skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> didn't choose to be homeless

Let's be realistic here. One generally ends up in that situation by exercising bad judgment and choices over time.
There are a few math books in the "Head First" series (which I always love). Those might serve more as refreshers for most people, but for a true math noob (like me), they have really helped.
By "spread across IPs", I meant "from different physical computers", rather than the sorts of dynamic IP behaviour from a single host that can, as you say, be overcome through the use of cookies for tracking.

And how does Google know what kind of car you have? It knows what kind of car you might have been looking for information on, but that could have been because you were looking to buy one (and decided not to), or because you were helping a friend change the spark plugs. The data is considerably less rich when it's just search data without any ability to track conversions.

That said, I didn't actually think about Google Analytics when I originally replied. That is likely to be a source of data that is as good as Amazon's, if not better. Search-derived data on its own is of limited value.
Well said, however no government is perfect. That being said....

The US has incredibly powerful teachers unions as well. The teacher's union is so powerful it's still technically on the Homeland Security list of terrorist organizations.

Yet we don't have healthcare.

Not only that there's a reason why IT and (real) Doctors aren't the most popular jobs (or majors) unlike Business and Psychology, it's because they're the #2 and #1 (respectively) most stressful occupations according to Forbes.
Similarly my SUV does infinite miles per gallon on initial in-city mileage (only counting the 1/2 mi downhill stretch from my house)
Things like this makes me once again appreciate languages with a static type-system. Not in any way claiming they guarantee bug- or exploit-free code, but these kind of bugs/vulnerabilities simply does not exist.
Hi guys,

I hope you enjoy these tracks. My brothers and I couldn't let them go to waste.

PS: Some of these tracks are definitely NSFW. So be careful.
Strongly seconded. And don't do what this site did, and only list the alternative languages in the language that is currently selected:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrismear/3330007381/
Certainly. You get good at doing something if you do it all day. But it isn't a requirement.
If you think people volunteered to go off and get involved with war then you are possibly delusional. Most of my friends that joined the reserves (the ones that were supposed to be helping natural disasters really) volunteered to defend their country. Starting a war in Iraq was something they didn't volunteer for. And millions of killed civlians is something else they didn't volunteer for either.
It's possible, but I find it a bit unlikely. Porn differs from other media in that it's easily replaceable by inferior goods. If someone can get off on watching a 7.0 on PornTube or whatever, you can't get them to pay for an 8.0, you have to have a 10.0 before they'll pay money for it.

By contrast, there's a large difference between even a decent amateur movie and The Dark Knight. Part of this is production costs, but a lot of it is that there's not a diminishing return on "epic" or "action-packed", or at least there's less diminishing return relative to porn.

So while the cost of making a quality production in both fields is falling, it impacts porn much more than it ever will film because there's a differing sensitivity to quality.
The court date was likely written on the ticket the police officer handed him. No letter involved.
Most diffs do that. The Diff that ships with gvim on Windows has this option on by default and I couldn't find where to turn it off because it was severely screwing up what I was diffing.
Falls Church / Merrifield , VA
well, now you know :-)
Completely agree. I once had somebody ask me during an interview to write a binary search on the white board. Very tough in that circumstance for me, completely blew it. Interestingly that was 11 years ago, I am now the chief architect and the other fellow has been gone for years. I doubt I could today just stand up and write a binary search from scratch that was worth darn. Even though it is not that tough of a problem.

Programming in my opinion is a reading comprehension skill, solving cute little technical problems won't build large scale maintainable solutions. Even though they are fun to throw around at interviews they don't prove much. :)
This reminds me of a chapter from Michael Lopp's book "Managing Humans":

"Each weekend morning, my process is this: I wake up, walk upstairs, sit down at the computer, and figure out what is happening on the planet. Once I'm comfortable that the sky is not falling, I walk to the kitchen, grind my coffee beans, and begin to boil water. While the water is heating up, I return to my computer and follow up on whatever tidbits tickled my fancy from my first pass. This morning, it was some font research, followed by looking into options for wireless headphones. Turns out, Sony sucks. Go figure. Water's boiling! Back to the kitchen, where I pour hot water into my French press and dig up my favorite ceramic cup. The coffee needs to sit for three minutes, which means back to the computer! OK, so why do Sony headphones suck? Poor sound quality? Bad design? Bit of both, really. Coffee's ready, so one more trip to the kitchen, where I pour the steaming brew into my favorite cup and travel, once more, back to my cave.

It looks like a lot of work, but I do it instinctively. It's a routine designed to do one thing — get me into the zone."

Quote taken from http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9781590598443/the_zone
Joshua, I'm sorry for posting your regret of selling to Y. I hope it did not distress you too much to see it. I should not have done it.
The way you write "to" is blowing my mind right now.
So now it's confirmed: Life on earth :)
S3Stat looks cool and I myself might be using that in the future. However, usually it is not simply time vs money as you say. Using prepackaged software is a dead end. You can't do anything further with it. You usually don't learn anything that will give you an idea for doing something else. It may be just a time vs money trade-off for non-developers but the equation is different for developers. Fun and learning opportunities come into play.
Free login to any site
That's a nice, but false, sentiment (that we don't have castes in America). The castes in America are more subtle and fuzzier than those in India, but that makes them no less real.

The reality is that the vast majority of the chronic homeless are both poor and physically or mentally ill (or both). It's a natural consequence of the closing of so many mental institutions (which in and of itself is not a bad thing) without providing alternative treatment and housing options (which in and of itself is a bad thing).

Add all of this to the fact that it is by and large expensive to be poor and you end up with large groups in America who are unable to shift their fortunes in any meaningful way.

Yes, there will be a few fortunate individuals that manage to claw their way out of being poor in America (and they will be held up as examples by all sides, missing the point that they are the exception for a reason!), but in general people who are poor in America stay poor in America.

[I suspect that one could substitute "Canada" or "France" or "England" or most other Western countries for "America" here, even if the problems and reasons are slightly different. Toronto has a substantial chronic homeless problem because of idiotic downloading of social programs from the province to the city and subsequent reduction of mental health programs. Note as well that I'm differentiating between chronic homeless and temporary homeless; your statement about "not destined to stay..." is true for the temporary homeless. The original article is mostly about the chronic homeless.]
I suspect the changing society has a lot to do with it. Porn used to have to be delivered in brown packing envelopes, and girls wearing tankinis was scandalous. Now we've got 16-year-old celebrities pole-dancing on broadcast TV, and no one bats an eye at crazily short skirts so long as it (barely) covers everything. As we become a more and more sexualized society, the idea of paying for porn seems sillier and sillier.

And as our medium changes, the ideal content size changes. It used to be that you could only get an hours-long movie because that's the format TV and tapes worked in. But you only need 10 minutes of it. So as we move to the Internet, the same thing happens to porn as happened to music - the filler becomes extraneous. I don't need the whole album, I need the singles. I don't need the whole movie, I need the best scenes. There goes at least half of your work.

This moves the "porn formula" from "any decent looking chick in a two-hours-long movie" to "absolute stunner doing a few 10-minute scenes", which completely trashes the industry.
Perhaps I'll avoid taking the train home tonight, in that case.
Seems kind of embarrassing, though, as far as bugs go...
This is why I generally prefer event-driven programming over multithread programming. This is the sort of programming you do, for example, when you are implementing a GUI: you write short event handler functions that respond to events (such as mouse clicks or the completion of network or disk reads), and then a master loop receives events and dispatches the handler functions.

You get the same benefits as concurrency (maximum processor usage, at least when you only have one processor), but you avoid the pitfalls of shared memory, race conditions, and unexpected state changes (because only one event handler runs at a time). It does take a bit of getting used to (it seems so easy to make function calls like time() or mkdir() that are actually blocking and thus technically should be separated into a new callback function). But I find that the benefits of processor efficiency plus the comfort of avoiding concurrency problems are worthwhile.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event-driven_programming
Regular expressions are hard, let's go shopping
Ehrenreich is anything but confused on this matter. There is a societal failure here and the criminalization of being poor is a further failure.

As I pointed out in another comment, a large part of the modern urban homeless problem is related to the fact that we don't have mental institutions the way we used to. I'm glad we don't, but when we eliminated them we didn't come up with alternatives to house and treat the people who needed them.
Agreed. I believe the author doesn't get what a well designed protocol aims to provide: good security, even if some of the mediums are compromised.

Any plaintext-equivalent protocol (including the recommended http digest) will be susceptible to a wide range of attacks. For digest, authentication, there's chosen plaintext Attack, man in the middle, online dictionary attack, and others. And, given enough motivation, there will certainly be someone to carry those attacks. So security is never too much. And I think we're responsible to use schemes that are harder too break, once they are known.

These days when I need a simple auth protocol (one that doesn't require a trusted third party), I stick with Stanford's SRP. It's a zero-knowledge protocol (the client doesn't leak any information about the password, not even to the host, except the fact that it knows it). At first this looks like black magic, but in the end it's easy to understand (and implement).
The Web's Dirtiest Site
This looks spammy. Need to give my email address for more info? Why?
This announcement proves two points:

1. Moving forward, MPG is not going to be a good measure of efficiency or operating cost.

2. GM is run by salespeople, not engineers.
bugmenot was a neat idea. But now i can't find any working logins there. The ones that do work, mostly don't work a second time around.
Yes, they might have been irresponsible, might have made bad choices. But many people end up homeless, for reasons outside their control (bankruptcy, families abandoning them etc). In any case, their 'crimes' are nothing compared to those like Madoff.

These homeless people need help, not punishment and fines.

EDIT: Just remembered this
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cnn.heroes/archive/anne.mahlum.h...

Programs like those would have far more impact than jail.
Perhaps this is true in some strictly literal sense, but we could argue all day about whether the responsibility for that judgement and those choices really lies with the homeless person in question, or with our culture, education, and society.

If a lot of apparently sane people make (disastrously) bad choices, I think it should be our first inclination to consider where the bad choices are coming from, and perhaps try to help them make better ones, before we dismiss the issue as some individual flaw.
That niche diversity is probably their way forwards. It's hard to compete with a generic free product on RedTube or whatever (unless you literally have a girl who's a 10.0), so you've got to compete on something else. If putting her in a cheerleader's costume or dying her hair green makes her more attractive to your audience, it increases your odds of getting a sale with someone who's otherwise only a 7.0-8.0 and competing against a 6.0-7.0 on RedTube.
Honestly, I stopped reading after the first few paragraphs. "The iPhone has taken the world by storm." We know. "The Apple AppStore is not an ecosystem and it's not a new market where companies can participate freely." We know. "So why do I think Apple has created the modern equivalent of the La Brea Tar Pits?" Let me guess... because of the App store gatekeeping? "So Apple controls the gateway to even offer an application to the market." Bingo!

I'm not trying to be condescending, but these points have been beaten to death on HN already, right down to barking "Just open the iPhone for third-party developers and allow other application stores," which, while it gives me warm fuzzies, is just clearly not something Apple is willing to do without serious forethought. Why not add something novel to the debate?
so long as your email account isn't hacked either.
Post Vacation Reflections
While a flag may work for some countries, don't forget that not all countries have a single official language.
Placing a South African flag on your site would confuse most South Africans as we have 11 official languages (probably a worst case scenario). But there are plenty of other countries with more than one widely spoken and/or official language.
I thought "nickled and dimed" was good, as it made the interesting point that for the low-paying jobs, it is very hard to get affordable housing.

One thing that she did not explore while she was working in the maid service is that of working in the manager's shoes. Her approach is to work the low-paying jobs herself to walk in their shoes, but did not do so for the manager. That would also have been enlightening.
This is not a good book for someone who doesn't know math. He's on to hyperbolic geometry by ch 2. (unsuccessfully) reading this book was one of the things that convinced me to back to school to study more math :-)
If someone has access to your email account, they always have access to your WordPress since that's how the password reset functionality works.
One thing that didn't seem to be addressed in the slides themselves is the reason that GPUs have fixed function texturing operations, a fixed pipeline stage configuration, etc. It saves on memory bandwidth by making the memory accesses more coherent and dramatically magnifying the usefulness of relatively small caches.

Basically this is a claim that there's a massive amount of graphical quality that will be unleashed once we're unchained from the tyranny of the fixed function GPU behavior that remains, and that this is worth whatever loss in computational power we'll have when we increase the sizes of caches to cover the less-coherent memory access.

I'm not sure if I buy that. Games look quite nice already, and I'm not sure if I could personally tell the difference between what we see in something like Crysis and something like Toy Story, which didn't have the shackles of fixed function pipelines.

An easier explanation that's long been a pet theory of mine is that Larrabee is essentially a thread parallel FP-heavy processor for the scientific market motivated by GPGPU's encroachment on that market segment, and necessarily labeled a "CPU/GPU" in order to not step on toes in the wrong places at Intel.

It's definitely going to be an interesting next couple years in graphics, though.
It has a cleaner interface, but I have to click a button every time I find a login that doesn't work to get a new suggestion. On bugmenot, I don't have to wait for code.

On the other hand, this might somehow protect the site from getting scraped by a domain that doesn't want logins showing up there... maybe?
This is what MS has been doing for years, no one uses MS products for a stable quickly recoverable environment. Not Google, GE, or any other big company. MS thrives on small to medium businesses because of it's dominance in the market, and it's ability to offer every product a business would need. They make their products so easy a monkey could set them up, but so profitable that only MS employees can manage them efficiently with inhouse tools.
Ask HN: Advice for freshmen entering college
Hi Hacker News, I'm going to college* in two weeks. I've read <http://paulgraham.com/college.html> and right now my two main goals are: get really good at hacking, and do well enough academically that grad school is an option.

What's your advice for college freshmen, HN? "What do you wish you'd known?" I'm particularly interested in surprising, non-obvious things that I am unlikely to hear from others or think of myself.

Thanks!

__
* Olin College, for what it's worth.
Looks good. Time will tell.
Why are we killing bugmenot? I'm a fan...
It'll work until the sites that require logins go here and disable any user names they find.

I like this clause in the TOS, I'm sure it will make a huge difference:

# If you are an owner, employee, partner, affiliate or representative (legal or otherwise) of any site which enforces compulsory user registration then you are forbidden from accessing any resource of this site. Failure to comply constitutes unauthorized access
> Why would an irrelevant over-statement discredit the other points? It's a literary device.

As someone who doesn't use Photoshop or Gimp, I can't comment directly on how hyperbolic the comment is. That said, overblown hyperbole sometimes indicates the writer is willing to take liberties when writing about more substantive things. The validity of this here depends on how much blindness you think Gimp actually induces.

(Soccer is so boring! It's like watching a slower version of paint drying! Cricket is the sport of kings! <- Here, the hyperbole may indicate that this is argument from [rationalized] fanboyism, as opposed to argument from a more reasoned opinion.)
I completely disagree. Do not rely on ancient texts to give you understanding of what mathematics is about. They're very difficult to read, they do not teach well, and you'll know next to nothing about even basic notions of mathematics, as understood now, after you're through with them.

Do read the classical texts for pleasure, to round out your education, or to understand the history of mathematics. But don't study math from them, that'd be a terrible mistake.
I think it's example harrisbank.com is sleazy. I clicked it and then it went on to say: "Sorry, no logins for: harrisbank.com Please, add your login and password".

I don't think you want to encourage anyone to ever give you their bank's login data...
Difficult. IANAFD so this may be slightly technically inaccurate:

We got them to actually draw something (called a flat) from a half-drawn garment, draw a full flat from scratch, identify trends from a series of photos, pick textile colours from photos, identify designers from "signature" garments, have them debug a spec. to see if a garment was reasonable (say the spec called for a notion like a chunky zip on an unsuitable fabric), and a few other things.
Retweeting in Real Life [Cartoon]
How does it actually work? It looks like reset_password needs to get a valid key to be able to get the user's details from the database.

$user = $wpdb->get_row($wpdb->prepare("SELECT * FROM $wpdb->users
WHERE user_activation_key = %s", $key));

How does that line of code retrieve a valid $user? I looked at the bug fix which filters out the $key being an array, and that will prevent you from passing an array, but I don't see how the array gets you over the hurdle above.
I should have jumped right in while posting my first comment to mention the pair of twins (tested for monozygosity, which no one would believe without testing) whose photograph appears in one edition of the Vogel-Motulsky textbook on human genetics. They are very discordant in height, and one is thin enough to be a horse-racing jockey (but maybe not strong enough for that) while the other is within the height range of professional basketball players, I think. People who read the literature on the subject find amazing examples (which serve as counterexamples to what people in the general public might guess) of all kinds of interesting phenomena of genetics.
Why? (Article doesn't seem to clarify the title)
Sorry, not sure how this helps dan_the_welder or any other care owner in the situation described?
Let's be realistic here: you don't know what you're talking about at best.

Those who are homeless tend to be so for a few reasons:
* Being a battered wife who has finally decided to leave her husband;
* Being mentally ill without the support structure to ensure that you have all of the (expensive!) medications you require and/or treatments that keep you stable enough to be productive to society;
* Losing one's home to a fire or other disaster without sufficient insurance to recover from it (if one could even afford or qualify for insurance) or where the insurance company refused to pay for legitimate damages (see also Katrina);
* ...and exercising bad judgement and choices over time.

Stop being a judgemental ass.
Dammit, back to junior high English for me. Still puzzled about the "solutions," though.
It's not quite true that Canadians have dropped British spelling. Careful writers still follow British conventions, but no Canadian will be bothered by US spelling on a site that is directed at an American or international audience. Some people will notice and mind if the site appears to be a Canadian site targeted at Canadians (e.g. a Canadian government site).
The answer is no. Nobody gives a shit but the local business owners. Sure, someone will give them food... and they'll gather at that spot for more.

This is a really common situation: local business owners are put in a position of being the bad guy and using the police against the homeless, because the rest of society chooses not to care for these people.

This is how and why the 'bum bot' was created. http://www.oterrills.com/bumbot.htm Its a terrible thing, and yet Rufus is not a villain. Society's burden was placed on his doorstep. He responded with a squirt gun robot. That neighborhood is very, very dangerous because of the shelters. It sucks.
> reasons outside their control (bankruptcy, families abandoning them etc)

Those reasons are usually well under individual control.
I agree entirely, which is why I said that it wasn't a crime "against their own countrymen, at least." Everything else is distinctly less ambiguous, as you point out.
Checking out the trac link in the article to the Wordpress source code shows some other interesting things in the PHP source:

do_action('retreive_password', $user_login); // Misspelled and deprecated
do_action('retrieve_password', $user_login);

Isn't this a verbatim example from the "Signs you are a bad programmer" list from a few days ago? Code that does nothing but is left in anyway to "make sure it all works".