skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Realize that you are going into business for yourself. Bread will only arrive on your table and the mortgage will only get paid through your blood, sweat, and tears (not speaking figuratively at all here). You have to hunt down that prospect, turn them into a customer. You do the work, you do the billing, you nag them until they pay the invoice, and gee wiz, you may have accounts payable before you have accounts receivable.

1) Health insurance: assuming you are in the US, you buy it - try ehealthinsurance.com, your state's health exchange, etc.
2) You figure out what your customers can afford relative to what your competitors are charging
3) As much as you can get, from any source you can find. Build a sales pipeline, you are in business for yourself now.
4) There's no time for social interaction, you are self-employed. Any time you aren't doing the work, you need to be doing sales, bookkeeping, marketing, updating your website, writing new work proposals, and half-a-dozen other things. Your only social interaction will be with customer and prospective customers. I'm only partially kidding.

I'm assuming the 20 hours/week that you are doing now is in addition to a full time gig. If that's the case, keep your day job. Keep doing these moonlighting gigs (and saving the money from them!) and use them as a test to help you figure out things like a) what to charge b) what it takes to win new business c) how much work you can handle. When you have enough work built up that it is overtaking your day job, then you'll know it is time to quit and go full time on consulting.

Good luck!
GPU: Changes Everything (1999)
My first reaction when all of this started was how do you cover agencies which cooperate with other countries agencies?

I remember thinking about that when I first heard about ECHELON [1], which was at the time seems like a great get out of jail free card. Any of the participants of the system can deny they are doing anything specific because it's handled by another agency.

Even more liability is farmed out if you use 3rd parties to do the actual work: "Is GCHQ storing information on UK citizens?", "No" (its all in Amazons S3).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
I don't get to hack stuff just because I say "white hat."

If it's not yours, don't mess with it.
Void Main Void by Emperor and Mefjus
Hope I am not the only one that thought this had something to do with Leonard...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Hofstadter
. . . said no interviewer ever.

And as selfishly awesome as it would be for my career if security holes became career-ending mistakes (hire me so you don't lose your job!), the only people who haven't written software with security holes are those who haven't written software.
A study without a control is barely a study at all.
I wonder how well PC emulators will render this :-)
How is this not a form of perjury?
How does this not get every defendant a new trial?
How many law suits will come of this for violations of people's constitutional rights?

This crap should result in RICO charges and jail time for all parties that knew of this coverup and didn't try to stop it.
Amazon does have a remarkably fine-grained control mechanism - but you need to use it.

For example I never publish my Route53 (DNS hosting service) keys, but even if they were leaked the account is only setup on the Amazon side to work from a single source IP.

You can restrict permissions significantly, so again in my case I've got a user configured who can only add/delete DNS records - but cannot create a new zone, or delete other zones. Not ideal, since "remove all records" is almost the same as "delete zone" in practice, but I'm not worried that unrelated zones on that account will be broken if I do lose my keys.
SICP. It's my first introduction to functional or object-oriented programming. It's making me want to minimize mutable data/state in my projects from now on.
The VIC-II and SID chips in the C64 are amazing. They blew away anything that could be found inside an IBM PC.
We’ve tried to give users examples on the studies page to give an idea of how it works. You can see those here:
http://www.que.by/studies

I had previously also put together a quick youtube video showing some of it as well, you can see that here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6tkUa9OtlI

A summary here is that our main tool available right now allows the user to use a bookmarklet (we’re also working on browser extensions) to scrape the page being viewed and send it to our systems for parsing and saving. This means that any posting you find can be saved without relying on sessions, cookies, etc to keep track of it. And once it is in your saved list you have control over when it is removed, so that even if the job expires on the originating site you still have a record of it.

You can keep your positions private, or publish them to a public feed which others can then subscribe to thus getting a feed of positions you’ve found. Say you are interested in helping to support the Ruby on Rails community and you’d like to keep a list of good Rails jobs that is sharable with others. Anything you save to this queue is published to the feed and anyone can subscribe to it.

That's the quick-ish intro, we have more coming, but this is the start, and we’re hoping to get feedback and people using it.
One missing factor in the article is the source of energy. Free energy can be easily obtained from renewable sources like wind farms since as a result of wind variance only some fraction of generated power can be practically utilized. Variance is very different around the world making it difficult to centralize.

Though miners would then work only for 20% of their time making it feasible once electricity will be about 5 times more expensive than equipment.

Therefore the sooner we will reach state of the art equipment, the better. And for simple SHA it is much easier to reach the limits imposed by physics than for CPU.
Isn't dithering done offline at encoding time?
By not having INTERNET permission, so users can be somehow assured their data's more likely to stay with them. Why the launcher would need one?

Android really needs a sane custom permission system and some content provider protocol standardization (like "this app provides weather data" and "this app may access any providers that provide store prices") and a package manager that support dependencies on them (similarly, "this app needs a news headlines provider").
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/51959

Petition to force a debate on Tempora in UK parliament
Has 1500 signatures
It appears that there's more going on beneath the surface than we knew about. First, police departments sign NDAs so threatening that they don't want to reveal the use of stringrays. Next, US Marshalls seize Florida records of the use of stingrays. What does this pervasive concealment of the use of IMSI catchers/stingrays mean? I can think of two things:

1. IMSI catchers are used constantly, without warrant and maybe even without any administrative oversight. The discloseed use is the tip of some giant iceberg of surveillance. Revealing the use of IMSI catchers would imply the giant iceberg, even if we don't know where it is.

2. There's some kind of Freudian shame/concealment issue at the DoJ. They know it's un-American (and it is!) but they can't stop doing it for some reason. So, they hide its use.
The problem with watches is typically the only way to tell if it is real or not is to take it apart.
I guess it is simple - all the citizens in all those countries co-operate to stop the buggers.
Also Super Mario 64 was, er, 64-bit
For what it's worth Joel Splosky looked at the numbers when he toured FogBugz and London was No1 ahead of SF and NY even. There's also 5991 members on the HNLondon meetup group. There seem a lot of tech interested types here.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/11/16.html

FogBugz Biggest turnouts

FogBugz World Tour

London
Toronto
Seattle
Austin
Boston
Arlington, VA
Amsterdam
Vancouver
Dublin
Denver (Boulder)
Cambridge, England
San Francisco
Mountain View, CA
Dallas
New York
Atlanta
Copenhagen
San Diego
Waterloo
Emeryville, CA
> real-time dithering

Wasn't dithering done before the encoding? I thought that was the reason he needed ordered dithering.
I get it. Because absolute security is an impossibility, we just shouldn't bother at all.

See what you and I did there? Extremes, both sides of the argument. I know that no interviewer says that - it was done to illustrate my point.
Considered a ground-up rewrite using something like Unity? They have some kickass 2D tooling now, plus you get physics for free
Source Code Hosting Service Code Spaces Deleted By Hacker
"Tickets will go on sale June 20th at 10am!"
Surely it's not 10am GMT. Anyone knows the time zone of the referred 10am?
Xcode 5 navigation command keyboard shortcuts
The CEO of Mobli is not the CEO/founder of Yo.

Also:

> The app has received $1 million in angel funding from a group of investors led by Moshe Hogeg

So there are multiple investors, not a single one.
(Repost) Really we should stop talking so much about tools, and what tool/language/ide/whatever is best. Many years ago people didn't have half the tools we have now, and they still did amazing things. Most of what we have today is very good already. IMO focus on building products, not on bashing the tools.
checkout http://prog21.dadgum.com/51.html
The Wacko in the Morning Show 06/20 by The Wacko Network
I honestly don't know, but I'd guess maybe $125k.
All sorts of bundling are perfectly fine. On my morning drive I heard an ad for an insurance company offering discounts for, literally, "bundling home and auto insurance." Their words. (And it made me think about which kinds of bundling are and are not allowed, so I was a bit primed for this comment.)
I'm not sure where the documentation is.
I finally got a chance to watch that video, and it looks as though what you're worried about is `flip`. Ramda for one already includes a version that works much like Haskell's. I don't know if this satisfies your objection, though.
I'm with Andrews & Arnold. I won't need to tell them anything because I know they take my privacy very seriously. They're the best ISP I've ever dealt with.
If you can travel by train and couchsurf, I think you can keep the costs down.
I don't know of any accurate IBM PC emulator. Most of the typical ones like DosBox will play it either too fast or too slow.
I signed a petition that triggered a debate. Wrote to my MP and asked him to attend and put my point across. He wrote back to say that he stood by the government decision and encouraged me to read the transcript.

I read the transcript, it was in a side room and at the end the Minister for the department in question said they would take the minutes back to the department for review.

Which I am sure they'll just put in a pending tray as the whole thing was a case of going through the motions.

We need to decentralise, devolve countries into smaller units. England split into 7 would be far less of a threat to its countrymen and have the nimble ability to innovate of a local needs.
Are there not currently businesses that do exactly this? You drop things off and they list them. I ran one for a while (albeit in the states).
Welke gezonde voeding helpt tegen chronische ontstekingen? | Leef Nu Gezonder
I agree, this would be very useful information to know.
>some people have stuff to sell and no time on their hands.

The quality of ebay's UX is the main determinant of how much time you need to have on your hands to sell something on ebay.

>Does Instamotor exist because of the terrible UX of car dealerships?

Yes.
Israel is certainly bigger than Berlin. It's not clear which is bigger between the UK and Israel as it depends which metric you use.
Hi,

I'm the author of the first reference cited by this article, and the coiner of the term 'self-corrosion' for this phenomenon. First of all, thank you to the author of the headline article for their interesting article and for citing our research.

I'd say our main findings were a little bit different to what is described in the article, though I'd agree with most of what was written there.

We discovered that SSD drives can wipe themselves (with their own GC) even in the absence of TRIM commands and despite the use of forensic write-blockers that block both writes and trims being sent on the ATA/SATA bus. To my mind, that's what is really shocking - you get this phenomenon even when the very best forensic tools are used and even on OS's that aren't using TRIM. (My coauthor was a professional forensic investigator armed with professional equipment).

For example, imagine if you had some data on your disk that was fragmented all over the disk. If the disk has a garbage collector that wants to consolidate flash sectors so it can erase the leftover space after consolidation (e.g. to improve performance), then you're going to get deleted data being purged without any TRIM command being involved after the consolidate/erase operation.

If I remember right (it's been a few years), some firmwares also detect fast-formatting operations in OS's that don't support TRIM and use that as a clue to trigger automatic GC. That was the really stunning one for us. A fast format by the user led to the disk wiping itself just minutes later under forensic conditions.

Of course this sounds great for privacy, self-wiping and so on, but the problem is that it could look like this accidental wiping was an intentional attempt to destroy evidence (e.g. manual wipe, logic bomb or something). That's where things get tricky.

It looks like the link isn't working, here's a working link:

http://graemebell.net/publications//upload/bellbodd2010-prep...

or

http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/3714/1/solid_state_...

That paper was written for any educated person to understand, not just forensic experts, so I hope you enjoy it if you do take a look. We talk about both the technical and legal side of things in the paper.

Thanks for reading, and I'll check in on this comment later in case anyone has questions.
Maybe this is AN issue, but this is certainly not the issue highlighted by the komonews.com article. The point of the article is

> It turns out Starbucks isn't contributing any upfront scholarship money to an online college degree program it introduced this week.

This is technically true, but readily misleads the reader into thinking that Starbucks is not contributing any money at all. (If you disagree, I suggest scrolling down a bit in this thread to see the reactions of your fellow HNers.) In fact, Starbucks will reimburse workers for the cost of their second two years of college--ASU and the federal government (essentially) will pay for the first two. The article does also mention this, but buries it more than halfway down.
This looks like a cool idea. I think a couple of (neat!) examples, stuff you can't easily do with normal grep, will go a very long way. The list of features is secondary in my opinion.
Cracking Encryption By Listening To The Computers Vibrations
It's a new implementation of a common service. You have a point with the auction house providing the service it blurs some lines. Similar points have been brought up regarding some of Amazon's services. I think it will rely on eBay's willingness to shutdown bad vendors (something they aren't known for at the moment).
And leave security holes open for people with less good intent and actually harm users?
> We are quickly coming to an end of an era where hardware can compensate for sloppy code and processes. We are heading back to the days of 640k barrier or the old C-64 days. It was amazing how efficient programs were and the genius of the software engineers.

I don't think we've ever had a "golden age" of software development. Sort of like going back to find examples of good art (in whatever medium) from decades ago, we end up with the impression that the scifi of Asimov's era was somehow better than what we have today. Really, the crap just disappeared. Pointing to examples of good software in the 80s, certainly impressive feats can be found, doesn't mean that they were the norm. Having worked on a lot of legacy projects, I can assure you there's plenty of crap from that era as well.

What we end up with is a false impression of our current time. We see all the crap, we're filtering it out now, and we think things must be worse now than they used to be. We just won't know until we can have a proper retrospective in 10-20 years. Once the crap's filtered out, what remains?
> The text mentions one of the quotes, the other is "What I cannot create, I do not understand" which I assume refers to his ability to create the solution to a problem from scratch.

Although I cannot speak to Feynman's mind, it is also possible that he was referring to creating the problem. When someone poses you a problem, he is asking you to think of it as he does; but you might have more success by figuring out why you might be interested in the problem—a trick of which Feynman was a master.
One other thing, if you want to try this out at home, all the code we wrote for our experiment was given at the end of the PDF paper as open source scripts, feel welcome to try it on more modern disks/OS and tell us what happens :-)
Are there not slight differences in weights from the real to the fakes? The eBay service mentions like-new items so I'm kind of assuming specs would be available.
I guess I was mainly trying to say that the Linux version was similar to the Windows version, it's not Windows-only as the previous comment indicated. But right, your other comments are all valid.
Yeah, I struggled with that as well. The landing page of any software project like this should at the least have a lot of example syntax with output, plus a glaringly obvious link to full documentation.
Then maybe don't comment?
Sending SMS From Your Go App
This game is awesome! Everybody starts with pong when learning to make games... but this game tops them all. I like the bumpers and the "gravity" well (I haven't gotten past level three yet because I had to pause the game to come and praise it.). I like that you can get enhancements ala Arkanoid. Once you get past the fact that this is a coolest variant of pong, you start to notice how simply beautiful this game is. I like the expressions of the bear and seeing him "play" the game. I like how when you lose a round your screen "zaps" out of focus, just like what you see when his screen goes out. Very nice webgl project!

Oh and this has a webRTC network play?! This is the first web game I've played that I would honestly say I would pay to play (after I got a demo version first, of course). This is by the far one of the coolest projects I've seen posted on hacker news. Beats the hell out of 1024. Thank you, thank you, thank you for sharing!
> Still doesn't make much sense to me. A tank, helicopter or fighter jet can all move in 360 degrees, allowing for the full use of a joystick or two.

(1) A car can move in 360 degrees too (if you can rotate a full circle in a plane...)

(2) All it takes to make full use of a joystick is to have controls with two relevant dimensions (which cars have).

(3) A helicopter typically needs a lot more than a joystick, since it usually has about 4-5 relevant dimensions of control (2D cyclic, 1D collective, 1D yaw, 1D throttle, but the last may be managed automatically in normal operation).

> We can't use two joysticks like a tank because it would sheer the rubber from your tires

You could, with the right control regime (e.g., double forward is drive, double back is reverse, but any other combination is based on relative position), but you probably wouldn't want to. Of course, you know what else often doesn't use "two joysticks like a tank" -- actual tanks. Because two joysticks is overkill for two degrees of freedom .

> That and it seems confusing and unsafe to have both direction and throttle controls on one device, especially when that device is as sensitive as a joystick.

"As sensitive as a joystick" isn't meaningful. Degree of sensitivity on a joystick can be as little or as much as you want.

> When you slam on brakes in a car, the force pushes your body further into the breaking system. If you were to slam on the brakes with a joystick, the force would push you (and the joystick) forward, disengaging the brakes and applying throttle.

My first instinct with a joystick based system with a car would be to have brake being forward, not back. (Forward push brakes are a common control element in hand controls for autos, e.g., those that are made for the handicapped.)
Unity is closed-source; I'll bet in ten years we'll see the same thing happening again, with people trying desperately to find some way to run these old games that were developed on the no-longer-supported Unity platform.
Great article. Love that the author put some time into the research and links.

Bit on Practice also dovetails nicely with a post I wrote (much less scientific in nature):

http://scottndecker.com/blog/2014/04/25/Never-Solve-the-Same...
True, but you could just as easily replace "lazy" with "busy." Are you a single mom with two kids and a full time job? Are you an office worker with an 8-7 job, lots of weekend work, and barely any time to run errands? Are you frequently on the road for work?

Whatever the case, there is a large category of people for whom selling on consignment has always made a lot of sense, even if their margins are terrible. Their economic substitute to selling on consignment is throwing things away. Better to make a few bucks per item than none.

Secondary consignment markets have been really big on eBay for many years now. Makes sense that eBay would recognize the pattern, and attempt to own a piece of it. Meanwhile, big-time and category-specialized consignment sellers are still going to do just fine.
"We are heading back to the days of 640k barrier or the old C-64 days. It was amazing how efficient programs were and the genius of the software engineers."

I think software is already getting there, since we've been dealing with slowing returns for a while. The previous generation of languages like Python, Perl, Ruby, etc. traded convenience for performance and waited for hardware to catch up. It was a good trade in many cases at the time, but as we collectively learned more about the design space I think it has become clear that it is not an intrinsic trade; it is possible to get a more convenient language that we had in the 80s or 90s without trading away performance.

LuaJIT was an early example of this, but the flood gates are opening now. Go is not architected to the nth degree for speed, but it's a language that's only slightly slower than C, and in my experience, only slightly slower to develop in than Python (possible with a crossover point as the program size grows where Go is simply faster). Rust ought to be a lot easier to work with than C++ once you learn it, and I expect it to reach near-optimal speeds, possibly even beating C/C++ in practice as it will be more feasible to perform some aggressive optimizations for multithreading. And I've noticed a lot of the other little bubbling languages that may become languages of the future, like Nimrod, have the same sort of focus in them, "how can we get these convenient features without a 20-100x speed penalty"?

Then, once you have these languages, I'm noticing that in many cases while bindings exist, entire stacks are being rewritten to be simpler and faster. Go has its own webserver. Dollars-to-donuts Rust will too in another couple of years. I suspect this is actually part of the trend; rather than binding to older, huge frameworks and code written without much concern for latency issues, etc, more code is going to start being rewritten to care more about those things. Between mobile pressing us on one end and desktop speed advancement stalling out on the other, there's increasing motivation to write faster code where it matters, without necessarily having to use C or C++.

I'm not saying paradise is incoming, but I get the impression that we're seeing more care about performance manifesting in real languages and code than we used to.
I would love to see Apache Thrift added to this comparison.