skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How is this a good rule of thumb?

A small fraction of the population are assholes who are constantly thinking "if I robbed this person right now would anything bad happen to me? On balance, would it be profitable?"

If you don't want to be robbed, you've got to make sure any assholes who consider robbing you are going to decide not to because you can make bad things happen to them.

One way of making bad things happen to assholes who try to rob you is calling the cops, but you won't want to do that if you'll get arrested too.

There are other ways, of course. Depending on the market that may be chargebacks, marketplace reputation, the loss of future trade worth more than the profit from the robbery, tipping off the cops anonymously, pulling a gun and shooting the guy, killing their prized racehorse, whatever.

It's a good rule of thumb to keep the call-the-cops option open, especially if you don't have access to alternative means of dispute resolution.

Seems to me if you're a customer of bitcoin drugs marketplaces, you don't really have any options to make bad things happen to assholes. So that customers got robbed is unfortunate, but not surprising.
I think you mean indifferent bureaucrats without guns.
That is the opposite of my understanding of the history here; my understanding is that "they" has, for most of the history of written english, been used a gender-neutral singular pronoun, and that it was a prescriptivist movement in the late 1800s that attempted to away with that practice.

The gender neutral singular "they" has a long history, is correct, and should be uncontroversial.
I see it as a yin-yang situation. Corporations are a way to organize capital for the benefit of the capital owners, unions are a way to organize labor for the benefit of the labor "owners." In a healthy capitalist system, both are necessary in order to maintain balance.

That's the ideal. In the real world, both types of organizations will seek ways to exploit any advantage in their favor. But that's life.
The Significance of Grit: A Conversation with Angela Lee Duckworth
Of course I would -- it's hard to find people. Some companies give referral bonuses to incent their employees to recruit on their behalf. If the idea is to get "inside information", I think it will fail (or at least, hope it will). Not treating company information as secret (especially to strangers) is a sign of a dysfunctional organization.

If it's just "feel" that you are looking for -- then I think you'll get that.
Benefits of Scala in CS1
Telling the Time Blind (without sound)
No affiliation. Just searched to see if this had been posted to HN before and seems like it has not, which is surprising because a) it's cool and b) a lot of lessons to be learned from the process they went through to design/build it.
I am on the hiring committee at a university mathematics department. As such, I read a bunch of rec letters. All of them are positive and praise the applicants. But, some of them say things like "Candidate X ingeniously solved Problem Y which I, along with Famous People A, B, and C, had no idea how to do." And others just say "Candidate X is diligent, cheerful, and a hard worker."

In short, +1 to the parent comment. It should definitely be possible to gain useful information from an e-mail that focuses on the positives.
Why is it so difficult to have the motivation to finish MOOC? That's the main problem with online education, and we need to figure out what is causing so many people to quit halfway.
I'd call that a pretty radical reading of the text.
When I was a minion at a medium sized software company, if you had emailed me at my work address I would have either not replied or would have done so very cautiously.

If we had met through friends or at a meetup, I'd have been happy to talk to you much more openly about my job and the workplace.

The best developers I know have contacts all over town. They occasionally go along to meetups and user-groups on things they are interested in - not in a cynical way, they just enjoy chatting to like-minded folk and learning.

I would suggest you start doing the same, with the warnings about appearing desperate as mentioned in jonnathanson's comment. You don't have to sacrifice your personal/family life, just go along to a meetup on some technology/language/topic of interest once or twice a month, be friendly and personable, swap details with any like-minded people and stay in touch with them on occasion.
Every year the same article. No one is forced to work at a temp agency or retail. If it sucks so much, find a different job.

Yes, yes, I know, it's not that easy. But it actually is.
If anyone is interested in my particularly strange use case, this seems to work:

$ sudo ifconfig en0 alias 192.168.2.210 255.255.255.0
$ sudo ifconfig en0 alias 192.168.2.211 255.255.255.0
$ sudo ifconfig en0 alias 192.168.2.212 255.255.255.0
$ dispatch start
SOCKS5 server started on localhost:1080
Dispatching to addresses 192.168.2.28@1, 192.168.2.210@1, 192.168.2.211@1, 192.168.2.213@1

Also the link I mentioned is different from what other people have mentioned in this thread. It's not interface bonding or TCP multipath. It is actually similar to dispatch-proxy, it balances TCP connections across interfaces as far as I can tell.
Thanks for the recommendation, Netflix doesn't have it available to stream but Amazon Prime does. Awesome film so far.
An old friend ...

Most submissions have little or no comments - I've marked those that have more than just one or two ...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642628

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4611015

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3840273

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3602025

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3289795

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3279927

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2889115

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2547655 : 22 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2210070

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1601472

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1499630

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1041500

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944431

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=451951

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=451923 : 31 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204042 : A few comments
The real question here is not one of information freedom, but one of trust.

If I were to send you a GPG-encrypted email, it's a relationship of mutual trust: I know that you have full access to the information, and can do with it what you want. However, the ISP/NSA/GCHQ/KGB do not have access, because they are naturally not trusted.

DRM is different: if I distribute content to you using DRM, I am saying that I do not trust you to have the unencrypted content. Furthermore, DRM implies control over the hardware and software used to play content.
You can't be free from work.
This is so horrifying to read. Is there anything we can do to help?
Once again, the gender-neutral singular "they" isn't inaccurate; it's been used by everyone from Shakespeare to CS Lewis.
Yes, but that is at the application layer, not the transport layer (i.e. at TCP). Meaning, you need to be aware of what is actually being sent.
Wow bnoordhuis, way to be a dick! Reject the pull request, then try to have it reverted?

I've had nothing but trouble with the node.js community from the get go, including isaac. This whole donate hardware so we can run our crappy npm repository also rubbed me the wrong way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6802203 Bnoordhuis needs to be cut loose. You can't have poisonous people like this in charge of a project and expect to accomplish anything. Sounds like they all need to grow the heck up.
I think a better question for your doctor is "Do you give these same vaccines to your own children on this same schedule?" The answer is almost certainly yes, and that means more to me than a document of liability, particularly considering the liability would mostly be transferred to the doctor's insurance provider.
After getting a number of my estimates wrong recently I was thinking about this question. While walking to work I determined a few things.

It's hard to estimate something that is complex. If I am very confident the job can be completed in under an hour my assessment is very close to 100%. This is because something simple does not have a lot of variables and interacts with very few things. Things like fixing a display bug, a simple calculation, adding a print now button are all easy. Once you go beyond this it gets more difficult to determine how long something will take.

Business wants the estimate done quickly. Many businesses want estimates done fast. An accurate estimate for a complex job cannot be given fast. There has to be several rounds of back and fourth. Use-case scenarios need to be determined, which will open up even more questions. The underlying architecture to accomplish the feature also has to be scoped which will take time and usually we don't get it right the first time we think about it

Some more reasons are, businesses want the job done quicker than is realistic. Businesses don't know everything they want. They think they need stuff that they never end up using. Haven't thoroughly thought out the feature or problem themselves and that uncertainty gets passed into the development phase more often than not. Business is not solely to blame though. Sometimes developers think a particular portion of their code will be simple when its not or difficult when it isn't.

Basically the whole process is riddled with human error on both sides.
This is really awesome, congrats!
Personally I feel trading a single copy of any IP with a friend or individual should be covered under fair use.

Broadcasting, or reselling should be covered by legal protections against.
That was fascinating. I would have preferred some more details on the evidence found during this that a camera obscura actually was used. I suppose not having it makes this article a pretty good teaser for the documentary.
xtopdf, a toolkit for PDF creation from other input formats.

xtopdf supports many input formats, and more can be plugged in. Runs on Linux, Mac OS X, Windows (except for some platform-specific parts). Has a core library and CLI, GUI and web apps built using the library. Written in Python.

xtopdf links:

Overview:
http://slid.es/vasudevram/xtopdf

Posts (with code) about using xtopdf:
http://jugad2.blogspot.com/search/label/xtopdf

Source code:
https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram/xtopdf
Green dragon is a drink.

"Water pipes" or "bongs" still involve smoking, but the smoke is passed through water. I don't know to what extent this reduces the ill-effects of inhaled smoke.
On top of that, from what I read, he regularly demands meetings with Cook, Ive, etc. Seems like the actions of someone on a power trip.
I'm so disapointed, da fuk she's even on the list ?!
The very first comment says that it was signed off on https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...
I do appreciate the literary history (and I really do), but it's needlessly ambiguous in an environment where it can easily be construed to mean what it commonly and currently not in Shakespeare's time means: a plethora of writers, not a single writer.

Better to write documentation as you might write code:

Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others
Ask HN: Would you use a personal concierge to help you manage your time?
Does being unexploited pay the heating bill? That's all minimum wage workers really care about. Not some nebulous ivory tower view on economics.
This article provides more context: http://allthingsd.com/20131017/apple-gets-its-e-book-antitru...

"Together, Bromwich and Nigro will oversee Apple’s internal antitrust compliance policies and employee training on them for the next two years."

$1,100 an hour is not an unusually high fee for internal investigations work, nor does $70,000 per week seem unusually high for an ongoing compliance investigation and policy restructuring of an organization as large as Apple. This sort of work usually involves getting down into the weeds and looking at how even fairly low-level employees go about their jobs. The going rate for this sort of work tends to be pretty high, because companies who hire law firm to do an internal investigation tend to be in a pretty tight spot.
"The User" solves that ambiguity, and temporal information like "The current user" is more precise.

I can't think of many situations where user activity won't also be automated, what's the gender of a testing script again?

There's really no good reason for gendered pronouns.
Here’s the HN post that Paul Graham, BDFL of Silicon Valley, won’t let me write.
"if vaccines killed one person for every ten saved it would still be worthwhile"

Why?
Samsung: My unbranded German S3 came with shit like delivery-service apps etc.

Nokia: I don't think that the things you say about their reputation is true (for German), in Germany Nokia phones had carrier crapware like all the other phones too.
Does herd immunity require herd mentality?

This is why I strongly prefer the term "community immunity" over "herd immunity".

Can one investigate, or at least try to be diligent without being vilified?

Yes, absolutely. If you stick to actual reputable provable science, you'll wind up in the "vaccines are safe" camp. If you follow crackpots who don't understand science, you'll wind up somewhere else.
Amazon acquired Kiva Systems to employ robots [1] to replace people for these various tasks. Although taking away a viable source of income for low-income earners during the holiday season probably isn't viewed as "help" by most of them.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KRjuuEVEZs
You didn't read the comment at all, did you?
> " There are many completely acceptable uses"

This article is about being on your phone putting your eyes on advertisements put out by facebook, buzzfeed, etc. because you need to be constantly entertained. It's an encouragement to people who are in that situation to stop doing it.

If you're not in that situation, proclaiming that you're not in that situation and that maybe other people aren't in that situation is a useless comment. It's simply not relevant to the discussion. It's like coming in to a discussion about Hulu and Netflix and telling everyone that you only watch live sports on broadcast TV. What's the point?

[EDIT: P.S. you're not, by any chance, Ryguy from Rangers blue squad?]
The $70k / week figure given is for the first two weeks. I'm going to jump to a conclusion and say that the first two weeks will be above average in cost due to introductory meetings, posturing on both sides, and generally bringing the process up to speed.

The $1,100 / hour is not out of line for a top law firm. It would be interesting to know what Apple is paying it's outside attorneys. The claim that the figure is "higher than Apple has ever encountered for any task" is clearly untrue. Apple has payed it's own executives much more in the past.
Except there is a difference in that the really awful scenario is already here, and little by little, with big and small efforts, some communities are trying to climb out of it. How is spreading fear of upcoming doom in any way similar to trying to fix the existing, real problem?
How about adopting "she" as the generic pronoun, then? No chance of confusing it with a plural pronoun, and it's not subject to the gender-based critiques that "he" would be.
Tough situation - I don't think bnoordhuis is trying to push a sexist agenda, but trying to enforce a workflow (at least as I'm reading it)
What would it even mean to not be 100% self interested? Are people in India never charitable or selfless? No, of course that is not true. When someone acts charitably it is still self interested insofar as the charitable act is taken up in order to meet the end sought after. What you said sounds nice, but I don't see how you really do it.

Yes, it is true that India has a culture of corruption and bribery. I wonder if part of these girls' wages are taken for the housing or "company store" type things. There were some stories recently about workers in Dubai who are just lied to about the level of pay and then held hostage with visa or passport paperwork. If it is that type of case here, then it is fraud and the exploitation is due to the faulty legal system, lack of enforcement, culture of misogyny, etc.

I don't agree at all with the idea that wage labor by itself is exploitative. Basically the error with Marxist exploitation theory is that it ignores the concept of time preference. Wage laborers with a higher time preference prefer present goods in the form of wages to the process of saving and deferring some of the present enjoyment and then taking up their own entrepreneurial venture. Of course, the state by erecting barriers to entry and other distortions exacerbate the problem.
The term is used for candidate generated interviews with whoever they can get them with (usually through their network). It's often used to generate a position or to be top-of-mind by a set of companies when they open a position. It's a short leap from there to what you are saying.

Setting up informational interviews (to me, someone who has been hiring developers for 20+ years) is a sign of maturity. I think of such a person as "active", but knows enough not to put a resume in a pile. It only assures them of a real interview -- not the job (they jump to the top of the pile)

I personally would never apply blind.
How to monitor and load test websites
There's a discussion on Stack exchange here:
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/30455/is-using-he...

But I would still class the late 1800s as relatively "historical" compared with tech documentation.
Site has apparently been overwhelmed by HN traffic. Not sure that's what you intended to "Show HN".
Question for the women: does the use of non-gendered pronouns do anything to make you feel more accepted by the programming community?

It seems to me like there are much bigger issues to worry about, and changing some docs here and there is nothing more than feel-good measures (along the lines of "we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician's_syllogism)

But I'm not a woman so I have no idea.
> just spend more money

Mmmhmm, that's the true hacker spirit right there...
moreover the private party's flippant attitude is really distressing. i'm no fan of Apple, but this has now become an abuse of power, whether or not the actual financial costs are reasonable.
Check out Radius.com
Interesting article. Surprised it does not mention DC use in datacenters: http://gigaom.com/2012/01/13/the-next-big-thing-for-data-cen...

AC power supplies on computers are notoriously inefficient and "noisy" (as one datacenter facilities manager described them to me--he was referring to the voltage on the line, not sound.) Many larger datacenters have now switched entirely to DC-powered computers to cut down on energy use.

Years ago, when I was running my hosting company, DC power supplies were more expensive, but you could typically make up the difference in a year or so (less than the average 2-3 year lifetime of a typical server.) I suspect costs have come down since then.

I seem to recall at least one datacenter in SF running DC directly from the grid, as PG&E used to sell it back then. This article makes it seem like that may no longer be the case. Regardless, many datacenters now sell DC as an option, and will have installed their own converters to supply DC power to customers.
> Bromwich’s bill for his five-person team’s first two weeks of work: $138,432

To be fair, that's only $27,686 each per fortnight. Assuming 50 hour work weeks, that's only $276 per hour.

As always, check my arithmetic.

138432 / 5 people = 27686.

27686 / 100 hours = 276.

That's not far off a run of the mill family lawyer in England. (Without barristers and court fees.)
I've found that this doesn't work quite as well because modesty (the desire not to be seen 'naked') tangles up with privacy and creates a "that's different..." that seems difficult to quickly dismiss.
The original conversation about this was buried @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6823279 the fact that the majority of comments were in support of rejecting this rather obvious improvement was shocking.

Its also extremely worrying that the thread was buried (as I half expect this will be) and having a discussion about this topic is somewhere between censored and frowned upon on Hacker News.

I have always avoided commenting around the topic of lack of diversity in tech and tried to quietly 'do the right thing', however this is a problem that is becoming visibly worse over the time and one that makes me pretty ashamed of the industry I work in.

The upside is that something as public as this helps remind people that this is a big problem and can hopefully be a catalyst for positive changes.
But that's also clumsy because you end up with sentences like:
"The user switches on the user's computer and types the user's name".

Rather than the shorter and better flowing:
"The user switches on her computer and types her name"

We have the concept of "user stories" the idea of which is that they read like stories. Since stories tend to have gendered characters (even when not necessary) this is just the sort of writing that tends to work best in english.
This whole gender correctness thing is getting out of hand.

Edit: Just reading that entire github thread makes me want to throw up. http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/2838/spfart3vo.jpg
A collection of useful Snap.svg resources
That seems so right, but it gets fuzzy so fast as to be impractical.

Does that mean you can only give one copy to one person? If not, then can you give one copy to as many people as you like? If that's true, what's wrong with using bittorrent to do all of that quickly and more easily?
Mall of the future? eBay's new storefronts can gather your data
This sums up all the references to this sheep scam matter
http://www.deepdotweb.com/2013/11/30/sheep-marketplace-scamm...

Apparently that the owner also got doxxed.
Smartphones are great but damned if I'll ever accept a company-email-enabled device. I think corporations are making a mistake by handing blackberrys out to everyone. You want to give your staff time and space to think about the big picture and the big problems, not constantly being monopolized by trivial emails in their quiet moments.
This is where tools like https://www.nitrous.io are awesome. We just hosted a RailsBridge-type event and we used Nitrous. Highly recommend this for teaching.
We're used to looking at a pronoun's antecedent to determine its subject. In the sentence, "Jacob finally published a post he'd been mulling for a long time," we don't object that it's unclear whether "he" refers to Jacob. I don't understand why "The user receives the data they requested" is so fundamentally different. You still look to the antecedent; it's still clear.

I grew up taking great pride in "correct" English usage, but I now think insisting on gendered pronouns causes harm without any tangible benefit.
Yes, and that's the mechanism by which HTML gets confused and thinks that the curly quotes, which are not recognized as value bracketting, are part of the value.
In neither commit was the grammar remotely ambiguous; in both cases, the antecedent was clearly singular; "the user... they".

"They" is correct here, and always has been. "He" is arguably less correct, since the antecedent wasn't gendered.