skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The study in question might be this one by Carol Dweck et al:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/08/16/1313475110.abst...

or http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/11/1686.short

A theory I call demands theory is a little more nuanced. Willpower is a limited resource that gets exercised whenever we are overcoming psychological resistance to fulfill demands. What Carol Dweck demonstrated in my view is that its quite easy to frame context differently so that there is less psychological resistance toward doing a task. This means you won't have to exert your limited willpower resources.

To give an example, if you believe something will be fun, you will have less mental resistance toward the activities, so you will last longer. If you feel like something will be hard and unpleasurable, most people won't last as long as they use up more willpower to continue. The trick then is how can people adjust their mental orientation toward their day to day activities in such a way that their will power is maximized.

Or in 3 words: work as play.
I can't understand why the American people are not protesting drone use.

Given everything learned about US govt surveillance and their obvious intentions is it not absolutely crazy to let this happen?
By your own admission, all the existing error models are janky.

I'd think that should be a reason to encourage people who are trying new things in an effort to come up with one that works well, not a reason to offhandedly poo-poo anyone who isn't satisfied with the acknowledgedly crummy status quo.
> Contrast this with Microsoft, where I am finding very old examples designed for Windows XP that still run today.

xp? Up until a couple years ago when I switched to 64bit windows (first computer I had with more than 4gm ram) I could still run win3.1 and dos programs in (32-bit) windows 7. Including dos programs designed for the very original ibm pc (1981!).

Even today with 64bit windows I can still run most windows 95 programs.
It's also somewhat insidious. I was watching my local morning news show when the anchors cut to a segment featuring a "tech reporter in Washington D.C." who was going to give advice about buying tech gifts for the holiday season. Laid out on the table were a bunch of Microsoft products and the reporter proceeded to spew a hit piece aimed squarely at Chromebooks. Never was there any indication that it was a sponsored story but it was clearly a Microsoft backed segment. It was truly bizarre. I don't know how often companies pay news shows to pimp their stuff but I've never seen anything that blatant before.
That sounds like empty rhetoric to me. Is there actually any evidence for the manned space program being "the force that excites people to want to become scientists in the first place"? I am skeptical.

Even if true, there are likely far more cost-effective ways of generating the same interest, either with robots or other educational programs. I don't see why a robotic program can't be inspirational. And anyway we don't have any shortage of scientists right now.
Ok, I was clearly wrong about no one bombing a bus. However, my main point is still true; there are countless places where there are lots of people in confined spaces that are vulnerable to a bomb. We are always vulnerable to harm from someone who wants to hurt us, and there is very little we can do to make us invulnerable to random violence. Thankfully, the risk of dying from random violence is extremely low, near the bottom of the list of things that can kill us. We waste a lot of resources and time trying to prevent someone from harming us on an airplane when it is no more or less vulnerable than anywhere else.
If all your code is dealing with binary data, why the heck are you using strings for it? There's a bytes type there for a reason, which doesn't deal with encodings, and you won't accidentally try and treat a blob like a string.
It's a fundamental problem with browser crypto. The attack surface of a crypto routine running in a webpage is really large. There are a lot of places where information could leak in or out, such as timing attacks. If an XSS attack on a webpage succeeds, then a large number of different attack opportunities could exist on browser crypto loaded from that page. Users might also have browser extensions which have the ability to inject into or steal from the web page. The number of things to worry about inside a browser is just way too high to really even consider using it to secure anything. The crypto would have to be built in to the browser at the very least.
Oh, yeah. And the first character after the first * wasn't whitespace, it was another *, so HN ate them both and inserted an italicized zero length string.
Jacob Applebaum's 30C3 Talk about the recent NSA Revelations
> I hope Microsoft goes after Google even more.

Same here! If you look at the sales numbers for the past year, Microsoft is doing nothing but going 'after' Google. Keep it up, guys.
I can see this side of it as well. I tend to come from the camp that if you don't release your code as open-source, you can't really call yourself secure. If you're 100% open-source, distributing a desktop/mobile app will have enough transparency to determine "is it going to steal my CC numbers?"

There's also a barrier to entry to get a user to install anything. Mobile is different, but in the desktop world, if I told my users to download the "CNN desktop app!" they'd roll their eyes because why would anyone install some trashy malware-ridden program when they can just look at the website, for free, and as you put it, much safer? From my perspective, the only reason to distribute a "secure" desktop app version of your webapp is if you don't have a webapp to begin with because it's not secure to do so. So the desktop app would be an open-source complement to the browser extensions your secure app uses.
I apologize. I took it on faith that when The Information said they were running a "complete interview" with you, that it was in fact both complete and an actual interview. It seems very clear how this piece misrepresented you; the entire elided question you cite is particularly damning. I retain some of my misgivings (which have much more to do with the industry than with YC), but the "interview" clearly wasn't a good lens through which to consider them. I was nevertheless ready to do that too quickly, so the fault is as much mine as the magazine's.
Thanks for the explanation so I didn't look silly :). I agree with your main point - it's worth it if he gets to develop his skills faster.
I found the ad hilarious. Google is an ad company. A brilliant ad company, but still an ad company. As far as I know, this is something that is not on most consumer's minds.

The scroogled ads are pretty good for microsoft standards.

My concern is less with the data collection, and more with the lack of native application support. If it looks like a laptop, consumers like my parents will think they found the best deal in the world when they come across it. I have talked both of them out of buying one because it won't run the work applications they need (they wanted to use it to replace their aging laptops). If it was a tablet, I'd have no problem with it. Consumers are used to the idea of tablets as toys (and don't expect them to run office and their workplace's custom windows apps).

As a programmer, I really don't want another platform to write native apps for; there are so many already. I'll learn it if they get enough market penetration. I don't know enough about the native APIs for the chromebook; how different is it to write a chromebook app than an android one? Is it web only? Are you really cut off from any functionality if you aren't around wifi?
Did you read the article?

It provides an idea for a tamper-evident seal. Nothing more.
Transparency Regarding Data Security | DigitalOcean
Look at the history of hijackings in the US http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings.
I was surprised to see that over time, the number of hijackings has been fairly flat through the 90s and the 00s, while there was a considerable drop from the high level of the 70s and 80s.

I don't think anybody is suggesting getting rid of airport security all together, but rather that we be smart about it. The current system is too invasive and annoying without providing any more protection than the old system.
s/he-3/something else then/

I highly doubt there is any reason to be on the Moon right now than preparation for total industrial exploitation. It may be that the Chinese space program is the only thing that will get China de-polluted.
A Uniﬁed Theory of Garbage Collection
To me, it's interesting that after all this time and with the prevalence of languages that rely heavily on garbage collection, garbage collectors still don't seem to scale to large heaps.

Large heaps mean long pauses when doing the "mark" phase of the generation holding most of the objects. That seems like a big problem that will increase as memory sizes increase.

Maybe the way I'm looking at it is too simplistic and there are better methods now. But even in Java, which has had plenty of time to work these issues out, I have seen issues with long GC pauses.

My impression right now is that GCs just don't scale to large heaps. To use more memory, you need to either manage memory yourself (which not a lot of modern languages allow), or increase the number of independent heaps (by using more tasks/processes).

Please enlighten me if I'm wrong here.
Now that is fascinating. It explains a lot of the really depressing studies about how we perceive shows like The Biggest Loser and how it makes us both less sympathetic to overweight people as well as makes us perceive that exercise and health are not fun http://health.usnews.com/health-news/blogs/eat-run/2013/01/2...
I'm going to have to reflect on your answer, but on its face that makes sense. I sincerely appreciate the feedback, dude!
Doctors fight to save Schumacher
So sad. I distinctly remember how my sis and I (female) got a pair of generic brand transformers as a present back when I was 8. Dad was inspired after we watched Voltron every Saturday! Of course, my sister (being slightly girlier than me at that age) promptly used nail polish to paint its ugly-grey "shoes" because we needed to distinguish "ours" but still, what fun! It turned into a fighter plane and back and we'd spend hours playing with it.

... I mean, no, girls don't buy toys. Maybe if they didn't explicitly make it boring and discouraging for girls then they would?
Just look for the dude with glitter on his face.
I believe it's a lot easier to down a plane than to kill 180 people in a shopping mall. The latter would require much more explosive given the wide open spaces. You can bring down a plane much more easily.

Mainly, though, people feel more vulnerable in a plane, so an aircraft bombing is higher impact.
People are going to apply this tamper-evident seal and believe they are secure when it hasn't been tampered with. That's dangerous, because it assumes an adversary has no way of bypassing the seal. That's quite an assumption. And if you're not getting security guarantees, then what kind of security are you getting?
Yep, it's a personal decision to make. It would be simple for me to get a non-resident CCW permit in number of shall-issue states I visit, but I've chosen not to. That's, however, my choice based on my own circumstances. I don't think I can "objectively" decide this for others.
Well done. Your shill payment is in the post.
The products where users seem to preferentially install native apps are services like Dropbox, or video games, where there is value added by not using the "website version." Something that would be very revealing is to investigate how secure these kinds of apps are today. I find it unlikely that in the near future, native app security practices will change very much.
NSA’s ANT Division Catalog of Exploits
No. Google is a tech company. Ad is a way to sustain the company. Just like News Corp is a media company, not an ad company.
5 Tech Tools for New Year Resolutions
Pillow's first big forking action was python3 compatibility. It works, and it wasn't _that_ hard to do.
I don't think there is a "magic number" although I do think having 10 or 20 people giving you your credit card or cash is enough to get started. (e.g. Groupon sold its first deal—two pizzas for the price of one—in October 2008. Twenty Chicagoans bought in and trekked to the Motel Bar, located . . . on the first floor of Groupon's building.)

Although I will say that you might be looking more for a number like Amy Hoy's 30x500 - as 500 people at $30 = $15k MRR

Just a thought.
This is where the Ruby and Python communities fundamentally disagree. The Ruby community is great at moving fast and replacing bad things, while the Python community takes a much slower approach to the whole thing.

I wouldn't say any approach is better or worse, it has to fit your personal style. I like the Ruby approach, others love the Python approach. This means that Ruby breeds a lot of interesting stuff, but with less stability guarantees.

At the same time, Rails still builds on the ideas of Rails 1, which is an achievement in itself. So Rubyists is not totally not caring about backwards compatibility - they just tend to throw out bad ideas quickly again.

On the other hand, the quick pace allows the MRI team to build improved interpreters with a reasonable chance of quick adoption.

This is a much more fundamental difference than any snickering about the garbage collector of the main interpreter, from a users perspective.
One of the best use cases is already banned by Google - face recognition.

Is it realistic to believe that they can enforce this "ban", in the long term?
The phrase you need to google for, err, I mean bing (LOL just kidding) is "Video News Release"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_news_release

Its not new, although they've been growing in popularity for decades. I could see a stream of nothing but VNRs eventually replacing TV infotainment as we know it today.
It would not just be about saving anonymous people. It would be about the potential of saving your own life (not fighting back is a sure death, fighting back is only a possible, perhaps likely, death). It is also about saving the lives of family members or friends who might also be on the plane.

Not all fighting back scenarios involve crashing the plane into a field. In fact, now that cockpit doors are reinforced, most fighting back scenarios will end in the plane safely landing. There have already been several cases of passengers successfully fighting back before much damage was done.

tl;dr: I think fighting back is a rational response.
I wonder why pg did an interview for a site that was going to go behind an (expensive) paywall and was going to be edited. I know that "fixing journalism" is something pg would like to see[1], and (pg, sorry to put words in your mouth here) maybe he felt a for-pay site aiming for quality journalism was the answer? But it still seems weird he did this interview.

EDIT: I did read the article and know he was allegedly tricked, but my questions still stand. It was a long interview to just be a background about Jessica, and it was for a profile using the YC name to get $400 subscriptions. If they lied about the reasoning and then edited his words to say something completely different, I would have thought he'd be more outraged.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html (see #3)
San Francisco: Uber and innovation
Well, in spite of the silliness of those commercials, lately I have been creeped out when I start getting blasted by adverts from all over the web based on something I recently searched on. Often times, I'll quickly look up something / fact check what I've read in an article (most recently was "longevity insurance" annuities and reverse mortgages), and now I'm getting a whole bunch of ads aimed at older / retired people on many sites that I visit. And these ads have nothing to do with me, except that I happened to fact-check something a couple times. Kind of makes me want to re-think any of my web searches, and do them in a private browsing window.

I can't really say why this bothers me -- maybe it is because I know that their ad matching algorithm gave inaccurate results (so it grates on my OCD, maybe?), or maybe it just feels like I'm being stalked by people trying to sell me something.
If you read his essay, he states that this wasn't an "interview", the reporter was doing background for another story on Jessica. It was never intended to be an interview.
I'm impressed with both your response as well as pg's. Definitely refreshing to not see the pitchforks come out for everyone.
> Default unicode strings are obscenely annoying to me. Almost all of my code deals with binary data, parsing complex data structures, etc. The only "human readable" strings in my code are logs. Why the hell should I worry about text encoding before sending a string into a TCP socket...

If your Python 3 code is dealing with binary data, you would use byte strings and you would never have to call encode or touch UTF-8 before passing the byte string to a TCP socket.

What you're saying about Unicode scares me. If you haven't already, please read The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) before writing any libraries that I might depend on.
> Let's play a game: pretend that all of these special agreements have suddenly become invalid and the market has become deregulated. Assume you have (or can acquire) the technical expertise to challenge them. What's your business plan?

My business plan is to be Google: Install duplicate infrastructure for 80% of what the incumbent paid (per your other post), using my massive cash reserves, and charge $0 for equivalent or better service. Revenue comes from my massive ad network (which my competitors don't have), so I can sustainably run the business like this for as long as necessary to force the incumbent to fold. I now have the local monopoly, which I can use as I see fit. I might (for example) give priority to packets originating from hosts who are also customers of my ad network.

This creates a virtuous cycle for me--advertizes will only want to spend money with me, so I can upgrade my infrastructure more rapidly that the former incumbent ever could. That brings me more internet-users, which makes my ad network more valuable. Since I have a monopoly, I can also rent-seek with respect to internet access fees (though I might keep it at $0 to encourage end-uses to continue clicking on ads).

I will then repeat this process in other cities until I have a nation-wide monopoly. Despite being in blatant violation of anti-trust laws, I will continue to do this by bribing^H contributing to the election campaigns of friendly politicians.

Of course, this is cheating a little (because my business plan replaces one natural monopoly with another)--but not a lot, because you asked for my business plan to break into the current natural monopoly, not how one could sustainably obtain a competitive market. The answer to the latter question is obvious: You can't.
Please don't take this personal. You seem to be defending something you like. Note that I don't want to sling mud on ipv6 proponents (well, I would love to hear the brains behind DS lite explain a thing or two..).

No gain at all vs. ipv4 (with all its warts, forced disconnects, dynamic IPs) at home. You seem to say "but at least you DO get any address". But that's missing the point for the perspective here: German dude, online for just roughly 17-18 years. That worked. I doubt that German ISPs run out of (dynamic) addresses. On a global scale? Fair enough. So dual stack would be nice/a decent way forward. But claiming "at least you get .. something" is not quite the marketing slogan..

tunnelbroker: I will investigate that, thanks. But.. probably it's not going to help me a lot. I cannot change most configuration settings in that mandatory/ISP provided router. The one approach that might work is putting another router behind that thing, maybe.

I'm happy to read that the experience improved in the last decade. Please take a moment and consider this thread the point of view of someone that was forced to jump the gap - and found issues. I guess it is all quite easy and so much better from your point of view. But - which of us describes the majority/the demographic that need convincing?

Again, thanks for the links. It is totally unclear to me how I'll be able to use a tunnel with my native ipv6 connection (and.. why), but I'm certainly interested to learn. Just not.. while I would rather just use a working internet connection. Currently my single line to the net feels like a giant experiment or hoax at times.
Did Google open source Google Play Services when I wasn't looking?
I've seen breaking changes between Ruby 1.8.6 and 1.8.7, so I'm really suspicious of this claim. Start with which version of Ruby are breaking changes not to be expected until 3.0?
I don't understand all this excitement about the magical age of 13. Personally, I've never stopped learning--whether it's analytics, business, software development, or machine learning.

I don't think it's any harder for me to learn stuff now at 28 than it was when I was 13. If anything, it's easier, because I have a much wider baseline of knowledge that I can use to reference things. For example, I learned set theory in high school => I can apply that to relational databases today.

I do know some people, both men and women, that sort of stopped learning new stuff in their twenties, and now they're pretty much stuck. They can't keep up with technology changes (e.g., how does the router work) and they don't have a good baseline for learning new stuff. Nor the will.
The Spirit of the First Amendment
Are you still going to write about women founders? I 100% take you on your word about all of this, but that I still think a lot of the things you said were off the mark in understandable but important ways[1]. You're obviously well meaning and thoughtful and I think it would be great to read more about your thoughts, although I know you'd prefer to avoid the shitstorm that would follow (no matter how well reasoned your arguments would be)

1 - Most notably, as a gatekeeper in startup culture (<- this seems to be causing confusion: not a gatekeeper to doing a startup, but a gatekeeper to YC which can often be important in succeeding as a startup in my and many other people's opinions), it seems pretty willfully ignorant to assume that you'd know if you were biased against female founders because if you missed some you'd know. If women are a group that starts on the outside to, as a gatekeeper you'd need more than that to know if you're keeping the gates properly, since we it'd be pretty hard to argue the system as a whole isn't a boys club.
Debian Administrator's Handbook for Wheezy Released
Which makes the fact that the material was published as if it had been an interview, without any explanation of the actual circumstances, particularly bothersome IMO.