skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The site seems designed to enable lazy developers to scrape by without learning how to do things properly. There are developers out there who, when faced with a problem, don't bother debugging, don't bother looking at the documentation, don't bother searching Google for the error message, but just post a question on Stack Overflow and wait for somebody to solve their problem for them.

I've seen questions where you can literally copy and paste the question into Google, look at the first result to find an authoritative source, and copy sample code to solve the problem. Yet that was apparently too difficult for the person asking on Stack Overflow, and if anybody points out they should be doing this, they get their comment removed.

I've answered a lot of questions where somebody is genuinely stuck on a difficult problem and it's taken serious effort to figure out what's going on. I've also answered questions where the answer is only a quick Google search away. The former get a couple of votes up. The latter get hundreds of votes up.

This is not a healthy addition to the software development community. This is enabling developers with a vitally important gap in their skills to avoid becoming competent.
You place an NSA bug in our servers and call it an inconvenience?
I would be interested in the stats of 'successful' startup investments (for YC and otherwise), how many of those technical founders actually started programming at age ~13 (vs 17 or 18).

Would also be interested in seeing what the relative success/failures of investments with startup founders at 23 w/ 10 years experience (started programming in teams), vs 28 (who started programming at 18).
Definitely a good analogy, but I think your conclusion is wrong (although I do still think having a non tech founder is not ideal). If you only want to sell horses then not knowing about horses is going to be a tough time. Same with trying to sell some kind of programming tool or something. However, as soon as you start to do something involving horses and not just selling them, it opens up a bit more.

Instead of just selling horses, you can make a startup that makes it easier for for people who want to ride horses but can't to ride them. You could have a stable with restaurant to let people watch others ride them, etc. Simply because you don't know about horses is not the problem, because the problem is finding ways to bring people to horses based on the public's opinion of horses. Your horses don't need to be looked after by the world's most knowlegable horse lover, just someone who sort of knows horses and is willing to learn will hopefully keep your horses in good enough condition until you can hire more horse caretakers.

This analogy works very well for tech startups too. You don't necessarily have to know how to make the website, it can be enough to know how to create something around the website (physical deliveries, or whatever) and just get some bare-bones barely functional web presence that you improve when you get traction and funding.
Perhaps it is mainstream media but that university student who thinks today's Russia is a communist country is taking the cake.
Even if it does, it still won't help. Crypto in the browser is like playing soccer in a minefield: either you don't move or you lose a leg. Either way, your game is hosed.

The issues are, to put it mildly, insurmountable. The environment is simply too toxic to trust. Between standard Web security flaws, timing attacks (what happens when one context can detect the timing of another? Remember, the code is slow, so your resolution doesn't have to be good), inadequate random number generators, an inability to securely manage memory (don't want key materials floating around), etc.

I'd rather trust Bob's Discount Car And Certificate Authority than JS crypto.
I know nothing on the subject, but would it be possibly for Disney (or any other creator for that matter) to start a Mickey Mouse company, with Mickey as the logo and mascot, that sells Mickey Mouse paraphernalia and protect the characters as a trademark?
I believe the statistic hiliting the relatively few deaths from terrorism is valid, and supports my contention is that the USA probably spends an order of magnitude too much fighting terrorism. It is unclear, but I think it is possible that programs like global NSA hoovering and drone attacks in other countries might put us in more danger of terrorist acts.

BTW, I never stated that terrorism doesn't exist.
I may be old, but this just reminds me of Larry Wall's Perl 6 and in my opinion Python 3 should have been a hobby project / incubator for changes that could be introduced to Python 2 eventually.
It doesn't matter how silly you think it is. You don't create a system that reinforces bad behavior and then say "oh, but you should magically turn off your human nature and do the opposite of the what the system teaches you to do". Systems need to be designed to reinforce good behavior, otherwise we get reddit and HN and wikipedia and SO.
Can I install cyanogenrod? I'd probably need some sort of adapter to connect my car to my computer.

But then, will police start checking cars for Android-modding?

Also, I am willing to void my warranty, but not my car insurance.
Thanks! Checking it out.
Here in Sweden one just goes to the voting place(in ones district) shows their ID and one gets checked of the list.

The List is just a list of every one that lives in the area.
Considering the Future of Internet Governance: Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn
There Are Almost No Rational Numbers
Not to discount your point about retail availability, but this appears to use the M.2 (NGFF) format, which has been widely praised (outside of any Apple context) as an industry-standard approach to flash memory.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6293/ngff-ssds-putting-an-end-...

The M.2 form-factor is available for both SATA and PCIe cards. PCIe versions are becoming the new normal, due to the speed increases - http://www.tested.com/tech/pcs/456464-why-ssds-are-transitio...
$100k DJ: How I Turned My DJ Hobby Into A Six Figure Business
It's just a maxim, it doesn't apply in every case. I think the motivating example is Einstein's fervent denial of entanglement in quantum physics. In other words, he's saying the tendency of scientists as they get older is to be more resistant to new ideas.

Whether that's true or not in general, is debatable. But it wasn't intended as an ironclad law in the first place, just a tendency
I agree with that. Whenever I use the site, the 'description' from "Whose Line is it Anyway?" plays in my head.[0] However, it's the same as any website where there is a "karma" system (like this one for instance ;) ). It feel good getting points, it feels bad losing points. It feels good knowing you have tons, and are in the "Top x% of answerers" or whatever.

Do I think that's necessarily the right way to get people to come to your site and answer programming questions? Maybe not (no, I don't really), but it certainly does keep people coming back to the site. That and the fact that it's probably the biggest answer repository on the net.

Oh, and here's an upvote for you to show no hard feelings. I believe your general statement is correct, I'm just not sure that's what the author is going for.

[0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KAGwNtI26w
I've been hearing about the end of Moore's law ever since I was in college (late 80's). There are indeed some hard limits for Silicon, but there is still a lot of space for other materials, major improvements in interconnects and better software.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ Salary To Get 50% Bump To $3M In 2014
The iPhone compromise, if such exists, further endangers dissidents in oppressive countries

I've implicitly acknowledged this point.
It's actually difficult to explicitly put your work in the public domain. There are no well-worn routes to doing so.
Thanks for sharing this! Very interesting.
I at least did not intend to agree ;-) - my point is that cryptographic communication tools are kindof useless for activists unless they are used by a large number of people in general, both because otherwise they are isolated and can not actually communicate with anyone using the system (except for a few other activists), and because using the tool would make them stick out, which is why they are also indirectly somewhat useless for the general public, because part of the function of a secure cryptographic communication tool is to give the general public the benefits of the activism by making the general public help in hiding the activists. So, I guess my point kindof is that "crypto for <x>" doesn't actually work because using it marks you as <x> - secure crypto has to be used by everybody in order to provide protection to those who need it the most.

As for the fact that people who do risky things need to be a bit more cautious anyway: Well, yes, but that does not mean that they would not benefit if everyone knew which crypto tools are secure and how to use them, and in contrast to most of physical security, there really is not that much need to distinguish between "professional" and "end customer" tools - proofing your vault against bombs might be a bit more expensive than proofing it against a burglar, but secure cryptography does not need more expensive computers or anything like that.

And also no clue how you to quote here ... ;)
Agreed. Free/Open OS'es changed the world. Linux happened to be the most popular one.
Innovation was replaced by financial engineering, mergers and acquisitions, and evasion of regulations.

Wait, this is new?
Well certainly, and littering in America was supposedly endemic before the anti-littering campaigns of the 1960s with stiff penalties were instituted.

That is my frustration - that short-sighted individuals don't realize how hard fought and won many of the things they take for granted are.
Good read, do you have any examples on how to use this in a production application?
“If people are wondering, Bethesda has the rights to these games starting Jan 1 2014. Which is why GOG having them for free was great. So many people that may have purchased them from Beth got them for free before then.”
Unfortunately, after the recent revelations this is how I feel about computers in general :)
The environmentalists got me when I was young. The awareness never left even if it only amounts to taking out the recycling.

Some of my favorite places as a child are still my favorite today - the CA Academy of Sciences and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Those two institutions alone probably have changed Bay Area perceptions of the environment.

China should set up institutions like that, both for research and public awareness. There is so much biodiversity in China that we rarely hear about [0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_giant_salamander
Thanks, I'm obviously not very knowledgable about guns. But the word choice sure doesn't change the political reality in the US about any sort of gun control being totally untenable.
We act like and have the same compliance standards as a bank - so we don't have "unrestricted access" to your bank account anymore than someone you give a check to does. Yes, that person now has your bank account and routing number (because it's printed on the bottom of every check you've ever given anyone), but they only can legally do what you authorized them to do: cash that check for that amount. We're the same way.

The only additional thing you give us is temporary access to some other information in case you want to transfer it (name, address, etc) - but we don't store it. We also have access to your payment history temporarily to ensure that you're likely to

1. Be who you say you are (fraud protection)
2. Have the money to make the payment.

But both of those things are just temporary - we don't and can't store it and we don't and can't use it for anything other than explicitly what it's for.

Side note: government gets a lot of hate in the Tech community, but this is a place where regulation is fantastic. Since we have to be Regulation E compliant, even if someone (investors, partners, etc.) wanted us to use this access for bad purposes, we can't! You're protected and therefore we're protected. As the founders of this company, we wouldn't WANT to nor would we ever do anything with your information, but it's fantastic not to be under any pressure to do so.
As of today, it is not available in Spain.
The biggest problem with this convention is that new & anonymous users cannot comment, so the only option they have is to edit the post. These then get rejected out of hand and useful contributions disappear. This is doubly wasteful since this behaviour often discourages people from every contributing again.
Yep. The way I used to explain it to my students was this:

Distributing "Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare": not plagiarism or copyright violation.

Distributing "Romeo and Juliet by Turing Machine": plagiarism, but not copyright violation.

Distributing "The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien": Copyright violation, but not plagiarism.

Distributing "The Lord of the Rings by Turing Machine": both plagiarism and copyright violation.
I think most of you are missing the point of the article. He targets SO specifically in this article but really, it can be applied to almost any community on the Internet. He mentions Wikipedia specifically but I've seen the same thing repeated over and over on forums, games, and even the IETF for over a decade.

The question is: Is there a way to fix this?
Stop Chopping Yourself to Pieces
Why would you apply for something when you've determined that you're not going to accept even if you get in? Also, it seems irrational to spend time completing a form when you know there's a very small chance you'd be accepted and even if you were you would decline it? If the chances were very high, say 80%, you could say "Well, I have no intention now but I'll apply anyways just in case circumstances change and I do want to go" You can't even rationalize wasting time on a form when you know there's a small chance you even get the option of changing your mind.

(just to get more tangled the fact that she was accepted into a well known accelerator probably means she's not in the 'so low" category of acceptance)
This Moore's Law coming to an end meme reminds me of Voyager 1 leaving the solar system. You could just replace the text in the xkcd and it would be just as funny: http://xkcd.com/1189/
I'm using them in a side project, it's on Github:
https://github.com/m1ck3y/inspires/blob/master/app/client/vi...
I didn't say that anything had been burned. I said that rather than have it go into the public domain, publishers would rather it be burned, because it competes with their catalog.
I can't really fault Disney for this. Mickey Mouse is one of the most recognizable symbols/brands on earth. The difference between Disney and McDonalds and Coca Cola is that there isn't an expectation we all get unfettered access to use the Golden Arches or the Coke logo. Disney is still making new IP with Mickey Mouse; why should they be expected to give up their rights to their most recognizable character that they're still making things for?

So I'd say this isn't so much the result of Disney, as it is the result of bad legislation and possibly outdated expectations about intellectual property that hasn't been updated to reflect reality.
"Temporary" means "while you're making the payment". Once that's done, it's gone. It's never stored outside of the memory, so we couldn't keep it longer if we wanted to.
If you have moral values, you simply should not make software for music industry at all.
Killing of a living active game is surely bad PR, no? Badwill ruins future sales too.
Not in combination with an 'average income' graph.

It would be valid if it were plotted on its own or in combination with, for example, summed marginal income (the total amount of dollars those graduates made more thanks to their education == what the investment older students made brought society). Of course, that is hard/impossible to quantify and it, ideally, should be done per cohort (hard to do, as we don't even know what graduates from 2010 will make 5 years after graduation), but it would be a telling graph, I think.

Another way to show the issue in a honest way would be to estimate the number of years it takes graduates to pay back their loans. Again, hard to estimate (a student with $40,000 in income probably _could_ pay back a $20,000 debt in a year, but is it reasonable to expect that?)

And, of course, it would probably be very useful to see the combined distribution of (debt,income) pairs. If all students have a debt of 20k, and income of 40k, there is little to worry about. It is more likely, however, that both debts and incomes show large variations, and are only poorly correlated. The data set will both contain that dropout with a company worth millions, a trained neurosurgeon with 100+ k in debt that gets into an accident that invalidates his/her hand just before (s)he has the money to pay for insurance, and a talented, but a bit slow art student with limited commercial talent.
a. Need there be a cause for blame, at all?

b. I know a certain number of woman who were 13 roughly 10 years ago. None is now working in programming, or that I know looking to start a company. Several are in the technically demanding field of architecture. One is an RN, which requires a good deal of intelligence. All seem reasonably happy with their choices.

c. For it may be hard to see in the world of HN, but programming, let alone programming as founder of a startup, is not the be-all and end-all of vocations.
Here's Jobs touting the accessibility of the 1999 PowerMac G3's internals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=pH-...
Lessons Learned Starting Two Software Products (Our 2013 Fails)
No, new and anonymous users do have another option, they can post their own answer.

That's irrelevant anyway, since that's not what happened here. The author of the post tried to edit his own answer with a second account. He should have just used his original account and this would have never happened.
The money is what matters politically. Interestingly in this case, while that's one of the most sickening aspects of US politics these days (the extreme dominance of money), it's also the one we can count on here. Enough damage - which seems to be a matter of time now - and a lot more companies will stand up and 'force' their politicians to dismantle the NSA's programs.

Either that or the military industrial complex has reached a point of scale where it's basically going to end up destroying itself by bleeding out the economy and the tax dollars required to fund such a massive beast.

I'd argue that there's no scenario in which the military industrial complex survives intact going forward, short of WW3. That's particularly fitting timing wise, as America has reached all sorts of crossroads in its path forward (huge generation changing issues on debt, education, standards of living, war, jobs).

edit:

Another thought - it's also going to self-cripple the military by eroding the US technology sector (capital seeds tech companies in other countries instead of the US as a response, so more technology is created outside the US in the future, in a downward spiral, potentially depriving the NSA and military of all sorts of technology and access). The relative US technology lead has been a massive competitive advantage for the military for a century.
I thought it was clear that I think it belongs on a list of books that give a better treatment of codes, codebreaking and intelligence history than "Cryptonomicon" (as parent's list claim to be).

As for being lazy, I'm not about to click through ten [edit six] links on my cell phone just to see what title hides behind the links; I appreciate that parent made a list of (presumably) relevant books -- I would have appreciated it more if he or she listed the actual book titles/authors as well.

As it was; I felt it made sense to recommend Singh's book as it is very good and relevant -- and that it wouldn't contribute much to the discussion to overtly critize parent for being inconveniently (for me) lazy.

But since you bring it up; personally I think it is good netiquette to prefix links with a meaningful title when not contained in the url, when posting in a mostly-plain-text medium. The title and author (optionally year) is relevant information -- an amazon link is trivially discoverable from that (as is a hit in your local library db) -- but the amazon link by itself isn't useful without leaving the context of the discussion. And opening ten tabs on a desktop browser on a reasonable fast connection is certainly not an insourmountable effort -- but is rather inconvenient on a cell phone (For all I know that might be why parent choose to list just the links -- mobile cut'n'paste between tabs is a pretty miserable).
Testing a new hypothesis after 18 months that resulted in 5 new paying customers AND an exciting new direction for our startup.
Nobody owns the air but we all like to avoid lung disease and death.
The kids aren't the purchasers of the majority of entertainment products. If the kids had a choice between free River Kwai, and $12 modern version of 3:10 to Yuma (or something funner), the $12 would become $2 in no time.
The suggestion of using TRIM does not (in all cases) protect against accidental data visibility to the "next random guy", it doesn't even protect from some other current random guy as your container could have moved and left another user with access as their new container got created over the space you used to occupy - so unless you have another method that hasn't been discussed yet there isn't a point in between: you protect yourself from both or you protect yourself from neither.

If you need to be sure your instructions to wipe data do protect you from that random other guy then you either need to use good encryption (it doesn't have to be full volume encryption but once you get to the point of caring it is probably easier to go the whole hog than do it piecemeal) or you need to have dedicated physical storage (something a VPS provider generally doesn't offer.

Of course the provider could instigate full data wiping for all relevant operations, but that imposes I/O load that will affect all other users of the given host machine(s) unnecessarily (I say "unnecessarily" because most won't care as their bulk data is not sensitive and they've invalidated associated things like SSH keys anyway, the host will take the attitude that if your data is sensitive you need to take measures to protect it).
The migration is so difficult that you might as well migrate to a different language and solve the speed and memory usage issues while you're at it.
First, I agree 100% with what you note above.

And furthermore, showing the salary of college grads in isolation is useless. You need to show the delta between those with vs those w/o college degrees. If the salary of those without college degrees is falling more than those with college degrees then it still may be a prudent financial decision.

It would also be interesting to see this broken down by school. For example, I suspect that top tier public schools end up looking a lot better than bottom tier private schools.
Considered Harmful considered harmful, please use the active voice.
Blizzard actively shuts down people that reverse engineer their servers[0].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd