skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While the regimes aren't inviolate, Congressional action would probably be required to change the status quo. Besides that, the fact that you can reimagine the legal rules doesn't change the philosophical and political positions that led to the existing status quo. It's a mistake to think that the drafters of the 1996 telecom act didn't understand what they were doing. They made a conscious effort to try and deregulate the industry while conceding to keep much of the existing regime applicable to voice service.

All this could be changed if you let Congress have another shot at the classifications, but you really don't want that. The forces that made telephone regulation the morass that it is will conspire to turn internet regulation into a morass as well. It sounds good to say that rural areas should have access to internet service, but opening that can of worms is a disaster in the making.

Infrastructure regulation in the U.S. is a disaster because of the disproportionate power of rural voters. It's not efficient to build infrastructure to rural and exurban areas, but rural votes, particularly in the Senate, hold infrastructure projects hostage unless inefficient infrastructure is built in those areas. That's why Amtrak is obligated to run a nationwide network when it should just run a train line from DC to Boston. Indeed, the desire to provide universal service is responsible for much of the dysfunctional aspects of the telecom industry to begin with. Many cable providers are monopolies because municipalities granted monopoly status as a concession for building service broadly instead of just to the profitable locations.

Look at the aspects of the telecom industry that are actually getting people excited. T-Mobile's new LTE network, for example. The reason it works is because T-Mobile avoids a whole bunch of capital construction by only focusing on urban areas. Cities get LTE, and everyone else gets HSPA or 2G. Or look at Google's fiber service: hitting major urban areas and avoiding anywhere that doesn't yield a lot of subscribers per mile of fiber. That's the right way forward--that's how we get internet speeds in the U.S. that match countries in Asia and Europe that are much more heavily urbanized. Treating internet service the way we treat other public infrastructure will destroy that.
A lot of the time when I'm writing a scraper it's because of bad/old code or incorrect HTML. So if Kimono has issues with that its utility is reduced.
As I wrote in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7067752 and elsewhere, the solution to rising prices (which is another way of saying "gentrification") is to increase supply.

Or to decrease demand, but that seems unlikely to happen in SF in the near term.
Steam Controller Ditches Touchscreen For Real Buttons
Oh really? I viewed your github, but have no impression. Why did Google give you an interview? I think you have other profile, not just github.
The last stripe CTF literally changed my life. I've always been interested in security but didn't have the confidence and honestly thought I didn't have it takes to be successful in the field. I decided to try the CTF anyway just for fun and was able to finish everything much to my surprise. I had read about SHA-1 padding when it affected Flickr so I knew just what to do on the level that involved SHA-1 padding, which I thought was the hardest.

When I came to HN and saw a lot of people I admire talking about how hard it was, especially daeken [1], I remember thinking something along the lines of "well, I thought it was hard but not that hard", and decided to try to find a few security bugs in open source software... Best thing I ever did... In just a few weeks I found some nice bugs on both Drupal and Wordpress, got the first CVE credited to myself, and then I started to have fun (and some profit) with the various bug bounty programs around the web, most notably those run by Google (I'm currently 0x05 overall) [2] and Facebook (7th) [3].

After a year doing security work on the side I was able to quit my day job last august and now I make my living basically as a security consultant and also as a "bounty hunter". I also got multiple job offers from US companies (I currently live in Brazil).

And all of this happened only because the stripe CTF gave me the confidence to actually follow my dreams. Oh, and I still don't know if I have what it takes to be really successful in the field, but frankly security bugs are everywhere so I go ahead and keep on finding them. I'm learning a lot every single day and the mean time between bugs is getting lower and lower, which is great. So thank you Stripe. Thank you very much.

Shameless plug: BTW, I'm in the committee for the W2SP conference, so if anyone has some interesting discovery to share, please submit a paper.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424299
[2] https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/hall-of-fame
[3] https://www.facebook.com/whitehat/thanks
[4] http://www.w2spconf.com/2014/
Speed Skater's Parents Couldn't Afford To Go To Sochi. The Internet Stepped In
I think a lot of the points are great but when we talk about super successful, I can think of some great startups that grew organically but also a lot of operationally efficient companies that knew how to build businesses at scale with a combination of organic growth, massive marketing, and smart PR. For example, one of Google's largest advertisers in spend is Booking.com (owned by Priceline). They have built an efficient machine that can acquire users/customers in an efficient manner and in the process capture 48% market share of online hotel bookings in Europe and help make Priceline a $60B market cap company.
Their digest and weather app are both rated 4.5 stars in the app store and received very positive reviews. Digest is featured in the app store right now.

These apps are both (presumably) something people use every day.
Put content decscribing why desirable!
Install All Google Web Fonts on Ubuntu, Easily
The Parable of the Housemate
pbs.org videos are US only. Any links for the rest of the world?
How to create jewelry from old plastic water bottles...
Maybe he means it's a desert with culture. At least from my experience going to school down there, "desert" is pretty accurate for the climate/environment in LA.
I don't have much to contribute to this discussion beyond saying that a) the article fascinated me and b) this article is compatible with "Why Nerds Are Unpopular": http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html :

As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.

and "Lies We Tell Kids": http://paulgraham.com/lies.html :

Imagine if you tried to keep someone in as protected an environment as a newborn till age 18. To mislead someone so grossly about the world would seem not protection but abuse. That's an extreme example, of course; when parents do that sort of thing it becomes national news. But you see the same problem on a smaller scale in the malaise teenagers feel in suburbia.

The main purpose of suburbia is to provide a protected environment for children to grow up in. And it seems great for 10 year olds. I liked living in suburbia when I was 10. I didn't notice how sterile it was. My whole world was no bigger than a few friends' houses I bicycled to and some woods I ran around in. On a log scale I was midway between crib and globe. A suburban street was just the right size. But as I grew older, suburbia started to feel suffocatingly fake.

Life can be pretty good at 10 or 20, but it's often frustrating at 15. This is too big a problem to solve here, but certainly one reason life sucks at 15 is that kids are trapped in a world designed for 10 year olds.

What do parents hope to protect their children from by raising them in suburbia? A friend who moved out of Manhattan said merely that her 3 year old daughter "saw too much." Off the top of my head, that might include: people who are high or drunk, poverty, madness, gruesome medical conditions, sexual behavior of various degrees of oddness, and violent anger.
>What a bunch of assholes.

While it might be true, the sentiment is entirely unhelpful and mirrors a fundamental problem with the reaction to these types of problems: there is nothing special about these people that makes them assholes.

In fact, I'm proposing that any group of people put into these roles would behave exactly the same. When you put people into jobs, the – let's say architecture – of the organization they are put into has a drastic influence on their behavior (see the Stanford prison experiment)

The question that should be asked is what's wrong with the architecture of these organizations that brings out the natural bad qualities of human behavior in average people?
Preserving all the data is the logical endpoint but that's not what I was suggesting. I'm just saying there's nothing special about keeping two points.

I'd rather not feed two points to my decision algorithm, whether it's machine learning or a human looking at the data. It makes more sense to make some attempt to preserve the shape of the graph unless you have strong reason to believe it's Gaussian, and even then the assumption should be checked.
Geez, take your own advice. And please leave this community.
State pulls plug on $90 million tax computer system
It is sad how SF is becoming a monoculture and it seemed to happen so quickly. I moved here only 4 years ago and when I was first here it was flush with weirdness, but now, that weirdness that made SF so fun and free minded, is all but gone.
The Potential of Online Education in Africa
This URL now redirects to the root of facebook.com, so I guess they've already disabled it.
This Norwegian bay got so cold so quickly that fish froze while swimming
Do you even marketing, somewhat obtuse bro?
But that sort of plays into my point.

With a 64 bit version of XP, and 8GB of RAM, you could fit the entirety of the operating system in memory, paging file and all. A clean install of XP, with nothing else included, occupies about 3GB of disk space. You'd still have 4GB of RAM free to run the system.

But as of Vista, the mandatory minimum RAM was escalated (from 64MB) to 1GB, and all to support a hideous UI, and not much else. The operating system sprawls across 64GB of disk space.

With every new version, it feels just as shitty as before. Despite umpteen quadruplings of hardware resources, shit still feels like it's Windows 95, fucking again. Nothing gets faster. Drop $3,000 a year, just to swim against the tide, with incremental changes in the appearance of progress bars, so that ugly animations can actually flash periodically as they steal your youth from you, rather than inflicting anxiety whilst freezing intermittently.

Every subsequent version of Windows fails to improve, continues to suck, and in some areas it actually gets worse than it already is. But christ almighty. After 20 god damned years. Why?
I observed the same thing in Beijing. Daytime deliveries are handled by motor-trikes with a small flatbed on the back. Delivery trucks do not block streets in the daytime and appear to be largely, maybe completely banned during daytime.
Is this legal? Did I give consent to Facebook publicly associating this information in ToS?
The newer versions of Windows have much higher system requirements. Seriously, get out of your rich man's ghetto at least occasionally. Many people still run very old computers because they do not have the disposable income to buy new ones.

My computer can run the newest version of Windows but I have a Windows XP/Win 7 dual boot setup. I keep Windows XP around because of old games from the Win9x/WinXP era which do not work (correctly) on newer Windows versions. Unfortunately, there is no WindowsBox (i.e. a DOSBox equivalent) yet. I have tried virtual machines but the experience was not positive. They are for running old office apps, and tend to fail miserably at running DirectX games.
Cnpmjs.org
Not entirely at odds with the experimentation you quoted, I think it's perfectly within rights to call these people assholes. If they really had any conscience about the matter they would speak up or leave the job, seeing as they don't it's well within rights to refer to these actions as their own and hold them at least partially responsible.
how are you going to do it without having to know the actual authentication key(s)? if i don't trust anyone enough to give my auth away, and so unless the site being scraped has some sort of oauth support, how are you going to get any data?

of course, if this was an offline product, or self-hosted product, then it would solve that problem of auth instantly.
Depends on the use case, no?

Would I want to store a lot of important write-once data on HFS? Reluctantly, if at all. High-throughput database? Yuck, no.

Would I trust it with a source-tree that is stored in a DVCS and immediately restorable, while also giving me much faster compiles? Yep.

Would I choose either FS for a server? Nope. That was the point - there is no single "best" file system, or the world would've long ago settled on it. Look at what you need it for, and make your decision accordingly.
Internet access in the DPRK is strictly limited, but they do have an intranet, which uses IP, DNS, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwangmyong_%28network%29
Regarding the argument over whether parking ticket revenues are fairly obtained, stinkytaco and others claiming they are fair and legitimate should address the fact that everyone reading this understands what it means to get a ticket "fixed."

There would not be a word for it if that form of corruption wasn't endemic.
Hmm... so while we have the whole gentrification thing going on, those on the outside of tech are watching us complain that maybe we don't get paid enough. Imagine what the outside-of-tech people think when reading this article. The recession and/or effects of it isn't over for a lot of them. If there was an article about bank or oil company execs complaining that they don't get enough money we'd probably all be exploding with rage.

Just saying....
First logout from Facebook, then re-visit the url.
>And all of this happened only because the stripe CTF

Well that and all of your hard work and talent.
We are prone to saying super while talking. That's ok.

That many supers in writing? Sorry, but that's bad writing.
Survival bias is interesting.

It's clear we mostly look at success as an example, but then again there could be a cause/effect confusion in the accusation of "Survival bias"

I think PG's advice "Don't Die" combined with some of these traits like They generate revenue very early on in their lives, They keep expenses low and They are focused on growth logically seems to lead towards a company biased towards survival.

It would be interesting to build a Bayesian model of these traits.
Am I on USA-Today or Hacker News?
I work at facebook on the security team.

This is an account recovery endpoint used if your account was hacked for example.

Your name, profile picture and a few other things are considered public information so there is no security issue displaying them. See: https://www.facebook.com/help/167709519956542
Well, that past tense is a bit weird, but "We're Hacking" or "We're Trying to Hack" would be acceptable (if still linkbaity) in my book.
I'm kind of tired of people in tech who are "misunderstood". Maybe they just aren't very good at expressing themselves or doesn't have the experience they think they have. Sometimes people can of course be be argumentative to the point of hypercriticism, but saying it's because they "misunderstood" is belittling.
Your thinking about the guard/prisoner scenarios and it's effect on people? Likely very true. But, I wonder if there are some types of people who actively seek those kinds of roles and others who actively avoid them. In some people, with all the information the might not participate.

Idk - just thinking out loud, I am not aware of any research the back up my hunch.
Employment at will. They can find other jobs. They're assholes for continuing employment in such corruption.

I may even go so far to call you an asshole for defending them.
Yes, but how is hacking the host infrastructure different from hacking your own infrastructure (in case of a dedicated server)? You'll always have external trusted third-parties unless you also maintain your own datacenter and network provider. I can't see how cloud is inherently less secure unless the host acts against their own interests.

(all this in context of the statement that "if you are serious about security, use dedicated hardware")
Despite its imperfections, the US Constitution's very measured and explicit introduction of independent branches of government with checks and balances between them strikes me as one of the greatest political innovations of all time. It's right up there with representative rule.
There's definitely things that a custom-built scraper can do more efficiently than kimono, but our focus right now making scraping accessible across a broad enough range of web sites.
What's Yahoo? I'll google it.
Quizlet employee here.

For the JS logging you see in some of the screenshots, we use some JS on the client side that watches for errors and fires off a request to us with as much data as on the error as we can collect (in most cases we can get stack traces, which is pretty nice).

In terms of where this all gets stored and aggregated, all of our application level logs are shipped into Elasticsearch, and that's where the aggregations and counts you see in the screenshots come from. All of the application level logs are sent in with a unique identifier per-client so that we can keep track of them that way, as well as tagged by username, IP address, and anything else that might be useful in cross-correlating with logs from the rest of our stack.

If there's any more specific details you're curious about, I'd be happy to elaborate.
The Day I Got My Sight Back
The Best Leadership Advice I’ve Ever Gotten
In case you can't watch it, here's a mirror:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:58d690227d4c88ba52673db6c5b08201150266c2&dn=frontline-northkorea.mp4&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80%2Fannounce
There is some argument that MAD is actually better than RMS for a lot of applications. Apparently it predated RMS, but one of the reasons it was switched to was because RMS minimizing linear regression is much, much simpler to calculate. Also consider comparing the robustness of RMS based regression with MAD based regression. See: http://matlabdatamining.blogspot.com/2007/10/l-1-linear-regr...
Ebook readers
Firing seems remarkably mild, considering. If you or I did something like this, we would go to prison.
Yes, we're excited about the possibilities of an end-to-end use case as well... in fact we were surprised when we found a lot of interest in front-end output layers on top of the APIs than just the APIs themselves. Would be curious to know what output features would be most valuable for you.
This issue affects all of us. Just because we are on Hacker News doesn't mean we ignore this Kafkaesque way of putting people on no-fly lists. Hackers do travel on airplanes :)
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Oooh boy, I get to PG you and point you at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man as my answer for your first comment. Breaks down like this: I said this law is right. You then say I'm saying all laws are by definition good and then attack that restatement of my position, which isn't what I said.

Your disagreement on semantics is just plain wrong. If the law they broke is a "conspiracy" law, then the fundamental difference between what these companies did and what a union does is the "secret" part of a conspiracy. It's not a conspiracy if everyone knows about it. In addition, them going around warning each other to keep it secret is a direct admission of guilt that they knew it was illegal. Some of the emails even say it's illegal, so they knew it was illegal and conspired to do it anyway. Get it? That's a conspiracy.
I'm largely a fan of the idea I've felt the burn of the "I paid full price for this because I appreciate your work but now it's 33% off?" moment (Borderlands anyone?). I want to see that abolished. Because I've seen a lot of negative feedback of the argument, I want to offer an addition to it.

As an example, I had my eye on Kentucky Route Zero since I saw it in IGF and I fit the example user "It'll go on sale. I'll wait" But after a year it only went on sale for 50% (crazy, I know) and that happened a couple times. At that point, I knew it wasn't going to go to 66% or 75% any time soon so I picked it up. I can see a happy medium with sales where you make it clear that you won't go on sale for a certain period of time and/or for a specific discount. You don't necessarily have to verbalize that either. I don't follow any KRZ news but it was clear that that price point was not going to change quickly. This way you still get the press about sales (I saw a lot of KRZ at 33% and 50%) without having to screw fans over.

I'm sure there are a few ways of strategizing it that would require some experimentation (e.g. a bit before a steam sale, have another 10% type discount like might be seen on launch week but make it clear that it's not going to go below that). There are also more mediums for sales with the Humble Store now you see a lot of games with shallower discounts.

I will say I don't think this model works as a long term plan however. I like the idea of starting low for pre-orders and then increasing the price over time, but I don't think it would work as expected over a two week period. With Minecraft there was the expectation of more content over a period of a year or so between increases. It may still be viable but that may be a case for early access. Make it clear there that the price will increase when it's finished.

I hate seeing what appears like developers feel like they have to sell out on their baby, and I hope something like this can work.
How offensive. Aren't you aware that empathy is a core engineering value?
laws are ostensibly enacted to the benefit of the majority (tho of late, i m not sure if that's true anymore). Therefore, anything "illegal" is bad under the above assumption.

Also, you made the implicit assumption that a corporation is like a human. It isn't, and you should not be using values of a human but apply it to a corporation.

A corp should be treated with more strict rules, to prevent it from becoming too powerful, because the collective mandate of a corporation is profit, and if it were to be judged as a human, would look like a high functioning sociopath hell bent on doing anything possible to make a buck. Therefore, it should not deserve the same rights as actual humans.
I'm saying there's not much difference at all. Paying to upgrade delivers the same shit in a different package, even with more than ten times the hardware resources.

It's a shitty upgrade treadmill that promises much and delivers little.
He's not defending them - just pointing out that behavior is engendered by the situation, and thus it is wise to architect the system to minimize the incentives to behave badly.
WindowsXP was updated patch Tuesday.
I'm not sure if Joyent's blog, which characterized him as an "asshole", would qualify as a minority voice.