skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you ever done any troubleshooting in Windows? I spent over a year as tech support for Dell supporting Windows, and I honestly can't say that Windows is any easier to fix. Most of the time(outside of PEBKAC errors), I ended up a) enter obscure commands in cmd b) making an obscure edit to the registry or c) re installing windows. No operating system is easy for end users to fix when something isn't working right and at least in linux you very rarely have to reinstall.

Your example of double clicking on setup.exe to fix the wifi is pretty wrong. First of all, you have to find the .exe file which is pretty hard for joe average and you have to make sure its the right one, etc.
Unless https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry#Advers... is implemented in the protocol, I'd not invest.
Why would you buy any goods if the value ouf your "currency" keeps going up? BTC is DOA because of its inherently deflationary properties. There will never be a consistently expanding BTC economy as hoarding makes more sense than actually spending it.

The people who like BTC for having a fixed cap on the amount of coins in existence are probably the same people who would like the gold standard back, because they don't understand the economic consequences.
EBay and PayPal UK website hacked by Syrian Electronic Army
You don't need a TODO app
8 hours is an oversimplification that doesn't count things like the automated preliminary searches performed elsewhere. Boiling down the invention to its basic elements, determining the delta, then finding prior art is a science.
It'll be fine, git will refuse to delete the branch you're on and the loop will continue:

error: Cannot delete the branch 'master' which you are currently on.
Of course it is a prank. It does not tell you the password, it just likes a page of their choice and tags all your friends in the comments.
Offering a tie in Final Jeopardy wagering is a good idea. If you beat the opponent already, why not play him again instead of a random new opponent who might be better?
The password system also has no login attempt counter... so basically you could bruteforce all you want according to my brother whos a student there.
> "This is a critical thinking question, there is no wrong answer"

This might be an 'exception that proves the rule'.

By saying there is no wrong answer (in this case), you are illustrating that you have otherwise been strict on wrong answers. This is either going to be concerning, or a sudden change of pace which is difficult to manage.
You are gay whey
Fixing a broken agile process
The thing I find fascinating about both this article and now your comment is that regardless of who's game it is, it seems to be taken as fact that it's a MANS game. You said "you get a wife"...I suppose history isn't littered with too many breakthrough female mathematicians.
(originally posted in the similar post "Optimizing Your Industry to the Point of Suicide", I thought _this_ post title had been edited [same subject, same domain] - apologies if that's against HN etiquette)

As much as I also dislike how some IAP game developers base all their gameplay mechanisms purely on maximizing the user likeliness to keep spending without even noticing, I recognize that they get the very basics of video game design very right.

Because they have to.

The goal for any game developer who treats its creation not only as an artistic piece but also has a product, is to design software that offers a positive feedback loop to the user in order to keep her engaged.

Consider how Nintendo, for instance, considers the Mario platformer franchise as an instrument (see Ask Iwata interviews). During development, designers are focused on getting the timing (rhythm) right between challenge (say ennemies or holes) and corresponding rewards (powerups or secret exits). This ultimately plays/tricks how our brains are wired (effort needs reward) in order to engage users and ultimately enjoy the game... and pay again (and again) for the sequels/updates when they need their fix.

Imho IAP is an interesting return to the origins of video gaming (and coin-based arcades) and refocuses the industry on getting the core ingredient right, the feedback loop, rather than betting it all on graphics, story, feature-creep... and marketing.

Marketing is disproportionally important when you need to convince your game is worth paying upfront, even in a seemingly minimal amount, as mobile gaming is a very "dispensable" expense in the general public.

There is no ROI in marketing an IAP game that does not engage enough of its users (enough).
On the other hand, marketing heavily an upfront-cost game can draw sales, sometimes thanks to the franchise name as well, despite providing no to little entertainent to most of its users as the feedback loop is just not good enough to engage them.

For good or bad, I think IAP is accelerating adoption of data-driven practices for video game design. As an engineer/scientist, this is very interesting.

Last but not least, IAP probably helps expand the (mobile) gaming audience to people who would have otherwise either not played game(s) at all or would have downloaded illegally.

In the long term, I believe this can only be good for the industry. The bad apples of IAP will be regulated by better consumer protections for the worst "abuses" and more naturally over time by the users themselves as they get more familiar with the model and more "meaningful" IAP titles become available.
The really amusing part is that their trolling represents better economic policy than Bitcoin.
Maybe consider Fressian for EDN-like bytecode format...
Disillusioned with teaching
Hi HN

I graduated three years ago with a good degree in Mathematics. For various reasons, I took up teaching (in the UK) but I've decided it's not for me. The hours are ridiculous (I commonly work 60 hours a week if not more), there is constant stress and pressure from management and the situation for teachers looks like it will get worse with all the changes the current government is introducing.

I love working with children and I love Maths. I thought teaching was the perfect career for me but I'm at risk of burning out if I do this for much longer. I have been looking for other jobs (mostly in finance and software) but lack of experience is hurting my prospects. I have been trying to build an open source portfolio but I simply do not have the time to work on it. Has anyone else made the jump from teaching to industry and if so, do you have any advice?
PHP Web Application Server
What? Everything about this comment is wrong.

> "Topology ignores such things as corners, distances, and convexity."

No, that's what topology is.

> "That makes it hard to combine with GIS systems."

No, GIS systems rely heavily on topology. Here are two definitions:

Topology: 1. the study of geometric properties and spatial relations unaffected by the continuous change of shape or size of figures.

Topography: 1. the arrangement of the natural and artificial physical features of an area.
You can create your own Like Button which uses data from Facebook's Graph API (e.g. http://graph.facebook.com/?id=http://news.ycombinator.com )

You can output a different value if Facebook is returning a 0.
Two last paid support cases were closed after they identified a bug in their code and we found a more elegant fix than the hack suggested by them. We still had to pay for both.
I'm not impressed with aws support so far. Especially Elastic Beanstalk. Looking into OpsWork to take matters in my own hands.
How to extract only the interesting parts out of boring videos?
The free market takes care of all your points, except the first one, which isn't a big deal, really.

- Lost coins? Analysis can make good estimations of how many coins are lost. The market price will adjust.

- Yes, it puts down concerns from people who believe that inflation is necessary, that is true. Whether deflation is bad is another story, and again, the market takes care of it. If value of the currency goes up over time ("encouraging hoarding"), then the reverse also holds true: merchants lower pricing to encourage spending because they'd rather have bitcoins/litecoins/whatevercoins than the alternatives.

- Same as above. The deflationary aspect has been discussed extensively already, so there's no need to go much further. Here are some nice responses: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/66/will-deflation...

Now, as to whether this decision was good or bad, I think it's fairly neutral. If the currency was capped, then I'd say there wouldn't be much to distinguish it from litecoin or bitcoin. This just seems like a way to add a new-ish aspect to it. I'm all for experimenting with multiple currencies, multiple ways of doing things, and I'm interested in seeing what'll happen. Perhaps 10 billion dogecoin will eventually become irrelevant because its value will be too low (akin to spending a ton of resources to mine a few pennies). Or maybe not. I'm rooting for all cryptocurrencies in general nontheless.
Will we see support for partial updates of json types? Right now, if one needs to update a json column, you always have to overwrite with the full json data.
So the thing that's interesting to me is that now you can actually diversify your altcoin holdings and while the value of any one coin can go up or down, the market value you are holding can actually be fairly stable. For example, as Dogecoin loses value as a result of this inflation, you will likely be able to switch to a different coin starting with a new blockchain. In fact, I wonder if the solution to all this is some type of "metacoin" that would represent the averaged out value of various coins.

For example, I used to mine scrypt-based coins, then have them automatically traded for BTC via http://www.middlecoin.com/. It's an interesting concept as I would not be able to mine BTC directly on any hardware I own, but I can mine a small amount of scrpyt-based coins. Perhaps the idea of holding value the same way can be introduced. Sort of like a mutual fund of coins. And a coin industry index (Standard & Bits?)
> Though I fear it's likely going to be an uphill battle for a little app like this to reach the people who aren't.

Young people can use this too. Just one example: at a "safe sex" seminar during freshman orientation, the organizer recommended letting your roommate or a friend know where you are going before meeting someone off of Grindr[0], etc. At the time I heard that, I actually thought of making something like this, though I never actually got around to it. I'm glad that someone has, though.

Another example: I haven't had to travel by plane since this summer, but my friends have told me to let them know the next time I have to go through security, so they can know that I made it through safely.

These are both somewhat niche use cases, sure, but the product is general enough that it can satisfy both (and, I suspect, many others). The concept of a "dead man's switch" is certainly not new or obscure.

As you can see, the application mimics behaviors that already exist in the real world. So, their challenge will not be finding real-life uses for this application, but rather marketing it in a way that people understand the variety of things that they can use it for.

[0] Grindr actually didn't exist then - it was probably Cragislist or something. Also, it wasn't really a "safe sex" seminar - Columbia calls their anti-sexual violence training their "Consent" campaign (colloquially referred to as "Consent is Sexy": http://health.columbia.edu/services/svprp/advocacy-outreach), but I digress.
Not that I'm currently aware of, though if JSONB gets a little committed it will give a better foundation for it.
It's not so bad in theory, at least it counters the deflationary-currencies-are-evil-and-stupid argument. The real worry is that now some entity has been entrusted with the ability to manipulate the value of the currency, and that the entity may violate that trust by later deciding to further inflate the currency.
That's my experience with Rackspace. They're fairly inflexible in what they offer, and it's a bit of a pain to go outside of their standard offerings, but if you can work within their limits then they offer truly unparalleled service even for tiny 'insignificant' customers.
In my view the simple explanation that there's more to learn before reaching the cutting edge seems credible.

Biology is another area. I live in a town where there's a lot of biology research, and there are start-up businesses, but they aren't formed by kids who skipped college to get rich. Instead, the typical start-up founder could be anywhere from 40 to 60. It takes a long time to learn biology.

Another possibility to consider is that math research takes more time now because it resembles more of a search than an inventive process. If proof is computer-aided, for instance, then an Edisonian approach could be applied to finding a proof for a theorem (or at least, finding important steps), resulting in discovery of proofs being a matter of time, even for the most brilliant mathematician.

(edited for spelling)
For reference, I live in a small town along the Hudson River on the edge of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate NY, but have worked for Boston and NYC startups for some time now. So, not living near a top 5 city doesn't really have any bearing on the conversation.

I agree that long-term contract-to-hire is a reasonable way to go for may employers and employees, particularly folks that already are already contractors, but the premise of "you've got a couple weeks to prove yourself" is a non-starter. I'm not going to quit my day job and risk my family's financial security for a company that is unwilling to take a similar risk on me. In an ideal world, it is the best way to evaluate a candidate. However, if it were practical, it would have already become an industry practice. The fact that it seems to be rare indicates to me that it does not work very well.

As a Systems Engineer, a practice that I would like to see more of (and may try to implement at the company I work for) is a brief troubleshooting exercise with a shared tmux session. Set up a server with some problem and ask the candidate to identify the issue and try to resolve it.
Pandomonthly, Stanford Entrepreneurial Series, drt.fm, This Week in Startups
Shucks - I just ditched Onenote for Evernote!

Oh but can you access google drive without wifi? it's collaboration stuff is cool, but when you are working out in the field away from the aeron chair - it may not work so well.
And Ilfak (the creator) refuses to provide special student pricing (even when offered proof of identity). I was willing to spend many hundreds of dollars for a student license but instead settled begrudgingly with objdump. Perhaps it is because Ilfak is so paranoid about leaks/piracy.
1 DOGE will be 1 DOGE for eternity. If that is not 100% stable then I don't know what is.
Interesting definition of immutable values, and a valid one. My perspective is different. An immutable value has a value add more than that of avoiding defensive copying, such as structural sharing. When you add a key to an immutable map, the new map can point to the old.

It has become more and more common to model systems with append-only as the only form of write (Event Store, Datomic), so readwrite can probably be avoided in some cases. And things like IP packets certainly makes sense to represent immutably - anything else is a bit of a lie :) But there is certainly a risk that the trafeoff of immutabulity becomes too costly for an OS..

Also, the system language will not be pure, like Haskell. Just immutable values, like Clojure :)
No, trying tends to make things worse, at least in my experience. Someone who is bullied is not good at retaliation. Bullies tend to be super-great at complaining to teachers and getting you punished.
Same here. Was very surprised to happen upon this article explaining it.
Worth noting that Hennessy was talking about the time of Harold Macmillan and the V-bombers.

A great book:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Secret-State-Whitehall-Cold/dp/0...
Yeah, didn't think about that, could be tricky if you're on another branch. Nice catch!
Why “just use Adblock” should never be a professional answer
Average water use per person*day by country
Weird Science Weekly: Larger testicles means more infidelity in female mates
Very cool! "If you're the only one with an idea, it's probably a bad idea" :) Feel free to e-mail me, would be lovely to join forces.
this guy must be under 30 and have like barely any relationships or companies to manage.

sigh. I miss the days of not needing a todo list.
I've always been baffled by Clojure's view on state. It seems like just a rename of the concepts present in most languages today. Ie atom is mutable variable and value is an immutable value. What's the novelty here?
There is a Toronto startup that plays in this space for the enterprise - http://www.guardly.com
Senior Windows Software Engineer | Duo Security | Ann Arbor, Michigan (Relocation strongly preferred)

(https://www.duosecurity.com/company/jobs)

Duo Security's hosted two-factor authentication service brings strong, scalable security to organizations of any size. Duo's unique, high-availability architecture provides centralized management, self-service enrollment, and interactive secondary login through an intuitive web interface, eliminating the high costs, complexity, and confusion associated with traditional two-factor systems. Every day, over 1,000 organizations in 80+ countries around the world rely on Duo for their security.

Duo Security is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and is a privately held company whose investors include Google Ventures, True Ventures, Resonant Venture Partners, and Radar Partners. Read more about Duo's investors.

About Duo / Co-Founder Bios: https://www.duosecurity.com/company/about

-----------------------------------

Our ideal candidate is an experienced Windows developer. Experience with security products a big plus, as is experience working on B2B and SaaS products.

Job duties:

* Integrate Duo with all things Windows including Active Directory, ADFS, Exchange Server, IIS, and Remote Desktop Services.

* Help us build and deliver cloud-based 2FA services for two-factor authentication as part of a high performance development team.

* Handle field escalations, related to Windows integrations, when fronttline support escalates support requests.

Main qualifications:

Windows development experience

* C++ (e.g. Win32 API, COM, MFC)

* C#, .NET

* Windows Installers (e.g. WiX)

Secondary qualifications:

* Experience with Windows security APIs and technologies

* Experience with development and administration of Active Directory, ADFS, Exchange Server, IIS, and Remote Desktop Services

* Experience with Python development

* Mobile development for Windows Phone, iOS, or Android

You also...

* Care about contributing to an amazing work culture and environment

* Are comfortable with the rapid, unpredictable nature of a tech startup

* Don't believe you have to live on a coast to work for a high-growth, tech startup

-----------------------------------

Excited? We can't wait to hear from you!

https://www.duosecurity.com/company/jobs
Right, I agree to an extent with that assessment. It would, in my mind, be more agreeable to say that the 24 hr news cycle was negligent and in dereliction of their duties as members of the free press to not report the story simply in the scope that it wouldn't generate enough viewers as, say, the Bieber thing. I don't believe there's complicity between the press and the US Govt which was (I believe) implied in the article.

But I still hold to the opinion that the coverage by mainstream press did garner enough attention from most people outside of the Internet. The Boston Globe, NYT, and the AP, covered the story.

Of course, those sources have a limited audience and I can't prove how many news outlets bought AP's story because I don't know how.

Edit: News media doesn't hold a monopoly on truth, but this was an exaggeration that can be easily refuted.

Forgive me for my initial sarcasm. You prove a good point but I don't fully agree.
Moreover, the ads themselves may not be honest (e.g. they might make claims of products that are untrue, misleading, etc.), and the game developer may not be in a position to verify whether they are or not. Especially if they're just 'randomly' delivered from an ad network.
I do. I'd rather fix that before we try to "fix" dev bootcamps.
Better for the collective, maybe, but removing selfish incentives for hoarding and mining Alt-coin will lead to low adoption and depreciation. Same problem with Peercoin: http://www.peercoin.net/
The package manager is part of the OS distribution. It's not 3rd party code.
emailed to this to my girlfriend! green light the cheat thanks!
Generational GC usually depends on write barriers to detect creation of references to newer generations inside older generations.

Immutability prevents the mutation of older generations, so no new references can occur.

So I expect generational GC to be easier to implement. I wouldn't expect it to be faster or slower though, because programs will need to be written differently to cope with the limitations on mutability. O(1) algorithms will likely be replaced by O(log(n)).
The goal of Linux was not performance, it was to create a free OS. The fact that it has become a high quality performant OS is a side-benefit (driven by external commercial factors, much later in its development timeline).
Indian College suspends students for eating in class: Orders enquiry
It agree that might turn out very well, but people have a right to be upset when the rules are changed mid-game.
I'm sure you'll get voted up because the HN crowd loves to hate things, but I'm honestly curious why anyone would think this is objectively a better economic policy.

Regardless of the inflation vs. deflation debate, the same exact thing could happen in bitcoin if it is what the community wants.
Her: When AI Doesn’t Feel Like AI
I get not available in your country (Canada).
Milton Friedman was a monetarist, who believed that the ideal monetary policy was for the currency base to grow in time with real economic growth since this would result in neither inflation nor deflation of prices. If you could deduce economic growth from the blockchain you could make a Friedman coin.
I would also point out that Dogecoin's stated purpose in this move is to stabilize the currency at 100 billion coins. They believe that 5 billion coins fall out of circulation each year; therefore they intend to mint 5 billion new coins to keep the money supply constant at 100 billion coins.

Therefore the Dogecoin money supply after 2015 will be constant: the number of coins in circulation will remain approximately 100 billion, and the value will only increase or decrease as the demand for the currency moves.
Am I the only one puzzled by the fact that the title sounds like something has changed when the linked status says:

"Thanks for contributing to this discussion. Based on everyone’s feedback, we’ve decided to leave the Dogecoin code base as it was originally released, and not implement a change."

Which means that in fact, nothing has changed and it was always like this.
Related, a purely functional package manager, Nix, and a Linux distribution based around it: http://nixos.org/nix/
From the Wikipedia page for the French-UK incident:

'Hervé Morin, France's Minister of Defence, said that they "face an extremely simple technological problem, which is that these submarines are not detectable".'
Erdos said no.
Given this, the title is super link-baity. Could a moderator update the title to "30 minute Snowden interview in Germany"? I still would have clicked through.
> discourage hoarding

Is there compelling evidence that inflation discourages hoarding? I don't think anyone would agree that USD-centric societies discourage hoarding, unless you think something like investing in mutual funds doesn't fit the term.