skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Clearly there is no need for physical paper mail/envelope delivery to most people's home. With just a few exceptions, I haven't received a single piece of USPS physical mail "directly" since 2003. I was moving that fall, so I had picked up a PostOffice Box (And I had been using paytrust for all my paper bills since 1999) - and when I moved back to the Bay Area - I just never told anyone what my home address was, and put a big "DONOTDELIVER" on the post office box that came with my apartment.

The only exceptions to that, were in 2010, when I needed to get a California ID, and they would only mail it to my home address. Soon thereafter I started getting Jury Summons (Ironic for this Canadian) - with those two exceptions - no paper sent directly to me, couldn't be happier.

Pro Tip - A Post Office box at a "friendly" POBox location will throw away all your junk mail (probably in violation of some kind of USPS statute) and for a small fee, remail it to you anywhere in the world. Never have to change your address ever again. Never receive any direct mail.
Walk from Whitechapel to Portobello Road via Harrods

Learn 10 Chinese or Japanese characters

Learn 10 phrases in Hindi, Indonesian, Russian and Spanish

Visit a refugee camp

Go to Botswana

Build something with a Raspberry Pi

Cook scrambled eggs sous vide
I've been exposed to the idea of an energy-backed currency since reading Arthur Clarke's Imperial Earth as a kid (it's actually got a lot to do with energy economics in general, among other themes).

More recently I've been looking at some of the principles of dissipative systems and wondering if one of the fundamental inequality equations of that field isn't applicable as a general concept of capital accumulation. Let's see if I can't find that ... OK: the storage function here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipative_system#In_control_...

I've also been kicking around the ideas of, variously, an organism (say, a human), or a herd, or an ecosystem, as an economic analog, and trying to figure out what the equivalent systems within them are. For the body analog, there's the long-standing metaphor within economic literature of the banking system and money as the heart and blood. My read is that these are mistaken -- those correspond to physical constructs within the economy (transportation systems and energy), not the control and signaling systems of the economy. There I think you'd want to map something more on the lines of Ca+ ion exchange or endocrine signaling, though honestly my understanding of biology and systems is pretty loose. I've been meaning to look at how biological and ecological systems signal for resource utilization.
Remember that in order to get a chargeback you have to tell your credit card company that you specifically want a chargeback. Do not tell them that you are disputing the charge. If you do not use the term "chargeback" they will merely contact the vendor who will then advise that the charge is valid. Under Visa/MC rules, if you ask for a chargeback using that language they have to give it to you.
Help someone without expecting anything in return.

I rather hope that's not new to you, but it is for a lot people...
Celery-php (celery.php) transformed into a CodeIgniter library. 
Plug and play CodeIgniter library used to create tasks to be sent in backgound using celery.
Is it possible to give an 'upgrade' message to old browsers in this case though? If they fail the SSL handshake then they'll see a browser error before it loads anything from your site.

I agree with the principal of pushing people towards upgrading, but it's harder if you can't show them a helpful message to explain things.
To build habits?

My bank has free bill pay, so my wife and I have an automatic check sent out every month to a local all-volunteer charity that does very worthwhile work. We never see that money and we budget around the income we have left over. Whenever I peek at my bank statements and see those debits, I'm reminded of what we're doing.

Even a small amount, say $50/month, is a great start. This also forces you to find a worthwhile cause now, and to attach yourself to and actively re-evaluate that cause on an ongoing basis. It becomes a part of your life instead of your future.

All that said, thanks for the honest discussion. This stuff is important.
I'm playing with home automation/control. I integrated "smart" devices from 6 different vendors into a webapp with voice control that I run on wall-mounted tablets throughout the house [1]. From any room, I can say things like "dim the lights", "lock the front door", "turn up the heat" or "launch netflix on the living room TV". And, because I'm a bit of a Trekkie, the computer talks back. [2]

1: http://i.imgur.com/sduLRv6.jpg

2: http://www.lcarscom.net/sounds.htm
Seems to be fixed in v2.0: http://slick.typesafe.com/news/2014/01/21/slick-2.0.0-releas...
Also, Africa had the 3rd biggest war in human history[1], which probably didn't help development much. There was a major genocide and assorted other significant wars, all of which have been pretty much forgotten in the developed world.

[1] In terms of deaths: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War
Sorry if you're trying to be funny, but that is disgusting.
I read that as "Librarians Find Out Delivering Mail Is Hard and Expensive"

I wondered why librarians were delivering post. More coffee needed!
Can't be a good reason you're not on Mavericks. It's free.
No; China is, through it's exporters, getting USD from abroad, not giving it away.
Here is a fairly extensive guide for Apache: https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Strong_SSL_Security_On_Apache... - Also one for nginx:https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Strong_SSL_Security_On_nginx.... - This will get you an A+.
You can't make any assumption based on SSAE16/SOC1 compliance, without looking at the statement of applicable controls.

You can take more comfort from the ISO 27001 compliance
I'm guessing, that they simulate an iCloud login and then store the cookie on their servers and then use that cookie to login in the future?

But thinking about it, it's a CalDAV server which normally uses email + password to authenticate..
Piledriver, boring :/
Glass deemed 'not appropriate'in theater following homeland security incident
Ebay-Prestashop Connector
We understand our users, they want a unified Sunrise experience everywhere, and so we can’t use a local API for that.

Of course you can, but you need to do extra work to store and synchronise calenders.
It's good to have plans for big charitable actions, but small actions can make a difference too. Even if you give only 100$ or 50$ per year (and 100$ is close to a rounding error on your yearly income), it can still go a long way for some charities. Charities in general need money all the time, and their work is easier if they can rely on a steady flow rather than big sporadic gifts (which require them to invest part of the money they get into fundraising - that's also why small monthly donations are better).

It's also super easy to help, you just need to donate a small amount of cash. You don't have to invest any of your time or to think and plan deeply about it. The advantage of small donations over large donations is that you don't have the same emotional attachment to how well spent your donation is gonna be. (Just investigate briefly which organizations support causes which you care about and look into how well-managed their funds are - usually most of these organizations are pretty transparent, and consistently managed over the years. So you can pick a few favorites and give to them blindly afterwards.)

One big advantage of numerous small donations is also that you can contribute to many causes you are attached to without having to "choose one". As far as I'm concerned, I give to food banks, emergency relief organizations, human & digital rights associations, and environmental protection associations, because I find all these causes to be important.
Here is the Apache version: https://raymii.org/s/tutorials/Strong_SSL_Security_On_Apache...
Pretty sure that's the furthest thing from my problem. Women love talking to me.

> Basically, be interested in everyone

I think the main advantage of this is that it keeps your options open. It is a numbers game, after all.
Snowden Calls Russian-Spy Story 'Absurd'
He would have had better luck finding a partner by getting away from the computer, sleeping in a real bed, improving his lifestyle and learning to be a better conversationalist. Sounds like he was a recluse "Sleeping at his computer cubicle" and spending no time actually going out and enjoying life.
The only "fail" for grepular.com is:

IE 6 / XP - No FS - No SNI - Protocol or cipher suite mismatch

This is because I disabled SSLv3 which means people using IE6 on WinXP simply can't access the site. I see this as more of a win than a fail.
I was ialwayschooserock

Dude that was cool. I think it would be neat if there was a chat.
Functions should be short and sweet, to an extent, because by thinking in terms of functions you're building a new language in which you write your program.

If you're writing big functions by habit then you're just laying more code after existing code to build a program. If you split your code in functions and, instead, start talking in the language you've just invented then you're composing a program. And I think compilers should do the building while I refrain myself to composing.

Of course, one-line functions don't have inherent value but sometimes they're needed. For example, to present a higher-level concept that just effectively happens to be a simple assignment or an inc.

Short functions themselves don't have an inherent value either: if you manage to write your function with less tokens, possibly due to composing it out of other functions, then that's all good but isn't the real value of doing it. Shortness for the sake of shortness only matters until you're down to a screenful or so.

The real value of defining and writing functions is thinking of the proper words for your language. As soon as you're making your own language, then you're just using functions as vehicles to represent words in that language. Some words might take 30 lines to code, some words might take 3 lines. It doesn't matter as you've got your language together in a way that is concise and beautiful which is the real point.
> Just never thought about it, because why would I?

Anyone with family members using their iTunes account would and has for many years. That's why it's there.
Kudos for you for similar thoughts, but you'll missing some points (or correct me if this isn't meant to be offensive...):

1. The "Trick" of the node-webkit based skeleton is, that frontend-developers must no longer think in terms of "frontend" and "backend", and therefore do not need to use different languages/libraries for different parts of the application. And: python is not that common among frontend developers.

2. NPM is just superior to pip.

3. I can't see any hint on your given links that you have a tech that is aimed at building crossplatform desktop applications without hassle and with maximized productivity. Maybe you should market your project differently.
[Updated] Guest Blogging, the Fork and My Take :)
The author of BlackPOS malware professes his innocence and good faith
I worked on a massive codebase once many years ago (C#/.NET) which had been built by a relatively competent outsourced team. Somewhere along the way some consultant on the UK side of the business had insisted that each function could be no more than 5 lines long. It was horrible to work with - it took so long to find the place you actually needed to make changes, and it seems like they'd just started inventing layer names in order to facilitate it.

So yeah, small functions good, but you can take it to extremes.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4895
Anandtech review: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6508/the-new-opteron-6300-fina...
You do make a point. I worked quite some time to get my app working, and occasionaly i spend time tweaking things. But currently, (and for almost 2 years). I hardly worked on it. And money still flows in.
The Push Up Muscle Shirt - Creative Marketing
Async 201
Building desktop applications with node.js
That's just the power in the word "no". It's easy to say no, requires little thought, and no effort. This is not endemic to the US, I encounter it all the time in France as well.

So you learn not to ask, just do it. Or use a bit of reverse psychology to get to why it can't be done.
Offshore secrets: British Virgin Islands, land of sand, sea and secrecy
> Try ending with the question, rather than leading it. For instance, taking your line about weird foods and flipping the sentences yields this:

My sentence structure is almost always question first then statement, not the best form, but one that seems to come naturally to me. I'll work on flipping it around!

Then again I enjoy abuse of English in general, one the sign offs to a message I sent went as such:

With the names of artists hanging in the air, I shall end this message, with hopes of hearing a reply.

(That one did get a reply!)

I have done other hideous things on OKC as well, including getting into a short story writing contest with an English teacher one time. That was enjoyable. :-D
I am open for new ideas of simple and viral games :) I think there is a lot of sites that are for traditional games, so maybe we should think of something fresh and cool :)
> I just understood that to mean anywhere, but it must have a more technical meaning that I am ignorant of)

AFAIK, Rust can infer types within a function, but not the signature of the function itself. On the other hand, Haskell uses Hindley-Milner type inference to infer the types for the whole program (in practice, you'll want to add type signatures anyway, but that's not strictly necessary).
There's probably network layer (ie Samba) caching which would help in this situation, too.
What's the motivation for making your dissertation a private repo?
Cash and credit cards, no, probably not.

But if I were Western Union I'd be shitting bricks.
The nginx package in Wheezy supports both TLSv1.2 and ECDHE as well as AES-GCM, I'm using them with it at the moment.
It's actually phishing. I bring it up because I see more than one commenter on this page that has it wrong.
Joining an open source project will probably be necessary for me in order to get decent level of hands on experience. There is also a possibility of getting some mentoring which would be really good for me.

What do you think about MINIX as a learning tool? It seems to look as a good place to start but I don't know much details about it's internal design except that it's using a microkernel which is different from most operating systems in use today. So I'm not sure about the practicality of spending time on MINIX. My other open source project choices would probably be Linux or one of the BSDs.
Weather Stock Footage in HD
I work for a company that does not uses github at all. We store code on our own servers. Do you seriously think that anyone working in such company is going to be unemployable?

I would say the companies you look at work in have seriously flawed hiring practices. They would not hired our best engineers, cause they do not have open source github contributions. They code plenty for work through.
1 entry per household.
There is nothing wrong with a one line function. Nothing whatsoever. There are huge benefits to extracting a single line of code into a function. I'll just link to a stackoverflow answer I made on the subject several years back: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/785145/one-line-functions...

Summary: Performance almost certainly isn't an issue (compilers are smart). Abstraction leads to better design, using a well-named function can improve readability, making it easier to understand, easier to prove correct, and easier to modify. When you keep code inline it increases the inertia of the given design and implementation, extracting even a single line into a function (when warranted) can make it far easier to drastically change implementation. And if you want that single line of code to become several lines, or to switch to calling out to a web service, implement caching, add error checking or what-have-you that's made much easier when it's encapsulated inside a function than when it's sitting inside a block.

Componentization is always good, even when the components are sometimes very small. Like all design choices extracting code into its own function requires judgment based on experience but when done right it can have many benefits, even when it's a single line, even when it's a fraction of a single line.

Blindly following a rule such as avoiding making functions too small is just as big an error as avoiding making functions too large.
I read from a recent expat (to the US from AU) that US payments heavily revolve around cheques - to the point that "automated debits" for payments consist of your bank mailing a cheque each week/month/whatever, and banks developing smartphone apps to handle cheques. How is this possible?

I'm 31 and I have never once had to write a cheque - I've used i think maybe 3 bank cheques (issued by the bank itself after funds are deducted so it's known to be "good") for "large" things like buying a car.

How is that you don't have standardised electronic transfers for funds, both into and out of your bank account(s)?
Don't forget the tax.
Look, I understand how people use the phrase "passive income", but it's really not correct. Like "object" or "unit test" "passive income" is a term with a meaning. It has advantages for you to understand the difference between "unit test" and "regression test". It also has advantages to understand the difference between "active income", "passive income", and "portfolio income". For once you can speak with professionals without misunderstandings, and you can think about a topic in a different way. When you understand what "passive income" means you will see, that you actually really like "passive income" from a tax paying point of view, even if you have to work as hard for it as you would for your "active income" (e.g., salary). The thing is, though, that often if you have to work hard for something that is considered "passive income", then you are probably doing something wrong or it's actually your "active income".

[1] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/passiveincome.asp
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_income
Guardian blocked in China after story about leadership's offshore wealth
Yeah and Snapchat was offered $3 billion..

I'm not sure that I understand your point -- people place a value on things but that doesn't mean anything that makes less money is any less important.
We've already signed you up, and it's been sent to collection as a convenience to you.
People may have 1+ device per person and not share them.
Thanks, dude. Yeah I was (pretty obviously) learning as I went on the iOS front so I encountered a lot of newbie bugs. I'm still working away on it though so hope to provide you with good value for money!
Do you remember the article about Nintendo that came out a while ago?
There was an article on the history of Nintendo on hacker news a while back. Does anyone remember it and have the link? I was trying to search for it but couldn't find it.
Assuming that the creator meets his goal to reach C-level performance, C has exactly no item present on the list of Myrddin's major features. If you are programming in a higher-level language, you get performance (again, assuming it's actually fast), and "lightweight" static typing, if you don't have that already. If you're programming in Rust, switching to Myrddin is more debatable (I don't know about D or other languages competing in the same space).
Mandatory link to http://blog.okcupid.com/
Less story, more analysis.
Show HN: Gugodoc, my static web generator (for what it's worth )
Yes, that also put me off somewhat. There's an air of dishonesty about it.
> I'm sure you mean well in educating people about scientific facts

Well there's that, but I also prefer my spirituality funny side up.
I live in a city that lacks hotels and doesn't have any tourism, so the only people contacting me are people who work in our local industry (offshore oil production), and just need a place to stay while they are doing training, etc. I've never had any problems, and like I said that has kept work for me really low.

In terms of pricing, I just priced it by what I thought was fair. I do refuse people though, since like I said I wouldn't host for more than a week or so per month (I don't want this turning into a job, but it's the easiest money anyone can make if they have a spare room).
I'm teaching myself Obj-C, one of my apps[1] has made it to the store and whilst I continue to learn, I'll be pushing improvements to it. I've just pushed another app that'll hopefully make it to the store - the simplest QR Code Scanner ever.

1. http://james.brooks.so/contare-my-first-ios-app/
Thank you for correcting the statement. It was a valuation.
Not true; from the article: On May 27, 2008, TeliaSonera released a press release stating that it would start selling the iPhone in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia during 2008.
I thought that Saverin had identified advertising as a potential revenue stream very early on but Zuckerberg didn't want to spoil the site with adverts.
Does anyone think that this is really creepy?

I mean, men using dating sites like OkCupid are mostly creepy people already, but actually writing programs to automate stuff on OkCupid?

That's basically fulfilling the prophecy that men are just in for the sex.
Steve McConnell makes some good points about this in Code Complete too, one of which is "small methods tend to become bigger". Even if it started out as a one-line method, it is not unusual to later find the need to add something else to it. This is from memory (I don't have the book here), so I can't give a more specific reference to it.
In my experience, it's the people who fear that they are going to be taken advantage of the moment they do anything they don't absolutely have to. It seems unlikely that getting spoiled as a child causes that kind of distrust.
That's one crazy wide heatspreader — http://www.amd.com/PublishingImages/Public/Photograph_Produc...
You can try to improve that model, but I would bet that you will get rising inequality as well, it will just be masked by the growth ad infinitum. And unlike in the Norvig's model, in your model the inequality will not be bounded.

Of course, in the real world, people need upkeep (which could be modeled as a fixed amount subtracting from their wealth over time). So not all transactions are net positive, because at some point you have no choice as to whether or not to buy food. Which would even exacerbate the effects of inequality for low income people.
> Functions Should Be Short And Sweet, But Why?

In my case the why (as well as many of the arguments here) is because I'm not a "superstar/rockstar ninja coder" and by keeping functions short, clear and with a descriptive name in 6 months when I open the file to fix the change request I won't have to spend 2 hours building a mental model of the system to fix the bug.
How The Internet of Things Will Make Our World Smart- Infographic
Perl is used heavily in biology and bio informatics. It's also really really good for messing with text in complicated ways. And it's still in use as a web language. So that's three more use cases.

I think you can think of it this way. ANSI C doesn't have a built in linked list, or hash/dictionary, or line count when reading a file, or map or grep or a bunch of things... and you can implement them (though map/grep are a bit tricky) but you have to worry about the implementation, and matching other people's implementation. By having the many useful primitives Perl does, it provides a broader standard interface for doing things, and that makes hacking easier.

Perl tries to give you lots of tools to express yourself. If you are a wood carver, you know that you can work wood with very limited tools, but having the right tool in your shop makes things a lot easier and simpler for the expert. So it is with Perl.