skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> His suggestion that all behavioral data be deleted after a certain period of time means every little piece of data collected must also have a timestamp. Inflating databases and costing money.

I'm not convinced that startups are such an inherent social good that they need to be insulated from the costs of responsible behavior.

> These obligations must be handed down from company to company during acquisitions. A company selling data about to expire will get acquired for a lot less than a company with fresh data. This may in turn cause a series of unforseen consequences in the acquisition market.

Working as intended. Forcing companies to be responsible will cut down on rash, irresponsible acquisitions.
How to use java.net.URLConnection to fire and handle HTTP requests
> PRINT WITHOUT NEW LINE sys.stdout.write('blah') I can't use print to print?

You can. Compare the output from:

print "foo"
print "bar"

With that from:

print "foo",
print "bar"
Well, every now and then Google drops support for a core Android open-source app in favour of Google's own "Google Play" version.
Just curious, how do they handle broken code? (Like when you start writing a line in the middle of the file, not yet done with it, but already need all the goodness like highlighting and code completion to work.)

A common approach with libraries I've encountered is that parser just stops with error - but that's almost unacceptable for use in a proper code editor, which should really try its best to recover and continue processing, even if some chunk in the middle is failing.
"and checking ANOTHER gmail address"

If you forward it it's not another account to check though. Sure you have to set it up.

Also, obscuring it doesn't prevent someone who has written to you having a situation where your email ends up in the wrong hands (for sure you've received, if you don't have spam protection, those emails where someone who has emailed you has had some virus which gets all their email contacts, right?)

If you setup a dedicated gmail you can periodically change that as well "refresh" using your own email you can't do that.

To be sure though the pet peeve is really more just thinking that people are being overly hygienic about protecting their email address I guess. You are right that it's not a huge burden on someone who is sending you an email.

When I used to post my gmail account to my HN profile gmail caught all the spam it wasn't a problem (maybe this was for a year or year and a half that it was in the profile..)
If you're interested in this kind of behind-an-industry reading I can highly recommend The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. http://alaindebotton.com/work/
Does anyone know why this "ships free to anywhere in the world except for Japan"? The Japanese landing page seems to only state that it'll be available soon, though I might've missed something on there as my Japanese isn't that strong yet.
The BSDs use massive monolithic repos that would be difficult to move entirely over to git. Instead of putting separate projects in separate repos, they consider all of their different projects to actually be "one project". These ludicrously massive repos have no business being in git; they would need to restructure their projects to effectively migrate.

This is not a scheme that should be emulated. Compartmentalization/modularization is not only useful at the micro-level in code, all of it's benefits are available when applied at a project/organization level.

For another point of view, consider this page: https://wiki.freebsd.org/GitDrawbacks I think nearly everything on that page is misleaded/misleading, or flat out incorrect, and they failed to identify the technical limitations with git that would apply to them. Other viewpoints are nevertheless useful.

(Actually the BSDs use a handful of massive monolith repos, but that is just nitpicking/)

(Disclosure, I work at a company that uses git at a _much_ larger scale than the BSDs use CVS. Many many times larger than all the OpenBSD repos combined (http://www.openbsd.org/cvsync.html). The trick? We don't have a handful of repos for the company, we have a handful of repos for each team. Each project gets it's own repo. Our build systems, deployment systems, and dev environments are tooled for this. One of the things it even allows is different teams using different VCS, if you're on a team with a bunch of luddites you can still use SVN for your code, and you will be able to build against other code and other code will still be able to build against yours.)
I'm not privy to the details, but to the best of my recollection, Mozilla's contract with T2Mobile is explicitly designed to avoid the problem of stagnant updates. Namely, they're required to "provide the the Flame with updates to each new major version of Firefox OS and a simple mechanism for switching between different release channels" for quite some time.

This is also the device that Mozilla's own employees will be standardizing on for the next year or more, so it should have a relatively long useful life.
Consider that at least some of that should probably be reserved as the beginning of a retirement fund... perhaps 150k if you and your spouse are currently 30? Id look for some sort of reasonably safe financial vehicle to place that as retirement.

The rest of it depends...

If you like where you live I'd probably get rid of the mortgage and keep the remaining as an emergency fund. Minimizing living costs gives you a lot of financial freedom to do many other things and knowing you'll always have a roof over your head can increase your ability and appetite for trying the riskier sorts of things (starting a business, investing, etc).
Applying and Interviewing for DevOps/SRE/SysAdmin Positions
This post set off HN's voting ring detector, but we turned that off because we want to see original work on HN.

All: it's not in your interests to ring-vote posts (i.e. to solicit upvotes for it). It's against the rules, incites the ring detector into demoting your story, and eventually will get your account penalized.
Agile, UX and user research
The Siren Song of Backwards Compatibility
I recently read Paul Lutus's book about his solo sail around the world in the late 80's. He mentions using satellite navigation and I was curious what this was since the adventure preceeds GPS. It turns out it was a system called TRANSIT that was operated by the US Navy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_(satellite)

http://arachnoid.com/sailbook/
They'll probably always need some human around for liability reasons. That is unless the robot bartender is going to add some sort of breathalyzer component to see if people have had too much.

Also unless it's a club it likely would need to scan the person's ID and confirm whether or not the person was who the ID mentioned adding some complexity to the robot that otherwise wouldn't be required for just serving drinks.

The sysadmin person you mentioned could definitely take on that liability role in addition to anything else he needs to do to support the robot.
I'm not sure if this announcement changes anything. The bottom line is to make apps for the end user. Google is simply saying that those best practices are now crawlable in a way that is very mature. The same rules still apply.

A simple guide can be found here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/. Although I suspect it needs to be updated since its from 2012.

If you create an application, make sure it alters the URL when applicable. For simple apps, the following repos will be useful:

The old way, that still works: https://github.com/asual/jquery-address

The better way, preferred: https://github.com/browserstate/history.js or https://github.com/defunkt/jquery-pjax.... not sure which is better to be honest. Feel free to chime in.
This is the third time you've submitted this URL this morning. Deleting then resubmitting a URL on Hacker News is a bannable offense.
All these governments accusing each other of unscrupulous spying has got to be the biggest bunch of pots and kettles calling each other black in human history.

The USA is, despite all its overreach and corruption, much more on the liberal side of things than most other large superstates. I think a safe assumption is to take Snowden's revelations as a baseline and to assume that nearly all nation states with the means are at least that bad.
Massimo and Me
Thanks for the heads up - looking into it...
Between a simple captcha and a CSRF token, I've found that nearly all spambots are defeated. Hidden form fields don't do much, since bots are almost never paying attention to anything other than the DOM.

What can work well -- if you're willing to give up on fallback for non-JS users -- is inserting a required form element into the page with JS on submit.
Iran Court Summons Facebook's Zuckerberg Over Privacy
While I agree with the premise that most people do not know enough statistics, there are several underlying problems to that.

When I was first encountered to statistical topics as an undergrad, the lecturer himself was not confident of the matter and taught a very bare subset that consisted of linear fitting, error propagation, means and standard deviation. Even back then I had the feeling that the equations provided were insufficient and contained a lot of things that were not motivated or explained.

Nowadays I can see why I was not introduced to statistics and probabilities back then as I was introduced to algebra, analysis and quantum mechanics. The field of statistics is complex, full of contradicting best-practices and analytically challenging. Let alone Bayes-vs.-Frequentist, etc. In a way I doubt that all researchers working with Poisson-distributed data once in their life as scientists can work through the details Poissonian statistics analytically.

Maybe an illustrative introduction would be more beneficial. I imagine people could perform statistical experiments before working with real data and experience first hand how misleading a small data subset can be for example, or how fundamentally data plots can change their face. Maybe then people would stop being overenthusiastic about their N=20 experiments.
>Anecdotes are not evidence

Actually they very much are. Anecdotes such as what we have, real and verifiable posts "our company switched to Go", are very much evidence of people switching to Go. Finding the mangitude of that is up to us -- there are no hard numbers available. But if you care about this, you have to gauge it from what information you have.

Oh, and in certain fields, like what's the next big thing in pop, fashion, etc -- and I'd argue: programming language, you don't have hard data (until it's too late). You have anecdptes and people murmuring stuff here and there, and you have to figure it out yourself.
T-Mobile USA storing passwords in clear?
"This calculation is necessarily imprecise, because it can’t control for any pre-existing differences between college graduates and nongraduates — differences that would exist regardless of schooling."

I think this is a key point that shouldn't be understated. We can't simply say you'll make 1.8x as much because you went to college. The people who go to college might have been the people who would have made more anyway. I'm not trying to say college isn't worth it and won't pay dividends, I'm just saying we can't put a number on a graph to quantify it like that.
it is pretty clear that people who think about ethical issues, must be unhappy in and with this world.
I fail to see how uber's growth will cause traffic chaos.
Better yet, is this major at this university given my personality and skills worth it?

Cars may be "worth it", but that doesn't mean everybody needs to be driving around in a Lamborghini.

There is a vast, vast difference between a person who has committed themselves to being a neurosurgeon no matter what the hardship and one who has no idea what they want in life or whether a college education would help them out or not. Lumping it all together doesn't help either of those two figure out what's best for them.
From where I'm standing it seems that the "traffic chaos" is being brought about by the cab drivers, not by Uber...
> How will a bank manager be able to tell if a book deserves to be financed or not? And will the bank take a loss if the book doesn't sell?

Obviously they're a specialised kind of bank manager who has this specialised skill. Like the mortgage loan guy or the business loan guy.

Oh wait, that's "a publisher".
Ask HN: What server setups should I test my new self-hosted app on?
I'm currently running a small ISV, developing a self-hosted (on a LAMP stack web server) analytics package.

We've just hit the alpha testing stage, and I'm wanting to make sure that our app runs on as wide a range of web server environments as possible.

It's designed to be installed on a LAMP stack, so I'm trying to think of all the ways that stack could be configured which could cause us problems.

Currently, on the list I have:

* Test as many distros as reasonably possible, including Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Debian.

* Test versions of PHP back to 5.2

* Test older versions of MySQL

* Test drop-in replacements for MySQL like MariaDB.

What else should I be testing? What other configurations, settings, modules etc have you seen cause problems for a simple PHP/Mysql app?

All suggestions gratefully received!
he choose to spend it by not spending.
I remember seeing that pencil and thinking it was really stupid. I guess it's popular with a certain set?
100 Reasons Not to Go to Graduate School
> any captcha worth breaking is already "broken", given the existence of captcha farms

Yes, but there remains a cost. The goal of a security measure is to make it so difficult/expensive that it becomes worthless doing.
I grow herbs in my house in a consumer grade hydro system (really, like basil and mint, and sometimes lettuce, not weed) and a big thing for the organic types is no herbicides and no pesticides and that is pretty trivial for indoor hydro.
please do not auto play the videos.
But then you're getting too specific for any useful answer. I personally would be interested in seeing the pay difference between those who graduated college and those who did not in the same job. For instance, how much more does the average software developer with a CS degree make than an equivalent dev without a degree?
It would mostly be a parent investigating it on their own I would say.

It's well known that children with autism have frequent GI issues (diarrhea etc). You'll find that many parents have their autistic children on special diets (gluten free, dairy free etc) all of which attempt to alleviate the GI symptoms. They may work, but it's likely because they are changing the gut flora, rather than removing the gluten protein for example.
Thank you for taking the time to share your anecdote, even if it is an unpopular one here. I hope Hacker News readers are understanding enough to recognize the need for buy-in from developers, and the necessity of a reasonable level of expertise when leading the switch to a distributed source control system. Sorry things didn't work out for your team; TFS branching and merging is so much more painful!
You can find salary medians and ranges for every different major. I don't think it's possible to calculate "is this major from this school worth it to me." If it were, someone would have figured it out by now.
"If you can master the pollination cycle and control pests through environmental controls you have the basis for a sort of 'super-organic' type of farm."

Ironically, if you mastered indoor multi-story growing and it became the norm, you would almost certainly create a new marketing label for food that was grown in one layer outdoors. Similar to how we currently have a marketing label for "organic" food.
While I can't speak to the issue of mental health effects, I can say with certainty that being purely vegan requires a very high level of knowledge and understanding about the human body's intrinsic dietary needs and metabolic processes.

Most vegans I know have acquired this knowledge over time. A vegan diet demands physiological due diligence and truthful self-discovery. Neither of which is a bad thing.
I'm curious how those numbers are calculated. Especially when it is broken down my majors. Feels like the same lie of "college = job" that we teach our kids, which fools them into thinking that they don't need a tangible vocational skill to get a job.

Also, how much of the growing gap is a result of existing college grads with jobs getting pay raises faster than those without a college degree? With the tech boom, are the outliers skewing the data? Not all college grads are created equal.
fixed link: https://github.com/defunkt/jquery-pjax
Whoops. I saw the link to the PDF at the top of Schneier's article, but missed the blog post link at the bottom. Thanks for updating!
Seven habits of highly effective digital enterprises
Show HN: Interactive Chart Of Which Jobs a College Degree Actually Gets
> Specifically, what discrete banking options should be available if someone is homeless, owes child support, and maybe has open warrants someplace.

I used to publish a street paper and have been trying to solve this problem for the past six years. Street papers are theoretically great because they solve many of the problems associated with homelessness. However, their efficacy is being cut because more and more people don't carry cash. Unfortunately, to take part in a cash free economy, you need things like a bank account, credit, or a device.

Another problem was cash management. We would launch an issue and out vendors would start selling. Then, after four hours, they might have made $80. This was problematic because some of the problems that lead to homelessness can usually be exacerbated by a sudden surge of cash.

In my experience, paranoia and/or fear of the system is the biggest barrier to discrete banking. Homeless people are disproportionately affected by laws banning camping in public parks, or that 'close' public parks at 11pm. When society continuously passes laws making it harder for you to live, it doesn't take long before it's hard to trust society. Add in schizophrenia (which is an epidemic amongst homeless populations), and banking is very hard.

Some of the ideas we came up with include:

- selling ads to cover 100% of the magazine's cost, thn 'selling' the paper to vendors for $1 a copy. We'd hold this amount collected in our bank account and hand it out on request. We abandoned this idea because it felt too much like enabling addictive behaviours.

- building a new payment card system. If you buy a magazine, you would put cash onto a vendor's card. Then, we'd have a list of merchants (ie - grocery stores, landlords) who would accept it. Not only is this idea insanely difficult to pull off, but it attacks dignity. A loss of dignity is a cause of continuing homelessness.

This entire question is complex and if you explore it deeply enough, you quickly run up against money laundering/banking regulations. But, if we can solve it, we can solve a huge problem.

Consider social assistance cheques. If you don't have a bank account, you have to use cheque cashing services instead. Cheque cashing companies charge a large premium to cash cheques. In the case of government cheques, there is virtually no risk other than counterfeiting.

Thanks for bringing this up!
We're still using hypertext transfer protocol, right? You need to send hypertext down the wire.

We shouldn't let one company, google, dictate how the web works, simply because of their proprietary technological innovation.
So what is their new method of measuring performance?
Primer on Problem Solving with Algorithms and Data Structures in Python
I use Debian, and python 3 is one "apt-get install python3" away. Ubuntu probably includes the same packages in its repos. SuSE and Fedora are in the same boat (python3 in repos). Arch and Gentoo obviously package python 3. Redhat really is the black sheep here. There is no reason for the assertion that no major distro has more than a half baked python 3 alternative.

It is not really important if it is the default python or not. Python 3 is no less available than ruby or nodejs or any of the other contenders presented in this thread.
This is all fine, but he doesn't suggest an alternative. Which, of course, there aren't any. Which is the reason it's a problem.
> Spreadsheets are remarkably easy to learn to use and to use correctly compared to scripted/compiled software.

I don't think this is true. IME, people who aren't primarily programmers/developers and have been using Excel for years tend to have worse practices developing Excel tools than the same people have with much less time learning, e.g., Python. Excel is much easier to learn to use to get some kind of result, perhaps, but not easier to learn to use correctly. (Part of it, I think, is because the cost of incorrect use is somewhat more deferred, which is also part of what makes it more attractive to use initially in many cases.)
how can there be too few college graduates if we are fighting over the slots currently availble?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/led-by-stanfords-5-top-...

the original title was "Led by Stanford’s 5%, Top Colleges’ Acceptance Rates Hit New Lows" -- with potential double entendre

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7556074
how can there be too few college graduates if we are fighting over the slots currently availble?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/us/led-by-stanfords-5-top-...
Digital Ocean
SiteApps
Cloud at cost
proxy4.us
Appengine
PRODUCT DESIGN AND GAMES DEVELOPMENT COMPANIES JOIN FORCES TO GAIN ADVANTAGE
Agreed - it just stands to reason. Say a college accepts the top 20% of applicants. Wouldn't these people always perform in the top 20% of the young people pool, just by definition? It seems almost stupidly negligent to not count this factor heavily in discussions of college effectiveness.

I've read at least 1 study that shows that the biggest determinant of student success in the workplace was what colleges the student applied to (not even accepted by, let alone attended).
Setting Up A Twitter Lead Generation Campaign
"When experts and journalists spend so much time talking about the limitations of education, they almost certainly are discouraging some teenagers from going to college and some adults from going back to earn degrees. (Those same experts and journalists are sending their own children to college and often obsessing over which one.)"

This particular totally misguided comment is a good example of the bias of this article: As a upper-middle class parent, if I can send my son to Berkeley, MIT, Urbana Champaign, etc. then of course I want him to go those colleges and of course they add value. That's not the point.

The point is about students from poor neighborhoods getting hammered about the value of college and this being presented as the only way they can get a better life. Then, they end up in brain-dead diploma mills with very debatable effect on their employability.

I had this debate many times with teachers in the Chicago South side high school that I mentor: Compare attending a place like Illinois Central College for four years OR spending that time learning about a craft, e.g. programming (yes, I'm biased) and then trying to attend, say, Hacker School or something similar. Granted, this is not an option for all students but things like this should be mentioned to students and put on the table as an option. Instead, when I mention this and similar options teachers and students look at me alike like I'm from Mars.

The reason is that high school counselors and teachers whose job it is to guide disadvantaged students do not have a clear understanding of these option for the simple reason that when they got educated these option did not exist.
A new way for sex change coming? The ability to do the almost impossible adam's apple change, along with the body in a single step.