "the financial system" on my brain tonight.
guess I need to change my hosting provider... didn't expect so much traffic...
"This happens very, very rarely. I have more than enough fingers to count the times this has occurred since I started working here a year and a half ago. I wouldn't need a single toe, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't need both hands."

Pfft, he's counting in ternary.
Godaddy.com :)

I understand why your site is down :)
RSA doesn't scale the same way as a symmetric encryption algorithm, though. It took a rather heavy duty cluster for its day months to crack RSA-512 ( http://web.archive.org/web/20070621021111/http://rsa.com/rsa... ). NIST itself states that RSA-1024 should no longer be considered secure ( https://blogs.rsa.com/rsa-768-factored/ press release regarding RSA-768 being factored, because NIST's pages are part of the shutdown ). While your numbers are true for a traditional crypto algorithm, factorial based problems don't scale the same way.
Yes, you do have to know your deps, but the deps don't change very frequently. Common Ruby build tools will tell you what the deps are for your operating system, even if you're not going to use them in production (I don't).

As far as system Rubies go, I try to keep things simple. I use Debian for my systems, so I know that `/usr/local/bin` will always be first in my path, so that's where I install.

This falls far short of "awful" in my opinion. There are many pieces of software that are far more difficult to compile from source.
Not if Verizon is the only carrier with decent coverage where you live, which is more common than you might think.
There aren't really any legal threats here, just a simple "We'll disable your account if this software continues to have these features." He is under no obligation to remove them, unless he wants to continue using the services Facebook provides.
I couldn't tell that the dots were colored differently at all.
Chomsky's interview kind of repeats Searle's (Chinese Room) argument.

To reproduce a system someone has to understand how it works, otherwise we doomed to make something, similar to infamous Cargo Cult. Meanwhile, our brains are limited in size, just 3 lb of matter and certainly have limited capacities to understand things. It is perfectly possible that complexity of human mind is too big to be comprehensible and therefore artificial intelligence is not achievable. However it is also possible we can understand the way brain/mind works and will eventually create artificial minds. It is unclear right now.

Returning back to Searle's argument, the idea that simulation of mind is actually the same thing as mind is possibly very flawed: mind can turn out to be rigid physical phenomena of this particular physical world and not reproducible in any other media than ionic neurodevice it is.
>I went on to explain that either party could reopen offices.

You didn't in the comment I replied to. You talked about what the Supreme Court did, What the Senate could have done, and said that both parties and both wings are at fault. This all fits the logjam narrative.

I see now you speak of solutions that could come from either party through a 'simple vote'.

My preferred party is not at fault because my preferred party is not in congress. My comment was nonpartisan and did not restrict blame to any one house or party, or even branch. It extended blame into the present.

That said, there are some car accidents in which one party is at fault yet which could still have been prevented by defensive driving by other parties. You could always say everyone involved failed to yield right of way. I also suspect any explanation of simple voting must include the word filibuster.
To quote Gruber on AI - "take that with a grain of AppleInsider-sized salt (i.e. a big chunk of salt)"
A bit of an aside, are you sure we lived without property for over a million years? Is there evidence property didn't exist? Has the idea been observed, between say, apes? I'll guess that, not codified, the idea has existed for a long time. Just a thought.
That's not true. Functional purity means there are no side-effects. What you're describing is simple determinism.
Can we please not get distracted by police investigating criminal activity acting within the bounds of individualize specific suspicion of a crime and keep things concentrated on warrantless wiretapping and wholesale surveillance?
oops.. next white house movie alike.
Excellent point. As I understand it, Darpa does not preclude recipients of funding from patenting their work, nor do they insist on publication. I believe the govt gets some sort of free lunch on the patent side -- they can use anything they want with some sort of IP override (if someone knows more about this please explain).

The way the govt avoids vendor lock-in (in principle anyway) is by farming out the money to multiple vendors, especially as the progress moves towards real practical deployment. They did that with autonomous vehicles, and they're doing it again with legged robotics (http://www.darpa.mil/our_work/tto/programs/darpa_robotics_ch...)

However in this one area (legged locomotion) it seems to me that BD is far, far ahead of anyone else, unless that work is taking place in complete secrecy.
Do More Science
Has anyone ever done an analysis of how effective these systems are? I see the alerts all the time, but I'm curious how many times a rescue has been attributed to them.
Sorry, this is completely unrelated, but I've been trying to email you, and it keeps bouncing. What's happened?
What do you do if the package servers go down for a couple of days? "Oops! Guess I can't deploy. Oh well!"
Question.
Is there any way possible to receive an explanation as to why I have evidently been hell-banned?
A function like

sqrt :: Double -> Double

is pure. Still, when evaluated on a CPU somewhere a register or a memory location gets mutated, i.e. it produces a side effect. In that sense nothing would be pure.

So if sqrt is pure, why is

addUser :: User -> DB -> DB

impure?
Neat, but without the ads what was your plan for making money?
I wasn't talking specifically of Apple here. I was talking about the ways in which markets may have nothing to do with end-users.

> Apple are doing nothing different from their competitors with regard to patents.

This is absolutely wrong. Some companies are more aggressive than others when it comes to abusing patent, trade dress, and copyright laws. How many trade dress lawsuits have you seen Samsung, LG, HTC, etc. initiate against Apple? In the recent past, a handful of Apple's patents were invalidated because of prior art. How many companies filed lawsuits against Apple when iPhone implemented these features?
Look, you are making the assumption that she went into the whole 180-day project with absolutely no idea about web technology. Given what she says, I think that's a wrong assumption. From the post:

'When I set out on this project, I knew I wanted to learn to code dynamic interactive websites, but I also knew next to nothing about coding. Rather than try to tackle the enormous task of building a complex, fully functional social network, I took a small first step. I pieced together a few bits of html and CSS to make the website for day 1, the homepage for the project.'

So if you look at the first sentence--she clearly knew something--some terminology, some idea of the technology and what it could do. IMO, most programming (heck, most tech stuff) is just _knowing_ that something's possible. After that, you just need to look up how to do it. There are kids out there who pick up this stuff easy as breathing. I think she did the same thing, just on a slower trajectory.
What would be a professional developer's rate then? Should one charge higher if the project involves building the back-end yourself?

Also, exactly what does it take to qualify as a "professional" developer, by which I don't think you merely mean being a mobile developer full-time, but actually having some set of qualifications?
Hah... it was actually Westhost - don't know why I'm still using them. Called them and seems like I hit the limit on simultaneous clients allowed.. :/

Now begins the search for better blog hosting... any ideas?
Okay, now I'm somewhat political, but have largely just steered clear of this whole shutdown business (as far as engaging in discussions), but this just seems ridiculous. How much can it possibly take to run the Amber Alert system? A dedicated server, maybe? They send out a few emails, a few texts, maybe integrate with those signs on the side of the road--I just can't see it costing that much, and should have already been pre-paid for! I don't understand the government shutting down systems which have already been paid for with tax-payer money. </rant>
You can, of course, edit your git history. The whole thing works on an honor system. Since the community is pretty tight-knit, it works.
Nothing in particular, but the same nothing in particular that makes me think that it possibly can. I'm just saying that there's nothing in the known laws of nature that make this impossible from a purely physics based standpoint.

I'd be much more surprised to encounter a ship that could fly me to Alpha Centauri in 3 days than a super-human machine intelligence.
Every school in every field need something like this. It's amazing to just give people a small set of rules and let them compete in a short period of time. That's better training for life than sitting and listening to a teacher (don't get me wrong, a bit of that is good too).

There is no better learning and knowledge retention than by doing...
We had song players for iTunes / Amazon for each song displayed, links for concert tickets, and ringtones.

Ads, but tastefully done I think. Definitely not any popups, no Google Adwords, etc.
The OP said he has thought about going back multiple times. Obviously it has some value to him.
Why is this political campaign being reported on HN? (The labor cost to turn it off vastly exceeds its marginal cost of operation. Ergo it was turned off by a subversive political operative.)
It's really irritating, as someone who works in C and C++ with good reason, to hear people continually deny the very real performance benefits of working at a lower level.

We (C/C++ guys) write the OS's, VMs, browsers, codecs, etc that power your software stacks, and then you (managed language fans) turn around and tell us we're wasting our time by using C and C++, while giving us stuff like Eclipse.

So yes, when someone says it's hard to beat Java with C++, it inspires some snark. Write the next JVM in Java if you think it's that easy.
kiva.org -- small loans (usually around $1,000 total, crowd-sourced in $25 increments) made to people for new business ventures, farm improvements, etc. Definitely worth a look!
I don't know how this would vibe in the open source community, but I'd definitely donate to help out a Capistrano project.
[To expect Airbnb research hotel laws and taxes in every country they operate in seems like an undue burden.]

Just because you are Internet Business you are entitled to not figure out tax laws? Airbnb is Billion Dollar company (Valuation wise) and saying they don't need understand laws of country they operate in insane.
My impression was that AMBER alerts were essentially pretty much as useful as the TSA. Good for giving the public an impression of utility, but not actually effective for their purported purpose.

The reasoning is that in almost any case where a child is in significant danger of violence, there is essentially zero chance of law enforcement being able to act quickly enough to prevent that violence. So issuing an alert might help you recover a child more quickly who would have been recovered anyway, and does nothing to prevent children from actually coming to harm.
If you make a new database and return it without modifying the original, it's pure.
Not very, but there's a few cases where it's worked. http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/20/... is the classic article on it that always seems to get linked.
> To expect Airbnb research hotel laws and taxes in every country they operate in seems like an undue burden.

Well, considering it's their buisness, isn't it a necessary burden?

That's just like saying a hardware manufacturer shouldnt have to research local wireless compliance laws in each country they enter because it's 'too hard'.
I've seen this before and it's in my opinion an example of how divisive/slimy politics can get. When city/state/federal governments have budget issues they shut off the "consumer" facing services to get the outrage required to move public opinion. Who would care (other then the government employees) if some obscure government agency was shuttered? This is a message. I'm curious how much the amber alert program really costs (I assume not much, a few million?) compare that to a laundry list of what's still operational and you'll see my point.
temporary google cache version of the site: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
This is the point where you realize that you're not going to get any points by saying what you really think about Chomsky.
It's worth noting that one can still be conscious of performance without knowing about big-O or other academic nomenclature. In my experience as a self-taught programmer -- it became quickly evident that doing something in less cycles or while consuming less memory takes less time and gives the user a nicer experience. I didn't need big-O to figure that out. That said, eventually learning about it was very useful.
The metro system in the DC area uses NFC (or something similar?) for its reloadable fare cards. I can just tap my wallet on the scanner, without having to take the card out. It's very convenient.
Open Source has been berry, berry good to me! (Anyone else old enough to catch the reference?)

It's really an amazing social phenomenon, something unexpected and unique, that seems to go against the grain, or at least usefully counter, the market-driven, proprietary, DRM, locked-in, control-freak sensibility that is so prominent today in mainstream high tech.
Is It Safe to Invest at Just One Brokerage?
Amazon's Fake Artificial Intelligence
github pages + jekyll should work nicely for you
Just get a Macbook Pro. You get all the benefits of UNIX and you get a slick easy to use UI.
That's how they work. I was stopped at one of those between France and Switzerland.

Stopped, searched (me, my gf at that time and the car) and drug-tested.
Very interesting concepts and ideas. I was looking for something like this for my startup.

Especially the bit about "Shut up and listen to them". I had the same experience the other day at Start Up Weekend, where the best advice was when you listened to the mentors.

Thanks Dan.
The quote explicitly "disclaims copyright" and includes the blessing "in place of a legal notice". It would be truly absurd even for a lawyer to believe that the blessing constitutes a copyright license anyway.
Feral child
There is extensive law covering sweepstakes -- often specific to country and state. Does ViralSweep guide me through the process of ensuring that my sweepstakes remains within those legal constraints?
I am also in a similar situation and I say go for it. I'm a Coronary Care Nurse (8 years and counting). I was previously employed as a Cardiac Rehab Nurse as well and it was very frustrating as I did not have creative freedom to manage problems I wanted to solve in that industry. Like jnardiello I'm in my late 20's, no kids, no mortgage, just newly wedded and have a very supportive wife. I basically wanted to solve a specific problem at work and I came across Web Apps. This changed my world and I decided to build one for a specific purpose at work (sixmwt.com,6MWT App). I did this in my spare time and decided only two weeks before my wedding (last month) to quit my Cardiac Rehab job and pursue web apps. I still work as a Cardiac Nurse once a week with the flexibility of picking up extra shifts when I do need to. It's scary as hell as I am a clinical person and have no experience with the IT industry. I basically stackoverlow, youtube and google things I need help with. I am very lucky to have a friend who is mentoring me in .Net/C# at the moment, I won't bore HN with that (you can read more at neilbo21.wordpress.com). I've been working on my resume and portfolio and I guess that's the main thing to work on. Show people what you can do (especially on GitHub). This advice has been recently reinforced from a great Software company (@Net_Engine) who I met with the other day to help guide me through this life changing decision. So I guess if it is any source of inspiration...ask yourself why you want the change, what is it about programming that you love? I guess I'm still in the honeymoon phase of learning something new, I love the instant gratification of writing a few lines of markup code and solving problems with web programming. I'd love to delve deeper and make a real CRUD app and use databases etc.

I wish you well in whatever you choose to do, Good Luck.
Rsync is designed for the general case. It's useful for backups, but not designed for them.
He was living with people I think he found on craigslist, and gave them a fake name so I guess thought he could disappear from there at anytime. He would've been nailed going to a drop anyways they would have just waited for him.

Why did he even need the fake IDs? They claimed it was to rent servers, which makes zero sense I've never been asked for ID when renting dedicated servers they just ask for money. PRQ certainly doesn't ask for anything except email address and payment.

I guess he didn't read that story about the secret service running a sting operation for years posing as an ID vendor on fraud forums.
Many: Samsung, Motorola, Nokia, etc...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-14/nokia-apple-payment...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._litigation
I think what he was saying is people already started researching on what ideas to implement prior to the event. Many people brought in their own Pi and hardware hacks so it isn't like they didn't figure out 1/3 of the hard work. But I wouldn't undermine their ability to piece things together in 18, 20 hours.
You're right. OS8 and 9 were basically lipstick on the System 7 pig. I worked on a helpdesk part-time in University and had to support OS8 and OS9. Horrible, horrible operating systems. To make matters even more annoying, Apple hardware had a funny habit of hiding the power switch on the back of the box at the time too, so it was always fun explaining to professors how to reboot their hard-locked machines over the phone. The puck-mice were indeed post-Jobs, as were the iMacs. Despite those terrible mice, the iMacs were a big hit with people who liked pretty colors and didn't actually want to use their computers much. I suppose Jobs needed time to get into the swing of things. It wasn't until the iPod that Apple (and Jobs) really shifted into overdrive.
Capistrano really has saved us multiple times, sad that a vocal part of the community tends to exhibit such behavior.

At our company, we develop multiple RoR apps and we've run into many of these issues (mostly related to the asset pipeline), yet none of them actual problems with Capistrano. Since it's the bridge between so many things, I can imagine why it's easy for it to become cannon fodder.

We've tried to standardize many of our recipes such as local asset precompilation into a single cohesive gem (https://github.com/innvent/matross). That has saved us the trouble of debugging the same issues over and over when they inevitably pop up across applications.
Ok, what is it?
If you're targeting a vertical, using one example customer, lookup who bids against them for the same keywords in Adwords on SEMRush. Adgooroo and Spyfu also support this.

If you're selling a horizontal product targeting customers where their existing technology they use could tip you off (e.g. companies that use Marketo and Mailchimp), LeadLander and BuiltWith are useful.

Once you get a list of target companies, the next trick is finding the right person to sell into. If you know their title, search Google like this:

site:linkedin.com "Company Name" "Title"

That works well since it lets you plow past Linkedin's limitations on searches outside your personal network.

Once you figure out your customer's company, name, and title, head over to email-format.com or data.com to look up the email format for the Company. With Rapportive for Gmail, you can take a few guesses and usually find the right person. Or read this post: http://www.distilled.net/blog/miscellaneous/find-almost-anyb...
It was already submitted twice.
Good post. I think many of us focus on the product and modifying it first (before questioning sales / marketing tactics) because we are developers, we know how to code, and in fact we actually enjoy tinkering with our product; it gives us a sense that we're doing something consequential that could change the dynamics of the situation.

The unfortunate truth is that early in a product's lifecycle, I suspect the quality (as programmers measure it) of the product, the beauty (or lack thereof) of the codebase, and even outright bugs, misfeatures, and poor performance, are not the reasons the product does or does not get traction. As OP says, what gets traction is product/customer fit -- the NEED a potential customer feels for the product. And if the wrong customer is pitched, and the right customer does not know about your product, all the tinkering and new features and bugfixes and refactoring in the world will not change that situation.

TL; DR: Programmers have code hammers, so they just bang the product nail again and again.
I love getting down voted for pointing out someone using this disclaimer as evidence that the MBA must have inherently better battery life, as if any one of those things wasn't also a factor for the MBA.
Wonder what Mozilla's stance is about W3C approving DRM for HTMl5...