skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How to Derail an HN Thread
I came across an interesting observation in a rising Ask HN thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6999429).

The question asks about FizzBuzz equivalent tests for other fields. But if you go check out the comments, all you'll find is one person's answer to the actual question, and rest of HN arguing about the answer to the commenter's response and its explanation.

Why do you think this happens? The question is FizzBuzz level of difficulty and there's no physical or external reward for the right answer. But the question managed to derail the thread so hard, that everyone seemed to forget the original question entirely.

Are we trying to prove something to each other or ourselves? Or perhaps our inner geek just can't stand to let a question go unanswered? How many days in the 21st century have dates in which the numbers of the month and day add up to the last 2 digits of the year (1/2/03, 1+2=3)?
Making a Difference with Data: Data Projects & Advocacy
The whole networking aspect lets us make our own games. I agree to an extent that the programmed logic of the game falls into the background a bit with these kind of games. There still has to be rules - but it's more like the rules of real-life than an actual "game" that is being played. In real life, nobody can really prevent you from shooting someone else - its just that most people agree that you should be put in jail (or killed) for doing something like that, and therefore there are consequences. People find it interesting that there can be other worlds with similar dynamics (but the stakes are lower, since you can't really die).

I think the ever-increasing computer horsepower and network speed is contributing to us wanting more of a simulation/charicature of real-life than a fixed set of games to play.

I wonder if we'll continue on this trend in the future to the point where it's truly more entertaining to play inside a simulation than live real life (I know you can argue that is already true for some games, but I mean much more common).
Twitter SVP Chris Fry Breaks Down How His Engineering Org Works
Do these affect the commands used by orgmode?
"...while driving around, waiting for their next fare."

Why drive around whilst waiting? It seems like a waste to do that unless you're a licensed taxi (and are therefore permitted to pick up people who spot you as you're driving around).
Gorgeous glass sculptures let you see into the world's most deadly viruses
Among developed countries, it's mostly just the US that is so crazy.
Is it unreasonable to call a thread that decidedly ignores quantum attacks worthless? I mean, absolutely speaking, given that quantum attacks really are or will be out there, is it not bad advice to suggest systems be built with quantum-vulnerable algos?
The identity of a hacker
This reminds me of the Red Bull X1 out of GT5. I remember going round a hairpin at 250km/h, that's bound to snap your neck.
I'm in my happy place I'm in my happy place I'm in my happy place where Randall made good FP language comics

http://xkcd.com/224/
Is there a post somewhere where they describe this?
This is an atrociously optimistic view.
The fundamental inequalities between the rich and the poor are more getting more and more out of balance.
There is chronic long-term unemployment, the Debt has ballooned beyond reason and Fundamental Liberties are under sustained assault.

So the "reinventing" might work out for a measured few while the rest have a hopeless, orwellian future ahead barring some serious course correction.
Suicidal thinking is almost always a mental health problem or the result of a mental health problem.

You say that there are some situations where suicide is a rational choice. But even in these cases it's not that clear.

While I respect the right to chose death, and support changing of law to allow people to seek medically assisted suicide, I am worried that people with undiagnosed depression who would respond to treatment are allowed to die.
Good stuff! Thanks!
I like that better.

The word, not the fact you've just described my life.
See also: http://6artisans.com/
"Check that your backups are working the way you think they are."

I'm a bit horrified to read this here. If you're a sysadmin and don't have both automated and manual testing of backups, it's hard to imagine what else was a more important use of your time.

There aren't many things that could bankrupt a healthy business overnight, but catastrophic data loss is certainly one of them.

An analogous entry for a lawyer might be to pay attention while reading contracts.
There was a wood sunglasses company on Shark Tank a while back. IIRC they already had decent sales. I don't see any reason it wouldn't work for prescription glasses.
There are vestiges of dual case in many Slavic languages, and it's alive and well in Slovenian.
And for multinational corporations (eg Google or a bank) that's the norm for white collar employees moving internationally.
A modern take on Ginsbergs poem "Howl"
so Bitcoin is doomed?
How many years professional experience do you have?
MIT and the Prosecution of Aaron Swartz
In Finland you can buy these: http://pöllöt.fi
Comparing rates of attempted and completed suicide between the prison and general population is tricky, partly because access to means and methods should be much harder in prison.

But why are the rates of attempted or completed suicide so high?
It's easy to come up with a 100 ideas when you don't have to execute any of them. I know it sounds dismissive but i'm speaking from experience. One idea will take a thousand other new ideas to turn it into a successful business, plus a ton of hardwork and persistence.
I thought this article was satirizing every negative stereotype about HN, until I came in here and read the comments.
Diamond Blade - Gilatools.com
Yes. I agree. What were MIT's and Heymann's true motivations for blowing it up to a security issue? Did they act out of fear or out of ego? Regardless, they exacerbated the issue (just as media sensationalizes stories). It's upsetting that such intelligent people would fail to think through the situation. Or even worse...they did think it through and planned to blow this up as big as possible to prove a point or make an example out of Swartz?
A big challenge with imports is quality, and the quality of imported Chinese food products has been found highly wanting.

It's even considered suspect in China, which is among the reasons Smithfield Foods, an American pork processor, was bought by a Chinese company last year:

http://www.pigprogress.net/Pork-Processing/Meat-Companies/20...
> They refused to sign-off on any deal that did not involve Jail time.

It's not up to the victim how the perp gets prosecuted. It has absolutely nothing to do with them - it is up to the prosecutor alone.
http://www.xenproject.org/developers/teams/mirage-os.html
http://openmirage.org/
I find that hard to believe. Many prison systems are now the largest providers of mental health services in their various states because so many people with mental illness are imprisoned.
There's a bunch of files on Thingyverse for 3d printed and lasercut acrylic/wood Raspberyi cases, most of which are quite readily opened and modified for custom projects. (I've got a file somewhere for a common 3d printed 'pi case which has been modified/extended to include a 4-ish inch lcd screen - intended eventually for a offline bitcoin safe…)
Did I forget my physics, or do their diagrams actually show the particles suspended at the anti-nodes, i.e. the high-pressure areas?
"Evil triumphs when good people do nothing"
TEPCO Quietly Admits Fukushima's Reactor 3 Could Be Melting Down NOW
I'm going to start mining rapper's gold teeth, with my steel toe-capped boot.
Ask HN: are there tech jobs that require very little time?
Having been in the startup gauntlet as a CTO for a couple of years now, I'm finally starting to feel the weight of 60-70 hours a week on my social existence. Having gone through major relationship changes recently (because of the work), and having spent this Thanksgiving, Christmas and NYE at the office working, I'm starting to reconsider my priorities in light of an ever-advancing age.

Hypothetically, if I were to quit and just try to stay afloat for a while optimizing for me time, what could I do? I'm fairly good at my role and I'm sure I'd bring a lot of value to any organization, but I just don't want to work more than 5-6 hours a day. Having lived on savings for the past few years, I'm also very frugal, so I wouldn't need much for sustenance. A room with a nice bed and a shared kitchen is probably good enough.

What kind of role would you recommend? Any companies out there that can accommodate for that kind of thing? Do I pretty much have to work on my own for that kind of lifestyle?

Tips would be really appreciated.
Instead of netstat(8) or ss(8) check out /proc/net/sockstat and /proc/net/netstat and /proc/net/tcp. Might as well save a fork and some context switches.

net.ipv4.tcp_rmem=8192 873800 8388608
net.ipv4.tcp_wmem=4096 655360 8388608
net.ipv4.tcp_mem=8388608 8388608 8388608

You may want to rethink this. Your default values would support initial send and receive windows of 400 & 600 packets. Ive ever seen initial windows that high in the wild. If it's a client you've seen recently they should be in the peer cache already. With this default receive allocation you only get 39,000 sockets mx. And once you exceed tcp_mem high your sockets will be force closed with a RST sent to the other side. Much better to have 'pressure' kick in and limit the buffers, throttling the send & receive windows.

Go look at 'mem' in sockstat. I'd guess your average utilization is more in the 50kB range. And that includes both send and receive and the tcp_info structs, IIRC.

net.ipv4.tcp_max_orphans=262144

That seems incredibly high, Id expect more in the ~5,000 range on a very busy host. Check your 'orphans' from sockstat.

net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 16384

From the source comments this is actually a per CPU packet backlog, havent verified the implementation though.

net.ipv4.tcp_max_tw_buckets=6000000

You may not need to do this. sysctl_max_tw_buckets limits the number of entries in the TIME_WAIT queue. When a socket moves to TIME_WAIT and the list is full it will instead go directly to CLOSE. Not very polite, and its possible you fail to retrans data, but IMHO a low risk scenario. See what level youre actually running at in sockstat.

tcp_tw_recycle

The worst sysctl name ever. The useful part is setting the TIME_WAIT timer to socket RTO instead of TCP_TIMEWAIT_LEN (60 seconds). The terrible behavior is in tcp_v4_conn_request() of tcp_ipv4.c. The sysctl also enables strict timestamp & sequence checking on SYNs. If peers behind behind a NAT device have clocks > 1 second apart their SYNs will be silently dropped. IIRC PawsPassive from /proc/net/netstat will be incremented for each drop.

tcp_tw_reuse

See tcp_twsk_unique() in tcp_ipv4.c. IIRC when you request a new ephemeral socket it's checked against the timewait socket list. If sysctl_tcp_tw_reuse is set and the TIME_WAIT socket is older than one second it can be reused. Normally TIME_WAIT sockets are aged out of the queue after TCP_TIMEWAIT_LEN, ~60 seconds.

On TIME_WAIT in general you should probably look in to setting the Maximum Segment Lifetime to a more reasonable value than 60s. You want to cover your max client RTO + one or two retrans. IMO something like 10s may be too short, but I can not imagine 30 not working splendidly. See TCP_TIMEWAIT_LEN & TCP_PAWS_MSL & wherever else I'm missing the header values.
> a new era where the precepts of Moore's Law can be applied to virtually any field

It was at this point that I started reaching for my revolver.
That makes sense, cant access linksys website now to check (glad I got this binary in time :P) binwalk says "Squashfs filesystem, little endian, version 3.0" so I'm going to dl that and try again. Who knows, if I can get this to work, I can make a new wifi cracking script[0] that wont take hours with the vulns found so far by going through the backdoor, for security research purposes of course ;)

[0] https://github.com/cinquemb/WifiBruteCrack/blob/master/wifi_...
“Persons residing on the west coast of North America
should IMMEDIATELY begin preparing for another possible
onslaught of dangerous atmospheric radiation from the
Fukushima nuclear disaster site in Japan.”

that sounds very threatening...any other news articles picking it up? I don't hear any warnings from other news outlets...
Abusing Network Time Protocol (NTP) to perform massive Reflection DDoS attack
I can't listen to audio. Why is it interesting?
How "fine" will they be? If they had their rankings due to surreptitious means, and they can't use those nefarious means, how will they be fine?
I find you guys requiring a transcript with the intern application distasteful tbh.
[U.S. Attorney Stephen] Heymann subpoenaed Aaron’s girlfriend, Quinn Norton, to give grand jury testimony. That was bad enough, but even before the jury convened, Norton agreed to meet with Heymann—against Aaron’s pleas. Norton would say later that she thought she could talk Heymann into dropping the prosecution. Instead, he grilled her until he had what he needed: Norton mentioned that Aaron had coauthored the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (remarkably, the prosecution had failed to read through the blog posts of the Internet activist they had intended to charge). For Heymann, this was a key piece of evidence: It established a motive.

I never realized Norton agreed to talk with the prosecution against Aaron's wishes.
How I hacked my own happiness
"Published On: Mon, Dec 30th, 2013"
I have not checked the game, only this Polygon article, but the premise sounds a lot like a (washed down!) Dwarf Fortress. Specially the unfair part. You'll realise how unfair DF's adventurer mode is the day you pick your first mission to kill a scrawny beast only to find yourself brutally killed by a pack of capybarss.

Toady (the developer of DF) is preparing a big update to adventurer mode, by the way.
Finding a job could be difficult, the financial crisis is not showing any signs of going away anytime soon, and there's a decent supply of CS grads for a small number of jobs. This could change in the future, though. No need to learn Dutch, it's a hard language to learn (as in unpronouncable!) and everybody speaks English anyway.
Doing a startup here is challenging, too. The Dutch are pretty risk-adverse, the market is small (16 million) so we don't really have angels or VC money. If you start the startup in the US and then move to The Netherlands after, say, round B, that does sound like a plan. Which is exactly the way I'm planning on doing mine!

Tax rates are pretty high, with the exception of big multinationals. Think U2, Gucci, KPMG. They're officially based in The Netherlands because of the tax breaks.

On a side note: as a Canadian, you probably would like it here. Climate and mentality are pretty similar, and I know several people who made the switch. My elementary school teacher was from Canada.
What if Wealthy College Kids were required to do Low-Wage Jobs?
36 hour week in a public institution, 28 days holidays, 2 extra days a month cause I work 40 hours a week. I know, it's cheating ;)
It's not "over" simplifying the problem, though. Pay based on seniority is politically untouchable and is not correlated with the true variation of quality in the teaching profession. Lack of correlation with pay and performance is the number one problem with incentivising better talent to apply itself to teaching. The profession looks basically like a ponzi-scheme in that regard (pyramid pay). It is a bizzare that government uses this model of compensation...does anyone know why? It is all throughout the many layered beuracracies...
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-netflix-uses-analytics/
"One of the best podcast episodes you'll ever hear about selling software. Actually about cars. Stick with it."

https://twitter.com/patio11/status/418879954894340096
That's a slightly loaded question. I'm assuming you're alluding to difficulties schools have with firing burned out and ineffective teachers due to strict rules governing employee dismissal.

This is definitely an issue, however in my experience it is exaggerated by the media. Yes there are some who shouldn't be teaching, but they are far outnumbered by regular hard working people.

As for the other protections enjoyed by teachers i'd say they have a positive effect on employee mental health and would therefore have a positive flow on effect on student learning.
Punycode.
I would go as far as to say that freedom is our ultimate goal, not just for preventing burnout. And the nature of laziness drives the most wonderful innovations that has to do with automating things. So if you have a lot of free time and the sky didn't fall, you are on the right track.
Better source here http://rt.com/news/fukushima-steam-nuclear-reactor-064/
You may also want to send a request for GPL'd sources to Linksys for this device.
Future: clean single-source support for Python 2/3
On the radio side the cable doesn't have to be susceptible to getting hit by lighting since the radio itself is a big metal thing sticking up in the air. In many cases the cable from the AP down to the PoE injector is the most attractive path for lightning to reach the ground. You can make it less attractive but that often costs money or takes work (See the Motorola R56 Guidelines).

This also goes for ethernet between buildings. Surprisingly enough if the building is poorly grounded the best path can be over your ethernet to a different building.

The ethernet transformers don't really help. They are just another part to get melted off the circuit board if there's a close lightning strike.

Surge protectors pretty much exist as a sacrifice to protect your more expensive electronics (switches and routers).
** NEWS FLASH -- URGENT ** STEAM SUDDENLY EMANATING FROM
FUKUSHIMA REACTOR # 3 - WEST COAST OF NORTH AMERICA
SHOULD BEGIN PREPARATIONS FOR POSSIBLE RADIATION CLOUD
WITHIN 3 TO 5 DAYS

Saturday, *28 December 2013* 22:55

http://www.turnerradionetwork.com/news/146-mjt

damn it rained heavily today and wind was blowing like mad here in west coast Canada.

yet no pick up by mainstream media of course...don't want to cause a massive panic...by subjecting them to radiation.
Thanks a lot for the detailed reply. I appreciate it. I hope you don't mind my original comment.

> Being told this a dozen or a hundred times is worth preserving the option value of being in the solution set for the Fortune 500 or allowing my rates to move faster than common intuition says is reasonable as my demonstrable achievements and changing client base began to allow it.

I didn't understand this sentence. Could someone explain what this means to me?
The algorithms and operations behind the storage and distribution of those physical disks is a marvel to behold though. A friend of mine was in Netflix's DVD operations for a number of years, and it was fascinating to hear what they had implemented (I can't do it justice). Imagine a bunch of Computer Scientists implementing sorting and data storage optimizations in the physical world, and you get the Netflix DVD distribution system.

If you ever meet someone from the DVD division, take him out for some drinks. You won't regret it :)
"The poor farmer in India might need repeated reminders about weeding. One might not be enough. The minimum wage worker in America might need a couple of extra days to pay her bills instead of being slapped with a fine one day after payment is due."

That is the solution? I am not impressed.

They are also fairly easy to test scientifically, and considering he's a researcher, then why didn't he do so?
The GNU Name System and the Future of Social Networking with GNUnet
Kickstarter funded "Veronica Mars" theatrical trailer released
I'm not so sure. What I hear about Russia's is mostly cronyism. That happens in the US too, but let's say that it happens way less.

How is it for the average citizen, and normal disputes? Do they have something like a huge minority (blacks) that they consistently discriminate against in their justice system?

Do they have as absurd laws as the three-strikes?
I wrote about Cask as well as other tools sometimes back, http://ashishb.net/tech/mac-101-migrating-from-gnulinux-to-m...
This is all according to the "Turner Radio Network" and "OccupyCorporatism". I'd give these two sources about one epsilon more credibility than The Onion.
Hi! I do research in quantum error correction and topological quantum memory.

There is absolutely no way that the NSA or anyone else is going to build a quantum computer in the next twenty years.

The reason is that the overhead of error correction is, while feasible to meet long term, too large. The number of physical qubits that must exist in a system that can work with K logical qubits is O(K log(E)^c), where E is the logical error rate, which must be inversely proportional to the total runtime of the maximal feasible algorithm, and c is a constant that depends on the memory architecture (quantum error-correcting code, in general a subsystem of a degenerate ground state of an effective Hamiltonian on the qubits).

Shor's algorithm requires ~3N logical qubits and O(N^3) steps, where N is the length of the number to be factored. The minimum feasible size for a computer that could perform this calculation on a typical 2048-bit semiprime is several hundred thousand physical qubits.

By contrast, the largest quantum computer thus far constructed has less than ten qubits. Even if we double every 18 months (not at all likely), that's a good 22 years away with the most optimistic outlook for quantum stability.

Far more than 80 million dollars has already been invested into quantum computing research. I think it's money well spent, but it's not going to change the nature of the problem.
Suppose that employees are working less than before, fewer people are actually working, and compensation is up. Would that be evidence that power shifted to employees?

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/RCPHBS

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ECICOM

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USAAHWEP

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EMRATIO

(Wages have stagnated because companies have shifted compensation to untaxed non-wage benefits.)

...another labor movement. The first one gave us things like healthcare and retirement...

This is not the result of a labor movement. It's the result of working around a dumb law. Employers wanted to raise wages in order to compete for employees but there were laws against pay raises and wage competition. Net result: "we pay the same as everyone else, but also free health care/retirement/etc."
http://www.netc.com/ this map is kinda making me nervous
1. Read Getting Things Done. It will change the way you look at approaching tasks.

2. Clear, approachable goals. "Ship the website" isn't something you can just do, "write unit tests for deletion of users" is. One of my favorite features of Trello is a checklist on a card, it allows you to break down actions into very defined actionable items.

3. Have a list of things you're going to take an action on today.
Supposedly, the reason there are so few successful FOSS games is that no one wants to play a half-finished game, offer feedback (or patches) and come back and play the next revision. Is this changing?

On a different note, I've been intrigued by the idea of an MMORPG with a mechanic that coerces players into acting in-character. I think DayZ just pulled this off. You can be the desprate survivor just trying to hang on, you can be the thug monopolizing precious resources, or you can be the dangerous, unpredictable psycho, and all these possibilities feel perfectly in-character. There's no grinding, leveling up, or amulets of +2 charisma.

I suspect that right there is the real reason for this particular game's success.