skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>...no use to the economy and thus, most probably, to society.

I think you made too big of a jump there. We are already being confronted with a situation where vast quantities of people are no use to the modern economy. The fact is technology is going to replace a lot of what we traditionally considered work. This does not mean that these people are worthless, they still hold social and cultural value to society (well, most people, there will always be people who are a drain on society, but we have that now and I don't think that will ever change).

>... it creates a huge power lobby...

We already have that. And to make matters worse, the current process of distributing welfare is highly political and manipulated by special interests. With a BI, the power stays in place, but at least the bureaucracy and special interests are removed from the process.
I think the larger issue is that usually when you are forcing yourself for a long time, your quality and quantity of work suffer. So I agree with you on the whole.

However the question usually isn't whether to do a task you don't want to but how to start a task you don't want to start out of fear or feeling like you don't have a grasp of it, or just aren't in the mood for it. If you can start a task, then you shouldn't have to force yourself to complete it. If you do, that's bad.

But there are things we have to do that we may not want to at any given moment. The question is how to structure one's work so they get done.
The C++ and programming books I recommend
I have suffered from depression for years and it is destroying my life. I read articles like this and think that what they're saying sounds like a great idea, and then proceed to completely ignore it.

I have tried multiple types of antidepressants and found the side effects unbearable. They didn't make me feel happy, they made me feel nothing.

I have tried CBT and regular therapy, both of which have failed because I was unable to motivate myself to actually go.

Maybe it is just a matter of changing how I think, but it's hard to change how you think when you don't even feel in control of your own thoughts. No matter how hard I try, I always fall back into the same patterns.

I don't why I'm writing this here. I don't know what else to do.
>Given the text of the article, which entails only a single incident of a legitimate transaction being stopped

If you're gonna have a say on the issue, then at least not base it just on the singular information of the article. This is a common occurence. Here's another example, posted just a few weeks before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7240777

And there are many, many more.

>we should conclude that it is entirely reasonable to state that the whole US government -- every single branch and agency -- is incapable of carrying out any action competently, at every level all the way to the very top?

No, who is retorting to hyberbole? Did he say anything about them being incapable to carry out any action competently? IIRC, he wrote: "did you expect anything else" from them, which could be read as related to this particular handling of the situation. Which, as we saw, is not uncommon at all. See also TSA, et al.
Story I heard a long time ago. Possibly an urban legend.

Professor at a university in the US wins the Nobel Prize for research in chemistry. The university see this as a way to get publicity.

The president calls a press conference to announce this. He congratulates the professor and asks if there is anything the university could do to better support chemistry and scientific research and produce more Nobel Laureates.

"Pay professors what you pay football coaches."

"Now, be reasonable..."
SDN = Specially Designated Nationals, OFAC = Office of Foreign Assets Control
The only thing that infringes copyright are the images and music... And those can be sourced very easily. So if he removes those, he should be fine. Those images could easily be replaced with placeholders too.
PNG Crush
I second this. Latest Chromium.
That could make sense, because that's what I've seen it used for: international calling, video conferencing and professional chats.

Still, wouldn't that amount to more than 30M users?
Biggest Mistake I Made in Business
Another very simple thing I use when procrastination strikes is Seth Roberts Magic Dots technique. ( http://blog.sethroberts.net/category/procrastination/magic-d... )

He came up with it based on reinforcement studies in pigeons. There are more details on the linked page, but basically whilst working you just put a dot on a piece of paper every 6 minutes in the shape of a square, then join all the dots with a line. Something about doing this essentially meaningless thing improves motivation and throughput for me.
Yes, the worse part is the nagging feeling that there is some nasty bugs lurking underneath that you forgot. Somehow there will always be bugs and sooner or later, we all have to face judgement.
i actually converted it to rtf and imported it then in MS Word (On OS X). I took care of pagination there.

Actually the Plan was to typeset it in Indesign, but as i woke up the day of the final layout i just decided to do it in Word.
Also, the ios over-the-air update refused to download over 3g even though it was only 10mb. I couldn't even manually update until I got back home much later :-/

(Last time I tethered to a friend's android phone!)
This is where the theory collides unpleasantly with the real world. The "minimum needed to survive" will be ratcheted up by every politician courting votes, and the people will happily play along.

F'rinstance I don't begrudge anyone a roof over their heads, but right now in the UK it is causing an enormous political storm trying to roll back "... with a spare bedroom or two, in the postcode of your choosing" getting tacked onto this basic right somewhere along the line.
It's the NSA, of course they knew about the bug.

It probably wasn't the only trick in their book, but it was surely one of them (and a quite useful one at that).
Blue Jello Island Dessert Recipe
Facebook Marketing – Para Marketing Blog: Para Marketing Blog
Love Yeoman. One of my favorite generator is the JekyllRB Genrator[1]. It leverages the power of Jekyll with Grunt and Bower.

1. https://github.com/robwierzbowski/generator-jekyllrb
No, Basic Income hasn't been voted on yet in Switzerland. You're probably thinking of the 1:12 pay scale referendum.

And yes, the numbers do work. You just need relatively high tax rates (>= 50%) to support the Basic Income -- but no higher than already exist in many European countries.
I know I should be happy for them but I'm sad. It's rare to find a company in the bank/personal finance space executing at such a high level consistently. Also, I have never seen a great company in this space continue to be great post acquisition.

Commerce Bank and Mint have been mentioned already. I'll also add Outright which was a great little app acquired by Godaddy.

Nature of the beast I suppose...
Not to disagree, but this is just the industrial revolution taken one step further, again.

While I genuinely believe efficiency is a good thing, these improvements tend to concentrate das Kapital even more. If this is something we don't want to see, there will have to be a complete change in how the system works.

No, I'm not offering a solution.
Apple Is Already Building Its Next Massive Business
Here's the first ten countries in the list of countries by suicide.

Greenland

Lithuania

South Korea

Guyana

Kazakhstan

China

Belarus

Slovenia

Hungary

Japan

Obvious caveats about national suicide stats apply.
> So if this payment needed to be stopped in the eyes of the bank then why did they suggest a measure for circumventing their own rules by sending a paper check.

Making everyone accept a system which doesn't make sense is just another step on the path to a dystopia. You'd be surprised at the number of such rules that existed in communist dictatorships.
No, post-scarcity is what is dumb. Some things just are scarce. Let's say we agree a basic human right that everyone gets a house. Who decides who gets houses on the beach?

You can actually see this in practice if you visit Cuba. In Havana there are 3 families living in one apartment with cardboard over the windows for normal people, and there are gorgeous ex-Colonial villas with landscaped gardens, where well-connected Party types live.
Not to be obvious, but have you tried medication? Like a lot of things YMMV but it can help a lot, and also make those other approaches more effective. Hang in there...
Well, only kinda. For example here in the UK we could scrap our welfare system and give every man, woman and child in the country £3000/year no questions asked no strings attached, for what the welfare system costs now.

A family of 4 could live on £12000/year not luxuriously but with the basics, somewhere like Wales. A single person could not live on £3000/year in London.
A good work café would have Apple TV, Miracast and HDMI cables connected to 24-30 inch screens & borrow keyboards wireless and usb charging of devices.
Curious as to why someone sat down and added this line to that file:

Allow: /maps?hq=http://maps.google.com/help/maps/directions/biking/mapleft.kml&ie=UTF8&ll=37.687624,-122.319717&spn=0.346132,0.727158&z=11&lci=bike&dirflg=b&f=d
We thought of creating a post about this experience on our company's blog

It's worth doing it for you and for others who are buying advertising. If it doesn't become popular, no big deal. If it attracts attention, it might be more profitable than the €2000 spent on FB for very little time spent, maybe you'll even get a refund.

I'd personally like to be able to persuade clients not to spend so much on FB advertising - superficially they look like they are returning likes and hits, but if you look into it, they're pretty useless - our referrals have actually gone down while advertising. This sort of blog post would be enormously helpful in persuading them.
I have worked with both QNX (learned C on it) and Windows CE (the Brazilian electronic voting system used CE for the 2002 version ballots) and, while CE is very insular, with some Windows skills being translatable, many developers already familiar with Unix-like OSs would be readily at home with it. Also, being used in other subsystems, it will make the potential talent pool much larger as someone from the on-board entertainment system can be allocated to engine management without extensive retraining.

Poor execution is still possible, but it's now easier to execute it well.
Wow. Thats really bad, who would have thought OpenSSL is such a piece of crap? Its about time someone writes a decent alternative!
I agree that the practice of morality seems sort of neglected in the western world.

I don't see how ethical science relies on the advancement of technology, though. I'm not even sure what ethical _science_ is, to be honest.
Since companies increasingly look for it , is there any way to improve "general cognitive ability" ?
Assuming that they did write off the bill it is curious that they didn't try and keep the client. Why not just fix the problem and rerun the campaign for free?
My iPhone had a popup with yes/cancel for the update and then showed a badge on the icon when I declined at first.
How To Get Users Without Asking For Them? – Whatsapp case study
You can't fool your feelings. If you're stuck in a ditch, medication or "changing the way you think" (advice from other depressed people) won't help.

You need to surround yourself with people you want to emulate as well as beautiful women 24/7. And don't forget to travel the world. This should activate those dormant parts of your brain and make you real happy.

Some of us, however, need to get rich before this can happen. So if that's the case with you, go make those apps!
> Same, except everything else about the car too.

I've spent a couple months with a rental Focus and I never really liked it. It's not that there was anything particularly bad about it - it's actually a decent car. It's that there wasn't anything particularly good about it either. It was average on all respects. It was the quintessential rental car.
FWIW, I keep finding it in my webserver logs.

Apparently some security scanner tests some php vulnerability based on fopen trying to load that.
That's not a café, that's an office that has coffee making facilities.
Lumia phones are leaking private information to US-servers
The biggest Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat is reporting that Lumia phones are sending sensitive information to Microsoft servers in the US.

http://www.hs.fi/sunnuntai/Nokian+Lumia-puhelin+vuotaa+tietoja+ulkomaille/a1393046974949

On the 14th of July 2014 the Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority (FICORA) send an official inquiry to Nokia, asking them to confirm that no "confidential communitacions, positional information or other private information is revealed to third parties without the users' permission".

Nokia did not answer the inquiry.

FICORA met with Nokia in August to discuss what kind of confirmation they could give. They agreed upon that answer that Nokia is unaware of any hardware functionality added during the manufacturing process that would allow private information to leak to third parties.

Other magazines in Finland are specifying that the Windows Phone OS is sending, by default, "the position information, text massages, contacts and web browser usage information" to Microsoft servers.
Well, if the conversation is encrypted and the connections are routed through tor, you don't really care who intercepts what.
I'm not sold on the idea of aligning one's failures with charitable contributions. You'd inevitably learn to feel good at the prospect of not having to yield cash to a good cause. Also, dangling a piece of charity (say, to a watsi patient) and then ripping it away once you 'succeed' seems a bit... unethical.
It depends on the problem. There are problems that are higly parallelizable and problems
that are not. There are problems where expertise is paramount and problems where it is not. What you said is true but what I said is also true, if you stretch enough the
definition of "fairly unreliable" :)
You are assuming "culture fit" is just an excuse to interview somebody, waste all that valuable time on evaluating them and then reject them under a transparent ruse. Why would a company do that, where's a upside in that?
Culture fit is a real thing and if the person does not fit the team, it would be an expensive mistake to hire that person. Shortage of talent does not mean the company would hire anybody. It just means it is hard to find people that they want to hire. There could be plenty of people that they don't want to hire, still.
* There is no point in brooding over a decision we have made in the past. Given the circumstance and no prior knowledge of the future, we will always make the same decision. So we have to accept our shortsight/mistake, learn from it and keep going.

* I try to give the maximum I can for an objective, so I will not have any regrets later, whether it is achieved or not. Clear conscience.
What "new search engine" has actually generated actual revenue for any webmaster in the past ten years? You could argue DDG but that's the only one I can think of.
We had a couple of experiments. This article asserts all sorts of vague positive effects - the concrete effects are a 9-13% drop in working hours and an 8.5% decrease in hospital visits. Unfortunately, as usual with articles on this topic, primary sources are not cited.

https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money...

Back of the envelope calculations are also useful. I did one a while back, you can steal the source code and build your own to at least determine affordability. The basic gist is that an inefficient targeted program is vastly cheaper than an efficient untargeted one.

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic...
It certainly seems to be the case, though the interests seem to be too skewed towards it.
The email address field can only be viewed by you and Y Combinator. Put it in 'about' if you want it to be publicly visible.
I've suffered from depression in the past, mostly during my late teenage years and early adulthood. The first thing I will say is that depression and motivation are different for everyone, so you can take this with a huge grain of salt, but here is what helped me:

* Get sunlight — I grew up in Minnesota where if it's sunny in the winter that usually means its too cold for exposed skin outside. When I moved to Santa Fe (300+ sunny days at 7000' elevation) the first winter I was amazed at how much better I felt.

* Get exercise — Find some physical activity you enjoy (preferably outdoors) and do it. This is maybe harder for some than others, but I can't emphasize how important this is to me. I sit 10-12 hours per day in front of a computer, without outdoor activity on a regular basis I would wither.

* Check your diet — Okay, last but most certainly not least, there is more evidence coming out all the time about much diet and gut health can impact mood and psychology. One of the prominent books in this area is The GAPS Diet (http://www.gapsdiet.com), but I think this is just the tip of the iceberg. In short, if you live in America and you just eat what's easy you're probably eating a lot of processed grains that could be altering your health dramatically.

I hope those don't appear as facile answers, but the truth is those things have made a huge difference in my life. It wasn't an overnight thing, I had to grow up a bit, move away from my family, and establish my own life before I really started to feel happy. Best of luck.
The alternative (deluding yourself into thinking you can somehow quantify how well someone will work in a company through some metrics) seems a lot more dangerous in the long term.
Postgres has never been popular. Why the sudden race for popularity now? MongoDB is replacing MySQL not Postgres. I would be interested to know what proportion of Postgres users use the JSON features, I suspect it is still small, even amongst the Node users. The popularity of Postgres is growing at a manageable rate, not an exploding rate and that seems fine to me.
Nice reading, bookmarked.
Best Monitoring Solution – OMD (Nagios + Check_MK)
The fallout from this will last for a while. Most normal people are not aware of these security issues and many of them rarely install updates.
Its exactly the kind of thing I would build and abandon. So the maybe more interesting things is why you don't use it? I presume its a UI thing, or classifier is unreliable, or something?

I would love to hear why vanilla HN is better now.
PostgreSQL is the best open source relational database and I hope it remains that way.

While I don't mind seeing some non relational additions like JSON, it shouldn't be detrimental to Postgres relational core.

It's not a pissing contest : if MongoDB is more popular than Postgres for non relational (NoSql) data so what ?

It's not like Postgres is a commercial product and need wider adoption to keep the parent company afloat.
I don't know about where you are, but here in London there's more competition between buyers than between sellers.

If you give money to me and the people bidding against me, the money will end up in landlords' pockets for sure.
The Growth Hacker's Cookbook – a new collection on Medium
On April 15, we'll invite the groups that seem most promising to meet us in Mountain View between April 24 and 28 ----

-- This is too less time for companies based outside of the US to arrange cheap tickets, visas etc.
Wrong. The only 3 options are these:

1) The NSA knew about it, and exploited it.

2) NSA itself planted it surreptitiously.

3) Apple, complicit with the NSA, added it.

Such a bug would've never lasted this long without NSA knowing about it. Even if they didn't find it themselves, which seems unlikely, they would've bought it from the exploit black market long before now. There are people who all they do long is try to find exploits in the iPhone.

And as we know, if NSA can do something, NSA will do it. So they most definitely took advantage of that "bug" and everyone's data that they could get through it.

To me the more likely scenario is still that Apple cooperated with the NSA here. The "adding to PRISM" at the same time this bug appear is way too coincidental.
Why should anyone be subsidized to live in London? Let them live someplace cheap, or work to cover their expenses for living in an expensive place.
God says...
Justina handwriting ridiculous bud Ruler First sublimely
ones long lose plucking disentangle raisest moving infantine
shudder named Pontitianus inflicted now recommended digest
scarce-remembered wroth felicity indigested Ambition Amen
inhabited Maker Court intercession

----

How about human motor skills over thousands of years. Handwriting control in millimeters?

God says...
dir divisions overwhelmed latter scatter littles adversities
candle steer 'may Thyself courage
That's a lot of code in the PHP example! To use bcrypt you can just do this:

password_hash($password, PASSWORD_BCRYPT)

From version 5.5 that is, but you can get a compatibility library for older versions.
I've got an Android, an iPhone (and a Windows Phone arriving tomorrow), I assumed that both of these were already sending location and web browser usage stats to Google and Apple servers.

I think Microsoft does a pretty good version of outlining their data collection in easy to understand terms http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/legal/wp8/windows-phone-pr..., I just hope they aren't collecting more than they say they are.
and added some bugs ;) like I'm having hard time "rm" a stopped container since 0.8
Seems to be down, here's the google cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:S76Yg0P...
I love the note at the end of that file about how they can't figure out their own web framework.
All these sound interesting to read but none are really practical when it comes to implementing. To a large part, when things have to happen, somehow circumstances contrive you to accomplish it. These 'techniques' are rarely ground breaking for the true-to-the-spirit procrastinator.

What works without fail is peer pressure or a stinging comment.

Disclaimer : Personal experience, may not be generalizable.
I find it harder to get motivated when I'm at home, but when I go to a coffee shop I know I'm there to just do work, and paying for my time there (in coffee) also helps spur me onto work.
I can see what you mean, although the flicking between markup and formatted text as you moved the cursor would annoy the hell out of me I think.

Now, would the cursor be a block over a character or a caret between characters? A lot of history riding on that one.

Jef Raskin's Canon Cat springs to mind with its in-place commands (but not Vim's modefulness).
I agree, but that isn't the "spirit" of basic income.
Keyboard shortcuts to use Facebook.
I always thought that configuring Facebook permissions is more complex than administering Windows Advanced Server.
Obvious exception of the Eastern European countries. South Korea and Japan are notorious for the high suicide rate. The work hours in these countries are ridiculous. People literally get worked to death. Engineers pretty much devote their entire life to their company. There is no work-life balance. There is only work.
The title is so misleading. Hello link bait. They are considering switch to QNX, which has been used my many car nav systems for years (e.g. BMW). While yes, QNX has been bought by RIM (now Blackberry), it makes it sound like the godawful ugly Blackberry phone software was now running in Ford trucks...
should i apply ? am from Nigeria .. Thanks
The Indian education system
Except that the contract prohibits doing this sort of "third party audit".
I suspect that your clock (or one with the same result) is the future...

Right now we have 2 clocks; Universal Time and time zone time. Even today, there is no real practical reason to have such small time zones. It would make sense to expand the size of the time zones to that point that there is only one (Universal) and just use solar time for the cases where daylight is important.