skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Censoring stories, partially or entirely, is standard operating procedure.

The most egregious example is when the New York Times delayed publishing revelations of unlawful wiretapping until after the US elections of 2006, on request of the White House. [1] There was no legitimate editorial reason for that decision.

That behaviour has not changed, and the Guardian is no better. According to ACLU attorney Ben Wizner (self-described "chief legal advisor" to Snowden) the New York Times, the Guardian -- and every other publication which got access to the leaked documents -- did not publish a single document without first consulting with the US government. [2,3]

Personally I don't trust any tax-paying organization to publish information the government does not want published.

[1] http://fair.org/take-action/action-alerts/the-scoop-that-got...

[2] "The journalists who Snowden gave the information to, have in every single case, gone to the government before they have published something." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs3mFZ4UWME#t=53m (At 53:00.)

[3] "The Guardian has not published a single story that has included NSA classified documents, without consulting with the US government. The same is true for Glenn Greenwald, and the same is true for every foreign journalistic partner. In fact, they put it into their contract, with all of those other publications around the world, that they are not to publish any secret document without giving the US an opportunity to weigh in." http://ww3.tvo.org/video/199289/sentencing-snowden (At 9:40.)

Edit: found a better link to the TVO interview.
Personally I've found the lookalike audiences to be much more effective as a targeting strategy to increase conversion rate and volume on Facebook than the Datalogix/Acxiom type data. Perhaps I need to give it another chance. Also, not everyone has access to the data needed to make a good lookalike audience on Facebook.
It's funny how there are about one third of the people in the poll that have MAs or PhDs, yet none of the comments mention doctoral programs.
I recall that in the late 90's there was a regulation in place that forced the phone and cable companies to lease their coax or DSL lines to competitors who wanted to offer service as an ISP. I recall getting mailers from various little companies with offers. There was a difficulty in determining what the proper lease rate would be for the little guys. And in the end it apparently didn't work out. I don't know if the law was changed or if the cable and telephone companies were able to set the lease rate so high that nobody else could be profitable.
Most nuts (raw or dry roasted, nothing added) are just plain good for you, even in significant quantities. They're protein, healthy fat, and fiber.
That's technically right (yep, I know gambler's fallacy too), but it doesn't address my comment.

Testing a block header is just a binary (yes/no) test with a given probability (target/max_target). Finding a block is repeating this test again and again, i.e. a binomial distribution, right?

Finding a block averages 10 minutes, which means that, after 10 minutes trying hashes randomly, the expectation of finding a block is high, i.e. the CDF of the binomial distribution approaches 1.

The result will deviate from the expected result? Of course! After all, it's a distribution... but this doesn't contradict the fact that as you try again a again, the probability of AT LEAST ONE hitting the target gets higher.

So, yes, it doesn't change the individual probability of each outcome, but it sure does mean that more hashes have been tried, i.e. there's a greater probability of a hash being found simply because we've tried more guesses as time passes, i.e. we're measuring the CDF with a high N.

To put it another way: the more coins you flip, the higher the expectation of AT LEAST ONE yielding tails (even if the previous attempts don't change the outcome probability).

Think about it: even if each coin outcome is always 1/2, we're not assessing whether it's going to be tails or not in flip N, but whether after N flips we'll see at least one flipping tails, whose probability is (1 - (1/2)^N).

Flipping a coin 7 times yields a 99% probability of flipping tails (or heads) at least once, regardless of previous outcomes.

And I'll stop here, I think I'm repeating myself :P
Top 20 Startups of All Time
IWatch + iOS 8: Apple sets out to redefine mobile health, fitness tracking
Wow, i thought i was really good at javascript. I tried 7 questions at random and got 6 of them wrong.

/me sad face
The top black bar on the results page for the query you mentioned is called the "local carousel." Its an organic, not paid, result.

The same thing shows up for "Restaurants in X," "Museums in X," and the like.
Yup -- you can authorize a card with a missing, or even incorrect, CVV.

I work at Balanced payments, and this frequently trips up a lot of people. If incorrect CVV information is entered, we note that in our response, but it's up to the user of our API to decide if they want to accept that card or not. (We also use this information as one component of many in our internal fraud systems, of course).
> You won't see a lot of blocks 10 minutes apart because only when measured over longer timeframes it averages to 10 minutes.

That's why it says expected! To be 100% correct you could plot the cumulative density function as time progresses, but I think just printing the expected time is fine.
Young people are starting to care about net neutrality
I have a bachelors degree in Motion Graphic Design. I dropped out of studying Computer Science at a university after the first year.

I am a lifelong programmer, since I was 8 years old. My high school had an amazing 4 year computer science program that totally spoiled me. When I got to a university it was so slow, and everything seemed outdated. Having to relearn all of it in an inferior way was excruciating.

I dropped out, worked for a few years in an unrelated field, and then decided to go back and study Motion Graphic Design, since I had a passion for it, and it seemed like something I could actually learn new information about.

I love what I do now. I work as a programmer, for the most part, at a design studio. I get a taste of the design and film production that I'm so passionate about, while also getting to program.

Even though I love what I do, not a day goes by that I don't regret quitting my CS education. If for nothing else just so that companies that are obsessed with credentials, like Google, would consider me.
Currently a Doctoral student.
node.js could be concurrent. You just run multiple node.js processes and leverage the tried and true concurrency of the UNIX process model, which Erlang architecture is based on.
I’m from Argentina, my daughter speaks English very well, and I have many friends with kids living in USA/Canada.

Do you and your wife speak the same language? You and your wife should talk to your daughter in your own language(s). Your daughter will be a little confused, but after a while she will understand.

Don’t worry, she will survive to the mix of languages. The main examples is Catalonia in Spain. Almost 100% of the people speak Catalan and Spanish for historical and political reasons. The kids grow up without problems, speaking both languages.

Your daughter will be a native English speaker. (The native language is the language they use in kindergarten.) She will use the English sounds to speak in your language and the pronunciation will never be perfect, but enough to talk.

Don’t worry too much. Just speak naturally and your daughter will learn.

Get some movies with English and your language(s) audio and subtitles. Play the wathc the movie in the different language. (With small children, the problem is not to repeat the movie, but to repeat it only a few times.) My daughter loved to see the movie mixing the audio and subtitles in different languages. (I hope you don’t have problems with the DVD zones.)

Books are also good. I try to buy her the books in the original language when it’s available and she can understand it, in spite she sometimes don’t know a word and has to use Google to translate it.

Also, start with comics. The story is simple, the text is short, and she will get a lot of information from the sorrounding drawings.
And if you use either TeX or LaTeX instead of Lyx, you're a masochist.
Writing a library strictly to modern browsers and using conditionally loaded polyfills is the better choice, than building cross-browser into the library.

The former, over time more people load less code, as they move to the new browsers.

The latter, code doesn't decrease, but overall the amount of dead code increases, as people move to the new browsers.

That's the cause of all this criticism of JQ now.. Over time, more of JQ code becomes dead or unnecessary as these functions are subsumed into the native browser.
That's called being rational; nothing startup-specific about it.
Easy Layering How-To
Did you read my comment? My problem wasn't that I asked for entertainment. I asked for education, which I didn't get.

I was very motivated when I got into the university. I was hoping we'd learn compilers, functional programming, low-level stuff, I was eager to learn everything.

What I got was professors who didn't care about their subjects and last time did their actual programming twenty years ago. We did have one programming course, and the so-called “semester coursework” took me twenty minutes because it was three C functions.

Most students didn't care either because they were there “to get the diploma”.

Not every university is like Stanford, you know. I was very bitter with my experience.
Buy Yandex !
Okay, fair enough, there are different kinds of success. But I don't know that Larry Wall or Rasmus Lerdorf would have predicted, in the early days of Perl and PHP respectively, that their languages would wind up being used for large systems -- and yet, they have been. This is the point I was trying to make.
Warby Parker and Bonobos are Changing Brick N' Mortar w/ Analytics
Armed with their successful ability to track and analyze how shoppers visit, browse and checkout at their online Websites, “click to brick” retailers like Warby Parker and Bonobos are taking a different approach with in-store analytics.
Richard Sherman [1] must have written this quiz.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjOkTib5eVQ
Guys, it's just a HUGE COINCIDENCE that the Dilbert guy is a big fat conservative who already believes that the rich are literally persecuted.
But DDG gets its raw results from Bing?
What is false? I'm not talking about the source string not being terminated when it's too long. That's obvious and there are plenty posts about it in this thread.

Not sure what you want to say with the example code. Maybe swap it for strncpy and strlcpy and see whether that matches your expectations?
Currently pursuing a master in Computer Science.

Every time these kinds of questions come up people ask "Is it worth it?". I cannot answer for anyone other than myself, but I see it as years I can spend exploring different fun and interesting things.

For example I've had courses in artificial intelligence, compiler construction, statistics, number theory, algorithms and graph theory. Most of the things I've studied during my time at the university I would probably never had met if I did not attend university. Sure there is Coursera and all information is already out there, for free, but I'm absolutely sure I would never spend the effort and energy if it all was by myself.

Studying is very much what you make it. One of the biggest advantages is actually to have five years where I can just do things on my free time, without any real obligations other than passing a few courses. I can read courses on coursera, I can read a lot and I've started Taekwon-do which is awesome. And I can play games and do a bunch of other stuff and it's all okay.

Additionally, it's not like 5 years is a long time anyways. Many are rushing out to work and to get the money rolling, but maybe I'm different. I don't really think money is the one thing to strive for - as long as I have enough to live and do things I like - why need more? I will realistically work 40+ years of my life anyway, I feel no need to rush.

Studying is absolutely not for everyone, but often here on hacker news I feel the benefits are being shrugged of a bit too lightly. And I haven't even mentioned the probable benefits an actual degree might have in your career.
It feels more like an interactive version of wtfjs.
I'm normally not a fan of that type of thing. To me it's like a ddos attack on the phone system.

Edit: ddos attack on the phone system of the legislators. Nothing wrong with calling. But enabling people to call en masse without even the friction of having to look up a phone number (which is easy for sure) for the purpose of helping the media do their job just doesn't work for me.

Has nothing to do with whether the questions need to be answered or not. But potentially overloading a representatives phone system is not the way I think it should be done. (5 people calling a day is not overloading so of course I'm assuming that this would result in more activity).

Now of course considering how much people don't like spam and junk mail (which are really way less intrusive en masse than the phone ringing) I'm curious why people are disagreeing with my basic point.
Umm because the YC partners are smart, helpful and therefore awesome to have as investors in your startup. Why would you want to prevent some of the best angel investors in the business from investing in the best startups?

Since YC itself doesn't do follow-on investments it doesn't have to worry about competing with its own partners (unlike the VC LPs).

This new policy seems to be addressing a specific problem: demo day is meant to be an opportunity for all the presenting startups, not a competition for attention between them. I.e. for YC's sake, it should never hurt a startup to present at demo day, so its a problem if not having a yc partner invest looks like a signal of relative weakness.
Jeez, firebug shows this site as being 64.7MB for me. And 'onload' occurred after 36 seconds.
...and calories, unfortunately. 2 cups of peanuts and you've nearly hit the recommended 2000 calories for the day. Nuts are certainly good for you, but not in "significant quantities". As they say, everything in moderation.
As a Canadian, I wouldn't mind moving to a more libertarian state like New Hampshire or Utah but I don't like the fact that I will be forced to be vaccinated in order to obtain their "health care"
A query like "Hotels in San Francisco" is very commercial. Even the non-ads results are commercial and it's the same on Bing, Yahoo and duckduckgo.

Just curious what kind of results you are expecting.
This isn't really true.

There are some programmers who are walking encyclopaedias of language features. It is absolutely no guarantee that they are good coders. Some simply can't code at all, they know all the motions but cannot see how to thread them together past the simplest of programs. Others cannot distinguish between useful language features and terrible ones, using them indiscriminately and making a terrible incomprehensible mess. And of course some are simply the best programmers you will ever meet.

Javascript is a language full of terrible design decisions. Knowing them all doesn't make you a good coder, in fact simply being taught only the safe parts will often make a better coder than knowing a lot of the results of these parlour tricks.
I typically outsource through oDesk, It was very hard the first time but each time gets easier. The hard part is keeping decent developers. Even the good ones, you become a side project after the first one, despite increased budgets. Typically, they don't turn down work and you suffer instead of them telling you to wait a month and risk losing you. I have had a simple crappy app made for $75 all they way up to a few grand. Typical release ready non-game app can be had around $750. Games apps can be all over the place as far as development costs.
>...doesn't breach any existing privacy laws...

Maybe not laws, but certainly ethics and/or good practices regarding privacy. It falls under the whole "how we use your data" disclosure, much of which for some companies is just reassurance regarding how they don't use your data.

For me, when in doubt regarding inclusion, the guiding question should be, "would a reasonable person want to know we're doing this?"
Don't worry about that. The stuff you've learned are more useful than what you have to finish at school.
You can learn what you need to learn and cherry pick them. There are some interesting courses during the program, but that really depends on the teacher, your class mates, etc etc. What you learn by yourself is more important than what you have been thought. IMHO.
Thanks. I guess I'll stick to BE-equivalent and explain when asked ;-)
Make a game that teaches SICP (cue leet bbcode masters with "have you read your sicp?" Snakes) - you learn the book by gamifying it; other people learn the book by playing the game.
Agreed, I use Java for my heavy lifting. Use JS to display the data, provide some client side validation on forms, switch some classes around or manipulate something in the DOM using JQuery or the like.

I cant create a full fledged client side JS app but I dont really need to if I have a larger language helping on the server side.
OP here

Made the message a bit friendlier for future folks, thanks for the feedback :)
> I think I would have a much better understanding of JavaScript if I knew how a good javascript engine works.

So would the people who write the good javascript engines.

I'm joking but only partially as they have to write an engine against both a standard and a convention plus support all the hacks going back years.

It's a mess but what I'm slowly and painfully learning is that if you avoid the shoals and hidden wrecks you can do some cool stuff with JS.
I don't consider the black bar a result since it just links to another Google search with even more ads.
Some may argue it's a dark art.
Sick Kids Denied Specialty Care Due to Obamacare
1995-1999: BA history & religious studies
2008-2013: MEng integrated manufacturing systems (basically a mix between industrial & systems)

I went back after ten years because, when the economy tanked, I wanted a piece of paper to validate my work experience. I learned an awful lot in my course of studies and it's directly applicable to my day job (directing IT for a high tech manufacturing company).
Treat it instead as a DDoS attack on your congresscritters' bad ideas.
No change fees?
To follow up with your water analogy: we don't expect the water company to deliver 400x the water to our homes than we did 20 years ago, but that's exactly what we expect of our broadband providers. It's hard to imagine a scenario where a municipal (or monopoly) broadband service will upgrade its network as fast as we expect. Competition is the answer.

My city spent just over $3b last year, meanwhile Time Warner Cable spent roughly $3b on capital expenses in the entire United States.

This is about as apples to oranges as it gets, but if your city spent $3B just maintaining water and sewer, and time warner spent $3B over the entire country then TW is winning in my book.
> Why we don't take a page out of the Israeli's book is beyond me. They have been dealing with this for much longer, have made the mistakes we are currently making, and have learned from them.

They've also decided that they're okay with alienating to the highest possible degree a huge chunk of their population and most of their neighbors with their security measures. I wonder how different their methods would look if they were adapted to the American situation, and how an already fatigued American populace would react.
But the main point is that the government didn't force him into silence. There was no First Amendment issue here. It was an employee/employer issue, not a citizen vs gov't issue.
> The point of all this? The Breaking Madden games are really an outlier that you'd have to specifically code for.

Rather than coding special exemptions or rules, it seems that using 8 bit storage would have to be a deliberate choice on any modern platform.
Could be a possibility, in the situation where I didnt have to select a card type the system would automatically register the correct type as soon as I swiped the card.
We've not changed anything. Unsure what you saw, but the examples' HTML has never been minified.
> And those that master more difficult technology make more than those that those master easy technology.

If anything, I think this part is probably backwards. The market does not reward you on the basis of how difficult the technology you mastered was, but on how marketable it is. The most marketable technology-related skills are not technologically very complex, but involve coupling fairly basic technology with good sales and product/market fit skills. Having ungodly levels of technical skill produces a Sun Microsystems: great technology (ZFS, DTrace, Zones, etc.), but out of business. Having relatively poor levels of technical skill but a good product idea produces Facebook or Groupon.
Underdog status, charismatic groundbreaking CEO, Flickr, a possible rival to Google's de-facto monopoly, the possibility of an epic comeback story.

Yeah, you're not the only one kind of rooting for Yahoo.
I really wouldn't draw any larger conclusions about Javascript from these examples or from the results of this test.

These are edge cases.

every language has them

No sane programmer would put anything like these examples in a normal program, and knowing these edge cases doesn't really help you solve problems or get things done. Because you just won't encounter them in real life.
Adults are Obsolete Children
I'm not even sure what this means. Calling your elected representative is one of the most effective ways of getting issues confronted (as long as you're joined by hundreds of others calling). An actual calling human (as opposed to an email) is important here, as we're a lot easier to ignore when we're abstracted behind text (see: greater internet fuckwad theory, etc).

People underestimate the humanness of elected officials. The mere perception that there's a groundswell of support for something is often enough to get someone moving on something, or at least thinking about it. "We need to head this off before it becomes a bigger deal" is your ally, as it's so hard to tell what will become a bigger deal, it makes that perception hard to ignore.

That's why political "scandals"--often so inane and often stupidly inconsequential--can have such a big impact: that perception of pressure brought about by the media or interest groups or whatever, sustained long enough, can reify itself through the actions that people think they have to start making to save face, fix the situation, capture the press cycle, etc.
Um you went to a blue collar shop-workers union to organise professionals? OPEIU or the CWA might be a better bet.

And unfortunately the anti union attitude in the USA means that all orgaising is done by full timers.
> Would this would be a "quick chat" where they can ask anything they want, lying is a felony, and choosing not to answer would get you locked in a back room for "secondary screening" until ten minutes after your plane leaves?

Good point, but it's sadly not that different than the way things work now. The difference would seem to be the TSA wouldn't need a provocation, whereas technically now they sort of do.
don't build a product to attract investors. that's the _absolute_ worst way to approach products. Investors don't know shit. By the time you try and finish a product, they've already moved on. They want the new hotness -- not follow-ons. Very rarely have "me too" companies done well.

Build something you would use. Dog food it. Build your narrative. Founder/product fit, product/market fit. Find them. Test. Focus your product. Build community.

If you want more advice, I'm dan@techendo.co