skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Password prompts are annoying, agreed.

I like the idea of delaying it as long as possible, even if sometimes it gets annoying. If I have to go through several steps just to register to a site, then I'll probably not register.

But remember that e-mail is not a secure protocol. Anyone could be sniffing your traffic to find a random generated password, an url that automatically log you in, and similar content.

I'd love to see a solution based on certificates, like how ssh works. Your browser and the server agree on a key pair over a secure (https?) connection, and then you use it to login.

This add a whole layer of complications to the browser, like how you sync those, take them into another browser ecc... But it would sure be a very cool way to totally remove the password prompt, while staying secure.

By the way, Amazon ask for my password every time I try to place an order, even if it's with a saved credit card and with on a registered address. Maybe it's an American thing?
Is Atheism Irrational?
News: it wakes up now.
This would make a great comedy. USA invades Canada, most Yank troops desert and move to Canada. With severely depleted military horde, USA reinstates draft. Most potential draftees move to Canada; Canadian militia now outnumbers American Army. USA can't drop nukes a few miles from its own border; besides, Exxon needs that tar sands oil. Canadian militia considers remodeling White House again. Harper declares the militia illegal; Canadian civil war breaks out. Mexico retakes Texas, the West Coast states (except for Orange County) secede and join Canada, Quebec secedes and becomes New France. It was a normal day.
The craigslist flow also has plenty of annoying edge cases. I ended up with an account at some point... I can't recall why exactly. I was maybe posting to a category with a lot of fraud in it so they made me? Anyway, now every time I post the process STARTS as an accountless posting, but ends up linked to my account.

It ends up not saving any steps. I create a posting, get a POST/EDIT/DELETE email, click that, log in using my username/password (or more realistically: reset my password, then log in).

Craigslist's accountless posting is a great thing, but managing a hybrid approach as they have ended up having to do seems messy and confusing for those of us who get accounts.
It is true though a bit (not incredibly) misleading. Adding "Bush and" would be better. We theoretically elect President's to lead our government.

The massive abuse of hiding government policy and actions behind claims of "terrorism" and "national security" by both administrations shows they both actively created and directly encouraged the environment that leads to exactly this type of behavior.
My next step up from "Hello World" should be relatively simple for most languages.

Pick a public JSON API.
Retrieve it over HTTP.
Parse the JSON into a data structure.
Print some interesting part of the data.

This exposes you to HTTP and JSON libraries in a new language, as well as working with data structures. For instance, in Go, the parsing JSON step forces you to write some structs and learn about marshalling.
I'm an ex-Linode customer also and hosted with them for years before switching (around the time that they were hacked via the Coldfusion exploit) and I agree, it's sad how far they've dropped from being one of the best in quality/support to what they are now. I can't tell if it's because they're trying to scale up too fast or if theres some other issue however.

Also, Linode is not really the "lowest-cost" option as Digital ocean and similar providers offer better deals for the low price VPS market.
How can you tell? As far as I can tell, he has never done anything while in Congress that actually accomplished anything non-trivial and non-transitory.

Read his bills, instead of his press releases, if you want to actually know something about him.
correct, technical debt is a very bad thing.
Fine, he was a morally bankrupt doctor. I agree I should not have claimed otherwise in my initial invective and apologize for my error, but let me reiterate: his stance on mental illness did not originate from his medical or scientific observations, but from his philosophy. And despite living through fifty years of startling advances in medicine, where huge swaths of mental illness were found to have biological origins in the brain, he never recanted. So fuck him, he was an asshole.
I spent 2 minutes with google and it seems the closest I could get is this: http://news.qq.com/a/20120625/000134.htm
Basically it says the total spending on manned space missions is less than RMB 40B from 1992 to 2013. That translates to about 6.7B in current ratio.

2 NEST to send man to space. Not too bad IMO.
I wonder if they had a plan for occupying Canada. As the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have proven, the challenges of long-term occupation are of a different order of magnitude than merely defeating a nation's military. Additionally, a Canadian insurgency would likely be far more difficult to deal with than either of those countries. The population is higher than either Iraq or Afghanistan, geographically more spread out and better educated/trained/equipped on average. e.g. Canada is nowhere near the U.S. in terms of total gun ownership, but they do have a lot of rifles that see daily use (Bears, eh!). There's also no language barrier and massive avenues for intelligence leaks both ways thanks to the intertwined nature of the two nations, but such leaks do tend to benefit the smaller, more mobile side asymmetrically.

The U.S. economy would likely be crippled due to loss of trade with the U.S.'s largest trading partner as well as foreign sanctions. Large portions of the U.S. would be left without electrical power. The flow of fossil fuels from North of the border would soon stop and likely stay stopped (Pipelines are railroads are relatively easy for their own workers to disable). I honestly doubt any U.S. administration that tried to attack Canada would survive the domestic insurrection that would soon occur.
Some assumptions I have to make are:

• The RTG in Yutu (the rover already up) will last that long

• Yutu does not move, get struck by a meteor, or other normal events in space that will damage it further

• The team who understands Yutu is still around in 5 years

Then China could, in theory:

• Assemble a rover with the repair parts on board

• Launch it to the moon

• Land on the moon intact

• Locate Yutu

• Do a remotely-operated repair

There's a lot of risk in each of those steps. It might be an interesting mission to push the boundaries of tele-operated robotics etc. Realistically it seems less expensive to launch a second rover that has been improved based on the lessons learned from Yutu. Hopefully China can think of lots of things to improve the second time.

Interesting thought experiment, though.
I imagine the intersection of those two sets is much larger than either camp is likely to admit.
I find it annoying that making incendiary accusations about political leaders has become commonplace and acceptable. It encourages people to think of things in terms of good vs bad people instead of good vs bad policies.
The same way you would in JavaScript: turn it into a string first. "(1, 2)" Its not that serializing python objects to json is impossible, just that there is not a straightforward implementation that everyone agrees is correct.

For a fully general python <-> json serializer/deserializer, you'd need a bunch of extra annotations etc that would make it look very weird compared with what most people expect when they think of json.
Yeah, but then you'd need LaunchKey, which is worse. Nothing against them personally, but handling your user account protection with a for-profit third-party seems far worse than having a password prompt.
Perhaps "subscribers" instead of "users"?
I have yet to meet a person not employed in one of the fields mentioned below who says

"Yeah, so like I was...

• taking my medication the other day and I noticed it was working so I looked up the formula and the background research

• eating out of this microwaveable and biodegradeable bowl that is made out of soy the other day and I was amazed that it held together so well so I looked into the manufacturing process

• watching this guy get out of a car with a prosthetic arm and leg and it was really neat the way the joints moved so I looked into the background kinematics/kinesiology

• watching the painters next door and I realized that the red was very vibrant and that it only took one coat for full coverage so I looked into the interaction between the binders and the pigments

...whoever did it came up with this super cool approach."

I think a little less introspection and a little more extrospection might be in order.
Well, if you loving programming and want to be that guitar guy at the same time, look into Overtone/livecoding.
Atheism is not like even-star-ism. I call straw man.
Innovation can be interdisciplinary, but my suspicion is that specialization leads to more of it. That's not saying that all political innovation benefits society equally and we need more political scientists and politicians. At some point we need to start solving more problems outside the realm of politics.
I agree with what your saying, but the important idea with Technical debt is it's the interest rate and payments that you really need to consider not the capital.

A lot of terrible UI code may be acceptable as it rarely infects the rest of the system where a smaller design bug in a tiny utility library may end up causing worlds of pain even if it's rather elegant code that could be reused on other projects just fine.
A lot of excuses project managers use to ignore technical debt is looking at the opportunity cost of building a new service vs refining an old service and saying "fuck it" and then conceptualizing their choice after the fact as a wise economic decision, then coming back to the problem after it becomes serious, then hiring someone fresh out of college to "fix it" because that's way cheaper then having the original engineer or a professional deal with a tiny fraction of exceptions the right way.

Then they move on to a new job once the debt becomes untenable. This works quite well (as an "economic" strategy) for industries of all types. I bet you can think of a few.
Russia cancels homework so kids can watch The Olympics
Though it's a weekly publication

That's one of its strengths. It doesn't have to create news out of nothing, as there is enough 'real' news each week to fill its pages.
Ask HN: Cloud server/service monitoring/alerting?
Seems like the world of cloud server monitoring is a big cluster right now, and there are no elegant packages out there that do everything.

Servers/services to monitor:
Amazon EC2 and RDS, Ruby on Rails web app Redis + Resque workers, our own Mac servers

Alert stages: Minor, where an unobtrusive message is sent to operations. Severe, where someone gets a phone call

Current solution: New Relic to monitor Ruby on Rails, Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon RDS, Redis, and Resque. Collectd + Riemann + Librato Metrics to monitor our own servers. Hipchat for minor alerting. PagerDuty for severe alerting

The biggest issue I'm having now, is that alerting in New Relic for anything other than Rails and Servers (RDS, Redis, and Resque) is bad. I'm asking HN, how do you monitor your cloud server and services, and how do you provide alerting to staff when something goes wrong?
You could look at the portion of similar diseases that have had genetic influences.
Well, there's a difference between describing oneself that way and describing others the same way. Julie describes Mina Markham as a "Badass Lady Dev," while her description of herself is the much more modest "Passion Projects Creator, Developer, and Designer of Websites and Also Slides."
How long would you consider reasonable before requiring the user to enter a password when clicking through an email? Basically, how long should the token be valid from a user perspective?

From a developer perspective I think unless you are comfortable with a 1-2 week token* (or longer depending on customer base) you could actually decrease conversion rates because you remove the features consistency.

Ex: a user is cleaning out emails, starts with the most recent and works their way back. Opens OkCupid message from 3 weeks ago because it was interesting, but the link doesn't work.

*I would appreciate further insight as to what is a normal length of time for tokens to be valid and the impact increasing the token expiration time might have on security.
Fish On Wheels
This is an awesome way for github to help solve the "women not speaking at conferences" problem -- there are qualified female engineers who have built things, but they tend to not be comfortable presenting, so you end up with a very small number of female speakers who get invited to speak at every event, and who thus turn down a lot of things.

(The other stage in the funnel which needs work is the "going into engineering" stage, but that's much earlier.)

The other stage to help out would be someone covering travel expenses/etc. for the pool of qualified and willing female speakers to attend events they otherwise might not. I wonder if any tech companies would contribute to that.
Personally I think it has more to do with the conditions of work. For example, working autonomously and not interacting much with others. Validation comes from shared experiences, but it doesn't have to be limited to programming. Just having the odd conversation with people about anything mildly intellectually stimulating helps so much.
I like the idea, but I only see options for mobile devices, no "app" for Linux or BSD variants.

I agree that the current paradigm is flawed, especially when PSK authentication is so easily implemented.
Wallaby Launches Native Glass App
He may not be long for this (scientific) world. As they say, _p_-ublish or perish.
> GC: My approach tends to be that the compiler/runtime are smarter than me, so I'd rather depend on it than me.

How is reference counting not leaving it up to the runtime?
There aren't many managers around that are going to feature freeze to pay off technical debt. In reality it has to be paid off as you come across it i.e. you're working on a new feature that depends on some code with technical debt. This seems fine as after all, there's not much point paying off technical debt if it isn't slowing down development.
Very rarely can an individual accrue debt that will allow them to make money.

Maybe not make money, but certainly spend less money. Energy efficiency upgrades immediately come to mind. Eating well is another.
I assume a lot of that is protecting the account or identity from people forwarding an email to friends.

One that I find a bit annoying is clicking a link to reset a password, then having to login again with that same password. Seems a bit unnecessary.
OK, here's a comment: This is neither sexist nor creepy, and nobody said that male programmers don't need public speaking skills.

There are already lots of events that primarily attract male programmers. Do you know what they call those? "Events." It doesn't even need to be stated that men will be vastly overrepresented compared to the general population — that is simply the way it is. Men are already served quite well in the tech world. It is one of the most man-heavy fields in existence. You are not being persecuted here.

More generally, this is not a zero-sum game being played between the sexes. It is possible to hurt one sex while helping the other, but the existence of something that benefits women does not automatically threaten us as men. And even worse, this kind of angry opposition to things that benefit women do take from them without conferring any benefit to you. This kind of hostile negativity is not a good thing.
For me, a problem eats at me when I can't solve it immediately. Or say it's not that I haven't solved the problem but I have to write all the gold plating code to polish everything up and I don't have time. Or I have to demo a feature with known bugs. It's an incredibly stressful feeling. I think it boils down to what I want to finish and the time I have allotted. This can be defeating and depressing. For me I have way more ideas than time. I love designing Apis and architecting projects but hate the last 10% that takes 90% of the time to get right. This sort of thing is what depresses me regarding programming.

I don't need accolades or recognition. The reward is the resulting awesome code for me. Knowing I built something useful is really all I need.

*edit autocorrect error
It's not a one-man shop, is it?

There ops/sysadmins shouldn't be handling customer relations/support.

It takes about 3 seconds to stand up and yell across the room to the frontline staff, telling them that servers are down and you're working on it.

Then the frontline staff should only have to make a few clicks for announcements to go out (pre-written templates outlining what's going on and what's being done to fix it) via social media, etc.
I agree, emphasis needs to be put on 'sitting at the computer'. I cycle 300km a week, am married to a dietician, and take medication but I still suffer severe depression.
But is technical debt really like ordinary debt? I think an argument could be made that technical debt is inherently worse than ordinary debt.

I think it relates the discussion of why software is an especially hard thing to write.

A simple way to put it is, "planning a large system is harder than you think it, for any value of 'you'". With another large part being that no only is calculating the time spent on the project hard, calculating how long or short the project will be is hard. And "harder than you think" means that no matter how sophisticated one gets, bad estimates will tend to seduce you based on the deadly combination of ignorance and wishful thinking - everyone experiences wishful thinking and everyone is ignorant of the real implications of a large enough new system.

Now, technical debt involves getting some momentary gain in the present based on planning to take of the problem in the future. And by that token, technical debt will expose you to the risks of planning a larger system immediately.

And this isn't to argue that one can or should eliminate technical debt - just that there's every reason to be more wary of it than ordinary debt.
He has indeed said that. We hosted the Elasticsearch meetup in NYC a couple weeks ago and specifically said it.
> Very rarely can an individual accrue debt that will allow them to make money.

Our whole financial, investment, and saving system is based on this statement thankfully not being true. You can't successfully save money or value of any kind unless someone successfully borrows it (I.e. Uses it productively).
That may be confusing because we focus on transactional email, not campaign email (which subscriber would suggest)
tea-pot-ism is a slightly more interesting example.
I'd describe it as an unlimited number of emails that you can send with a limit of 1000 unique email addresses that you can send to.
I haven't examined the statistics myself, but isn't it known that suicides go up when there are news stories about them, even in a preventive effor? This implies that suicides are, in fact, somewhat suggestible.
Well, you can have code that is a fantastic high quality implementation of a flawed architecture. For example:

Backend team: As we are building an MVP, this database table will have a poorly designed schema we will iterate on later.

Frontend team: We need some data that only exists in that other team's database. We will accumulate some technical debt by reading their database directly. This will let us deliver working software quickly.

Backend team: The time has come to refactor that badly designed schema.

Frontend team: That will break everything. You must not do it.

Backend team: Please will you pay off that technical debt?

Frontend team: It's not hurting us much at all, and we would rather be working on new features and things that make money. We are busy and many people are asking us for important things. Here is a link to an article saying technical debt is not a bad thing.

Backend team: I am sad because I'm stuck looking after this badly designed table. I wish I had done a big design up front.
Installment-based products are still debt, right?

That's correct. However, as my original comment states, assessing ability to pay is part of underwriting. For an installment loan, this means checking (at least) that someone's monthly/weekly income is higher than their monthly/weekly regular expenses.

The first loan I took was to buy a reliable car (for my journey to/from work). I could not afford to buy that car in cash, but could afford to pay it off within a couple of years, as my income was higher than my regular expenses, and I could use the difference to pay for the car.

it's no-good when we're talking about debt for subsistence

I agree. It's good mainly for revenue-generating assets (e.g. expanded inventory for your small shop) or cost-saving assets (e.g. a car which doesn't need frequent costly repairs).
How about opening an office in San Francisco instead? I know Google already has one but probably other companies from peninsula/south bay need to start expanding their presence in SF as well.
I don't appreciate the implication that I'm not a person. Xenophanes posted the link to this discussion to a public email list where (you may find this shocking), some people agree with him and are interested in this kind of discussion.

He also mentioned that HN is blocking him from posting more, so maybe you can blame Paul Graham for you not getting the answers you wanted. But there's still hope.

Want answers? Want a discussion on a forum that without censorship? Want a discussion where you won't be punished if you say "What You Can't Say"[0], as xenophanes dared do today? I think he, myself, and others would be happy to answer your questions at:

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/fallible-ideas/info

If you don't come, and instead stick to a forum where hardly anyone continues a discussion for more than 12 hours, then I for one will figure you aren't really that interested, and I won't be motivated to write answers for you.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Couple that with a situation where you do have a solution, and you manage to implement it, and then later on somebody takes over your codebase, rips the solution out because they can't be bothered to integrate their new idea into your architecture, and all the bugs that you thought you'd solved "once and for all" come right back.
You can express it formally in terms of a rewrite rule: If Δ is a derivation ending in an expression of the form α(((Qβ)γ)δ)ι, then Δ followed by the term αβι is a derivation.

Writing it as \xyz.x is just a less noisy way of saying that.
I think this is idea is the perfect middle ground product between what mail gun offers and what something like constant contact would offer. Developers and marketers get a ton of features and customization without sacrificing a ton of development time. Also the "CEO's direct phone number" for the top tier plan made giggle.
Offhand, you might find interesting Kruschke's "Bayesian estimation supersedes the t-test" http://www.indiana.edu/~kruschke/articles/Kruschke2013JEPG.p...
My favorite term for that behavior is "stargazing," because they're staring at the little asterisks instead of thinking about the meaning of the results.

I have been working on a guide for practicing scientists which attacks common statistical misconceptions:

http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/

It's on its way to publication, so you'll be able to hit your biologists upside the head with it in due time. (Although it'll be slim, so it won't hurt too much.)
Because real estate is expensive and impacted in SF.
People are limited by what they live with.
There is never one way to solve an engineering problem. Different people will use their own ideas, experiences and understanding to apply unique and creative solutions. Just like a musician.