skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, let's think back to the analog, circuit-switched telephone network. If you have a telephone line, you generally expect to be able to make a call at any time. But for anyone to be able to make a call at any time across the country, you would need to have one cross-country line for each person on the side with lower number of people (assuming, of course, that you divide the country in half and need to run cross country lines between the two halve; bear with me, this is a bit of a simplified example).

Of course, if you built one line for each person, then the vast majority of them would go unused. It would be completely ridiculous to overbuild like this; everyone would be paying for a ton of capacity that's unused. So how about if they build it to comfortably cover 10% more capacity than they've ever had used in the past. This allows for enough headroom for spikes, and when usage starts crossing that line they know that they need to start building out more capacity.

But of course, then some disaster strikes, and everyone tries to call their loved ones at once to check in on them. Usage surges to more than 10% higher than their previous high, and they run out of lines. Oops, now they've violated their "minimum service level". So, should they only have sold you long-distance service when they knew that there was less than one line per endpoint? Well, sure, it would have been ridiculously expensive and you wouldn't have bought it to have your own dedicated line the whole way across the country.

Now, the considerations in a packet switched network aren't all that much different. You can be more efficient about sharing the same resources because you can even share a single line, with several people sending packets at different times. But if you want to provide some kind of guaranteed minimum service, you need to take whatever you most limited path is, and divide up its cost and bandwidth between all customers who could possibly use it simultaneously. And I guarantee you, that will add up to paying a fortune for a pittance of bandwidth.

Why should it be acceptable to say, "How dare you
maximize your use of this, when it reduces availability
for everyone else?!?" Nobody gets a guarantee of
service at all.

Because if they do that, people will start leaving that service, saying "it's slow and glitchy, this other service gets much better ratings on SpeedTest.net and all of my friends on this other service say it's more reliable for them", when the reason for that is "this other service" actually has an enforces a ToS against abusive use of the network.

Does anybody get a "guarantee of service" to the public roads? Then why should anyone complain if someone else decides to run a private parade on those public roads, blocking everyone else? Or should we all get a "guarantee of service", and then deny anyone the right to have a parade ever?

Sometimes, you need to share resources without precise, hard and fast constraints, but instead based on social conventions, definitions of completely egregious behavior, and consequences for that completely egregious behavior.
My favorite use of extreme statistics to justify the superiority of one culture over another is Nobel Prizes per capita. #sarcasm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_laur...
he was a interesting blogger while running ArsDigita

He still is:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/

(BTW, if memory serves, back then he didn't have an actual blog, per se, but posted essays occasionally such as the one being discussed here.)
Ask HN: What is your advice for showcasing a beta website on HN?
Many of you have opened up early versions of your website for feedback from the HN community - what what would you do to make the submission more constructive/popular if you were to do it again?
This is a gross misunderstanding of the concept of privilege. The idea is not that Gates or Buffet's work had nothing to do with their success but that their work got them farther, per unit (if you could define such a thing), than would someone with less access to privileged parts of society.

Someone who's parents can't send them to college will obviously have to work harder than someone for whom a college education is assured. Someone who lives in a connected family will have to work less hard to be connected themselves.

In particular, this:

> The privilege we're all enjoying right now - all of this easily accessible, relatively cheap, amazing technology - is beyond anything being born to a successful Seattle lawyer is worth.

Seems anything but given to me. And you don't really make a compelling argument for it. That said, Bill Gates clearly had access to both technology and connections beyond average means, so I'm not sure what it has to do with anything.
Not enough!
I'm looking to move to Texas here.
Poll: RIP Google Reader. Which RSS solution do you use nowadays?
On July 2, Google Reader shut down. I’m a heavy RSS user and I’m quite satisfied with the alternative I found, but I’m always on the lookout for better products. If you used RSS before, what did you do to replace Google Reader?
AOL reader
BrassReader
Canto
Feedafever (Fever)
Feed Wrangler
NetVibes
PressForward
Protopage
SilverReader
YoleoReader
Web browser extension
Email client extension
Other (please specify in the comments section)
I really enjoyed your post. I agree that it's a good "directive smell" if your directive is reusable and application-agnostic.

In that vein, I think you're right that an isolate scope is generally a better default because it makes it clear that the directive expects no dependencies on the inherited scope, and it prevents the directive from overwriting any scope properties set by an ancestor.

I think using an inherited scope makes sense if you're building very app-specific directives that are tightly-coupled to their ancestor.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCSP_stapling
Can't have faster home Internet lead to decentralization...
great article!
a couple orthogonal notes:

1. if you were going to actually do something like the 'scroll' example, make sure to debounce the scroll handler. it's a good practice for any 'scroll' or 'resize' event handler, but especially when you have to dirty check every time, it could get slow: for example, using http://underscorejs.org/#debounce

element.scroll(_.debounce(function(){...}, 15)

2. Sean mentions "A good directive only does one job" which is so true! and in the same spirit, note that it is better to not make things be element based directives (the "restrict: 'E'" part) but allow the end-user to use it as an attribute-based selector (eg: "restrict: 'A'") because you can have an element "mix-in" functionality of 2 directives by giving them both attributes, but an element can only be 1 type (a <modal> cant also be a <photo>).
You must not know many typical mcdonalds employees. How many do you think are college educated (let alone educated in the right areas) or even possess a GED? Compared to http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/boa...

Sure education isn't everything. The average mcds employee is a good person trying to earn an honest living fit to have a beer with but probably not the best source of sound investment advice.

Put to a vote they would all vote to raise their wages to 15/hr and the vast majority would be unemployed in 6 months because I'd be able to get a better burger somewhere else for less money.
Hidden Spiders
Ask HN: Developer laptop under $500
What are your suggestions for a developer laptop?
I'll mainly use it for web dev:

- html/css/js/angularos editing

- need basic linux tools such as ssh

- need to be lightweight, long battery life, slim

My budget is $500
The Origin of the Shell (2000)
test...
[Other] I rolled my own Client for personal use.
Be extremely sure you want this, because per their TOS the return is the price you paid minus around $25 for the spit kit. Even unopened kit won't be accepted/money refunded, I was told via their helpdesk.

The thing that got me to change my mind was some blogger article that was going through their TOS/PP and realized that once you do this test, you are legally obligated for revealing results to the insurance company you plan to be insured with. Not sure how much the truth it is, but this plus the owner sleeping in one bed with Google's Brin ("hey honey so how is it going with collecting peoples DNAs? - very good - okay keep up the good work, in couple years I will buy you out then we can match your DNA database with their credit card / name / dob and attach it to their Google profile so we serve them more matching ads", turned me away for good.
"Come Home" Original Song
Google doesn't spy for the NSA. The NSA might be spying on Google, but that's not the same thing.
Follow up: I emailed support@lavabit.com asking them to update their configuration and linking them to https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS
(Thanks for posting that, jvehent)
Bad news for weekend,sat oct 12,
Thats an interesting idea. I'm sure the QWERTY could be improved but it would be tough trying to switch back and forth until it was fully adopted.
I'm not sure I disagree with any of that. I simply said that if you need to consider DoS you should consider DoS with the assumption your attacker has access to your source.
I wish that comments about previous submissions of the same article could be added to the HN commenting guidelines as "noise", and to be avoided, unless they were very far back, and actually contain useful comments.

Telling us it's been submitted previously, and with no comments (!), seems like a particularly useless bit of information. Am I supposed to care? Click over to it? Up vote it? Comment over there? Exactly how did you hope to enrich the comment feed here by posting that?
Matzacred Lisp. :-(
> > being poor impacts IQ simply because it becomes the mind's obsession of finding means to survive.

> While that's poetic, I'm very skeptical that you could even prove that empirically.

A study which claims to show exactly this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6298326

Anecdotally, I consider this plausible based on my own experiences during lean months as a startup founder.
PayPal tell you to check when you get the payment confirmation through to check the checkout ID against your own records for what the transaction should have been, but I have fixed just such vulnerabilities in my work before.
The right question is if Gates would have started Microsoft if he didn't have a trust fund safety net if MS failed.
This is a long standing and very intense debate in SF. You can reasonably criticize the "lottery" system, and you can reasonably defend the "school choice" system.

Kind of funny that Reason magazine, not normally a big cheerleader for SF politics, kind of likes the approach.

http://reason.com/archives/2006/04/01/the-agony-of-american-...

Anyway, I think it's perfectly reasonable to defend or criticize the assignment process, I just don't think you can accurately claim that SF public schools are horrible.
Reasons to stop using JavaScript
> Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of 23andme, is married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Not for long: http://allthingsd.com/20130828/google-co-founder-sergey-brin...
"My budget is $500" + "need to be lightweight, long battery life, slim"

good luck with that.

Chromebook or http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=Proper... are my suggestions.
Wait, don't public corporations have an fiduciary duty to their shareholders, debt duty to their bond holders and payroll obligation to their employees.

Sort of. It sounds good on paper - in a perfect world perhaps the invisible hand of the market would make "greed is good" a functional philosophy. But that's not the world we live in - there will always be significant friction, imperfect knowledge, etc in the market such that insisting that one part of the entire system be "pure" in the economic liberal sense is really just denying the obvious in a way that encourages exploiting those imperfections.

FWIW, the concept that corporations have no public duty beyond maximizing profits as a course of business is quite new. Here's some background:

False Profits: Reviving the Corporation's Public Purpose
http://www.uclalawreview.org/?p=1056
Did you share it online (Github, etc)? I’d love to take a look at it.
They work on the basis the almost nobody will rent a car and drive it for 24 hours straight unless you are planning to use it for a le-mans style event. They will have clauses in the rental agreement that prevent you from using it to enter a le-mans style event.
"then you're negligent and misleading people without even knowing it."

Is that their fault? I don't entirely think so. You might be able to claim they should have done the research before choosing that type of graph but the majority of people are not even going to give pie charts a second thought.

If there was an active campaign against pie charts and more discussion I might find fault in that persons ignorance to the matter.
I think that's fair, though. There are enough people who are old enough alive at any given time to have seen their system through to success or failure that it makes reasonable sense to prefer their experience over people just starting out.

As a basic filter, you could do worse.
> it's a shame [daily exercise] appears avoidable to us now

Unless you're elderly, sick, or disabled. Then making long walks, jogging, and sprinting optional is literally a life-saver.
I wonder how much of this is scripted by the globalist bankers.
Your analogy doesn't hold up very well. There are rentals that are restricted much more than your average apartment, they are called hotel rooms.

There are different options available, because there is demand for it.

The same applies to ISP service. In general residential service is over subscribed. This allows the company to discount the service in return for restrictions on how it can be used.

There are also dedicated bandwidth options, which are much more expensive. But you can use it pretty much however you want.
Lets keep validating user input. Even if it's "hard" i.e. uses a regex...

Sure there's better ways to build a regex then to hard code it into each method, but nevermind that, lets just accept whatever comes through the pipe into our barely tested (in production) and highly insecure frameworks, as long as it contains an '@'.

No matter what solution I propose, It's better than this "nonsolution" because it's a solution.
Actually, this looks interesting (IdeaPad U410): http://outlet.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/outlet_us/...

9 hr battery life, supposedly. And if it takes after thinkpads, then it supports a native GNU/Linux pretty well.
Doubt about this exact case, but I've seen MD5 being (ab)used in a really weird ways, which I attributed to mindless "oh, I'll just use MD5 here, heard it's good for security!"

One particular case I remember was use of md5(md5(md5(unix_timestamp()))) to generate "secure" session tokens.
That would be fine except for path dependence. You're talking about taking essentially the same service but making it sound much worse than it currently sounds.
Indeed. Chances of a random person accidentally setting up an open email relay of some sort are high.
Do you have a source on this? I believe you, just interested in reading more.
on passion vs grinding: don't you think that this guy is presenting a false dichotomy here? Couldn't I (and I would!) lend to the guy who loves his job... AND is prepared to work hard at it?
> AFAIK the Red Cross is funded by voluntary contributions; in other words, people pay the Red Cross to do what it does, indicating that people find what it does worth doing. That meets my definition of "profit", but apparently not yours.

First, donations are revenue, not profit; profit is revenue minus expenses. It is somewhat amusing that a post which makes this error complains about others having a "faulty definition of what 'profit' means."

Second, the term "nonprofit" is the less-formal term for a certain class of tax-exempt entity because part of the requirement for that tax-exempt status is that "part of the net earnings [...] inures to the benefit of any private shareholder or individual", that is, that the organization does not return profits to anyone. [1]

> In a sane world the Red Cross would be a normal corporation that was selling the service of helping people. If they made a profit, so much the better: more money to reinvest in helping people better. As it is, they have to hide what would normally be "profit" in various expenses that amount to the same thing, reinvesting profits in helping people better--but it's less efficient because of the subterfuge.

Except that this is not the case, because there is no requirement for the Red Cross not to have excess revenue above its expenses, it just can't have shareholders or other individuals to whom that excess is distributed.

[1] 26 USC § 501(c)(3); similar language appears in other paragraphs of § 501(c) defining other categories of tax-exempt non-profits, though § 501(c)(3) is the most important, and the one relevant to the Red Cross; http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/501
An Open Letter to Recruiters
Human Readable Emoji Checksums
And then there's the reverse: unsuccessful people, who spent mountains of time with their children, friends, and family, say "I wish I'd taken more risks."

Statistically-speaking, that is by far the most common response, because most people are not "highly successful people".
[Other] miniflux - http://miniflux.net/
Here's the actual Xinhua (official Chinese journal) article: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/indepth/2013-10/13/c_13279...
Here are copies of the paper and supplementary material:

Paper: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8859543/papers/Kidd-2013...

Supplement: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8859543/papers/Kidd-2013...
Armed with marshaled data, developers will drive the composable enterprise.

Hey lets bring back ASN1 and call it something hot.
I'm sure you're equally happy getting Viagra spam in your inbox, because everyone likes sex.

The core issue is it breaks a core UI convention, clicking back and stopping at the beginning, just to push a few more people into a shopping portal. Coming from UX, that's probably the most brazen abuse of Apple's previous good name in design and user experience.
Replying to subpoenas and warrants was recently redefined as "spying".
> How much of that trust fund - which Gates never asked for and had nothing to do with - did Bill Gates invest into starting Microsoft? All I'm seeing here is Bill Gates bashing with no actual substance.

This is specious reasoning. The safety net provided by a trust fund (even if you didn't ask for it), is quite significant and allows you to take significant risks.

Let's take the analogy of FU money. The whole point of having it is that you can take risks or breaks in the future (saying F-U to any/all VCs/Investors/bosses without impact to your financial security). You don't need to invest any/all of it, since you can generate more, but if you choose paths that don't generate that wealth, you haven't squandered your financial comfort.
Bitcoin to the rescue! :)
Very enlightening.
So it seems to be significant. Will implement OCSP stapling shortly. Thanks.
Also isn't necessarily diversifying. A major USD crash could also crash BTC.
Kind of interesting to think about his comment about the goal being to “create an international reserve currency that is disconnected from individual nations and is able to remain stable in the long run.” Hmm...I wonder if there are any currencies which currently exist which fit the bill...

And then think about pg's point #3 about why a government would have created Bitcoin: "because they felt their currency would never become the standard reserve currency, and they felt it was better that no one's be if theirs couldn't be" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547423).

It won't be proof that BTC came from China if China suggests using BTC as the reserve currency, but pg's point will be proven to me, at least.
>Do you ever listen to yourself? Seriously, I was being brutally honest. Your comment ranks among the most pretentious and awful I've ever read on HN, and I received a link to it in an e-mail thread where the subject was you. There is no plane of existence where anything you have typed in this thread is normal, rational human behavior.

Seriously? Calling the emergency when I come out of a piss-filled elevator to a body convulsing on the floor on the platform is not an emergency? And when I am attempting to bring small children through a public service elevator where there is real risk of infectious disease? Complaining about this is "on no plane of existence rational"???

You're deluded.
My understanding is that (in general) for associative containers, optimized trie implementations are faster than hash tables with cryptographic hashes.
I did some research into when diminishing marginal returns to exercise kick in. I eventually found this excellent study
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/5/1382.long

which indicated to me that ~1000Cal/week expended in a vigorous fashion should be what I shoot for. This means that stuff that elevates post exercise oxygen consumption like resistance training and interval training for cardio are great bangs for your buck. This jives well with other research on the health benefits of these activities. I'm currently hitting the threshold with 2 days/wk of HIIT and resistance training each.
Slightly off topic, but browsing the comments on this thread I'm just amazed how good and cheap Internet has become here (Romania) compared to some of the prices out there. A major local provider recently announced a new 1Gbps plan for about 18$/month. I'm currently on their 50Mbps plan, and I get just that: 5MBytes/s up/down.
NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally
Yahoo to make SSL encryption the default for Webmail users. Finally.
Your question is fair. Here, noting that the article has been submitted before is perhaps an illustration of the role of luck ("survivorship bias") in attaining success. I appreciate such notices (and regularly upvote them, from anybody) because I like a reality check on the feeling "Haven't I seen this article before?"
Good post. The way I see it, journals have traditionally provided three core features: publishing, quality control (via peer review), and reputation (via exclusivity). The publishing aspect is basically solved -- just post your article to the arXiv.

The obstacle is the other two -- quality control and (in particular) reputation. What we need, and what you've more or less described, is an independent peer-review/evaluation platform where contributors can build & show-off reputation.

The good news is there is a lot of activity around this now. My startup Publons.com is one of many ventures trying things in this area: PubPeer, Peerage of Science, The Winnower, Libreapp.org, peerevaluation.org...
Do you know anyone who suffers from pain?
How would you propose resolving this doubt of yours?
At least Gavin Newsom doesn't blame the poor. I'm fairly certain (or at least hopeful) that he's aware of his own privileges in life.
All you can eat buffets don't let you fill up takeaway boxes.
The thing about 23andMe, is that that kind of genetic testing really does not tell people what people think they are being told. The amount of actual actionable information you can get from a gene map like that is.... a LOT more limited than people such as 23AndMe customers think.

Here's just one article on that, just the first reasonable one I found googling: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenkotler/2012/12/13/what-is-...

So the real thing about 23AndMe, is how they took advantage of very popular misconceived exagerated expectations about a) the extent that genetics are destiny, and b) even to the extent that genes are destiny (less than you think), the extent that current science can actually succesfully figure that out -- to make a lot of money.

These are EXTREMELY popular misconceptions, they fit into the zeitgeist well. So 23AndMe can make a lot of money off them.

(And I'm not suggesting that the 23AndMe principals are intentionally taking people for a ride--I'm sure they believe it too.)