skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two quotes stand out for me:

> My friends who came closest to attaining the American Dream did it by breaking the rules on how to get there.

and

> For my friends and I who fought our way to moderate financial success, money came from transgressing society's norms. With much luck, it required doing the ambitious work everyone said you weren't ready for, then getting mocked and rejected for it, until, slowly, the wall began to crack. You could never do what you were supposed to, never stay quietly in your place.

There's something about these statements that ring very true.

Upward mobility in the USA has always been difficult for women and minorities; now it's increasingly difficult for men as well. There just aren't that many rising from the bottom, and getting to the top. Positions are more entrenched. Sources: http://business.time.com/2012/01/05/the-loss-of-upward-mobil... and http://www.pewstates.org/projects/economic-mobility-project-...

The author is identifying a response to the glass ceiling: by hacking the system and breaking the rules.
My suspension of disbelief is getting really close to breaking. Don't get me wrong, I'm fully against the entire NSA spying deal. But these "reports" just keep getting more and more outrageous. The problem is not that I don't think these things have been happening, but rather that the continuous slow leaking by news media is causing the next big reveal to be just more background noise.

We need a big, sudden, destructive reveal that causes a lot of impact. Not the slow drizzle of 'this week in civil liberties violations'. Probably too late for this, sadly.
We've hit the limit of how far you can scale down lithography however.
Please see my post debunking everything about DigitalOcean's need to spend even one minute scrubbing user data. The fact that they are using SSDs makes it extraordinarily cheap for them to scrub customer data using the TRIM command (on Linux: by sending the BLKDISCARD IO command). With that, they can logically zero hundreds of gigabytes of customer data within seconds.
yea but my view here is that you don't need to understand cryptography to derive the value of a Bitcoin. It is akin to other currency systems that have come before it. the crypto aspects are new, sure, & provide a good infrastructure that may give it staying power but the cryptography shouldn't actually be where the value comes from.

I think a sound economic analysis of the market can be done regardless of the transactional method. sure, it's clever but its a feature of a value store, not actual value
The Wallet Experiment
> I do think he has a blind spot regarding privilege and specifically the way his reputational energy reinforces privilege, and another related blind spot about how that fortified privilege impedes the progress of women in our field.

I don't know whether I agree or disagree with this (mostly, I just don't know what Paul Graham thinks about what he hasn't publicly spoken of), but this is a pretty serious claim to extrapolate from, as you wrote, an "impromptu essay".

I want to see meaningful change in the gender distribution/bias of this industry, but it's a shame that conversations about this frequently seem to contain detailed analyses of a reasonable person's "controversial remarks". It feeds a fire that shouldn't be fed.
Curious how the decision was made to go with Apple ipad vs a cheaper alternative for rural Malawi schools?
Seems yes. These 'credit card' agents employed by the company are generally poor people who are trying to make ends meet (they get some nominal money on every new person signing up for a credit card), and mostly "only" get to too intrusive up to being annoying, but in this case did forgery. The bank might not have anything to do with it though.
Write business memos using this LaTeX template
http://www.latextemplates.com/template/memo
France’s Hollande Gets Court Approval for 75% Millionaire Tax
If you make an API call that asks for your data NOT to be scrubbed, then it's not a leak that your data isn't scrubbed--you asked for it. If you haven't read the docs, you might not be aware that you're asking for it. That's a Bad Thing. No question. It should be enabled by default, to prevent unknowing users from leaking their own data. If you ask for a scrub and you can still find data on the scrubbed block device, then you have a leak from DO.
If we want to talk historical parallels a better one is the invention of the printing press and the invention of the internet. The printing press destroyed the Catholic Church's social and political power at its peak.

The internet has destroyed the traditional news media's ability to set the political and social discourse and thus agenda. The NYT and ABC, NBC, CBS are no longer able to set the political and social agenda, like everyone else they are following the internet. Recall that the recent 60 Minutes puff job on the NSA (and secondarily a hit piece on Snowden) fell flat and was generally panned by independent voices on the internet. This gambit was telling in that the powers that be are still playing by the old playbook. 25 years ago this 60 Minutes "news" report would have ended the discussion.

To echo the point of the Economist article, this is a dangerous time and nuclear war is one very real possibility. We are living in the middle of the greatest social revolution in the history of mankind, since the invention of the printing press 500 years ago, and nobody can really say how it will play out.

Read this article by Clay Shirky from 2009 for a better explanation;

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...
Attract women to STEM: focus on teachers and parents instead of on women
Interesting my Lenovo order just delayed by over 30 days.

Not that I won't wipe it and put Linux on it anyway, but if the hardware or BIOS was tempered with I'd be none the wiser.

(Not that I'd be worth effort, but anyway)
There is a massive love in India for documents. To get any service in private or public sector, you need ID proofs and address proofs. Even to browse internet at a "net cafe", you need to produce ID proof! That's so because authorities can catch (and some side cash) you if you were browsing anything against what they think the law is.

The problem is that there is massive trust deficit. Public too is keen to cheat whenever a loophole exists due to simplified procedures. That invites even harsher regulation and the cycle of submitting 10 documents where 1 would be suffice continues. There are endless certificates and NOCs (no-objection certifcates) required to operate in India: Aadhar citizen number, PAN number, TAN number, Service Tax number, Excise registration, LBT registration, Domicile, 7/12 extracts, 20 year old vouchers for LPG gas cylinders, nationality...and so it goes. Also, there is very little belief about who you are and where you live. So for everything an address proof is required apart from an ID.

Any wonder that there are no ground-level start-up stories from India. All that we can do is morph into HSFC (Human Services for Cheap) model to serve the rich western countries who want to off-load their guilt of wanting modern 'e-slaves' in the post-industrial world but not being able to fund their liabilities.
In 2005 the bogeyman was local government borrowing. In the late 1990s it was bad loans to SOEs that were going to collapse the Chinese banking system. You need to realize that the articles you are citing aren't based upon any sort of substantive analysis. They're based on pundits and consultancy reports basically taking the same arguments they've used in the past (scale, opacity, interlocking interests) and fitting them with new buzzwords, without taking into account why they were wrong in the past or how conditions now are different from before.
For example, when you create a sparse virtual disk and it appears to be XGB all zeroed and ready to use. Of course, it's not.

From within the VM, all the VM will see is zeroes. It sounds like DO is giving VM instances direct access to the underlying SSD or something like that. In fact, I'm having a hard time figuring out precisely how this is occurring. Whenever you create a new VM, how can the VM possibly be reading data from the host's harddrive? Isn't that the definition of a security problem, since VMs are expected to be isolated?

I hope someone will explain the underlying technical details more deeply, because this is very interesting.
jmarbach, being a part of digital marketing industry i have seen many big brands who are our direct competitor practicing these techniques and enjoying better search engine positions. I always thought why?

It is getting more difficult for SMBs to promote their products and services through organic search position.
Secret History of Silicon Valley

[ During WW2, silicon valley was a hotbed of ]
[ research in radio and sensing technology. ]
[ It's longish but an interesting history lesson. ]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
Home office deductions are heavily scrutinized by the IRS, precisely because it's so tempting for people to fudge the lines. You need to have really good documentation. As of this tax year, there's now a "simplified option" that requires less calculation on your part. See http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employ....
IMHO the only reason the NSA leaks have been so effective in shaping public opinion is that it's a 'slow drizzle'. Otherwise they would have ended up like other wikileak mass dumps which are too overwhelming to absorb and are quickly forgotten.
Chips are built differently from your standard 3D printing process: 3D is additive or subtractive, while chips are mask-deposit-strip (filter, additive, subtractive?). Keep in mind that the reason we can get to those sizes on microchips is through mind-boggling optical engineering on the masking step. I remember a prof explaining in the clean room over one of our Perkin-Elmer lithography stations that it takes years to redesign the systems for new wavelengths; the application's precision demands that each optical system is specifically engineered and tailored to that wavelength.

Get rid of the masking stage and you've got the missing link to 3D printing. But that would require nigh magical levels of control over a particle beam. Which could totally be solvable to a sufficiently clever team of engineers and a sufficiently robust and controllable beam source. But add that basically nothing behaves itself on those scales, especially machines, and there's still tons of work left.

But you're right like Feynman was all those years ago: you can totally imagine it is plausible, so there's no way we won't try! (Great, now I want to go back into microtech...)
And suddenly, people like Richman Stallman seem much less crazy when they ask for free (as in libre) hardware, free BIOS, free everything.
I'd agree with you, except that in this case the API call is called "destroy". Were it called "deallocate", this would be a different story.
It'll be interesting how the energy landscape gets defined in the near future. Of note, there's a funded kickstarter that stores energy in residential flywheels that appears to be another promising solution: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1340066560/velkess-energ...
You wrote a very long post about the benefits. Thank you, but I already understand that. This really doesn't address my post in the slightest! Unless I'm just thick as a brick here.
>they are charging their customers after their customers have deactivated a service (destroyed a VM)

They are charging their customers for the number of minutes it takes to safely destroy the VM. This is not a charge for something coming 'after'. It's fundamentally a charge for their actual server use, not a bonus fee.

>What sort of mental gymnastics are required to make that a reasonable choice?

They aren't charging for security, they are giving you the option to buy less server time if you don't need security, or handle it yourself by wiping only the sensitive files. There are no mental gymnastics here.
Please read to the end of my comment - it appears what DigitalOcean is doing is giving the VM access to a logical device that is preallocated. Perhaps carved out of LVM or MD or some other logical disk. KVM's default behavior when using these sorts of devices is to present to the VM whatever data already existed at the lower level.
7 Ways To Enhance Your Blog Conversion And Engage Your Audience
Tragic... but why the fsck is this on HN?
This unfairly ignores the influence investors can have on the company. Investors have a timeline for getting a return on money, known as investment horizon. Sometimes their bets don't work out, and sometimes the horizon is a bit too aggressive for the company. But when the investors normally have board seats and possibly other vectors of influence, you can't ignore how an investor's investment horizon influences strategic business decisions.
Well that's stupid. They should also take care of the case where I delete a vm. What do I care that it takes a long time for them to delete the data? That shouldn't cost me any money, as I have freed the resources from my account.
Great post. Bathroom hacks FTW. I hate the smell of olive oil. I personally use unscented coconut oil as a leave in conditioner. I also mix a little of it into my lotion in the winter for extra skin-softening power.
...or hair conditioner.
Neither the first time nor the last.

In fact, this should be a semi-official running gag (a-la Chaos Monkey) with all journals to keep them honest.

Btw I had this wild English prof that claimed to have written crazy shit in undergrad papers that was never caught to prove that graded papers were just skimmed.
In Germany this is obviously all over the news right now. I was surprised when i checked the internet yesterday evening after being out for the day that his condition is so critical because in the morning shortly after it happened they said he had a mild concussion but nothing serious.

I am a massive F1 fan, never was really fond of Schumacher though, but he is a living legend and i hope he recovers fully.

Tragic deaths of other F1 drivers who didn't die while participating (sometimes for decades) in one of the most dangerous sports but in private situations come to mind: Graham Hill, James Hunt
I am so raging at news regarding NSA's rogue behavior. Why isn't anything being done about this serious breach of privacy, the freedom to be you, the pillars of democracy? It's like NSA is saying "Look at me fuckers we are above the law and you are just going to have to take it up the ass".

Seriously? This is depressing, knowing that some asshole at the top is ordering all of these things and telling us to close your eyes and say nothing while the ass fucking goes on. At least buy everyone dinner before you've decided to fuck them.
Male Vibrator PULSE Technology Rooted In Spinal Injury Medical Devices
Can the bios chips/eeproms be replaced on a running computer?

Can you remove the bios chip, put it in a different (running) computer, use flashrom to read it, put it back, use flashrom to read it again, and compare the two?

Either the virus doesn't hide itself (on calls to read from the bios nvram), and it will be visible on comparison with a pristine (if you have one) copy of the same bios, or it does hide itself and it will be visible on comparison to itself once put in a running machine that didn't boot from the contaminated code, right?
Magnetic power connectors are clever, but were standard on rice cookers for a couple of decades before Apple adopted them. Not really 'theirs'.
As I replied to you elsewhere, I feel your comment here may lead people to believe that it would cost DigitalOcean money to correct this behavior.

This is wrong, it is costing DigitalOcean money not to fix it - in terms of SSD lifetime, not TRIMing those blocks increases fragmentation of the internal physical layout of the pages of flash memory. The behavior of DigitalOcean's virtual machines has surprisingly managed to achieved the worst possible outcome. Their hardware is being misused and their customer's data is being mishandled.
The Products Apple Doesn’t Have Time to Improve
The IEEE label isn't an indicator of quality and similar papers have been published in IEEE sponsored conferences. See http://diehimmelistschoen.blogspot.com/ and http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/.

One of my old professors used to joke that "for every paper, there is a conference that accepts it." Unfortunately this is somewhat literally true. This isn't unique to any one country as the SCIgen successes demonstrate and I don't really see a solution to it.
2013 was not a lost year for tech
I'm sure (or at least I hope), John Levine did not ask to be referred to as an "Ubernerd". Not to belittle Levine or his accomplishments or his nerd cred, but I think this article tells us much more about Krugman's ability to differentiate technical genius from mere competence than anything useful about Bitcoin. Given the high level of nerdery representd by the people developing Bitcoin, I'm unlikely to be convinced of a negative outlook for Bitcoin on the basis of an "expert opinion" from any ubernerd that Krugman chooses to trot out. The Bitcoin ecosystem has enough nerd cred to withstand pretty much any argument other than, "here's an exploit that I have figured out" with proof of said exploit.

I found Charles Stross' critique of Bitcoin far more convincing than anything I've read from Krugman. But, not on technical grounds; merely on ethical ones. I do actually worry that we may be replacing a horrible system that enforces and thrives on inequality with a possibly more extreme system that does the same thing (possibly with a few new players at the top).

Regardless, Krugman is in way over his head on the technical aspects of Bitcoin and it shows. There has been much better technical criticism from actual nerds, including nerds who have worked on cryptocurrencies.

I believe we are seeing one of Krugman's famous bits of shortsightedness, and I believe he is falling prey to the very type of bias he claims to be trying to avoid. Bitcoin has a lot going for it, whether you call it a "currency" or something else. I believe that it's impossible to predict how Bitcoin will play out, exactly, since we've never seen anything exactly like Bitcoin. I have some vague feelings, as well (like, I feel like it's likely Bitcoin will be replaced by some other cryptocurrency within a few years...for a variety of technical and social reasons). But, it's all just a hunch, and I'm unwilling to take the kind of stance Krugman is taking, which seems almost naive (certainly on technical issues, probably less so on economic issues) from my perspective.
My husband and I have teamed up to teach our daughter (11) how to program, and while it may put us in the "bad parent" category in some people's eyes, learning to program is not optional. Fortunately, she seems to be interested and enjoying herself.

There are a whole host of valuable skills that learning to program teaches you; critical thinking and analytical skills, problem solving and planning, organizational skills, collaborative skills, reading comprehension and writing skills (documentation).

These are all extremely important skills to have and they all seem to be severely lacking from her public school education, where the emphasis is on teaching to the test and following a less than ideal Common Core curriculum. Going to school isn't actually teaching her how to think to any serious degree.

It's teaching her how to intuit answers to standardized questions, certainly a useful skill to possess, but she also needs to be tackling problems too big to just "do" so that she can understand the thought processes and develop the methods to do complex thinking.

Actually being fluent in a programming language and writing a piece of software is something that I see as a sort of side effect; useful, certainly, but not the main goal.

Are there other ways to foster this sort of "big picture' thinking? Sure, but programming is what we know, so it's the vehicle we will use to teach her the skills we feel she needs to have, but isn't getting.
Their advice is to hold off on buying. I wish I had. Call of Duty Ghosts was a huge disappointment, Battlefield 4 crashed so often it wasn't worth playing, and the rest of the launch titles were pretty "meh" to me. Until BF4 got patched, I had a $500 Blu-Ray player (which is nice, as I had not previously had Blu-Ray. Bit pricey for just a player, though).

Kinect voice command is unreliable enough to be a last resort. The party system, that has worked fine for going on ten years, works poorly enough now that I'd call it broken.

I'd go on, but suffice it to say that I'm a bit disappointed and would recommend holding off until MSFT works the kinks out and lowers the price.
It's probably there for DO's sake. SSDs have limited rewrite cycles, and each secure wipe will definitely shorten the lifespan of the drive much more than a simple quick wipe. This translates into cost savings.
Marco Arment on the state of Apple software
> If by "natural monopoly" you are implying a monopoly arising without government intervention, I'm pretty sure you are completely wrong on that point.

The reason telecommunications service is a natural monopoly is that the fixed costs are extraordinarily high and the variable costs are trivial. In consequence it is not profitable to build a competing network once one already exists, because all you accomplish is to lay out an enormous capital expenditure in order to enter into an aggressive price war with the incumbent, since making $10/month from a customer that costs you less than that to service once the network is already built is still more profitable than losing that customer to the competitor and making $0. So the result will always be the same: Either there will be a monopoly (or equivalently a cartel), or there will be a price war until every competing provider either goes out of business or joins the cartel and it reverts to a lack of competition. And prospective market entrants understand this dynamic ahead of time and choose not to participate. The only reason we even have the duopoly that exists today instead of a straight monopoly is that the two networks were originally built to provide different non-competing types of service, so now they effectively act as a cartel with the knowledge that no one else is likely to enter the market.

It is certainly true that government intervention has been involved in the creation of that infrastructure -- it's plausible to say that it wouldn't have been cost effective without it. But that only means that in the alternative "free market" for telecommunications service, the infrastructure cost would have been even higher because the provider would have had no subsidies and would have to buy all the land without eminent domain and pay off holdouts etc.
Er, I fully read your comment when it was 7 minutes old, but it looks like you've edited it significantly since then to fill in some missing details. Thank you for explaining, I appreciate it!
Olive oil smell always reminds me of spaghetti. Maybe just because I always use it when cooking.
So I just asked: the first time it was an actual judge.
Apologies then, glad I was able to answer your question with the subsequent edit. :)
I have immense respect for successful people, like the author, who recognize that their success is a factor of skill, opportunity, cash, and luck.

"I am a deity destined to succeed" is a belief held too often by people who have early success in their lives.