skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a lot of high-profile themes here (age discrimination, the severe penalties that college tuitions inflict on high-IQ people having children, et al) but I'm going to focus on just one, because attacking all of them would take too much time.

This is proof that the model of undergraduate, liberal arts education has failed in this country.

What, you say?

The whole point of college is to equip people with the skills so that, regardless of market vacillations of trade-specific supply and demand, the person can always find work. Not to find "a job", but to provide someone with general-purpose skills so their careers are, at least, reasonably protected from the market ups-and-downs that afflict the trades.

The market doesn't buy it. People like him-- educated, capable-- end up unable to find appropriate work. Society has decided that higher education isn't valuable anymore. (It might be right; I'm not going to attack that, either.)

That's a market signal that this $40,000-per-year process that the US calls "education" has lost meaning and value.
I like bitrated. Because it's a bitcoin service where transactions are... arrrrBitrated, matey. Shiver-me-ASICs.

The service is so valuable you could call it a...
(•_•)
( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
treasure.
Dad Arrested for picking up kids from school by foot
One potential gotcha there: The Mono runtime libraries are licensed under the LGPL, so beware of using this option if you've got licensing restrictions that prevent you from distributing binaries that are statically linked to LGPL code.

You can always leave the --static flag off, but then your binaries will require the Mono run-time to be installed.
What's new or interesting about this? It's a framework in which the latest version was released Apr 14, 2013.
If they're actually local and speak English well enough to be understood over a crummy cell phone connection, I'll keep in touch.

If not, I whack the Spam button.
On the contrary, it is absolutely correct. You forget these huge companies were once small upstarts. As upstarts, their growth was propelled by buyers recommending the product to other buyers. (You can substitute users for buyers here if it is an app). So his point is valid.

If you go back to the early days of Oracle for example, they were providing a highly flexible database and would do it on (mostly) any computer platform you had. The competition was databases that were glorified flat files on mainframes, and IBM dominated that market. It took a few to take the plunge, but the others followed.

Overall his point is very valid.
Disconnected Devices: How Many Apps Does It Take to Turn On a Light Bulb?
IntelliJ IDEA is released once a year, and smaller IDEs are about twice a year. Because of this the plugins may miss some features for some time, that's true. But now, after the release of IntelliJ IDEA they will be updated with the latest Ruby, Python, PHP, etc. functionality
They're talking about viewing the source code and testing the login. The author could have just reported the leaked credentials and not logged on. Testing them especially since it wasn't part of the program falls under potentially extremely malicious.
It's not a flaw - nowhere is it specified that the substring doesn't retain a reference to the original string; nor in any case does the garbage collecter make very many guarantees in the first place.

The new behaviour is fine. But it's not a bugfix, and it causes nasty problems - probably causes more problems than it fixes simply because it's a change in behavior.

In order to write efficient string-processing algorithms in java, since the docs habitually don't specify efficiency, you need to make assumptions about which operations are how fast. Making an operation this much slower - and it's really a huge difference - is pretty risky.

Also, note that memory use in the new model is also likely to be higher, and can even be catastrophically higher (e.g. a recursive descent parser might retain references to all suffixes it builds during descent, causing quadratic memory usage).

I'm sure there are good reasons for the change, but the the way it was released is really shoddy - hiding it away in a minor (ideally just bugfix+security) release without a good warning well in advance means they didn't consider this to be breaking change, and that's just being ridiculously naive for a project as mature as the JVM.
Well, the axiom of dependent choice is a bit stronger than that. And your contrast with the full axiom of choice makes it sound like dependent choice is just countable choice.

For the onlookers:

Axiom of choice -- Given any collection of disjoint sets, there's a set consisting of one element from each.

Axiom of countable choice (this is weaker) -- Given any countable collection of disjoint sets, there's a set consisting of one element from each.

Axiom of dependent choice (this is intermediate in strength) -- Suppose you have a set X and a binary relation R on X such that for any x in X, there's some y in X such that xRy holds. Then there's a sequence x_0, x_1, ..., consisting of elements in X, such that for any i, x_i R x_(i+1) holds.

Countable choice is not enough to prove that aleph_0 is the smallest infinite cardinal; dependent choice is. Of course you could weaken dependent choice and still be able to prove it, but not all the way to countable choice.

(Ignoring the AC/CH thing, that's been addressed already.)
Your circular spray brush has a pretty awful distribution of points. If you hold it in one location for several seconds you can tell that it's heavily biasing points to the bottom left, and you tend to get very visible "lines" as well. I tweaked it a bit to improve it:

http://codepen.io/anon/pen/EqbnG

My implementation still isn't perfect, as it biases points in the middle over points around the edges. (A consequence of the fact that a bunch of points evenly distributed around a small radius are closer together than a bunch of points evenly distributed around a large radius.) But it's definitely better than the one in the article.
Why does CSS work with fake tags?
But still available some 4 letter-digit combinations
Interestingly enough, stenography was already being decried pre 9/11 as a tool used by terrorists [1]:

>"Uncrackable encryption is allowing terrorists — Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaida and others — to communicate about their criminal intentions without fear of outside intrusion," FBI Director Louis Freeh said last March during closed-door testimony on terrorism before a Senate panel. "They're thwarting the efforts of law enforcement to detect, prevent and investigate illegal activities."

So law enforcement is fine with encryption so long as it's crackable...

[1]http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2001-02-05-binladen...
The Bay Area at night, from the International Space Station
That's one of the very few exceptions. I don't think any words in English end in -tk, and few end in -t[vowel][k-sound].
Good marketing and advertising can cover up a bad product. A prime example is GoDaddy.

When their product is not growing like it should, Silicon Valley startups always hire more engineers to add more features. Oftentimes, the product is good enough they just need put in more marketing efforts.

It almost feels like marketers and business dev people are second rate employees compare to engineers when their job is could be more important after the initial launch.
Software engineers have an unfortunate tendency to accumulate technical debt and then run away from paying it. I've seen this way, way more often and with far worse overall cost than any kind of perfectionism. The dichotomy between quality and speed of development is often an illusion anyway.
Very good to know. At first I was irritated at having to shell out for another upgrade less than a year after 12, but it sounds like this is a worthy update.
Just don't forget that the official stance is that a fresh install is preferred to an upgrade for RHEL/CentOS. I'm sure for your purposes it's fine, but just a heads up.

(I manage a handful of CentOS boxen and have found this out the hard way.)
I have huge technical respect for Mr. Hillegass (bought and read several of his books). I also respect the crux of this post, which for me was the following sentence:

"Being smart and hard-working got me to seven employees. Luck took me the rest of the way."

The funny thing is that I don't want to be an entrepreneur for the money. I'm also not interested in the hockey stick. I wonder if the odds are better if one is just aiming for a lifestyle business.
Please share with everyone and help Ukrainians get rid of this Russian rule
Some people may have valid personal reasons for not wanting to make their charitable donations public. To make a blanket statement that this is "bullshit" is, in a word, bullshit.
This comment needs to be stressed. Altman's article simply doesn't make it clear enough that he's excluding companies such as Time Warner.

Military contractors are a whole other issue, of course.
In case people are interested, this website is using Telescope (http://telesc.pe/)
This one number explains how China is taking over the world
With regards to the future of Scala, the problem is that Scala isn't even the incumbent of being "the next Java". Java (8) seems to be the next Java. Scala is already quite old to be so far behind, and there are several alternatives to Scala that don't suffer from Scala's shortcomings. My take on Scala is that it's a very interesting language that has taught us a lot; time and time again, when faced with the choice, it has taken the research-oriented route rather than the developer-oriented route, to its detriment; while gaining strides, it has failed to capture the hearts and minds of enough developers; there are languages that have learned from Scala's mistakes, are more developer oriented, and are more suited for widespread adoption.

As to the few constraints, keep in mind that my point is that those constraints are or at least directly lead to benefits. So few constraints mean few of the benefits. Scala mostly enjoys the "few lines of code" benefit that Ruby developers like, but not the more important benefits of a solid, well-considered, easy-to-maintain language.
VPN.sh - £1/year VPN in 17 worldwide locations
So intrinsic value is a myth. Now we are getting philosophical.
I'm not seeing the screencast icon. (chrome 32/ubuntu desktop, chrome 31/android 4.1)
Unfortunately upgrading between major releases on CentOS/RHEL is very problematic and it's advised to do reinstall (!). Where on deb based distros it's just dist-upgrade. Recently I've tried CentOS on my work laptop, and managing software with yum is just plainly broken compared to apt. Multilib problems, excluding rpmforge repo conflicting with epel, etc, etc. For example I didn't find the way to compile qtlandcarte, it was just impossible to find required packages. Apt I must say is ages ahead yum. Even using nix for additional packages didn't solve all problems. But on the other hand I use CentOS on dev/test/QA servers for RHEL compatibility and I'm very happy with it.
I understand the idea of everything having subjective value but I believe people actually mean 'utility' when they claim bitcoin has no 'intrinsic value.'

In response to this, I think of the service provided by bitpay.com. They offer merchants the ability to accept payment in dollars (or many other currencies) on their website/app and receive the payments in dollars (or other currency). There is a middle step where bitcoins are bought and sold. There are some benefits to the merchant as versus 'traditional' online payment methods ie. better security and "cash-like" online purchases. It is abstract, but I believe that this example illustrates utility that bitcoins (or other crypto-currencies) provide.
Agreed. All the companies @pak mentioned have matured past the rapid growth stage.
This gives a strange combination of nostalgia for 80s tech with excitement about the future.
Another broken premise is his implication that in order to be "a great company", a company needs to be a "really big" company.
Apple is known for rejecting apps that mimic the functionality of the website (even the mobile version)

"We should make an app because if we don't Apple might reject the app we didn't make"?

The lead developer is probably more comfortable using Obj-C than web technologies

That is a terrible, awful, no good reason to restrict your target market. If a web site is worth making then it's worth making. Any lead developer worth giving even 1% of equity should be able to adapt to that. If you can do Objective C you can do the web.

The business is designed specifically for mobile users

If it's iOS only then the business is designed for a specific subset of mobile users. That's fine, but let's be clear. A responsive web site is also 'designed for mobile users'.
I don't see how it would be terribly difficult to undetectably (without key) hide a few bytes of data in the least significant bits of a .jpg.

There are likely trillions of images available on the Internet. I would imagine less than 0.001% of them have a hidden message. This increases the "haystack" so drastically for the NSA that, even if 100x as many people started using it, it's still a big-ass haystack.
Very interesting, often a source of insights into what's really going on.

Plus, he's rarely wrong
Wikipedia includes a table of this data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS

*. RHEL 6.0 to CentOS 6.0: 242 Days
*. RHEL 6.1 to CentOS 6.1: 204 Days
*. RHEL 6.2 to CentOS 6.2: 14 Days
*. RHEL 6.3 to CentOS 6.3: 18 Days
*. RHEL 6.4 to CentOS 6.4: 15 Days
*. RHEL 6.5 to CentOS 6.5: 10 Days
Python Web Applications With Flask - Part II
In fairness to C++, that rule mostly has effects where it silently does the right thing even if you don't know the rule rather than breaking things. It's just kind of surprising when it fixes code that looks broken.
Part of the reason for the change was likely to allow better optimizations of the strings. The new strings are basically equivalent to arrays and might be optimized as such; even without that they certainly don't need an offset nor length field anymore since the underlying array can provide that.

If you conditionally used one implementation or the other you'd lose the optimization opportunity. You could alternatively make string non-final; but then your method resolution is more expensive and that would really be a pretty big change in any case.

I think java made the right choice here since its trivial to wrap string in another structure whenever you need a fast substring, it's just that that custom string won't be passable to lots of other API's which makes it a potentially nasty surprise for existing codebases.
Google is building Chrome apps support for Android and iOS
The consensus in the infosec community seems to be that most (real) Islamic terrorists haven't been using email or cellphones since ~2003. So any mass-surveillance/SIGINT sales pitch about catching terrorists is mostly bullshit. If they do catch anyone, they are likely not the type of people who could have accomplished anything. It seems to be much more useful for catching other nation-state intelligence spies at work or catching aloof criminals.
> You forget these huge companies were once small upstarts. As upstarts, their growth was propelled by buyers recommending the product to other buyers. (You can substitute users for buyers here if it is an app). So his point is valid.

That's pretty forced.

There are plenty of ways for companies to grow, and word-of-mouth is just one of them. For example, a company can grow by getting a military contract, thus being infused with cash and lots of credibility. You don't get a government contract because Sally told Jim at the DoD about how great you are.

Edit: I noticed many of the comments that share my sentiment are being downvoted. Why?
MongoDB Facts: 80000+ inserts/second on commodity hardware
UN black lists: Illegal now in ECHR Member States
I've been here over 4 years. And I certainly appreciate good coders, and there are times when they do make a difference. e.g. Bill Atkinson...

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_O...

However, what was really important is that Bill helped to make the Macintosh great. However, I don't think people will be studying his 68000 assembler in the future like a great math formula or a great painting. We are talking about him because of the results of his work.
You cannot become a monopoly without having a better product at one point, unless you are friends with a dictator.
All I was saying is that is possible to actually have an informed opinion about this other than to rely on whatever you think you might have picked up from your own personal life experiences.
Obama's uncle no longer under threat of deportation, gets residency
Here's another fun steganographic tool: http://www.spammimic.com

Hide messages in SPAM Text:

Dear Decision maker , We know you are interested in
receiving amazing intelligence . This is a one time
mailing there is no need to request removal if you
won't want any more . This mail is being sent in compliance
with Senate bill 1625 ; Title 4 ; Section 302 . THIS
IS NOT MULTI-LEVEL MARKETING ! Why work for somebody
else when you can become rich as few as 33 days . Have
you ever noticed people love convenience and more people
than ever are surfing the web ! Well, now is your chance
to capitalize on this ! WE will help YOU decrease perceived
waiting time by 190% and increase customer response
by 150% . You can begin at absolutely no cost to you
. But don't believe us . Ms Ames of Washington tried
us and says "I was skeptical but it worked for me"
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and you get half off . God Bless !
Cable absolutely became huge as a result of word of mouth. It's been a mature business for 25 years so you may not be old enough to remember, but when it started people were pretty excited about 50 clear channels instead of 2 staticky ones. They told their friends and invited them over to watch shows they otherwise couldn't get.

Boeing became huge in the 1920s and 30s. I imagine pilots talked to each other a lot about what planes they liked flying, and they could not have succeeded if those conversations didn't favor them.
Your 'open sourced' link on https://www.bitrated.com/security.html goes to https://www.bitrated.com/TODO instead of https://github.com/shesek/bitrated
The Sultan's Wine Bottles
It's true that many common forms of steganography (such as hiding information in the alpha channels of a given image) are easily detectable, and analyzers already exist, but in some aspects steganalysis is somewhat of an oxymoron, since the entire point of steganography is to conceal the fact that hidden information even exists in the first place.

I'm not sure exactly how you'd define a steganographic protocol. It's not quite as straightforward as cryptography, in fact it's yet again oxymoronic. Steganography (at least ideally) works somewhat like an archetypal spy's codebook. It sounds like everyday conversation to you, unless you're meant to know it's not, and that there's a hidden meaning. If you catch something off-guard, then the stego has failed.
I'm curious if there was actually (implicit) word of mouth between businesses. I don't think of Cisco being good because of their marketing, I think of Cisco because I see their successes within other companies.
Most steganography is trivially easy to detect.

Steganography that is implemented correctly then requires reasonable amounts of cover text, and small amounts of hidden text.

NSA fucking loves steganography because most of it is a toy implementation where someone hides text in the LSB of the bytes of a gif or jpeg. The ratio of cover:hidden text is terrible. And the implementer forgot to mention that it's just a toy and not to be used seriously.

The number of decently implemented steganography systems is small.
I sort of agree. I'd much rather see tools to help business users/analysts traverse more complex types of data structures such as NoSQL DBs
Do you know someone who actually managed to live like this for extended periods? I would be interested to hear.
A more realistic title, "Here's One of Many Ways a Some Companies can Grow, or Not", probably wouldn't have made the front page.

This is a few paragraphs mentioning a fairly obvious point about growing companies, but trying too hard to seem groundbreaking.
Fake insurance exchange site put up by (California) Assembly Republican Caucus
One of my favorite things about the Spotify service is music discovery. In my experience I've found that they do a pretty decent job of helping to show me new bands based on my current preferences and listening habits, as well as those of my friends. If that continues to improve, I think they will also be able to do a much better job of helping smaller bands get additional exposure and therefore royalties.
But you wouldn't have to track down performance issues in your code if it never was slow ;)
Hmm, you're probably right that the other poster meant his disparaging remark about code quality literally. I also enjoy writing great code for the sake of it (artisanship), but from a business perspective bad, insecure, unreliable code typically won't hold you back much. Treating your employees badly is often good for business too. I'd much rather live in a world where great products win and doing the right thing matters, but we don't.

I also agree that the tone of the community has shifted a lot in the past years. Still, given how much HN has grown the community has survived surprisingly well. It's a bit meaner and nit-pickier than it used to be, though.
Generally the handshake was audible so that you could tell if someone was already on the phone when you started connecting, or if someone answered the phone instead of a computer.
I wouldn't exactly hold up QR codes as a successful technology either, in the US at least.
Ask HN: What sites do you contribute to the most, besides HN/Twitter/FB?
We are almost finished building a tool (Thoughtly) that quantifies people's written contributions online, so people can display their life experience in a broader context. We want to make sure our first version accounts for platforms and data sources that users find the most valuable. Do you publish academic papers to sites like Mendeley? Are you an active Redditor? Stackoverflow? What are your go to sites to engage in intellectual dialogue, besides HN (and social platforms like Twitter/FB)? With so many data sources and API's to choose from, we want to make sure we account for what people care most about! Thanks. http://thoughtly.co
I guess eventually the market will figure it out. Delivery drivers will make more than programmers and all will be good again :p

Anyhoo ... the idea seems cool.
Very interesting. This could be a simple low-tech alternative to Facebook groups and such, given that not everybody has a Facebook account.

Conversely not everyone has a Gmail account either. Do people who join a zeromailer mailing list need to sign up to Google to use the service? That would make it less useful.
Launch code for US nukes was 00000000 for 20 years
Good Luck SpaceX
At some ratio of hidden data to visible data, I'm sure it can be undetectable. But transmitting reasonable amounts of data leaves a trace using LSB algorithms. Here's one paper. It shows the LSB part of the image, which leaves an obvious looking impression.

http://rahuldotgarg.appspot.com/data/steg.pdf
I see you're implementing an idea from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts ;)

What are your fees currently (as the site operator)? I've only found ...

"Fees: For its services, Bitrated may charge fees, as it sets forth from time to time. Such fees may be deducted in source from any transaction, or be paid separately."
I suppose you are referring to devices like the new Nexus 7 that come with Chrome pre-installed. It doesn't have android's native browser and as far as I know it's the only device that ships with Chrome.