skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You will most likely be not able to host a personal email server from a residential ISP without an IPv4 address tunnel, anyway.

Without a proper reverse DNS record and an IP address not from a residential pool, most properly configured servers will reject emails immediately (in order to combat spam).
It has more to do with the amount top athletic programs bring into big athletic schools. If the school is making millions on tickets and TV rights on their top-rated football team, they're willing to pay a lot for a coach that helps them keep winning.
Consider for a moment the cost of a "51% attack" on Bitcoin. That is basically a lower bound on the cost of running Bitcoin, if you include the value of Bitcoin hardware. Now compare that cost to the amount of money that a bank spends on security, versus the amount of money that same bank processes. The ratio of Bitcoin's total value (basically low billions) to the cost of running Bitcoin (low billions) is much smaller than the scale of a bank's operations (hundreds of billions) versus the amount spent combatting fraud (hundreds of millions).

The only reason nobody notices this cost is that right now, the payoff from mining outweighs that cost. Yet a bank's operations are still vastly more profitable than Bitcoin mining (which is critical in maintain Bitcoin's security), even with the cost of fraud mitigation, and even counting only the cost of electricity required for Bitcoin; were this not true, banks would be running huge Bitcoin mining operations and only dealing in cash when they need to pay their taxes (which they sometimes do).
If only it was that simple to make Google stop spying for NSA
I mentioned the difference

"a structured/formulaic way to think about and build graphs"

This is what plotting using the "grammar" provides. Each plot is a like a sentence, for a sentence can be composed using some of the following - verb, noun, adverb, adjective, interjection, pronoun, proposition, conjunction. Alike, ggplot2 allows you to think of a graph in terms of layers, which layers can have different components that describe the "geometry" or "statistics" of the plot. Plus, there is a lot more.

You could probably describe your favourite plotting package as structured and formulaic, but an experience with ggplot2 would convince you otherwise.
It's a fine definition for an abstract. If it contained a full, precise definition, it wouldn't be an abstract. It's a single paragraph that summarizes a dense, academic 30 page paper. Everyone who reads them understands that the abstract is about the general idea, not formal correctness.
I think TylerE's point is that further 50% gains in six months are not guaranteed. You can look at any stock index and find assets that spiked in a similar manner. Had you invested in those, you would have made the same return without having to buy, store and run hardware.
Not sure what you expect for $5 a month.
Everything in moderation. This has been my modus operandi for nearly a decade now. Looking does not mean taking. Once I take a new job, after the first 30 days, I know I've got a window of about 12 months that I should stick around or it's going to look like I'm flakey/don't play well with others, etc... But I'm always looking.
I think distributed transaction verification service is of great value.

Sometimes people forget that mining has an important property: it is relatively fair compared to other mode of distribution of coin. I would prefer a fair system rather than a system controlled by single entity that distribute the coin as it sees fit.

The mining profit is approximately the percentage of miner's computing power divided by total network computing power.
I am wondering about the following scenario when you allow anything to be entered, but do require validation: what if I entered "myaddress@mysite.org, someone-else@elsewhere.org". The mail will be sent to both addresses, and if I'm faster than the other guy (probably, because I'm expecting the email), I can basically sign someone else up for whatever it is. Okay, it's trivially easy to find out that I did it (but I could use a throwaway address), but you may want to prevent this scenario anyway to prevent harassment.
Well, the world is full of people doing things in complicated ways because they find they work better than any simple way they know of.
I doubt they are trying to cut off competition to GMail. Email is blocked typically as a matter of convention by the majority of ISPs. It requires features 99.9% of customers don't care about in the slightest, and invites spam problems.
Skimbox Goes Beyond Email
Lesson I learned from this chart: if I want to earn more as a BART employee, don't join a union.
Wouldn't it be a good starting point to work towards a better public transportation system in the Bay Area then?

I see that you're bringing up NIMBY, but that should be the area to focus on instead of somehow trying to control the underlying problem through things like rent control.

I personally see the California High Speed Rail system as an interesting option there. If they offer regular rail service and I can reach my work in Silicon Valley within 1 hour then I would consider moving out of Silicon Valley. Especially so if the city is interesting or becomes interesting through the increasing number of people moving there and if they offer Wifi on the train so that I could even start working there.
An Entrepreneur's Tale of Gender Bias
Sure, but the fact that only a tiny minority of highly privileged people have the skill and extraordinary drive to move into the stratosphere doesn't change the fact that people like Gates[1] took advantage of opportunities that don't remotely resemble the opportunities that normal people get. Their billions may be self made in the sense they were unlikely to have been achieved by anyone else in their position, but not in the sense that they were likely to have had comparable success in any position but the one they found themselves in.

[1]and perhaps others like Zuckerberg more so than Buffet, who could probably have somewhat more slowly honed his investment skills and found patrons whilst working the sort of day job people with ordinary middle class backgrounds can easily get.
Couldn't agree more.

Coincidentally, early this morning, I received a notification email from a droplet i own. It(my security agent process) had noticed repeated attempts to login and that it had blocked the offending IP address. When i traced the IP address, it was from Digital Ocean's network!

I am getting unnerved with all of this. Looks like DO is now a popular target for hackers. I would think the vast majority of droplets (despite their owners trying to keep things secure to the best of their knowledge) don't have much of a chance against a sustained attack by a capable and determined hacker.

So yes, I agree that keeping as near to real-time backup as possible seems to be the only takeaway from all of this (assuming that we would want to continue with such a discount hosting provider).
Also, screw the "Confirm your password" cargo-cult. Email and password that's it. Send a verification email and you're registered.

Another one, using the stupid asterisk character hiding password input field. It's user-hostile, especially on mobile. No one is looking over my shoulder, and if they are I'll take care of it myself, thank you very much.
He mentioned this in an interview with CNET:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57597954-83/lavabit-chief-p...

"What happens to your customer's e-mails and data?

Levison: I'm looking into setting up a site where users can download their data and set up a forwarding [e-mail] address, but that may take a week or two to set up. That's all I can do until I feel confident that I can resume the service without having to compromise its integrity.

I will make it clear that I don't plan to use any encryption for that site. [People] should only use it if they feel comfortable with the information being intercepted. And yes, I do plan to have that disclaimer on the site.

Unfortunately, what's become clear is that there's no protections in our current body of law to keep the government from compelling us to provide the information necessary to decrypt those communications in secret.

I'm still looking at seeing if that's even logistically feasible -- there's half a billion messages [sent in the 10 years Lavabit operated]. By shutting down the service, I will be losing the infrastructure that I used to support all those people.

There's stuff that I can't share with my own lawyer. This is going to be a long fight."
Sasha has been incredibly involved and helpful in the docker community. He's one of my favorite sources of feedback on what should be fixed or improved next on docker. You can't beat large-scale production experience :)

Thanks Sasha!
Yeah there's someone in Shropshire in the UK growing it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/0/23885313
You are trying to claim that you can evade laws governing currency exchange by skipping around international borders. That is not how laws, borders, or currency exchange work. If you were to try exchanging Bitcoin for some currency in a country with loose regulations, you would still need to eventually get your country's own currency and would need to deal with your country's regulations on importing or exchanging currencies.

The point is not about murder or any other crime. The point is about trying to evade laws by crossing borders. At best, your strategy would shift the problem from regulations on currency exchange within your country to regulations on importing currency to your country; you still do not get a situation where your government has no power to freeze or seize your money.
You're right. I wasn't really thinking about building my own platform; more thinking about building a CMS that did what I needed it to do. The plugin API would take some work, but a templating system, image manipulation, user roles, auto-installer, comment system, and media manager are all very easy to implement, if not provided to you for free by PHP or an existing library (ImageMagick, for example).
Not really seeing why this can't work even so. Spent an hour ruling out one possible cause of that intractable bug you've been trying to figure out, then felt too tired to try anything else? Very well, mark an X for some progress today.
Seems like they changed it again
You could do that to pretty much every opinion piece posted and upvoted on HN. Many posters here have obvious blinders on, posts about what someone is doing are presented as 'this is what everyone is doing' or 'this is what everyone will do' because if this person is doing it, everyone must be.

It's just so obvious.
I remember looking at the PHP built-in option a year or so ago, there are bugs filed against that because it's too strict.
> the interest is now in Capitol Hill, where there is still an artistic/bohemian scene.

For now this is true, but I think many of these people are moving to the CD by necessity where they can still afford to rent or purchase. Of course, the exodus to the CD has had its own issues (http://www.centraldistrictnews.com/2011/12/gentrification-ki...).

What I think is very interesting is that the revitalization of the waterfront may change this dynamic by causing more people to move to Pioneer Square thereby relieving pressure on Capitol Hill. I'd actually consider doing this if it wasn't for the muggings, crazy people stabbing soccer fans, and it lacking the fundamentals of a livable neighborhood (e.g. a supermarket).
Sorry, indeed there was a typo - it is redecentralize.org.
I think you could definitely be selective in the routes and hours you would operate - I like the idea of charging $20 per person and transporting 50-100 people at a time from major downtown centers (e.g. Civic Center to Downtown Berkeley)
And the advice here, which I agree with, is to skip your steps 2 & 3.
Compared to WordPress, which touts backward compatibility as a strength, yet still manages to break itself in some way, shape, or form with every new release?
Being able to handle everyone using their connections to the full at all times would require being able to deal with massively more usage then you ever practically see. I'm a pretty heavy user, I work with data sets, watch a lot of streaming TV, have several video chats every day and I also download games through things like Steam.

My usage was less than 15% of what I could use (and that's with a slow connection, I'd not use significantly more data if my connection improved).

This means they can plan around particular users and everyone gets a decent deal. Remember that if they had to have the capacity of (max speed) * (number of people) then I'd just get a slower connection for the same price.

Now, someone running a server could massively outstrip my usage because they're not one person reading reddit but a machine serving millions of people. That breaks the expectations, and means all the actual people do worse off.
Perhaps you need a small amount of passion to get started. But passion and success are not independent, they form a very strong feedback loop.

It is much easier to be passionate about a project that other people love (measured in downloads, users, revenue, media response or just feedback emails), than working on something that nobody else cares about for years.
Why is it cursing at me... I feel bad. And apparently I should feel bad.
They have the other stats, but in the drop-down, but consider that this is a situation where in some cases salaries+overtime are 2.5x the base salary.

Only a small number of workers are skewed that high, but the overtime is significant for a large percent of workers.

They should have excluded other benefits by default, but I think you need to include the overtime to get a real picture.
i agree it's kind-of a weird sentence for the start of the abstract - seems too introductory for the rest. i suspect it was added because a referee wanted the abstract to be more general, or just because they didn't know how else to start referring to PRNGs. writing papers is hard.

but it's not bogus, it's just incomplete. what i was trying to explain is that if something in an abstract doesn't make sense, you should look to the paper for a more detailed explanation.

and finally, in a "deep" way it's actually a very good definition of a PRNG. it's exactly what section 2 expands on. there's nothing you can fall back to that's more fundamental, that i can see, than it being indistinguishable from random.
I do not think that is an exhaustive list. The only thing it excludes are commercial operations, so I would assume that yes, you can run personal services (even services you share freely with friends or strangers), but that you cannot try to monetize those services. IANAL though.
I was using this locally to help me... decided it could be fun to share.
Personally I don't care about being paid for unused vacation days. I just want my vacation. And I don't want to have to use it all for Christmas. (Some employers I've worked for give you a week or two for Christmas automatically, some make you use your allocated days.)

I think it makes sense to pay out for vacation days one could have taken but didn't when they quit or get laid off. I'm not sure it makes sense to pay for vacation not taken in previous years, but maybe.
As if NSA is the only problem there
While there can be analysis paralysis having a clearly defined workflow and writing a test for that flow before you even implemented that feature worked great for us.

Writing a functional test at this point helps in understanding the problem space and interaction with the service quite well. And with the functional test in place it is a lot easier to see which other part of the new feature needs to have unit tests in place to make it very stable.

At least that has worked very well for us for a long time now
Sounds like false advertising to me...
Asking for zip code first or instead of city/state is so rare that I find it jarring. I've rarely, if ever, thought that entering my city and state was overly burdensome and I strongly doubt there's any conversion improvement.
It is possible he was joking? Otherwise his response makes no sense.
It may be blocked by the ISPs that service a majority of people (i.e. cable companies), but I don't have any reason to think that it's blocked by a majority of ISPs.
> Umm, I seriously doubt that "almost everyone" in the state of Georgia in 1832

Touche. My point was that participation was extensive and varied. It remains to be seen whether or not this effect holds for women or minorities, but even if it didn't, that would only support my main point: context matters.

> A small event known in the US as the Civil War... just might have had something to do with this.

The authors address the Civil War in the piece. It would indeed have been a weird oversight for economic historians studying the pre-war South if they hadn't, if that just never occurred to them as relevant.
Or perhaps also because the .info TLD is frequently purchased as an alternative to the major three because of its relatively lower price and its rather generic purpose?

I don't know about the USA in particular, but this holds true for Europe.
I'm sure this is coming with Fiber. But for early stage products (technically Fiber only has three "customers" right now-KC, Austin and Provo), one of the best things you can do to encourage uptake is keep your pricing drop-dead simple.
I think they are just trying to balance that simplicity with keeping it fair by not allowing commercial servers. A couple businesses taking advantage of a system that wasn't built for them could wreck the speeds for everyone, and Fiber's reputation going forward.
Unless that's actually necessary (for example, in PayPal's case), that's a major conversion obstacle for very little gain.
Odd bug, must be a SIM related PIN on the device...
I've had no trouble paying a little extra for static IPs, not to mention delegated reverse DNS, over the past 15 years.
I think that the tax break the article is talking about is the fact that in the UK, if your 'main residence' is elsewhere, you only pay income tax on your UK earnings. That's different to the US where (I believe) citizens are expected to pay tax even if they are non-resident. I'm not sure why it's mentioned to be honest as income taxes are not related to just buying a house in the UK - which anyone can do whether they are a citizen, resident, or whatever.

Council tax in the UK is payable by the building owner or tenant, and is much lower than, for example, the US property tax. Council tax is supposed to just pay for municipal services. IIRC, they even break it down into bits on your bill 'Police - £xx, Fire Brigade - £xx' etc etc

I suppose my points were firstly that it is unreasonable to compare UK council tax and US property tax, and secondly that a tax directly related to a home's value can impact people disproportionately due to the crazy rise in UK house prices over the last few decades.

All that said, the idea of a property tax level resetting when a building is sold is very interesting - I didn't realise that was the case in California and it certainly makes sense. However, there is still the issue of our system of government being different - local governments can't create new taxes (and it would need to be a local tax since the problem is restricted to one geographic area), and the economics are different - people just aren't set up to pay high property taxes. Not insurmountable problems, I accept.

And yeah, 99 year leases are weird, but not uncommon. It gets weirder. For example it's not that unusual in the UK for properties to be totally surrounded by land owned by others. Also, land ownership in the UK (London especially) often has crazy disputes just due to the age of the records.
Hmm, I find it extraordinarily bizarre. My life has been filled with people charging down the wrong path because they have elevated system/process over goals.

For example: Agile/Yourdon/waterfall/XP/ISO9001/whatever. Our goal is a working system on time and budget (or whatever your goals are). The strategy is, perhaps, iterative waterfall, or agile, or more likely, some hybid approach (hint: how likely is small scale scrum to work to build a new Boeing, and how likely is the ideal Boeing process likely to create a great social web app). Systems are based on a number of assumptions about your goals; assumptions that may not apply, or that may change over time. If you aren't continually testing your chosen strategy (I prefer strategy over system, but I more or less mean the same thing here) against your goals, you are likely to be anywhere from sub-optimal to completely wrong.

So I live in a world where everyone is currently chasing Agile, without questioning whether it even fits the problem, or what its weaknesses are (even if it fits, it has weaknesses, and you should be aware of it so you can mitigate them). I live in a world where people grind through business processes, without questioning whether this is taking us where we actually need to go, or whether things have changed and our goals, which inform the system, still apply. To use the example in the article, it makes no sense to search for another job if you are retiring in a year. If the externals change and system does not, you are in trouble.
I suspect there's a whole department at Facebook, Google, and other companies that sole purpose is to come up with cleverly puzzled opt-in questions for users.
The way we think of it is that Beeminder is a goal tracking service that you pay for, except that if you never need Beeminder's kick in the pants -- if you keep all your datapoints on the yellow brick road -- then the fee is waived.
Software Engineers Are Making Money Like Professional Athletes
Site is pretty grueling, though. I have dozens and dozens of DNA sharing requests, but it takes like 4 clicks for every single one to OK it. Sometimes they are people I knew anyway once I see their name, sometimes it ends up being an interesting conversation with just someone from the same area as my great grandparents, but every time it's an annoying click fest to find out.
"Being able to handle everyone using their connections to the full at all times would require being able to deal with massively more usage then you ever practically see"

So what? All that means is that you can oversell throughput. How does it imply that people cannot or should not be running any particular service over their connection?

The real barrier to hosting commercial services on residential connections should be technical. Your service has little to no uptime guarantee, little to no throughput guarantee, and no guarantee of a static IP address (though with dynamic DNS this might not really matter). That is enough to discourage commercial services, at least at any scale that anyone could care about.
Or P2P services, which could potentially present a greater threat to Google. Only a small fraction of network users are willing and able to run a personal server, and even those that do aren't capable of competing with Google in terms of hardware.

Decentralized content sharing could remove those obstacles, and a high bandwidth network could facilitate the adoption of P2P services.
Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates Teach Code.org Online Coding Class
I might point out that some employment contracts specifically say you can't discuss salary with fellow employees. (I know I read it somewhere I applied or worked, probably at my current job too.)
That's good and all, but activity does not replace exercise.
It detects your forward walking motion and translates it to pressing forward on the keyboard (roughly).
Valve's Steam Box wants to bring Linux to the masses
As a computer scientist, it's a joy to discover when you're wrong about things. So I'm enjoying being on the wrong side of the discussion for once, because I'm learning lots.

Thank you for your replies tptacek, I've learned much from this discussion. If I could edit my top comment, I would.