skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most CS graduates I know did the bare minimum to earn their major credits and that's it, avoiding any challenging courses like the plague. They'd rather study some unrelated intro-level elective than computation theory. No actual interest in the field, no passion, no imagination. You're damn right they're not hackers. They're here for the gold rush and nothing more, they won't be the ones advancing this industry. They're the copy-paste from Stack Overflow types, they're the ones that get hired because their uncle works at the company, and they're the ones leaving knots behind them for others to sort out.
Blogging in 2014: Mindful resolutions bloggers need for success
Data Science For Software Engineers
if you talk to a reporter for a story, you're being interviewed. Let me rephrase, if I was talking to a reporter and the conversation was being recorded, I would presume I was being interviewed. If the reporter told me it was off the record, I would not consider it an interview.
As a founder, with due respect, why you don't do anything about it?

I think they are good ideas. So how is that you expect someone else to do the work for you?

As a founder I know how hard is to make an idea a reality, and my ideas had relative success(I managed to get things done and most people look to me now like "all I have was given" to me, or that what I created was obvious and easy, as it is obvious now, but the same person was arguing to me how it "was never going to work" in the past). Most people are not that lucky, but they try anyway.

So if you care about this, why you don't take action?

You expect someone else, who is a man (and does not care, there are more urgent problems to them), to do something you should be doing in my opinion.

The "frat house" is working very well and there is no reason to change what works. Different systems could work, but with different people, and different focus.

You could start working on this. It is impossible to do it alone, but organizing with others there is nothing imposible.
Socket.IO is awesome, but my understanding is that Socket.IO also requires server side components as it adds a layered protocol on top of the WebSocket transport.
Attacking zone page metadata in iOS 7 & OS X Mavericks
This is a good essay, but I was disappointed it wasn't a followup to his classic essay "What You Can't Say" http://paulgraham.com/say.html
The short and general answer is that the border entry area, where you are typically interacting with US Customs, is a "no-man's land" and you basically have zero rights in that zone. That goes for US citizens as well.

The simplest result is that they can turn you away from the USA and send you back on the next flight if they think you're a problem or unqualified to enter. You may also be detained and things get worse from there.

Carrying a laptop without a charger is not a solution at all. The hard drive can be extracted and read apart from the machine. Same for your phone/SD cards/external disks, etc.

The safest way to enter the US it seems is to carry completely blank devices, if you need to carry them at all.
Drug development also hinges on the false belief that invented drugs are the most effective (ginger worked better for my wife's morning sickness than any drug she was allowed to take, including morning sickness meds) at treating a condition.

DNA sequencing and GMOs would allow us to rapidly implement the medical grade production of substances we're trying to chemically mimic with drugs. It will also allow for easier production of these compounds so we can even test some of them in the first place.
Both men and women were killed during the Salem Witch Trials. A "witch hunt" isn't terrorism against women.
Yes, but why do no-one makes a company that will make friend with a bank and tell them : hey guys, let's do that but check the blockchain before accepting chargebacks..
Well then, I can happily inform you that depending on just how physics works out, we might just get a solution to that whole "heat death of the universe" problem. Too early to tell, precisely, but I've heard some neat things about new child-universes forming inside black holes such that they torque space itself and generate non-conserved new mass-energy.
Group taking down game servers
A group I've never heard of before today is claiming responsibility for a bunch of game server outages, including League of Legends, battle.net, and DOTA 2. This link is to their Twitter account.
Well plenty of people in the USA and the UK have serious issues with mandatory ID cards.

And given Germanys recent past you should be the last Country in Europe to be happy about ID Cards.
First off, there's a whole school and practice of security measures which is aimed more at revealing breaches than in preventing them, per se. Audits, tamper-evident seals, tell-tales placed in maps, watermarks in documents or images, and very large swaths of system monitoring, reporting, and alerting. Much of military electronic security "Orange Book" procedures have much more to do with auditing than they do securing data.

Sometimes the goal is to determine what was taken or breached, sometimes who violated confidentiality (especially via watermarks or telltales), or how.

In some cases, the goal may be to ensure/assess planted information was actually accessed. One counterintelligence mission, Operation Mincemeat from WWII involved landing a dead body (a deceased criminal if memory serves) with bogus military plans, and a pretty elaborate back-story, to mislead German intelligence into thinking an Allied attack would occur in Greece rather than Sicily. Part of the assessment of the plan involved determining whether or not the Germans had in fact examined the documents, and forensics showed that the corners of the papers indicated that they had been secured in a manner consistent with being photographed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat

Another case might be, say, a journalist who wanted to be able to positively demonstrate that electronics were accessed without authorization by officials (whether in a border crossing or some other means). The glitter polish trick would make for a useful and highly embarrassing bit of evidence which could be shown to the public in the form of before-after photographs.

No, it doesn't prevent access (and the title is misleading), but it does identify access.
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The American left is opposed to voter ID because it's a vote suppression scheme -- not all eligible voters have IDs or have access to obtain them. The voter ID bills have gone hand-in-hand with restrictions on early voting and same-day voter registration, which makes the intention clear. On the other hand, I have yet to see one of these bills accompanied by legislation intended to help people without IDs get them.
Not being required to have an ID card is something we Americans find to be an important freedom. Many (myself included) feel that requiring people to have an ID card is a slippery slope towards requiring people to show that ID card on demand. The idea of an authority figure being able to 'ask for your papers' is a scary one for us.

As the article said, voter fraud is NOT really a problem. No one has ever been able to demonstrate that people illegally voting or voting more than once has happened enough to ever change an election. We want to make it as easy to vote as possible to encourage everyone to vote.
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Searchlet Searches the Web without Opening a New Tab
Another important factor that took me a while to learn and be comfortable with: successful delegation is not the same as defect free delegation.

People will make mistakes. They will do so even if they are competent and you were well justified in delegating a task to them. Nevertheless, screwups are going to happen, and sometimes it'll be something that is beyond the capabilities of the person you delegated the task to deal with.

But it's a mistake to think of these things as failures of delegation, or to use them as an excuse to curtail responsibilities. Delegating properly requires a holistic view. One of the fundamental problems of people who micro-manage or are incapable of delegating is that there will always be fuckups, thus there will always be excuses to do it yourself instead of delegating. But this is because we're comparatively blind to our own fuckups, which we see as recoverable and due to things beyond our control whereas the temptation is to see other people's fuckups as due solely to incompetence.

If nothing ever seems to be going wrong that may actually be a sign that you're not delegating enough. The trick is finding the right balance.
This raises a good point, but informal inferences about age, ethnicity, and sex can be made from other parts of the application. Statistics on the discrimination of Ivy league schools show that (east) Asian face a stacked deck in college applications at "selective" schools[0]. Its plausible that much of this is inferred from ethnic names. To the extent it impacts the short-lists for interviews (ie, before candidates are seen in person), it's obviously detrimental.

Which brings up another point: it would be interesting to see a YC batch where the colleges/universities' names were redacted from the screening process.[1] Again, I don;t think this will ever happen...but as a thought experiment I would likely be of equal interest in terms of "opening" access. At some stage, business is as much about trading favours as it is about measuring "competence". There are some good game-theoretic reasons for this (ie, establishing trust in sequential repeated games), but there is more to the story than that.[2]

___________

[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/ivy-league-discriminates-agai...

[1] Even if this was replaced by a sort of rating system, eg. that placed X schools into N buckets. This could be done so that the information was recorded but never made visible (say by online application). And the data could still be verified later prior as part of due-dilligence/ affadavit to avoid a problem with gaming the system.

[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-30/jpmorgan-s-mistake-...
you cant make meth out of voting cards. you can out of cough syrup!
NSA Has Spyware Backdoor On iPhone
Yes, but other countries do voting without the need to pre-register. Some US states (e.g. Iowa) do voting with same day registration.

I might actually be okay with an ID requirement if we also got rid of the previous registration requirement.
>> I used Python 3 for the first time a few days ago

> Like I said, I haven't used Python 3 before today

Well, which is it? Neither makes you much of an authority on the subject.
isn't that true of most platforms?
I know the JVM has compressed OOPS to limit this issue, but I am not aware of similar things elsewhere.
What if the pot contains wine? What then?
When I was a kid, I should have lost my fingers for playing with fireworks. Roman candle wars, bottle rocket barrages... in hindsight I'm surprised we all made it uninjured to graduating highschool.
#RedTube pixelates all content by default and becomes #1 provider in Japan
Does your company respond to customers like this: start by pointing out your "sterling reputations" and end by claiming "I understand"?

The person you responded to offered two doable action points. A litmus test is if YC moves on at least one of them. YC does not have the excuse that it doesn't have the technical know-how. And it would be a laughingstock if they didn't have the hacker spirit to figure out how to implement them.
"Google alleges that Bing monitors what people search for on its site, if they have Internet Explorer equipped with certain features. Bing doesn’t dispute this. But Bing isn’t just monitoring what happens at Google. It monitors what people do as they travel across the entire web."

I'd love to see that on the Scroogled page.

(I recognize that on the internet I have basically no privacy from people who want to extract useful signals from my behavior. It sounds icky but in practice it doesn't seem to be a problem and it's a huge pain to prohibit. What bothers me is Microsoft pretending to be pro-privacy and anti-tracking when it does the same kind of data collection and mining as everyone else.)
I think it's great that he continued to search for a way to promote his own work. Your links demonstrate that he was asking us for help, received absolutely none, then figured out how to help himself.

New programmers (of any age) aren't competing at the level of professional, kickstarter-funded projects. And most people don't know how difficult it is to do this kind of gamedev work when you're just starting out, so it seems like people are labeling this as low-quality just because it's the work of a newer craftsman.

He's out there actually doing something and trying to make his own vision happen, and he hasn't resorted to spammy behavior. It looks like he kept his head down and continued to produce while looking for a way to promote his work, then correctly ascertained that the sheer quantity of work would intrigue people.
How I created my personal reporting system for bitcoin prices
Let's say I show up at the polling place and try to vote in someone else's name. If they've already voted, then I'm in deep trouble. In fact, my polling place often has a police officer hanging out on election day. If they haven't voted but come to vote after me, they're in deep trouble. Either way, there's going to be a big stink and a police report. Moreover, I can't vote more than once in the same precinct: I need to go elsewhere lest I'm recognized, and in most of the US, elsewhere is actually quite far away.

It really doesn't make sense spending money to prevent attacks that are completely economically infeasible.

Besides, let's say we require ID for voting. Now, everyone who illegally voted before can continue illegally voting: all they have to do is get some fake IDs, which any bored teenager looking for beer can do.
I can't wait for "[citation needed]" comments with zero content to fall out of favor, along with other low-effort "you're wrong but I don't have the time to prove you wrong" shots. There are many things I don't like about Wikipedia, some fairly, some unfairly, but that contribution to our discourse is one reason in my mind to burn it all down.
What's going on between Mailchimp and Beyonce?
Publishing remarks made as background when you make it clear that they were made as background and that they weren't part of an actual interview is not unethical

So, you're just wrong about this. Filed under: Ethics - Human Sources: "'On background' is a kind of limited license to print what the source gives you without using the source's name."

http://journalism.nyu.edu/publishing/ethics-handbook/human-s...

And, knowing many journalists, none of them would ever print something given to them on background with the source's name attached. It is unethical.
Correct me if my history is a little fuzzy, but isn't it Apple that plays the part of "move fast, worry later" so well? After all, Apple has been the front-runner when it comes to things like, "f--k your floppy/CD drive/FireWire/display-adapter, we're moving on", and that's just in hardware.

Microsoft has actually done a pretty good job maintaining backwards compatibility, considering the size of their user base and variety of software to accommodate. Though perhaps that makes it a better metaphor for PHP development than Python.
Show HN: Text Steganography for JavaScript using Markov Chains
> The outcry in the US over requiring someone to show an ID to vote is one of the most bizarre things to come out of that country.

There's a specific historical reason for it related to practices tied to Jim Crow (and the fact that the groups backing Voter ID now mostly have no evidence of actual problems that it solves, and are often tied to other make-voting-less-convenient-and-with-more-excuses-for-outright-denial policies.)

> And, to make it even more unusual, it's coming from the left, the very people who used to love issuing IDs, numbers, and whose intellectual and ideological predecessors set up most of those schemes.

The reason its coming from what passes for "the left" (center-right instead of far right) in America is discussed above, but I don't think that this description of "the left" -- either what passes for left in America or the Left more generally -- is particularly accurate.

> Practically, as much as the anarchist in me doesn't like that, you cannot have a mass society without strong, trusted IDs so this is a lost cause.

We've had mass societies for a long time without strong, trusted IDs.
That isn't fixed by voter ID schemes, though. For an ineligible person to register to vote is voter registration fraud, and you do have to prove your eligibility to register.

Voter ID schemes only prevent people voting under other voters' names, and that kind of fraud appears to be extremely rare.
I'm 14 and I've been coding since 6th grade and have coded very advanced things for my company and other small projects;it's not a big deal and I'm amused to see all the other kids who have coded these small games brag so much about it and how "coding changed my life" just simply for the attention. In my opinion, I could care less about how old you are;as long as you don't brag about it then there is nothing stopping you from succeeding;age seems to be the only factor of which has limited me and my company from succeeding, I've put through the efforts and work required;however, investors and actual business men believe the level of maturity is too little as put per my age.

tl;Dr:
I agree;don't brag and I don't like how people brag about how you've done so much as per your age group as if that would have limited you. I've done much more when I was in 6-7th grade yet I don't brag about it. on another note;congrats on your efforts and I urge you to continue to in your path.
I gather you're not from the US, and are unfamiliar with our civil rights history.

You can start here:

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965

Voter ID laws are simply the latest play in a long history of attempts to disenfranchise minorities and the poor. They have no other practical purpose. There is no mass vote fraud occurring in the US. It's another red herring, like terrorism.
The OP's update is still incorrect. A problem in NP is a set of strings which a deciding Turing machine must accept (and it must reject all other strings). You cannot define a problem in NP by what the machine outputs, because for a decision problem you can only output a single bit.

What the OP meant to say is that you can define TSP as a decision problem as follows:

TSP = {<G, T> : G is a weighted graph, and T is a tour of minimal total weight}

Then this achieves what we want: that deciding whether a given tour has minimal weight is NP-hard but not known to be in NP. You can also formulate the TSP problem as a decision problem this way:

TSP = {<G, v>: G is a weighted graph with a tour of weight at most v}.

This formulation is essentially equivalent to the first problem.
A credit card is just not the right way to do this. Non-refundable money transfers (wire transfers, Western Union etc) already exist and work fine.
"Proper procedures should make it easy for people to do security, otherwise they are part of the problem."

Correct. And leaving the proper procedure in other people's hands is the problem. The best procedure [in testing a new intergration prototype] would be to create a new special test key and properly track and maintain that it is only enabled during the known testing time frame and then properly "disposing"/"revoking" it in the system YOU control. We can argue all day that DO should scrub the data by default and prevent new instances from low level access... however security relies on trust. So, do you TRUST (and KNOW) that checking the "scrub data" check box actually works and does what it says it does? If it doesn't, its beyond your control. And if you care about proper procedures and security you either a) don't use systems/servers beyond your control (if you are that concerned...) and/or b) rely on proper procedures and things you can and do control. I don't know what happens in DOs infrastructure... maybe there is some other leak I'm unaware of so to limit any damage for testing I will properly create and control short lived test keys.
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Hackers tend to look down on some male-dominated lines of work, too. It's not like you see a surplus of respect for construction workers or prison guards, for example.

I think it's more of a class thing than a sex thing.
First, no being an artist isn't a requirement to be a gamedev. That's why I said find a friend who is.

Second, If, as you say, the app isn't the end goal, then don't release it and this issue doesn't even come up.

Third, you said "Wasting time fitting society's arbitrary moral standard is time not spent becoming a better gamedev."

As a parent, that is exactly why I would encourage him to create his own characters. It's not at all an arbitrary moral standard. Is theft an arbitrary moral standard? Plagiarism? If you don't have permission to use the characters, don't use them. These games are available on the official MS site right next to the official ones. Why go down the path of having to potentially have your account suspended, or whatever the punishment is if MS decides your apps are infringing.

Finally, What do you tell the kid the first time they have a successful project and someone rips it off? Don't get upset, you did it when you started, so it's ok? It doesn't matter that he's just getting his start, stealing these characters is just like stealing the source code an releasing it as your own. Are we condoning that as well? In my opinion, it's just as important to learn integrity as it is to build the app.
A friend of mine eventually succeeded to kill himself. He did so jumping in front of a big lorry on a (British) motorway. There had been many attempts leading to that one. Bodies of water, tall buildings, other road traffic incidents, alcohol and pills were all tried, with quite some determination.

None of us could persuade him that his life was well worth living, we all tried. He was the brightest at our school so it wasn't as if intellect was a problem. To him getting himself killed was simply a difficult task he had to get done. But it was far from easy for him.

We don't have guns in the UK, however I am sure that my friend, had he had access to a gun, would have driven out to somewhere sensible and done the deed that way. As it was he drove out to a motorway service station, walked onto the motorway and ran in front of a lorry. Much harder to do.

I know the above is anecdote but statistics don't tell the story. Guns are a mighty fine way to commit suicide given the available alternatives. As a society of mostly non-suicidal people we do not want people to kill themselves, not having guns around helps us with that.

Regarding bridges and the jumping off of, tall buildings and the jumping off of, have you looked over the side of the Golden Gate or the Empire State building? There are nets to catch those that try to suicide themselves.
None of those things are fundamental elements of democracy. Voting is.
But the key question is how long do we have to live before we're going to bed at night and backing up all our memories for the day to the cloud. So if we get hit by a bus we just wake up in a few weeks in a rapidly grown body?

I know people will say it won't happen, but are you going to let a 650 year old mind die with its cumulative knowledge and wisdom? Nope, you'd get them a new goddamn body.