skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't say it's increased boredom. People still work about the same amount. It's just technology now makes video games and the like possible where they weren't before.
CLIMATE KOOKISM DEBUNKED AGAIN: Brrr… More Record Lows Than Highs in USA in 2013
GVM: Go Version Manager
Moonshining is on the rise! In my travels in the south last year, I encountered many people drinking and selling corn whiskey, especially in the form of Apple Pie liquor.

Another anecdote: at my high school there were several people involved in a ring of cigarette carton theft, who would then sell cartons at the school for inflated prices.
Don't worry, no one will ever find out.
Signing up to a specific gym timeslot for Crossfit. The combination of social pressure, financial commitment, no-brainer workouts (variety, someone tells you what to do, and it works) and getting into a routine mean I haven't missed a 8am workout slot, 3 times a week, except for travel or illness since I joined a year and a half ago.
You're right that back then the expectations were a lot higher, but I don't think anyone even then expected it to replace Perl 5 that fast.

The goal was to run existing Perl code in the same process, so that you could gradually adopt new features or use existing libraries with new code. If that had worked out, there'd have been less of the Python 2/3 gap.

Then again, the idea that Perl and P6 are different languages is something that's come up after the fact, after it became obvious that P6 wouldn't be ready for general use any time soon.
It sounds like binwalk is a member of a family of programs referred to as file rippers. These used to be easy to find, but the "rip" keyword has been taken over by CD and DVD ripping software. They were commonly used to extract embedded files from demo scene demos, including .mod/.s3m/.xm/.it music and .flc videos.
... and plumbing, electrical, carpentry, auto repair. These are all jobs I think hackers would be attracted to.
The key was with all the ones I've tried. Not all the Linux games on steam.
I'm worried about the increase in entertainment actually. Technology enables increasingly addictive games, and there is a large incentive to make them even more addicting and even more attractive, and find exploits in human psychology. Farmville is only the beginning.
Out of the table, it seems 0.85 percent run some flavor of Ubuntu. That leaves the other 1.00 percent running some other flavor. I've got it running on Debian GNU/Linux (Testing) and play TF2 and CS:S from time to time. I even picked up CS:GO during one of their mega sales for five bucks or so in the hope that they eventually port it over to Linux.
wait, wouldn't it be faster to write a small script to hit the facebook API foreach activity? I thought this was hacker news, not clueless article writer news
We could all just move to Nigeria, but then there's a lot of things we'd lose out on.
Hmm, this dovetails with an idea I had for a Paleo monthly box, if you're interested in chatting... how much work on the day-to-day do you want to offload?
> I've been profoundly unmotivated to write more code

If that's you're only real gripe, move into management. I enjoyed it a lot. It's a great chance to multiply the effect of your knowledge. I approached management as engineering, except I would give up as soon as I knew how the tasks should be done (because I could re-assign them). Other than that, it's all team building and communication.
FWIW, I've been with three US banks and have had zero instances of fraud. :)
I used Sqwiggle for a few months but a software update sometime late last year made it something I refused to use.

The changes meant that:

1. You can prevent somebody initiating a video call by setting your status to "busy".

2. The busy flag is removed when you are the only person in the chat room.

3. The camera indicator is disabled when nobody else is in the chat room.

4. You don't accept incoming video chats, they happen automatically.

Given that I mostly used Sqwiggle in a browser tab it was very easy for me to lose track of that fact it was running. It's one of many tabs and there is no indicator my camera is active if I'm alone. I typically have headphones in too but don't always wear them, so there is often no audio cue that a chat just initiated.

This is actually something that happened. I had an active call for 3.5 minutes that I was completely unaware of with video and audio streaming to the remote caller without my knowledge, after I had set the busy flag.

I work at home, and the ability for somebody to have a live audio/video stream into my house without my permission is unsettling. Especially as the only protection mechanism I have for that is to remember to terminate the application or close that browser tab every time I walk away from the computer or want to prevent video/audio sessions.

It's been a couple of months now since I last used Sqwiggle, so perhaps the clearing of the busy flag has reverted back to earlier behaviour, but ultimately I think unless I can change my profile to prevent automatic connection of video calls I'd never be comfortable with it.
No longer available, in case someone has a screenshot, though I don't expect anything fancy in it.
I don't see how credit card fraud is the customers' problem. Max exposure is $50. When you file a chargeback, you get the money credited back on CNP transactions. Merchants are the ones who get nailed. Not only for the lost product but also the fees associated with chargebacks. As an e-commerce merchant, i would love to have more protections against fraud especially the increase in friendly fraud(customer defrauding us by use of chargebacks). As customer, i would fear burden of proof shifted to me instead of the merchant when dealing fraud. This is why i don't use 3-D Secure(verified by visa) online or PIN based transactions at stores.
Would be interested in talking more on email - whats your email?
interesting, thanks for the link!
Mag stripe fingerprinting, if widely implemented, can prevent a lot of offline fraud. It seems all the fraudulent transactions cited in the article were of the off line variety.

http://blogs.creditcards.com/2013/04/cards-mag-stripe-finger...
Aid helps the poor more than advice, study says
I'd describe it as a microcontroller breakout board with a built-in Python interpreter. I've also got Pi's, and make extensive use of lower level MCU breakout boards (e.g., 16 bit, programmed in C) for prototyping. It's easier to throw a micro at a problem than to coax a PC to work as a real time computer. And there usually has to be some kind of electronic interface anyway, so why not a micro?

The Python board will do a couple of things. First, by studying the design, I'll get a gentle introduction to a micro that's much more powerful than anything I've ever dealt with. I'll see what kind of code is needed to manage such a beast. Second, I'll learn the tradeoffs between a higher level language and C for embedded projects.
I would rather have code that always works than have it be all pretty and semicolonless.
To cope with doubts and fear I ended up finding a group of entrepreneurs who held a regular meeting. At each meeting we went around the room and talked rather openly about the stuff that was on our mind, good and bad. It was very helpful to me. If you can't find such a group, try to find others like you at networking events and go to lunch to talk things out. I once met a dude who was also a solo founder, in a vertical niche like me, used the same technologies, and even hosted at the same provider! We had some good conversations.

The "everything to do" is a blessing and a curse. Blessing: you're never in a meeting. Curse: everything else. I think the key thing here, if you're going to do everything yourself, is to make a product that isn't too complicated. If your product requires a tremendous amount of engineering work you should get help or you'll never get around to marketing. I speak from experience, sadly.

Wanting to give up: there are two things that get me through the days of poor morale. 1) knowing that if I give up I will have to get a job working for somebody, and all this glorious freedom of being my own boss will go in the toilet. 2) The fact that I am working on something with a workable business model gives me the confidence that it's just a matter of time. My product helps solve a problem, and people who have that problem are usually prepared to pay money for a solution. I think morale would be much harder to maintain if I were trying to build the next consumer-social-sharing app or whatever where the rewards may or may not come, even if I work well.
I would be curious to know what PG has done to earn your respect as nothing above does.
Every month Steam asks a random subset of Steam users a hardware survey.

OS choice is a new aspect of the survey. The survey's original intention was to find things like 64bit penetration, number of cores, monitor resolution, internet connection type, and power of GPU. Most of it is automated.

We don't know Valve's exact methodology. I would hope they take a random sample of users who logged in the prior month and send them the survey. If you get selected a window will popup and ask you for permission to run the survey. If you say yes then it gathers your system data. They should only count you as a linux user if you were on linux when you took the survey.

This still leaves room for Valve to cheat in the selection process but otherwise the survey should be meaningful.
Am I the only person who thinks Carbon 2.0 for Android is a terrible?
I feel like Carbon's the only thing I've read about the last 36 hours and I literally don't understand.

Overall the UX is awful and the navigation is terrible. That's without even mentioning the app's performance - it's painfully slow.

IMO Carbon's always been about the 'cool' animations and transitions, but has always been greatly lacking in terms of functionality.

Carbon for Android has always been an overhyped app full of disappointments. I remember prior to it's release how excited everyone was re: Android finally getting a good Twitter app (it should be noted this was probably in the early ICS days when Android actually began maturing). For ~12-14 months Carbon was 'going to be released next month' so the signs were.

That's the end my rant - my apologies.
A lot of things haven't changed at all. Televisions (apart from the screen itself), most kitchen and household appliances, all almost exactly as they were 50 years ago.
The chip and pin system would help. Credit Card issues in the US haven't gotten on board yet because the amount of losses prevented by chip and pin aren't high enough to offset the cost of a rollout. Using a debit card is just asking for trouble...ATM's should be used in rare circumstances at reputable banks etc.. I can remember hearing about ATM skimming scams over 7 years ago in the US. This is nothing new.

Consumer advocates such as Clark Howard http://www.clarkhoward.com/news/clark-howard/personal-financ... have been talking about this for years. I won't even get into the security risks or using a check to pay for something....and the sad thing is that I know people who will carry around their checkbook and still use them way too often. Once someone has your checking account number it is really easy to do all sorts of bad things. That is why I prefer online bill pay services etc..
Harvard's Intro to Computer Science MOOC [free] starts today
Builder Blames Navy as Brand-New Warship Disintegrates (2011)
This is one of the most useful comments I've seen on HN. Thanks!
I am not convinced, but that is because I believe that genetics drive human behavior to a very high degree. Since we are genetically optimized for pre-history, but not living in pre-history, anything short of re-engineering our genes is just going to be a work around. Hence the discontinuity, and problems with mental health will expand as the distance from pre-history, in technological terms, increases.
In Portugal there is a centralized system that allows people with cards from almost any bank in the country to generate virtual credit cards with any limit you desire for free.

It feels a lot safer to shop online in that way.
Anarchocapitalism, YouTube "machinery of freedom" for the ten minute primer. "The Problem Of Political Authority" for a good book presenting the case that the entire idea of political authority on which all states are built is internally inconsistent and unacceptable as well as why an ancap system would work well in practice.

It's the best alternative system I have seen so far I think, although I think instead of trialing it out by revolution in an enormous country like the US it will be good to see it in action first in the currently developing Honduran ZEDE's as well as seasteads when they become a reality. It's much easier to say it's a good plan when there is practice rather than just theory.
I've had related experiences in Germany. The police stop cars with no suspicion nor any explanation other than "police control". I told several German friends that this would be quite illegal in the US, and they were all shocked; it seemed normal and routine to them.

Denying the Holocaust and using Nazi symbols is illegal in Germany, but "papers please" is normal? I think they learned the wrong lesson.
I'd forgotten about these rippers!

Another good one to look at is QuickBMS - allows you to define a "script" and then feed it to the ripper. I guess it saves you time writing boilerplate code when trying to get at new/unknown file formats. The Xentax Game Research forum loves it - http://aluigi.altervista.org/quickbms.htm (blocked as Hacking/Internet by the corporate proxy here, so it's good)
I've found they've gotten pretty good. I have a 7970 and a couple of R290 GPUs, as well as whatever ATI GPU is in my laptop (a 6000 series Mobility GPU), they all seem to work fine under Linux. Admittedly, I don't do a lot of gaming, though I just bought a few new games in the winter sale, since they've added so many Linux games (and some of them are freakin' awesome games).

I haven't actually tried any of the really tough games, like Half Life or whatever yet...but, I'm actually super excited about playing Left 4 Dead 2 on Linux on one of the new GPUs. So, we'll see soon enough.
I knew they were still a big company, but I didn't know about their recent uptick. What's going on there?
Speculative Staging for Interpreter Optimization
I can mix both approaches. The buyer and other people can stash up bounty, which the first prover gets. I have not implemented this lest "bitcoin stolen from Coq proof exchange".
The abstract:

Interpreters have a bad reputation for having lower performance than just-in-time compilers. We present a new way of building high performance interpreters that is particularly effective for executing dynamically typed programming languages. The key idea is to combine speculative staging of optimized interpreter instructions with a novel technique of incrementally and iteratively concerting them at run-time.

This paper introduces the concepts behind deriving optimized instructions from existing interpreter instructions---incrementally peeling off layers of complexity. When compiling the interpreter, these optimized derivatives will be compiled along with the original interpreter instructions. Therefore, our technique is portable by construction since it leverages the existing compiler's backend. At run-time we use instruction substitution from the interpreter's original and expensive instructions to optimized instruction derivatives to speed up execution.

Our technique unites high performance with the simplicity and portability of interpreters---we report that our optimization makes the CPython interpreter up to more than four times faster, where our interpreter closes the gap between and sometimes even outperforms PyPy's just-in-time compiler.
Most people don't know this. I usually just leave the items I was going to buy on the counter if they tell me there's a minimum. Most of the time they'll change their mind and take my card, after first trying to slap me with a $0.50 surcharge that I decline.
I'm running it on Fedora 20. Haven't tried any of the really complicated games yet, but just bought some new ones during the sale, so will know soon what's up.

As a data point: I wouldn't have bought anything during the sale, had they not had so many games that work with Linux. I reboot into Windows so rarely that it seems like an ordeal to do just for a game. Likewise, I'm considering canceling my Netflix account because I haven't used it in two or three months...don't want to reboot, and Amazon Prime videos work fine under Linux.
Bitcoin Mining is Still Possible - A Guide for 2014
After not using Clojure For about half a year (not a language my last customer uses) I have started using Clojure again for a new project. Clojure is like Ruby in the sense that I am simply happy working with both languages. I also use Java and JavaScript a lot, but I don't get the joy using those languages (not knocking them, but they are not as much fun to use).
> How come they did not fix this..

How would you fix it? The app needs to know if your phone contacts are on snapchat, and if they are, what their usernames are. In other words, the API needs to exist.
I hope you're agreeing that the street address is way more private than a snapchat user name...
I think the big story here is that ~4% of Steam users run Vista. The year of the Linux desktop is very, very, very far away.
neither does snapchat
Hackers exploit Snapchat’s security hole, leak 4.6m usernames and phone numbers
Looking for people in the Portland Oregon area. I have an idea that has been bubbling for a while to change how scientists use and track computation as part of their work. I have various components prototyped, but lack front end and DB experience. I've got about 15 years experience in this area, and have been getting the startup itch lately to make some of the ideas materialize.
Interesting short story. The part on robots rings well, but there was one thing about parenting at the end that rang not so well to my ears:

"children grew up more attached to their robot nannies than to their actual parents. This was mitigated by making the robot nannies somewhat severe"

This reflects a very simplistic view on who kids love. It is in fact wrong even in the first order: kids actually love more severe parents or severe teachers (obviously, below a severity threshold, I am not talking about sadistic education here).

I experienced it myself as a kid: we respected and loved much more the teacher of French litterature, because he was severe and knew how to make himself respected. The German teacher tought the softer she was the better, and she was bullied and hated.

I experienced it with my own kids, and with the kids of friends. Each time I am severe with them, e.g. not bending to their will, I gain points in their hearts.

If I were to find a way to make kids prefer their parents over their robot nannies, I'd say we would just let the parents have and show they have the power of decision, and therefore the power of empowerment. From my experience kids love the most those would can empower them doing new things, the ones who will forbid and allow. a personal example is thusly: I forbid my 4yo son to touch my tools, but he is allowed to watch when I'm fixing something, and sometime I ask him for help ("bring me the screwdriver") and he is sometime allowed to use some tools when it is safe and supervised. This is I think a great way to make him interested in tools, and to feel empowered when he can use the usually forbidden screwdriver, and he clearly loves it.
Why what?

It's a backdoor in the sense that it allows you to change settings on the modem with no credentials.

It's plausible that on a badly configured network this port could be exposed to the Internet. Anyone want to check Shodan?
Excellent points here - thanks teleclimber.

Especially: finding a 'group' - been working on this already and have already gained some value out of it. I can also attest to point #1 of wanting to give up - i think it pushes me forward as well. Nothing is more satisfying to me than waking up and thinking "man, I dont have to be told what to do by someone who doesn't even know themselves - and so what if I work for 12 hours today - I LOVE what i'm doing" . This is much appreciated - thanks! 2 months in for me and another 2 decades + more. Thanks!
Fun story, some of the older (hehe, older as in "older than 30 or 35) people here might remember that in the 90s there was a startup that did exactly this but with a browser plugin as I recall (well, not exactly, they didn't hash the text, but they took arbitrary plain text and mapped it to a URL). The idea was to sell short sentences to companies, so "seinfeld TV show" (or whatever) in the address bar would have gone to the NBC "Seinfeld" web site, etc. I think the idea was to make "deep" links easier for people to remember, but I don't remember the details, I just remember that it existed and I probably read about it in PC Magazine.
Agreed, the slides were unreadable. A simple text document would have sufficed...
I'm running it on Fedora 20 as well, I play DOTA2 and Left 4 Dead 2 on it. I don't play either of those very often but they both work well. If they ever port CS:Go to Linux I'll probably have to take a sabbatical from work.
One of the factoids linked in the OP:

> The Defense Department estimates that it will spend $114.5 billion over the next five years on the nasty nuisance.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/05/the-pentagon-declare...

For perspective, that's about as much as Canada spends on its entire military (over 5 years): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_e...

Five years of military rust is equal to 10 years of NASA's entire budget: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
I thought the array package was deprecated. Its mutable API is nicer than vector’s, though, if I recall correctly.
Netflix runs swimmingly well on my Ubuntu setup using the Pipelight plugin in Firefox. I haven't touched my Windows VM in forever!
You are over thinking it...the outlet port to circulate/drain the molten metal would be the same hole the lower plasma injector uses. By using a curved surface it can take advantage of the centrifugal force and surface tension of the liquid metal to prevent the metal from falling down lower into the injector. So basically there is a doughnut shaped orifice around the top of the lower plasma injector that's connected to a pipe which feeds into the liquid metal circulation system. Here is a cutaway drawing where you can see it: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_VyTCyizqrHs/ScF7J2w-TOI/AAAAAAAADL...
I guess MIPS and PowerPC are still around somewhere, but it's definitely a lot less common to see them these days. For example, it used to be that every Mac came with a PowerPC, and so people were aware of the issues that chip had. Nowadays it's rare to find a programmer experienced with anything but x86. That was really Eric's point when he made that comment.
This was the mainframe we used in my very first programming class ... With 15 green-screen terminals and 15 card punch machines.
I bet you're just a joy at parties.
Slides, in general, aren't very useful without the accompanying talk.

And this didn't even have a talk.
I deleted my account and I am pretty sure all your comments on others' things do get deleted..
There's nothing weird about finding a camera in your home that you only have partial control of unsettling. If you think YOU get to decide when my webcam is active, then I am going to refuse to install your dumb software.
You mean to say a company that encrypts users' messages in ECB mode with a fixed key hard-coded into the binary and which was publicly disclosed almost a year ago and hasn't been changed isn't responsible with user data?
> It's your perception that the good climber is causing harm to the poorer.

pretty sure causing someone to starve is, indeed, harming them.