skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How am I getting you wrong? You said above that "he was not a gifted teacher."

You said "his teaching can be highly effective when matched to the proper audience." I disagree. He famously could teach extremely effectively to any level of audience.

You said Feynman "doesn't sit at the top of hierarchy of teaching excellence." Many people would disagree. Many people consider him the greatest physics teacher ever.

In terms of just the Feynman lectures in video form, Yes, I agree that they are limited. But I brought up Feynman because I believe a feynman caliber instructor alive today with the existing possibilities in software and video would definitely be able to make something very adaptable to many learners and easily more effective than the average teacher.
College is just high school with people who (mostly) want to be there. You'll be fine kid.
The falsest dichotomy of all. What are the circumstances? what is the "work" trying to accomplish? Who are your competitors? Sometimes you have to work both smart and hard.
Does that mean that Facebook will revoke them, or are they useless to an attacker?
Seems unnecessarily cynical. For many categories of mistakes, it is not hard to see the mistake in hindsight.
The exempt employees working for 50% more hours than they are compensated for really miss the boat. If you want to work 80 hours a week, god bless you. Just don't make it a charitable contribution.

I had to work a 90 hour week a few weeks ago to address a operational crisis. That netted me a bunch of overtime and a week off.
Thanks for the tip! I had no idea that feature existed.
They accept credit cards directly through the site for UK-based projects; only US-based ones use Amazon for payments.
1Password also has a 'history' for previous passwords
VAT is a bit tiresome. Some goods are non-VATable, some are 0% rated, and there is also a 5% rate for certain types of fuel. You have a couple of options for how you deal with VAT, with one option allowing you to count any VAT on outgoings against the VAT payable - and there's a certain amount of record-keeping required if you want to take advantage of that.

But I know one person who has done his own accounts (small company, 3 people I think, accounts included VAT and payroll) and he didn't seem to think it was too bothersome. The documentation provided by the UK tax authorities is actually generally pretty good. But the punchline to his story was that when he eventually hired an accountant, mainly to save time, it turned out he'd missed a number of opportunities to take advantage of this or that way of reducing tax payments. So it seems like the DIY approach might not get you in hot water, but a lack of relevant training and experience could still prove costly.

Based on this story I signed up for an accountant from day 1 ;)
It's not too hard actually. A line of python is roughly 80x slower than a line of C (no exaggeration). But a typical line of python does a lot more than a typical line of C. So things you can do with a "loose" loop (like once per 64k block) is usually ok in python. Things you have to do with a "tight" loop (like once per byte) need to be in C.

I once did a presentation about python performance optimization lessons from bup: http://lanyrd.com/2011/pycodeconf/sghxk/

And it's true, I'm not the most active maintainer anymore. The people who took over seem to be doing a pretty good job though.
please add option to output as animated gif. I will pay money
Why only one? I would share whatever I knew.

1. Start to develop a work/life balance. No one can tell you how many hours you should be working or what to do on your downtime. This is just the beginning - you CAN prevent burn out.

2. Start to network, find other entrepreneurs and listen to them. One day you will need someone to listen to you. Not all advice is actionable, but it's crucial to get multiple perspectives so you can play it out in your head. Eventually you will have enough plays in your head to tackle most, if not all problems.

3. Get your product or your voice out there. You need some validation of your ideas and thoughts. I tell you this because I wish I did this earlier.

4. Most of the best advice you will ever receive will be the regrets of others.

5. Capital is to an entrepreneur as a job is to an employee. Idea's are worthless if you cannot execute them. Cost to open a business is at an all time low. Low is not free.

6. Don't fail broke. Know when to cut your losses. I have learned that most people don't cut their losses because they are guilty that they have not done enough to give their business the best shot possible. On the flip side, if you are putting your all and you still 100% believe in your product, you need to get that passion and drive in front of investors to buy yourself as much time as possible. These have been the best times of my life, win or lose, never regretted a moment.

7. Don't ever stop yourself from doing whatever it takes to be successful. At my current startup, I am in the field everyday (I am building a marketplace), answering calls and doing physical work that is far below my pay grade. Why? Because at this point of the business I am far better off doing what I am doing now and to grow accordingly. Don't build an illusion of success by having office space, hiring people to do things that you can do yourself at first and creating the impression that things are happening. Let it come naturally.

8. Finally, Learn to build a life without regrets. There is are no hard and fast rules. You will regret shit, fix it immediately. Move on.
"anyone above middle manager level"

That meaning top management? :)

I guess it's some UK thing but I expected "middle manager" to be something pretty exclusive with not many people above. And this is where it loses relevancy to many people on HN.

Maybe you call shop clerks middle managers or something.
Note that these lawyers were working for a foreign government. It is a bit weird to claim that a multinational corporation deserves more protections than a corporation operating only in its home country.
How do people who would use this kind of thing manage to have remote servers with terabytes of available disk space on them?

Anything is possible with money, of course, but how is this anything other than really expensive?

For example AWS S3 would be $235/month (that's $2,820/year!) for 3TB not even including any data-out transfer charges. Sure there are others that are cheaper but only marginally so.

Is this really what people are doing? Makes the commercial services sound really cheap.
You saved the project and made somebody a ton of money?
People have been actively working on a "prune" feature but it seems to never quite get finished. This would indeed be nice to have, although it's less important than you might think, given really good deduplication (which bup has). Currently bup has a very simple model - never delete anything - which is hard to screw up, so you're very unlikely to lose data.
Really? Don't you see the Trojan horse here? I tend to feel that this is a European version of FISA 'improvement' act.

Merkel and Holland are politicians of a special kind. Politicians & their intelligence thugs caught in bed conspiring with foreign agencies/corporations against the people they represent. France quietly pushing through military legislation authorizing spying on its citizens [1].

We should not allow governments to have any more control over the internet. Look how much damage has already been done. Instead we need to build decentralized systems [2] and mesh networks [3] to route around censorship and government/corporate control.

[1] http://www.examiner.com/article/france-overtakes-nsa-spying-...
[2] http://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-plans-to-beat-cen...
[3] http://openlibernet.org/
"We shouldn't have to turn to HN to find it."

Why do you feel that a private company that is communicating with the press and it's users has any obligation to also inform in the same way (the blog post or press release) hackers and security personnel that would like to know the answer to these questions?

Disclosing these things is nice of course but it's not core to kickstarters business in terms of people who use kickstarter (projects or consumers).

Also be aware that in business there are a ton of behind the scenes things I would like to know that would help me. [1] And if your argument is that security information disseminated is helpful to all that's fine and is correct. So that can be disclosed at the companies discretion. But they have no obligation and aren't going to lose business because security people are mad at them or people on hacker news think a certain thing should have happened.

[1] For example more details on the Comcast merger and the back and forth. But Comcast is not in the business serving it's customer base by giving me info that is helpful to me.
not to mention the tragedy of the commons

interns who work for free prevent people from asking for wages for their work, to name one example.
Facebook made that behaviour normal

What, before Facebook you never showed up in your friends' photo album? Or your friends just never let anyone see their photo album? Because I know neither of those were true for me.
Where would you host the backups?
The US doesn't work that way... We pay US federal taxes even if we live and earn money solely in Abu Dhabi. So of course the rest of the tax code will be insane as well.
OK. understand that you don't like my use of 'american' as the opposite to 'socialist' here. Simplifications like this can be difficult and probably will h healthcare we are less overtly 'like america: although still a ways from being strongly 'socialist' (in the Scandinavian sense)
My suggestion is to backup your cloud servers, which are expensive and redundant and have good uplink speeds, to home servers which are cheap and have good downlink speeds. You don't need your backup file server to be ultra-reliable or even up all the time, so the cheapest possible PC sitting on a home internet connection is a pretty good choice. That way, 3TB is just $150 or so plus your electricity, and it's not a per-month fee.
What's more annoying is that disabling HTTP referrers breaks virtually all hosted font services and results in absolute mess as nobody seems to care to test their designs with their actual fallback fonts.
This is actually a fairly easy problem to solve; instead of "change your email address" you offer "add email address" and "remove email address" functionality. It tends to be a much more useful approach anyways, especially if you offer multiple authentication options (ie Facebook Connect).
Eh, I was surprised that the article didn't make any mention of this (any effort countering what seemed to me to be an obvious explanation), so I made a brief comment about it. I don't care enough to track down and comb through the study.

From experience, I tend to suspect the article is at fault, not the study, though the error of "spinning a study to make it appear to prove something it didn't" is unfortunately rather more common than something like "didn't mention anything about how the study showed causation".
Good luck with that, Comcast. Where I live there are two cable-basted internet providers, a wireless provider, and at least two based on the old phone system. Nobody I know pays more than $35/month to his ISP.

And that doesn't include the cell providers, which are just about out of ways other than price to differentiate themselves.
What about tripwire and the like?

(That is not asked out of idle curiosity, and I've been told the worst intrusions hack the kernel so tripwire would likely be useless, but don't know if those are widespread.)
Thank you for the very interesting post. You are quite right that these things are tremendously complicated - after all, as you say, even figuring out a 'normal' amount of happiness people should feel leads one immediately down a dozen philosophical and ethical rabbit holes.

I don't have the logical background to explore this space without a great deal of feeling my way in the dark, and I certainly don't have any medical insight into the matter. But I remain quite mystified by the original article - it seems so clear-cut that, although what the author experienced was feelings of loneliness, they weren't caused by solitude or isolation, and therefore debating whether the modern world causes solitude and isolation is thoroughly beside the point.
If you ignore the cloud services and rent dedicated servers you can get up to 6 TB disk space for 50$ a month.

edit: 45tb for 300€/month: https://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/xs29
This is the kind of wisdom I wish I had when I started my career and assumed that everyone who did things differently from me was stupid. I wish I could give it to all my current smunderlings when they complain about "bad" code written by otherwise smart and capable people last year... There's always a story behind what is, and it's worth learning before passing judgement.
I operate from the assumption that any serious compromise starting at SQLI injection equates to kernel compromise, so I don't spend a lot of time thinking about host-IDS either.

Tripwire is not a total waste of time, like a network IDS would be, but for most startups a minute spent setting up Tripwire is a minute that could be better spent on appsec.
Possibly because that's quite user-hostile? I may not be in a position to generate a new password and save it on a given arbitrary login to the site.

Fundamentally, this isn't a high-risk situation. If the password controlled something vital, then sure, force the reset on everyone. But what's the worst someone can do with my Kickstarter credentials? They certainly can't spend any of my money, that requires my Amazon password as well.
The most efficient backup system for operating systems I've used so far is 'tarsnap'. The only drawback is that restore is really slow.
>Wealth. Lots of wealth. Yet money wasn't the drive.

Please could you send me a list of anyone who agrees with this. I would like all the money they have made above average wage.
He's not judging, he's lamenting. Lamenting what he sees to be choices made as a result of a lack of information, which is something we do all the time when it comes to technological decisions. It's not a critique of the choice, but a critique of the context in which it was made.

I pity these poor fools, who thought Exchange was their only option...
we're going to add that this coming week.
My mental model here is that taxes in the US and UK are roughly equivalently complicated --- uncomplicated enough that many businesses forgo accountants, but complicated enough that most businesses shouldn't do that. Meanwhile, my model says that taxes in the UK are more onerous than those of the US.

The UK has the NIH though; maybe in 10 years the Obamacare/Switzerland-Lite model will prove itself superior to the NIH, but it's not there yet.
How about here:

http://www.soyoustart.com/ca/en/offers.xml
Pay Pals
Getting started with Laravel on Nitrous.io cloud development
Missing (2012) tag
‘Like’ing something on FB is entirely different that endorsing a product for your friends, which is what the AD makes it appear.

Too many times I have searched something on Google and then later on in FB low and behold I see an ad whiz by on my timeline pertaining to what I searched earlier on Google.

Taking this to the extreme, if my teenage son searched for Condems on Google and then later see’s the AD on FB and clicks like, do I want the AD to appear with my sons pic endorsing this product?
"But this is an issue wherein the company has failed the trust that was previously placed in them by the customer. The customer already made the decision to give the company his business and so could incur harm, even if he subsequently chooses to take his future business elsewhere."

Seriously? You think this is going to materially impact kickstarter? [1] That all of the sudden people will stop having projects and people will stop funding projects. That this is like the Corvair and "unsafe at any speed" or Audi unintended acceleration? To things like this a typical end will think "happens to everyone yawn what's for dinner".

[1] If anything the publicity of the break will help kickstarter if it gets any national media attention (I don't think it will but other security breaches have). Things like this are usually bad for well known brick and mortar companies (say Target) but not the same for a company at the lower level of brand awareness of Kickstarter. Very familiar to all of us on HN but in terms of the general public in fly over country not that well known. Remembering early stories of nasty stuff on ebay and craiglists that got mentioned that only helped them.
Thanks for the feedback. I'm still a little confused, because in my understanding heuristics are also based on statistical properties; e.g. Is there a strong correlation between property x and y as measured by the amount of click-throughs for example.

Both approaches deal with quantitative properties. But one assumes that causes are too difficult to map out and will try to find the most useful correlations, the other will be frustrated by how hard it is to accurately model reality and will end up using heuristics to whatever degree necessary to patch up their incomplete model. I prefer the second, but I guess the author of the article is correct: Whatever works for you...
You comment made me curious how many US army bases there are on German ground. More than I expected:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Army_inst...

(Not saying they are used by the NSA.)
"Cutting the cord, in Comcast’s universe, just doesn’t save you very much money."

And this is why (in general) Americans are in debt. They don't understand that ANY savings, is savings. And that "just" saving 20,30,50 dollars a month adds up over 5-10 years.

I went thru this with my daughters a decade or so ago. We kept track of all the "Gee Dad, it's only 10 bucks" conversations. At the end of the year we reviewed what they accumulated, which was almost nothing, their items were either used up, no longer needed/wanted, broken, or tossed away. On the other hand, the $1400+ dollars, all stacked up in a nice pile of $20's looked like (and was to them) real money, a nice weekend trip, a new bike, a new laptop, etc. I'm happy to say my daughters did much better after that living experiment.

Unfortunately for most Americans, they just can't say no to the moment, and banks (and other service providers) are all to willingly to exploit their lack of judgement.
By far the most interesting 'flappy bird' post so far.
To be fair, probably in France it costs much more than 22 Euros, too, but the extra cost is borne by the public.
It gets worse. Here's a case showing that this global dragnet has absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, but corporate espionage:

http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2013/s3904457.htm

"ASIO has cancelled the passport of a retired spy who's preparing to give evidence in The Hague about what he says was his involvement in a covert operation to record Timorese ministers and officials in Dili in 2004."

"For some time now the Timorese government has been alleging that the bugging operation was ordered by then foreign minister Alexander Downer during negotiations over a treaty governing billions of dollars in gas revenue between the two countries."

"It's understood the spy decided to blow the whistle when he learned that in his life after politics, Alexander Downer had become an advisor to Woodside Petroleum through his lobbying firm, Bespoke Approach."

tl;dr: Foriegn Minister of Australia spied on foreign government for Woodside Petroleum. Said minister now works for Woodside Petroleum.
Hashing is sometimes known as "one-way encryption."
I see an opportunity for a consolidated billing service. Right now, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and all the others send separate bills. What if there were a central service so people only get one bill, and have an opportunity to create their own bundle of streaming services?
Noob's mistake: I noticed you are the author of the article (#^-^#), I'll read it again after you've updated it.
How on earth will you monetize that? Because I'm sure as shit not going to pay extra just to consolidate my bills.
I wrote ddar, which is basically this but solves that particular problem, by using something other than the git packfile format.

http://www.synctus.com/ddar and http://github.com/basak/ddar

It's recently been made available on Homebrew, too.
My strategy is:

1. Regularly back up "important" directories (code/, papers/, web/, etc.) to fairly safe/redundant cloud storage with incremental history. I have pretty little of this, <50gb, so it's not super-expensive.

2. Occasionally exchange bulk but less-important backups with my brother, so we're each the other's high-latency, questionable-durability "off-site backup". No incremental dumps here, just rsync. This is where my MP3 collection, DVD rips, and similar goes.

3. Photos, which are important but also bulk, go to Flickr, which is free.

4. Don't back up stuff I can re-acquire, e.g. big public datasets I've downloaded to work on, or Debian ISOs. Also, I don't back up the OS, just my data.

There do, however, seem to be some cloud services that offer big full-disk backups for a surprisingly low flat price, e.g. http://www.backblaze.com/ is $5/mo/machine.
I hope that American companies and law firms, etc., wind up losing massive business in the future. It's the only way this crap will ever be contained. Economic pain seems like the only way to get things changed.
Wow, this is pure gold! Thanks for posting.
You will learn only what you teach yourself.
Personally, I find the ten-foot viewing experience vastly superior to a computer monitor, and totally worth arranging my furniture a particular way.

I can lounge as I watch, I don't have to hold my head a particular way, I can share the couch with someone else, and it also feels more natural to my eyes.

That's not to say that I would never watch a movie on a computer monitor (I have, plenty of times) but I prefer ten-foot.
Thank you for pointing this out. Most of the posts I see here are all work, work, and more work. That kind of mindset might work for someone in there 20s and early 30s with no wife or kids. But once you have a family, I think your mindset has to change if you want your home life to be as successful.
Interviewing for the anxious programmer
Exactly.

In business the "simplicity abstraction layer" [1] on a product is essentially taking something that was created by hackers for hackers (or engineers) and making it simple for end users "the layperson".

God knows anytime you can make something easy for a layperson and not make them think there is money to be made. They aren't interested in your Liebert fire protection system and diverse path routing.

It never fails to amaze me how highly technical types simply can't think out of that box. And yet they make fun of "sales types" that can actually speak and sell to end users an inferior product.

[1] I actually just made that up.
All other interesting events surrounding this game aside, I believe this displays well how pointless online and in-app advertising has become. Who are the poor advertisers paying millions for ads that are most certainly ignored because users are busy playing a game that needs their full attention?
Ha, fair enough - that statement was excessively cynical. Thanks for being a voice of reason on this issue.
I love Tarsnap, but S3 storage costs aren't exactly brilliant. Figuring out exactly how you wish to store keys can also be another thought, upfront (albeit one that arises from the increased security that you get 'for free').

Alternately, CrashPlan and other consumer-style services have a bad habit of using very slow, heavy, world-slowing systemwide file update scanning. :/

Having said this, a discussion of the merits and flaws of Tarsnap and similar backup services is something I'm fairly certain I've seen lengthy discussions of on similar HN posts.

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5767116 is a good source for lots of that sort of discussion)