skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that discussing this in academia is worthy. One paper can start a discussion, another paper can improve on it or disprove it and so forth. I think that putting out a paper with a controversial conclusion is not wrong, it is merely provocative. I hope there is more study on this and that it is serious.

I also do not think they are completely wrong. I think there is general consensus that in North America we have likely reached peak Facebook engagement -- unless there is a game changer. The question is fairly open at this point in time as to whether it stays steady, decreases slowly or fast from this point.
FizzBuzz in Assembly (Rejected by Hacker School)
Nice comeback by facebook. Instead of defending facebook against the claims in the paper (facebook is not dying! - a very hard-to-defend position) they turned it around and used the same techniques used in the paper to show that Princeton is dying. Offense is the best defense!
Yes that's all I've been saying. So sure, the future pipeline gets slimmed because of lowered expected returns.

There might even be further decreases to productivity of the research pipeline due to economies of scale (investigating one drug may make you stumble on a cure for something you weren't even looking for). Or there might be significant diminishing returns to more pharm industry research, because of the dependence on advances that only come through basic biology research. So it is hard to say which outcome is optimal.

Nothing in economics says that the money generated through monopoly prices due to patents is an optimal amount for drug research and development. And why chose 20-year patent terms rather than 30? Or 10? It's just kind of a system we've thrown together haphazardly.

Through NIH we fund more than half of drug research and basic biology research largely outside of the patent system. India funds research as well that we take advantage of, and India provides the early education for a very significant proportion of our graduate-student/pharm-industry-researcher population.

In practice, any monopoly (which is what patents provide, though in reality upwards of 20% of pharm research is just wasted on researching patent workaround processes and drugs to break the monopolies of competitors, adding no new functionality) will try and price discriminate. E.g. low-income people can get coupons for prescription drugs in the US and pay way less than high-income people, though it will be less relevant once we have near universal insurance coverage.

So, in the presence of patents and import/export restrictions/tariffs, the companies would end up charging much less on average per-pill in India and other low-wage countries than in the US in order to maximize profit. This means that though we give India a subsidy, it doesn't cost us much in lost revenue relative to the number of people in India who get a benefit.
I'm still getting them...
WebRTC demo to reveal your true IP address behind proxy or NAT
You see lots of things like this decrying the F-35, but the real problems don't lie in features or designs, but in a very broken defense procurement process.

Edited to fix a word.
Heck yeah blame the human race! If it wasn't for humans none of this would be happening! (heh.)
Let’s deliver better CMS experiences.
Rust user here, and I'm actually slightly embarrassed by those code examples because I think that our I/O APIs are far too unpolished at the moment. It's long been one of the weakest areas of our stdlib, and though I'm glad that we've finished the enormously-important Runtime-agnostic abstraction mentioned in the article, we still have to put in the legwork to make the lib nice to use.

For example, as shown in the article, the File::open function takes a Path type. The purpose of the Path type is for safe and platform-agnostic path manipulation... but that's really not necessary here. Say you provide a string containing an invalid filepath to the constructor to Path: you're gonna get a runtime failure. This is the same failure mode that you'd get just by providing the string to File::open directly. So ideally the open function would allow you to provide either a Path or a string directly, without forcing you to jump through the hoop. These are the little things that I mean when I say that our I/O APIs haven't yet had the polish they need.
This is a great talk at Defcon about Tor. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=864FxA3jmHk
why?

what makes you think you aren't worth 10 times that?
Startup Post-Mortems Offer All Sorts Of Surprising Lessons
Sit up straight
It says something about the level of intelligence of Silicon Valley people that it has taken this long for someone to point out that there are LOTS of things that local people could do to defuse the situation and improve the situation. In fact, given the number of people who live in SF and work down in the Valley, one wonders why on earth they started running private buses and did not go straight to the city and demand new routes on the city bus system. As for wifi, that could have been installed on the new routes for all riders, not just privileged Googlers.

Great coding ability is not enough to get by in life. You need creativity as well, and some understanding of social, business and political issues. Because life does not end at the edge of the CPU chip.
The Ignorance Of Crowds: Why Open Development Is Crap
US hints at Edward Snowden plea bargain to allow return from Russia
I agree that Julia is great. But it's not there yet, either.
More provable code is not the answer. Proving the functionality is meaningless if you can't decide on what the functionality should be. And this project has all the classic hallmarks of a requirements quagmire. The requirements are poorly specified and contradictory, and provable code and strong typing can't solve that problem.
I don’t want to sound like I am excusing this behavior but this type of thing happens all the time in various other industries all over the country. This is not an isolated sv disease. And as much as it is about money in regards to salaries it’s also about employee retention which is also about money haha.
> If someone takes your laptop, they have you by the balls (or ovaries).

People still have laptops that aren't encrypted!?
Flooz failed because it was centralized. But Bitcoin is, as you know, decentralized.
This video will change your life. Your LIFE.
md224 wrote: "I'm also curious why Princeton's search volume seems to have declined. Obviously it doesn't mean Princeton is going to disappear, but what does it mean? Could be statistically insignificant, perhaps."

I have seen this in most nerdy topics associated with early internet adoption in Western English speaking countries -- or at least that is my theory. Basically as other countries come online and late adopters come online, they do not search for the same types of topics earlier adopters looked for.

This trend for academic or technical topics decreasing as a percentage of Google trends is universal, see here:

http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US&q=Science,+/m/...
Judging from some of the comments here, that line at the end was apparently necessary.
You're spot on. That's a very good point. I guess I'm not a minimalist in the digital realm.
What happened to the news in the past year or so about the large glut of lawyers in America, having to work for relative peanuts because of supply outpacing demand? Has the valley somehow managed to keep them out?

Or is it that specialized lawyers can make $350+/hr? In which case developers with certain specialities can make that much as well.
> It took me over 27 years, or about 10,000 days, to get robbed. That’s still a 1 in 10,000 probability. Pretty good.

No, no, no. That is not how probability works. That's like saying that if I live to be 100, the probability of me dying was 1 in 36,525.
Want to Get Featured in Mashable? The Secret to One Startup's Success
There's a plugin called 'ideavim' for android studio (and all jetbrains editors). I use it in webstorm and intellij and it works great, gives you the best of both worlds.
Would be awkward to run django from inside julia though...
Study shows learning exotic functional programming languages like LISP/Scheme or Haskell to impact facial hair growth and accelerate neckbeards: http://thequickword.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/on-the-origin-o...
Apprenticeships Could Help Reduce Youth Unemployment, Business Leaders Say
TIL that the $392 billion budget for the F-35 program could have funded NASA's annual budget from 1992-2012.
Thank you, fixed. Not a native :)
Show HN: New from Ruby Jokes: taint_aliases
Well, according to wikipedia for starters.
> These secret conversations and agreements between some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley were first exposed in a Department of Justice antitrust investigation launched by the Obama Administration in 2010.

Why is it that lines like this never quite make it into the comments section here?
Indeed, it makes the problem worse... the strong typing and provable code stubbornly insist that the requirements are contradictory and refuse to even compile. But managers don't want to hear that, of course, so we go back to the dumber languages that happily compile even so. This does not make the requirements any less contradictory of course... it just means that the dumber languages will let you blithely code on, and are guaranteed to do something stupid at run time instead. Progress!
Not really. It's not carrier capable, which means it can't really get where the Marines need it a lot of the time.
I would have also considered Primecoin. It's another cryptocurrency, but the unique thing about it is that as of now it can only be mined using CPU. I myself have tried mining it with Amazon EC2, but only using the free trial (which gets me ~$0.30/day I believe). I have no idea how it would work out with a larger instance on a paid plan, but looking at the performace/price I got with some other trials of cloud services (like Azure and Digital Ocean), I don't believe that mining it (or any cryptocurrency really) is profitable on a cloud computing platform.
This might've worked if they'd offered him full clemency the same day the leaks started coming out. The handling of his case shows that capturing and punishing him was far more important to the administration than any concerns about national security.
How do I properly quantify exactly how much value I'm adding to the company I work for and the world to possibly determine how much I'm precisely worth?
How does Chrome have anything to do with this?
Agreed -- if you can't rest your fingers on the keys without accidental input, it doesn't seem like it'd do anything to help enable touch-typing.
This guy is advocating that all aircraft should be designed for short range dogfighting when this aircraft most likely designed for beyond visual range combat. Of course it's gonna lack the maneuverability. Try comparing it to the F22.
Doesn't matter. It ties your IMEI to your Apple login so after you restore you're still locked out. I've seen it action after unlocking an iPhone recently.
Here is a problem that all people have: inflation. 4% in the US. 20% in Argentina. Etc. All this means your current life savings will have lost tremendous value decades from now when you will need them. Bitcoin, by being deflationary, solves this.

Another problem: my landlord and I are both Wells Fargo customers, but I can't even pay my rent electronically because WF arbitrarily limits electronic ("SurePay") payements to $2000/month. Instead we have to use plain old checks. This is an aberration for the 21st century... With Bitcoin, nobody dictates me I can only send $X/month.

How about the underbanked with no ability to receive payments from remote friends/family?

How about Chinese dissidents getting their financial accounts seized by an evil government?

And so on... Bitcoin can solve numerous societal and economic problems. Too often people are blind to them because we have always lived with these problems.
Two 4TB Ext USB3 HD's and a Safety Deposit box at your Bank.
Cheap, more or less convenient (get four drives and rotate your backup drives), and secure.

Easier yet if you can pair the amount of crucial stuff to under 4TB, then it's just one drive that you can rotate monthly (weekly?).
writing can help you organize your thoughts and that can lead to new epiphanies. Writing helps you explore, helps you think, and helps you find ideas. Some people really hate that though. They don't like non-linear thinkers who use analogies and metaphors. They like to start with the proof. Other people enjoy surprising, sometimes ludicrous connections and analogies.

Some people also don't want facebook to fail. If you go deep into their comment history, many of them have argued that facebook cannot be the next myspace.

http://www.amazon.com/Surfaces-Essences-Analogy-Fuel-Thinkin...
Programming for Kids ebook is free today
No comment about pretentiousness of minimalism yet? HN is having a good day.
And then you want to interface your code to someone else's, written in something that is not your pet language, and you find yourself spitting text or binary matrices through pipes. IME it's easier to decide on a data serialization format at the start, and use whatever language works best for each piece.
None of those cities are anywhere close to as expensive as SF/NYC. And part of reason Chicago has "affordable" housing is because vast swaths of the south and west side are dangerous, gang-infested, and neglected by city services.
If you need a cynical money-driven motivation, it's more humans to sell things to.
I have jailbroken many an iPhone, so I have a bit of an idea. Apple's security is really quite strong. If you are trying to equate hacking to magic, I don't think you understand it.
It is extortion nevertheless. Or patent racket if you like. B&N described that behavior on their court hearings. MS is coming with threats, and says that no mater what you'll do, even if you'll try to refute some patents, they'll find others, so better pay up right away. It's a classic racketeer behavior, i.e. extortion. If you describe racket a "part of the business process", then it means that something is very seriously wrong there. And it's clear what is very wrong - the patent legal system is severely broken, leaving too many holes for such racketeers like MS.
Is it really proper to call it an "analog" clock? That word makes me think electronics, just not digital electronics. Maybe "mechanical" would be more appropriate.

That said, very nice clock! It never occurred to me that you could indicate the Sun's position that way.
You are starting off with the wrong assumption that IBM will sit on its hands and just pay their bills with the extra 2.3B (and more from increased efficiency). Just look around. You are at a site which is frequented with brilliant minds teeming with innovative ideas. IBM is budding new business in very promising areas, and they want to focus on these. Just cut them some slack in their decision, because they are the ones who have been in the business in person, they see the whole picture, and they have the neck in the game.

(Disclaimer: I work for IBM, but these are my personal thoughts, and do not reflect company position.)
Why aren't you getting paid like lawyers? Because tech companies don't operate like legal partnerships. As a techie, you are an employee, not a partner.

Don't forget either that lawyers don't just 'make money', they 'prevent loss'. That $20M suit that ends in your favour also comes with a nice injunction preventing your opponent from doing -foo- again. Techies can't do that.
> has offline maps so I don't have to hunt for a 4g/wifi

You just about immediately sold me on a windows phone with those words. "Offline maps" as someone who travels in europe yes please.
Agreed. I wish they would would buy Xamarin and make it easy to build C# MVC applications and deploy on Linux/BSD. Give me that with entity framework to MySQL/Postgresql and I am sold. Will convert over to using it for everything. Add in ReSharper and it has the potential to be the most productive environment on any platform.
Chinese hacking attempt/Secure your Servers
I just have reinstalled Debian 7 on my VPS. Logged in for the first time with "root" and on port 22..then I didn't locked down anything and within an hour I can see the below root password breaking attempt in /var/log/auth.log file .. WHOIS shows its an Chinese IP.
God knows when these people will get rid of Script kiddies.
Now I have locked down my VPS... does anybody else have similar story and what best steps you took to Secure your Servers .??

Jan 24 02:28:30 Sputnik sshd[1566]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=222.189.239.126 user=root
Jan 24 02:28:32 Sputnik sshd[1566]: Failed password for root from 222.189.239.126 port 1616 ssh2
Jan 24 02:28:35 Sputnik sshd[1566]: Failed password for root from 222.189.239.126 port 1616 ssh2
Jan 24 02:28:37 Sputnik sshd[1566]: Failed password for root from 222.189.239.126 port 1616 ssh2
Jan 24 02:28:39 Sputnik sshd[1566]: Failed password for root from 222.189.239.126 port 1616 ssh2
Jan 24 02:28:41 Sputnik sshd[1566]: Failed password for root from 222.189.239.126 port 1616 ssh2
Jan 24 02:28:43 Sputnik sshd[1566]: Failed password for root from 222.189.239.126 port 1616 ssh2
Jan 24 02:28:43 Sputnik sshd[1566]: Disconnecting: Too many authentication failures for root [preauth]
Jan 24 02:28:43 Sputnik sshd[1566]: PAM 5 more authentication failures; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=222.189.239.126 user=root
Jan 24 02:28:43 Sputnik sshd[1566]: PAM service(sshd) ignoring max retries; 6 > 3
He has no idea what he's talking about. He said in the very same post that he's only been to SV once in the last four years.
agreed, I'm trying to get out of engineering for this reason. I can make 3.6 million bonus on wallstreet, why waste my time here.
2 princeton students write a paper on Facebook, declining
1 facebook employee write a post on Princeton, declining
Perfect match... Dude, it's not about the scientific contribution of the paper... Do I need to emphasize this obvious thing to a Princeton alumni?... If I do, I do worry that Facebook post is speaking the truth...
Government grants go to all sorts of things that have a <10% chance of panning out big, though. That's the point of public funding for basic research (something some of its critics don't get).
> So, no

So, yes. You are simply talking bullshit because of some irrational GPL hate. If you cannot honour the license of a piece of software then you can't use it. Doesn't matter if it's free software like GCC or some commercial library you paid a shitload of money for. Stop being dishonest and irrational.
Problem is, boutique implies specialty. In tech, specialties involve short term expertise. Experience works against specialists in our field, whereas in fields like law and medicine, specialization is likely to increase value over a career lifetime. We are up against a far more sinister s-curve in the experience/perceived utility equation.
Another demo to sniff LAN

http://jsfiddle.net/Ln9cd/4/

It's strange because my chrome://flags disabled WebRTC yet this still works, without asking any permissions.

Btw I am re-hosting on jsfiddle.net because HN traffic. You can find original author links in page.
Engineering is systematic approximations and best-guessing. The art of it is knowing when shortcuts are good enough.

Only very small parts of software can be proven, especially for things like flight control, where the parameter space is huge, and exhaustive search or manual formal proofs are impossible. Not even speaking of the fact that the spec against which one could build a proof is never error-free to begin with.
Yeah, the first thing I thought of with this proposal was: this sounds like a great way to direct $$$ of NIH funding towards researching "why vaccination causes autism". For every $100k that Jenny McCarthy puts towards antivax research, the NIH would be compelled to match $10m...
what the heck is "real" science? A lot of the greatest science started the same exact way. Making connections that nobody else could see. Finding purposefully playful, surprising analogies. Doing things so ludicrous that everyone said would not work. Exploring ideas and sharing them.
Bug Exposes IP Cameras, Baby Monitors
Data Science Weekly Newsletter - Issue 9
Huh. Wouldn't have expected Cogeco to be that good, but I suppose it isn't surprising that it is as bad as Rogers or Bell.
The students also published it online before it was peer-reviewed. I think the grandparent is more referring to the typical corporate cop-out of "the actions of a few employees", even though the damage is done regardless of who did it--and the employees (or students) did it under the name of the organization.
Bitcoin hash difficulty rises to ensure the block rate remains relatively stable at 1 block every ~10 minutes. Meanwhile the block reward falls exponentially. By definition then, it requires that other variables change such that mining remains profitable for someone to survive, otherwise all incentive of maintaining the blockchain collapses. Sure, you could argue that mining will reach a state of neutral ROI just to serve the public good... but guess what, there's a fee system in the protocol that will ensure that probably won't happen.

The 'but banks charge fees' argument just doesn't hold water long term. Blockchain resources are finite, and all indications are solving Bitcoins long term scalability problems (in terms of number of transactions per second) is still quite hard.

Unless the value of Bitcoin grows with hash difficulty and the inverse of block reward sizes, fees will rise in the Bitcoin network. It's naive to think it'll be a free ride payment network forever.
The Chair Force decision makers aren't any better. The A10, one of their most successful programs ever, is/was also an open joke, it is the red-headed step-child of aircraft.
Unicode separators in urls make sites appear down in some browsers
This is also why the old advice of "duck and cover" was actually very relevant and good advice. If you're not vaporized, you'd prefer to avoid the oncoming blast as much as possible (and yes, even the flimsy newspaper-over-the-head helps reflect thermal energy and could seriously mitigate your burns).
Alrighty. Well, I'm disappointed nobody has any questions, but hope to continue to improve the software and maybe someone will take interest another day. :)
Slow emacs startup ... people restart their emacs?
I don't know if this post is intended to be a response or a summary of the blog post, but it's a summary.
Legal Heroin: Is Virtual Reality Our Next Hard Drug
> V/STOL capability was the one thing the marine corps absolutely insisted on

A while ago I read a long and fascinating article tracing this back to Guadalcanal in WWII, when the Marines couldn't get the air support they needed. Apparently this history is firmly cemented in the corps collective memory and is a large part of why they insist on this.
It would have been interesting to see how well this would work with that canonical phone that was going to have the side-scroll sensor in the side of the phone, completely off the screen.
I should have kept reading the entire article, I hadn't noticed that it used a proximity trigger. That makes more sense.
Well, that creates a very unique fingerprint for me. Yet another browser feature to disable I suppose.
Problems with poor morale on missile bases? The second in command at Stratcom[1] with gambling problems? Looks like we need to take humans out of the loop when it comes to nuclear decision making. We need something that will not be subject to emotions. Something that makes decisions based only on cold hard logic. . .

[1] Strategic Command - in charge of, amongst other things, global strike and strategic deterrence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Strategic_Command
This might not work at all but I wonder how it would work if you supplied it with a "mixed" language model. That is, a language model based around a person using multiple languages interchangably on the fly, simultaneously, instead of doing this modal switching stuff that causes so many headaches.