skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The dark side proof is that most mathematical problems are incredibly contrived. Taking a business requirement and translating it into known mathematical problems is harder than it sounds. Once you can do that, you're 90% of the way there, and people who can do that reliably are regarded as geniuses.

But most of the time, development is done without full understanding of the problem space. Usually, the problem doesn't become fully understood until you've already spent a good amount of time coding up your solution. If you wait until you fully understand the problem before starting, then you'll never start, because your brain simply can't comprehend the entire scope.

So instead, you get code bases full of sort-of well-factored code, but with lots of unwittingly reinvented wheels. This status is occasionally improved when somebody really smart happens to notice the commonality, and remembers a classic problem that it resembles, and manages to refactor the entire thing using the general solution. However, this almost never becomes apparent during the first revision.
No problem. At this point, server-side knowledge is pretty known, but client-side understanding is harder to come by. Those of us on the bleeding edge are working on making it more accessible, but it just requires time and resources our merry little band doesn't always have, you know?
In Chrome when going to https version of a blocked site, I get the "Error code: ERR_TUNNEL_CONNECTION_FAILED" instead of the inspirational quotes!
I donated $100, and yeah, our healthcare system is a goddamn travesty. I don't get it. If you're fortunate to live long enough, the one thing that's guaranteed to eventually happen is you're going to get sick in a very expensive manner. It's not an "if" question, it's a "when" question. I don't think that should mean financial ruin. People against universal healthcare must think they're just immune to ever getting sick or something.
It would be interesting to run a benchmark. My impression is that ptrace interceptions would add a significant overhead but I can be wrong. Still, it looks like a great project.

Alternatively they could use unshare and aufs to overlay another filesystem on top of a read-only root.
I was thinking Excel :)
Indeed, printf is shorter. I use it in a similar fashion in my own script [1], which can be made to behave like hr() (haven't tried shells other than bash):

centered_output '=' ''

[1] https://github.com/ppurka/sh_functions/blob/master/my_bash_f...
Message from the president of Dumb Starbucks
No more disconnected than the 82nd non-academic who named a program mbox.
Same here on Firefox 27
There's a great free Safari extension called WasteNoTime which does something similar without a proxy, and also has the added benefit of tracking the time you spent daily, weekly, or monthly across all sites (including non-blocked ones) so you can see which ones you need to block.
The funny thing is, at least here in the US, even if you have medical insurance you are totally ripped off your pockets if you have something like cancer. Mostly, you just don't pay the price which was anyway artificially inflated by this scam I'm talking about. There was an article only a few days back about this guy who had his appendix treated:
http://imgur.com/a/WIfeN

He had to pay $11k out of the total $55k bill, rest was paid by insurance. ($7000 for a CT scan? $4500 worth of Anesthesia? I'd be surprised if one still doesn't think these are artificially inflated prices)

I'm not sure how much would he be charged if this whole insurance thing was not there - may be ~$11k?

(Just for the curious: In India, that operation in the best of hospitals would have cost him may be around $1600 without insurance. With insurance, he'd save most of even that. )
Very inspiring post.
I think it will be hard for me to look at Ramen Noodles and not think about this for a while.

Paraphrasing from a a recent movie "Every one should live by a code...glad to know that yours is Family."
You are a good man. I have sent you love. Don't give up
Where people run
I agree Kiva should have more results data. The article is fairly lame though.

In one quote is says "With interest rates often exceeding 100 percent," which I am pretty sure is completely false. I have made hundreds of loans and I worry about rates above 40%. I seek lower rates (often between 20-30%) and find them often. The article says Kiva doesn't discuss the rate - but it is shown on every lending page, as a lender you can select based on loan rate (I know, I do).

The article also doesn't provide data either on the failure of Kiva to help. Granted I think Kiva should provide more data on the impact of loans and whether it is helping or not - I like to believe it is but <a href="http://investing.curiouscatblog.net/2009/10/16/micro-credit-... do question how useful Kiva really is</a>.

I don't know about expenses for Kiva (though sites like Charity navigator rate it highly). But as a lender on Kiva it really doesn't matter. Kiva expenses are paid by donation. To lend using Kiva you can make donations but you don't have to. High expenses matter it seems to me if you are choosing who to donate to.

Kiva does take advantage of human psychology in a smart way it seems to me, connecting lenders to people that need loans. It is a bit of a fiction as the article points out but it is also real - your re-payments are based on that loan. I see the benefits of that human connection as worthwhile (people like that human connection - showing their photos adds to that) though agree if you want to find fault it is something you can question.

I like another site that provides charity to local groups directly http://www.globalgiving.org/ I do figure there is more chance of fraud given the nature of having lots of little organizations that it is hard to monitor. But I like getting directly to small groups that are making an effort and being able to target what you like.

Some sites that have published research on micro lending

http://microfinanceresearch.org/

http://www.microfinancegateway.org/p/site/m/

http://www.cgap.org/
> The healthcare system is broken if you do an honest day's work and can't afford insurance, but that's not what we're talking about here.

Isn't it, though? If you replace "insurance" with "appropriate medical care" that does in fact sound like what we're talking about.

This individual was a programmer, who based on his blog only quit his job once he was physically unable to perform the duties required - and yet, is clearly unable to cover all his medical expenses.

The system is broken. Anyone who says different is either delusional or selling something.
And what are you doing to fix that?
I couldn't find a way to intercept SSL traffic that wasn't insecure (method I used was a custom root certificate), so opted for a broken connection instead.

I think the only way to do this securely is a browser extension which I was planning for a later version.
That assumes that everyone who was using GitHub for hosting their classwork is engineer capable of hosting their own Git server. What if they are working on frontend HTML/CSS things? or just learning Python? There are lots of valid uses for version control that don't mean you already have the ability to even try to host your own VCS.

No one argues that you need to have people host their own web server to start learning how to write Javascript. In fact, most would argue against hosting your own that early on. It's not beneficial, and more likely to end up tangential annoyances than solving the problems that matter for the person's skill level.

Just because someone teaches you a different part of the stack first doesn't mean they are handing out fish...
~150 friends only, I unfollowed only when a post appeared. And I marked lots of people as acquaintances.
Why do you have 1800 friends? Dang.
go back to 4chan u neet
Students can maintain a local git repo and just push their results to github. In fact, they must, that's how Git works!
It really is one of the better youtube channels. The presenter doesn't come off as arrogant or as an idiot.
San Francisco’s Tech Problems
+1 everyone should just be more comfortable open-sourcing in-progress work anyways.
Ask HN: where do you get your non-tech news?
I use HN for most of my tech news, but what other sources are good for everything else?
It's not like that would be the first "non-denial denial" Facebook has ever issued...
Make sure you're using a Barrier Breaker trunk build. The IPv6 address management code has been completely overhauled since 12.09.
Spotify App Supper Feeds Senses; Food And Music
I actually bought one of these. They work well.
no kidding. i'm afraid of seeing how long ago it was that i created this HN account...
Sorry, good catch. I meant to include the word "officially" in that sentence. Post has been updated to correct the mistake and clarify: the most likely reason why Flappy Bird was deleted is that he broke the rules, Apple found out, withheld his earnings, and forced him to take the game down.
Best Flappy Doge AI I've ever seen!
Jekyll GUI  App – Kreator mockups
http://blog.ravitejak.in/post/76219405433/jekyll-gui-app-kreator-mockups
There's an older app called Self Control that does this but for a specified time window and cannot be disabled once it's started, including by rebooting. http://selfcontrolapp.com/
We'll I clearly don't speak for everyone, but I think an ink less metal pen that writes forever and looks like that is pretty cool.
I just use RescueTime's get focus functionality.
You can put your projects INA shared repo "school"

Also, your schoolsw honor code is rather antiquated, and presumably it is used because your grades are based on copy-paste carbon-copy homework assignments :-(
The biggest problem with dumb-starbucks-as-parody is that it isn't very funny.
The reason the internet is still online is because people who would ask for this type of thing don't have access to it.

Routers shouldn't speak HTTP. People who don't know how to use blackhole communities have no business controlling them.
It's important to note that the Fed is purchasing these securities at "face value"...they're not doing any kind of valuation.

Lawrence Hunter wrote an op-ed for Forbes back in 2012 saying the Fed's (at the time) "$1.3T" of MBSes were "worthless." http://www.forbes.com/sites/lawrencehunter/2012/10/29/are-fe...

My main job was pricing MBSes. The calculation is basically sum of discounted contingent cashflows. Even before the 2008 crisis, back in the mid 90s, I'd often see MBSes with a negative net income. Then I'd get frantic phone calls from upset clients, often accountants or CFOs or brokers, who couldn't understand how a valuation less than zero was even possible, and I'd have to explain how their expected expenditures were going to be greater than their revenues...

I tend to agree with Hunter and Hedges that the Fed's "$1.5T" of MBSes are mostly worthless.

That said, I also understand the reasons why the Fed is making these purchases: increase MBS prices, increase liquidity in the MBS market, and so forth. But the bigger reason still seems to me: bail out TBTF banks.

For the Fed's POV on this subject, they publish FAQs and data on their "MBS Purchase Program" several places:

http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/reform_mbs.htm

http://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/ambs/ambs_faq.html

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/WMBSEC
both and. the talent acquisition folk were very interested in how the engineers went about finding people. they shared all of what we were doing with the other talent acquisition people at their all hands meetings.
Other causes of expansion of the federal government include economic changes brought about by technology and population growth; and cultural changes due to mass media.

There are definitely problems, but the US is still fairly free and prosperous, despite centuries of geopolitical events and economic / technological disruption that could not have been foreseen in the 18th century when it was written.

The Constitution works.

Because of its proven track record, let's try not to radically re-interpret it, pack it with frivolous amendments, or allow the continued exploitation of loopholes like the commerce clause.
Some standard IM protocol that federated between all your net (and external point of control), could be reached from anywhere, and had plenty of support on all kinds of computers would be better, but it does not exist

I would recommend an SMS sent via GSM modem for out-of-band emergency notifications.
the only bids i found were from $0.99 -> $3.00, who cares about flappy bird or whatever, i wonder if this is a good way to get a cheap iphone (then again, if it's really that cheap, the seller probably just won't ship it)
Do you really think, after our experience in Iraq, that we could win a world war? Our armed forces have been moving slowly away from a world-war type force since WWII. Fighting a world war requires having lots and lots of boots on the ground and vast quantities of manpower. A few robots can't match that.
> And in that land, the zpool array implementation makes it awesome to introduce an SSD+HD mixture with nearly the best of both systems.

With an array of half SSDs and half HDs, can I configure ZFS so that I never hit the IOPS bottleneck of the HDs? How do you recommend configuring the array?
Chantilly, VA (no remote) - H1B & INTERNS WELCOME

Ruby on Rails & Android Developer

TekMasters is looking for a Developer to join our dynamic Visa Application Project. We’re working on creating a better system to streamline the Visa process and get ready rid all the shops that are charging people a lot of money to process Visa applications internationally. We’re developing an international VISA application that is being launched in over 48 countries which is written in Ruby on Rails. This year, we’re looking to launch an Android native app to enable users to access the application via their phone which will empower users to understand the process and apply quicker and cheaper. Our project supports the Department of State and US Embassies and is fully funded until February 2020. That means even if there’s a government shutdown, we’re not affected.

This project has a huge impact on all people seeking to work on a temporary or permanent basis and to date, received over 1.9 million views per day. Due to the large enterprise level environment, we are focused on continuing our Agile methodology, bringing it to government contracts to ensure that users have the best experience with our apps, and there’s less chance of bugs.

We’re looking for junior developer with a passion for technology who want to learn a variety of different languages and have a passion for development; before, during, and after graduation from college. If you have either Ruby on Rails or Android, and a willingness to learn the other, you are more than welcome to apply.

-	Ideally 1+ years in either of the following: RoR or Android.
-	You must be familiar with a Linux Ubuntu environment, and have the ability to write code on a Mac.
-	You do not need to be a US citizen or have a security clearance to work on this project, however, this does require you to work on site in Chantilly, VA the majority of the time.

For more information, contact Shannon at swarren@tekmasters.com or call 703-349-5698.
i think it's hilarious. but i was there in person yesterday so maybe it's a "you have to be there" thing.
Is that a problem you commonly have with existing graphite/clay and wood pencils?
Starbucks should be paying CC for this kind of publicity...
"The silvery markings may resemble pencil, but they are permanent and smudge-proof."
An Introduction to LESS to Create CSS Stylesheets
I'm surprised most people were not wondering why the McDonald of coffee was this popular anyway...

Maybe this'll make them go to their local coffee shop instead, dumb or not! ;-)
R. Crumb Illustrates Philip K. Dick’s Hallucinatory Spiritual Experience
I got the GP's point immediately: He means that system administrators already get an enormous volume of email. Send them another email and it'll get ignored, deleted, or put at the bottom of a gigantic to-do list.

For airline pilots, an excessive number of warnings themselves (bells, alarms, audible warnings) are known to distract the pilots and cause errors.
You know, it is possible to run your own centralized git repository ...
More likely they THINK they are oblivious to them, but they are not. I recall (sorry, I have no citation) a survey of people who played the California state lottery that asked people if they had paid attention to any of the state's ads for the lottery.

They also asked the people why they played the lottery. A very large fraction of the people who said they had not noticed the ads repeated slogans and tag lines from the ads when explaining why they played.
That can't be erased. So really it's more like a pen.
> Without a standard deviation on the average, there is no way to say whether or not 14% is reasonable.

There is no reason to expect the expectation of preemies to be above average, never mind 14%, never mind standard deviations. And there is substantial empirical evidence which I linked you to expect it to be far below average. Rescuing a preemie, even if it were free, would be a bad idea compared to alternatives like simply trying again.

> Even if the child winds up providing 50% of the value of an average person, it can still be a net gain.

And we're right back to your original problem: you are not thinking on the margin. The alternative to spending millions on premature babies is not no babies ever. (And even if it was, there's still superior alternatives: for example, lobbying for Open Borders. Think of all the millions of immigrants who'd love to come to the USA, for free! We wouldn't even have to pay them! Why, even if they're 99% below average, it's still a gain!)

> The stats you cite are for extreme cases on the edge of viability and the odds still slightly favor normal or near-normal development.

Which is what we are discussing, is it not? Or do even slightly premature babies come with million-dollar pricetags...?

> That's horrible reasoning. The human body has evolved over millions of years for birth. It is the optimal gestation machine. We're working on approximating this optimal machine with artificial machines

I'm not seeing any disagreement here. Yes, the human body is the optimal gestation machine. That's why premature babies come with all the penalties. (And note that those citations are just the penalties sufficient to be documented with small samples; there's not much reason to expect the penalty to abruptly cut off somewhere, it's just the long-term effects shrink enough to be hidden by noise and methodological problems and researcher careers' limits.)

> That starts at birth.

An arbitrary line is not a good basis for a system of ethics and governance.

> What you're proposing is barbaric and borderline infantcide.

I'm happy to own to that. It is infanticide. Premature fetuses are not humans in the moral sense: they have no hopes, they have no dreams, they have no desires or preferences, they do not think, and they have the moral status of a puppy or kitten. Given the disabilities they come with, throwing away hundreds of thousands of dollars in heroic medical measures is a crime against society and the person the parents could have raised instead.
I don't understand, I thought the AFA (Obamacare) won and all those curmudgeons fought it all the way to the Supreme Court and lost and we now have healthcare for everyone.

What am I missing?

Why does this gentlemen have to loose his house to get medical treatment if healthcare is affordable?
He still has to write that argument before he can tl:dr it. I thought it was pretty clear from his comment that his thoughts weren't totally hashed out yet.
Woooooaaaaah
"This is the hackiest code I've ever written. Most of it is copy pasted from elsewhere. ;-)"

I see...
Last time I checked, to powder stone took more than 0 Joules of energy. Unless this powder was transported back in time from gigayears after the last sun burned out in this universe and entropy is near max, to now, to make this pen. In which case, it would be an stupendously awesome pen, and I'll totally buy one.
Nice! What's the record?
I've had a very similar experience. I migrated to a new Mac using Migration Assistant and Arq no longer sees my long backup history, and is trying to back up everything anew. I was never given the option to "adopt" the old backup set, and Arq and Glacier both see that there are several hundred GB in the vault, but apparently all of that is orphan data that I'll be paying for forever (I guess I could manually delete the vault).

Support was not very helpful in my case either. On the plus side, Arq 4 recommends deleting and recreating your Glacier-backed backup sets anyway...
CoFoundersLab now matching startup founders with interns
'Disconnected'?

$ apt-cache search mbox | tail -1
libetpan16 - mail handling library

Looks pretty connected to me.
Ask HN: I'm a really lonely college student. What can I do?
This is the last place I had thought of, but here I am. I'm a CS student in my third year of college, I'm 19. I feel old, I spend most of my time alone, and I feel as if I have no motivation for anything. My college experience has been, honestly, brutally disappointing; I just look around and see my peers having the time of their lives, finding opportunities, spending time with friends. I feel as if I'm not part of this community of young, interesting, capable people.

Worse still, I have no single person to tell these things to. I used to, but one by one they have left. I'm scared about being like a black hole...was my attitude the thing that led them away? I don't want to fall into that ugly spiral of negative thoughts, I don't want to be the person nobody wants to talk to, but I'm afraid I have become that guy. I deeply wish to be a cool, interesting person to be around with. This is so hard! I feel that before I had something to offer to people, something that made me interesting. I feel as if I've lost that.

I’m currently in counselling, but the therapist keeps telling me I should keep talking to at least one stranger every single day. I don't see it working, and it drains me physically, mentally and specially emotionally. I have no way of letting this out - I can't cry. Tears simply won't come out.

I constantly ask myself how could I -and why the hell I can't- connect and surround myself with the people that I would like to be with. Those, with which I could make projects, play music, stay up all night chatting, have the adventures people in college are supposed to have. It's just so difficult for me to even analyze what I'm doing wrong, or what I'm supposed to do. Everything is so confusing, and getting worse by the day.

Hope this hasn't been too long. I just have to let this out. Any word of help would be very welcome.
CloudFlare, a product supposed to increase uptime, has been my product's only source of downtime for the past several months.
OMG. I just hope you are being sarcastic.

That's everything we are complaining about right there on the index.
My take is that it's clearly an intentional misspelling and they're almost always pronounced the same as the original word.
This is why most CDNs avoid taking on controversial customers like 4chan, kaddafi.hk and other sites trafficking in illegal content. Due to their decision to accept anyone, Cloudflare is a constant target for DDOS attacks and their legitimate users occasionally share the brunt of those attacks.