skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, this is actually pretty crazy:

In ruby 1.9, a String containing a timestamp gets serialized as a String -- and parsed as a String in 1.9 or 2.1.

In ruby 2.1, a String containing a timestamp gets serialized as a Time (I'm not sure I'd consider this correct behavior), -- and parsed in again as a String anyway in ruby 2.1 (due to new YAML-safety behavior), but as a Time in ruby 1.9.

The ruby 2.1 behavior of serializing out as a Time but then parsing back in to a String anyway -- seems particularly sketchy, and ripe for roundtrip bugs where the string it gets turned into on parse isn't _quite_ the same one that was original before serialization. (Say, winds up with a different timezone or something).

I'm not sure what the lesson here is, but I don't think it's about regexen. It may be about how too much cleverness/magic will get you -- just keep it simple. Shared gem/library code should be predictable and understandable with simple mental models, and gems used as core dependencies should be very stable from version to version (yaml and yaml serialization rules are neither).

It may be, yet again, about how using YAML the way we use YAML is a big mistake -- either use ruby marshal if you actually want exact roundtrip ruby objects, or serialize only to JSON-compatible datatypes (whether using JSON or maybe that's what YAML should have done all along). This middle ground of YAML where it's hard to predict what is round trippable and what isn't, what is safe and what isn't, and it can change from version-to-version -- is just asking for trouble. But it's hard to decide to stop doing it, as so many of your gem dependencies might be.
PS: there is a way to get your college paid for, and that is scholarships, if your child is extremely good in school, he/she can get any college paid for. But you can't count on it as it is something very hard to do.

But my cousin got 8+ years of medical schools paid for, and also her rent was paid for.
On the face of it, it doesn't seem any more odd than that judges are usually attorneys. Also, you'd expect people who are more involved with arguing the law to gravitate toward trying to get the job that involves creating or amending the law.
Does that count as false advertising? Can you just say "I am selling X on my site" even if you aren't?
Not to derail this comment section too much but your comment made me realize how much I too find Amazon's search to be terrible terrible.

It's especially strange considering that Bezos has such an almost pathological (not necessarily in the bad sense) focus on the customer.

One would think Amazon would have some of the best, most laser-focused search of any site on the Internet, but I can't even reliably use 4-stars-and-up as a search filter, or even "Prime only." No matter what I do, I get shown things outside of the filter I set up. It's downright bizarre.

Again, my apologies for the little thread hijacking. I guess one could at least argue it's "search-related" lol....
The article asks why did GCHQ destroy certain components and not others then discussion is hijacked by somebody transparently trolling on cruise control. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...
Scalable and Flexible Machine Learning with Scala
Wireless broadband can reach the moon
I can't follow Jacques' reasoning when it comes to any of this. His first choice would have been a PHP framework (in 2014!), yet he goes on to criticize a bunch of languages which have sane == operators seemingly on the basis of his gut reaction to their very existence, while asserting things like "Python is like driving on the autobahn without guard rails" and "Lua is the sweet spot between Ruby and Python." That might be true if Python had shipped with exactly two data structures, and Ruby with zero, and neither of them had integers.

This is all before the frameworks are even discussed, which are included and dismissed for reasons just as arbitrary. Smaller frameworks like Sinatra are discarded because they can't handle the complex logic that flash cards demand, Django's out because of the whole auto safety thing, and we all know that ExpressJS didn't show up at Jaques' birthday party that one time. Play's out because Scala is unfamiliar, despite that not being a specific quality of Scala and just something that's true in general of programming languages one hasn't bothered to learn.

So the final list contains some more PHP horror shows and a few Java and Go frameworks to make things look democratic. Thankfully, Rails makes an appearance, but it feels like this is just because it was lucky enough not to get hit by a dart.

Let it be a lesson -- we all procrastinate, but when you get to the point where you're writing blog posts about dozens of languages and tools, none of which you have direct experience with, the best thing is just to pick something, do what you'd meant to do in the first place (although you will note that writing the flash card app was itself a way to procrastinate on learning Romainian), and discuss the pros and cons of the tools you chose once you actually know what they are.
You are now the only twitter account I'm following. That's awesome.
Wow, so negative.

> Maybe at first. With time you realize that the friendliness is a form of politeness that hides fear, distrust and greed.

This is not my experience at all. Maybe in Cali (I've only visited), but the rest of the US is not as cynical or distrustful as you make it out to be.

> Yes, if you like deserts and you want to live in SoCal. Note that "close" has a different meaning on that side of the pond.

The definition of close enough for a weekend camping trip for me would probably be 200-300 miles. Within that range, no matter where you are in the US, you'll find nice areas for this purpose.

> The food is either affordable or good.

In restaurants, yes. If you cook your own food, no. There are lots of farmers' markets, local grocery stores, etc., that are no more expensive than buying processed food.

> More like a house with a mandatory lawn in a region hit by a very serious drought. You might also want to ask about the rules imposed by the homeowners association and whoever rents you the house.

Only in suburbia. If you're out in the country, or in a city, there are (usually) no HOAs and only local zoning laws prevent what you can and can't do. The only requirement (usually) is to keep your grass trimmed to a reasonable height. I agree though, that HOAs are a bad idea and promote cookie-cutter neighborhoods.
At first it seemed like it would be posted automatically. But you read and interpret the data for your little friend, right?
Harry Reid Bows Down To Trial Lawyers And Big Pharma In Killing Patent Reform
Except if that serialization format was Json, we'd both be shocked if there were any problems, wouldn't we? It's possible, but pretty darn unlikely.

And if that serialization format were ruby marshal... there's actually a 'marshal version' embedded with marshaled serializations, which changes independently of ruby version, can change to indicate backwards incompat, but I don't believe has changed in quite some time, not between 1.9.3 and 2.1.x. So again, if the marshal version is the same, we'd be shocked (and it would unambiguously be a bug) if there were anything handled differently between versions. (Okay, that's not entirely true, I can think of some counter-examples too).

I think it really is about YAML, and the mistaken design decisions in the way much of rubydom has historically used it, which continue to pile up.

Note that I think ActiveRecord `serialized` uses YAML in the db, so that's another place you might find yourself "sharing state" via YAML between diff ruby versions -- if you upgrade to ruby 2.1 and have it reading a database created with an earlier ruby version. Oops.

Maybe the lesson is really that serialization is way harder to get right than you think, in terms of both security and forwards compatibility (future-proofness).
I wonder if the same free animal would enjoy it for a long time or if it is merely the excitement of something new.
I buy from eBay from time to time in spite of the fact I'm not completely crazy about them and wish they were better at what they do. At the moment, for better or worse, they seem to have the most sellers of the type I sometimes look for.

That being said, as a Google search user I am delighted to see them lose search ranking. Is sucks seeing eBay listed in first page search results for just about everything. If I wanted to look for an item on eBay I would go to eBay. What I want is INFORMATION about the item/topic, not a link to eBay. Now, if they could just get ehow and about.com.....
"My Tesla is using environment friendly electricity. It is slug powered"
You know you won when sites are created to help correct content on your site.
I read Namecheap were sloppy on some security issues, like heartbleed vulnerability. They also swapped my contact info with theirs on several of my domains.
Yeah, he may want to ask some honest friends. People talk about smelly people, just not to their face.
When I say I had a temporary increase in BO, I mean I noticed mild BO after, say, 6 hours during the transition period, and I showered again.

Before trying this, it would take 12 hours to get that level of BO.

And currently, I basically never notice that level of BO during a 24 hour cycle. It just vanished.

Measurement was....smelling my armpit.
German party leaks MySQL config.
Excellent, thanks for the advice. Do you know whether it's more likely to get a visa with a larger company (Google, Microsoft etc.) or a startup?
Remember when ICANN used to not care about these things and we'd ask for better enforcement of? Look, now they have.

If you've registered a domain name you should get an email every year like clockwork saying to verify the information or you may lose the domain. It takes 10 seconds to do a whois query. If you have more than a few dozen domains then it is a business, treat it like one. The IRS or HMRC doesn't care you didn't receive their notice. They'll fine you the same as if you ignored it intentionally. ICANN is in the DNS version of them. Ignore them at your own peril.

And $DEITY help you if you are using a DNS anonymizer. You are begging to get your name highjacked.
I knew a pilot who installed the blue lights used for airfield taxiways alongside his driveway. He said that when flying, the blue lights meant that he was almost done and could soon relax. He wanted that feeling when he was coming home.

There are many people in the world. I can well imagine that some want the associations that that font might bring.
Dying is Funny, Comedy is Easy
I'm downloading now to give it a shot, should be really helpful for my wife who's learning English.
> What do you do when your entire being opposes the task at hand?

...anything other than the task at hand, obviously. :-)
On mobile, both Firefox and Chrome download PDFs to be rendered by another app on Android. I'm unsure about Chrome on iOS. There is no Firefox for iOS because Apple.
Certified Stealing Sh*t That Works Practitioners
Native Americans also had domesticated animals, Dogs, LLamas, Turkeys, Ducks and even Guinea Pigs are just some examples.
> What science do you suggest they are ignoring?

All of it - again not saying they're wrong, just that the overall mindset I've seen is "I believe animals have emotions, and that's what matters" or "we don't need proof, it's just obvious", not "I have collected evidence beyond anecdotes that animals have emotions". By knee-jerk, I mean people tend to believe first, and look at the evidence either later or never.

(Though to be fair, much of the animal-non-rights movement seems to be similarly non-scientific :P)
I think you are referring to economics...
I don't think that's specific to programming. It's what we all experience when we procrastinate.

Set yourself small very clear goals which you write down and where you commit yourself to finishing them in a given amount of time.

However, what your mind is telling you with the feelings you experience in my opinion is something along the lines of "Don't do this, it's not great".

So when you experience this very often, you need to change something in your life, or else you'll fall into depression because you have overcome your inner hesistation one time too often.

Don't take this as a scientifically accurate account, just my personal experience.
Yes, and not only in tech. The drunken business owner who chased one of his employees around the table wasn't at a tech business.
Rule #1 I've tried to tell people since the 90's: if the contact email on your domain is not yours, it's not your domain.

It may be legally yours, but that's pretty f-ing useless if you go out of business whilst trying to gain actual control over it.

In a practical sense, nothing else matters more on your domain registration than controlling the email-address on the admin-contact, and actually reading the damn email. (Which also means, no spam filtering that you don't control and by which important notifications may be filtered out as false positives.)

Legal ownership of the registration comes a distant second.

If you can't handle that, outsource your domain management to a trusted party, and don't bitch about "but registrar X is soooo much cheaper". You don't pay them for registering your domain, you pay them for making sure your domain remains yours 24/7.

Managing your domain registrations is a way too important to neglect, but most organizations are ridiculously careless about them, even though one day of being unreachable may lose them a shitload of money.
It really depends how the pharmaceutical company is using its quadruple profits. If it is using them for executive compensation, returns to the investors, and gold plated fountains, that's one thing. The corporation could be focused on the short term extraction of as much money from as many dying people as possible.

However, the corporation (and its investors) focusing on long term profits and long term good is not incompatible with charging quadruple the price for its existing drugs. Bringing in more money faster means having more money to reinvest on R&D to research more new cures faster. In which case, double the price again if insurance companies will keep paying it.

At the end of the day those obscene profits are coming from insurance premiums spread over nearly the entire population, making it effectively a private sector tax. If that tax is, in fact, largely going to cancer research, I'm OK with it.

Of course, I'd personally prefer a public sector tax that I knew was going to research and not gold-plated fountains.
Ideas, Execution, and Jealousy
It's too bad sites aren't also penalized for fixed-position social share widgets that make reading on mobile impossible, like wordsteam does.
You need to be called out on your, to be blunt, bullshit.

It's not aluminum, it's aluminum _salts_ NOT THE SAME THING. Says so on the page you linked to.

(And what does Wiki P say?) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium

"Despite its prevalence in the environment, no known form of life uses aluminium salts metabolically. In keeping with its pervasiveness, aluminium is well tolerated by plants and animals.[6] Owing to their prevalence, potential beneficial (or otherwise) biological roles of aluminium compounds are of continuing interest."

And back to your page

"Most formaldehyde is removed from the vaccine before it is packaged."

And again

Monosodium glutamate (MSG) and 2-phenoxy-ethanol which are used as stabilizers in a few vaccines to help the vaccine remain unchanged when the vaccine is exposed to heat, light, acidity, or humidity.

This is a _good_ thing. This means the vaccine is more effective.

The English language does not contain the words needed to express how annoying people like you are. Go read the stuff you link to. Google for the zero evidence for the link between MMR vaccine and autism. Google it. Go on!

When you think about it, why would the centres for disease control and prevention put alarming stuff on their site? Wouldn't it go against their best interest?

Stop wasting our time.
No, "working to reduce inequality" is most certainly NOT a noble cause. Working to increase prosperity, especially of the poorest, that is the noble cause.

We have seen again and again that policies, programs and revolutions aimed at "reducing inequality" succeed only in increasing the misery of all and especially the poor who suffer the most from any absolute declines.

Those who perpetrate such evil on mankind always seem take their failure well, resting easy on the nobility of their intentions. In their own minds, their moral rightness excuses their mathematical error. They believe output to be an independent variable, immune from effect by their policies. But far from immune, it is hypersensitive.

We have known for a very very long time that the type of order that causes the prosperity of mankind to shoot skyward, enriching all in absolute terms, can also, to our moral horror, enrich some more than others. Our graphs an charts usually fail to show that it also greatly increases mobility; hardly anyone stays poor across generations. The only thing that can keep people poor are programs designed to reduce inequality.

Of course, there are certain policies that do create inequalities which could be unwound without shrinking output. To name a couple: debasement of money by central banks, corporatism (cronyism + bailouts). These simply transfer wealth from poor to rich without creating any value.
Meanwhile, most ISPs have done sod all about IPv6 and will probably only start when they start getting complaints from users that foo site doesn't work.
Ask HN: What questions to ask during interview?
Hi,
What questions should i ask a startup company during the interview process?
It is totally automatic. I'm still working out the tweeting time, so some variability should be expected.

The phrases are random, check the code for them here: https://github.com/jlhonora/iot/blob/master/rpi/twitter_mana... . The "mood" for the phrases depends on the ran distance.

The graph I posted was generated with matplotlip and I tweeted it manually. When I finish struggling with D3 I'll put an on-demand graph with the data.
'DNS anonymizer' - is that the same thing as a whois privacy service?
Perhaps I am judgmental towards them. Recently we had a big argument because they both saw nothing wrong with innocent people being wrongfully executed, and view it as a necessary evil to allow for guilty to be executed.

The fact that they both told my wife that they feel art is a waste of time and that artists should all find better things to do didn't help me view them as remotely on our level.

I'm very critical of myself. It is people who lack the capacity to be critical of themselves who act and think like they do. I am better than they are, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. I'm not better than them by anything given to me, but because I recognize that I suck and constantly seek to improve myself. They view themselves as amazing people. They aren't.
I'm American, but have lived in Scandinavia for a couple years now. When I incorporated my bitty start-up last year, I could choose between incorporating here or in the US.

Despite the higher tax burden, I ultimately decided to incorporate here. Why? There were a lot of reasons, but the two biggest ones were:
1) I didn't want to worry about patent trolls
2) I didn't want to worry about net neutrality effecting my first users (we are starting local)
It was a deal breaker when we were searching for homes as well.
A bigger company (with fancy lawyers) will have an easy time sponsoring someone's H1B than a startup. But I have seen startups sponsor H1Bs as well. If the startup is well funded, has traction and is a 'real' company, then I don't think they will have any issues sponsoring for a H1B.
> but their "bits" (qubits?) can be anything from 0 to 1

This is not the interesting part, because there are models of computation that allow for this, but are believed to be equivalent to classical computation. What makes quantum computing different is that 1. the basic data are unit vectors in a 2^n dimensional vector space (when you have n qubits) and 2. you don't have direct access to the qubits during a computation, and "reading" a qubit destroys all the information in any related qubits!

So imagine a classical computer program where reading a variable destroyed the content of your other variables! That's closer to the quantum model. So it's more of a semantic difference than a syntactic one.
Beyond The Boundary
It sounds like symptoms of burnout. I am not an expert but I have personally suffered from burnout before...and it took me a while to get over it. It sounds like you are additionally hampered due to being personally obligated.

As far as I know the only way to get over burnout is to stop. If you do not you will suffer more. I wish I had better news.
Qt based software update client – Check it out
>Sales of T-shirts with "There is no place like 127.0.0.1" are replaced by "There is no place like ::1".

FTFY.
Everyone I know, who has a conviction that other humans experience emotion, believes it for unscientific reasons.
God is perfectly just. Maybe God is punishing your managers for their sins and blanking your mind to slow down their project.

God is perfectly just.

If we have a bad president, let it be. We have a sinful nation and God is punishing us with a bad president. Maybe, your neighbor is bad or the CIA is bad or New Orleans is bad or Haiti.

It is hard to shoot the right people, but God has perfect aim.
This. Can't be said enough. There's almost certainly not a concerted effort in Google to de-rank eBay, and you'd immediately hear it leak from one of the many people who would have to be involved if there were.
It is Possible. But if there is a startup working on it / a service already there, and is getting some traction, Google probably knows about it. Again, Google can make/introduce new features to keep the users coming back to it or it can simply acquire the service ( For example, Twitch ).
1) Look at the problem a different way and try to find a way to make it more interesting, attractive and (most importantly) impressive. I had to find and fix a tedious problem so I wrote a visualization, defect detection and automatic correction tool. If you have the freedom, try solving it with a new language or technology that you've always wanted to learn.

2) Challenge yourself to finish the project as quickly as possible. If a realistic estimate is that the work will take 1 week then try to finish it in 1-2 days. If it is awful work, try to get it over as quickly as possible. It helps if you can find an existing solution that you can use as a starting point.

3) If you're paid hourly, you might consider outsourcing the problem to someone off of elance. You should reframe the problem so that it doesn't require you to share any info (source code etc) from your employer with the person you outsource to. Ideally, ask the person to create an open source project on github.
Some of that is what's become a standard career path for A.G.'s and prosecutors.
Wasn't eBay pretty much buried by Google for a while now? It's been ages since I've seen useless eBay results when searching for stuff like info on particular consumer products.
If you don't know me "from heck", then perhaps you should dial down the rhetoric before you assume I'm arrogant towards other human beings.

I used to be a construction worker. I know what arrogance towards human beings looks like because I experienced it every day by being looked at like an insect by every white collar asshole that walked by. I also know that my wife's sister and her husband didn't think I was good enough for her back then, but now that I make a decent salary they think I'm kosher. Fuck them.
Very cool. It looks so easy from the article but I doubt it actually is. (I notice this was the authors second attempt). Side note... the father-in-law in the picture actually looks like a Hobbit in the picture. Coincidence?