skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author uses an example of old cars to support his thesis. But the comparison isn't valid unless old cars suddenly and without warning blew up as you drove them along the road.

A better comparison would have been raw oysters in a world without preservatives or refrigeration. How long can you keep raw oysters on a sunlit kitchen counter before they're no longer safe to eat?

> Software makers accomplished something car salesmen only dream of: make using an older product socially unacceptable.

This reveals the flawed premise of the article -- dumping old Windows versions isn't about social acceptability or fashion, it's about security.
Which individuals data was compromised in making this chart?
I'm sorry but I'm missing something. Cars are not software. One is tangible and one is not. Cars will still work in 20 years, regardless if the roads disappear or not. Software will not, I could go on and on but I think you get the picture.

I don't get this comparison at all.
Well, if it's good enough for your local ATM...
Smartcsv – Turn dumb CSVs into smarter ones with model definitions
Meanwhile we have things like Wolfram Alpha and Google search trying to process natural language in the place of more code-like input.
I think Uber got hurt in India because they used a foreign exchange transaction for moving money between a buyer and seller present in India.

Money was being moved through USA, to avoid adhering to India's jurisdiction on Credit Card charge rules.

RBI is fairly paranoid about forex (like cofeposa).

But I think Uber was schooling the taxis in B'lore on how to deal with customers. Would be a shame if they cancelled out that part for the payment convenience.

Ignore the payment details, the pickup service itself was bloody convenient when I visited Bangalore last month, because I didn't need to have two phone conversations on a pick up about "where are you saar?" and "I see a building called Shiv Sagar on my left".

I'd rather buy "Uber credits" or something, just to avoid that.
Excellent point and I think highlights the temporal nature of most specialized capabilities.
Really? It's the highest one on both of these lists:

- http://www.heritage.org/federalbudget/corporate-tax-rate

- http://www.kpmg.com/global/en/services/tax/tax-tools-and-res...
I'm sorry you weren't supposed to have heard about it yet. My apologies.

Would you prefer to be reset to a pre-revelation state or would you prefer to be shown around your vat?
On case is someone I know directly, the other is a friend of a friend who I haven't met personally.

Both alledged thefts were of jewelry in carry on, so if the allegations are true then it was TSA.

We are forced to divest ourselves of metalic objects and then put them through an xray, out of our sight, operated by a low class, unaccountable workforce.

Going through there gives me this mix of feelings: anxiety from being on my guard, fear that I may lose costly property, anger towards whose who designed this awful system and the liars who enable it, pity for the poor losers who work in it, and despair that Americans allow themselves to be treated this way - like chattel.
Quick, somebody submit this to http://www.reddit.com/r/athiesm ;)
Will this change in the future? Has it already, for younger people?
God yes. (Anyone familiar with the work of Barnaby Jack would be chuckling about now.) Look out for printers, too.

They might be running XP Embedded, which is actually still in-support. But they also very well might not be.
There is a joke that perfectly illustrates this entire article:

A programmers wife asks him, "Please go to the store and buy a carton of milk, and if they have eggs, buy a dozen."

The programmer returns home, and his wife is very angry with him. "Why did you buy twelve cartons of milk?!"

English SE question detailing the linguistic mechanisms: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/40234/bring-6-egg...
My conclusion: providing you don't share a land border with the area you are upsetting (Chechnya, Palestine), most 'would be' terrorists lack the means/skill/desire to make a trip to your homeland to perform an atrocity.
I guess the cases of credit card frauds are far lower in India than other countries, where transaction happen without PIN numbers. There are SMS notifications for every transaction, which too is not available in other countries. If it was so easy to break security, RBI would have certainly enacted a stricter law or denied credit card transactions totally.
CCC has loose ties to the Wau Holland Foundation(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wau_Holland_Foundation), which collected considerable sums for Wikileaks and often collaborates with the CCC. I think they've already given enough reasons to be on the shitlist.

(Wau Holland co-founded the CCC)

edit: made it clear that by "collaborate with", I mean the CC and not Wikileaks.
Having lived in India for sometime and used Taxis a lot, it doesnt take more than a minute to pay a Taxi driver and they can give back change fast. Also everyone pays by cash compared to US where things are paid mainly through credit card.
Well, the news that Uber is shutting down in India made my day even though I expect them to be back. I have read multiple comments here in Hacker News that what Uber does is either illegal, or borderline legal, and what I have read about the company suggests they are unethical too. Here in India, we believe in the power of the government and strong government regulation. Putting locals out of business using investor money and then becoming an effective monopoly will not work here - thank you RBI.

(I am going to lose a lot of karma for this post, but sometimes the right thing needs to be said)
poof! No more atheists. Do unto others what you want done. Now the atheists are the retard-niggers.

God's world is perfectly just.

Highs and lows balance.

Find one person with great joy and not great sorrow. This is testable. Find just one human who had ecstatic joy and not the pit of despair.

Go find one.
Up to ten minutes to pay? Does anyone actually put up with this?

In India autorickshaws are ubiquitous, extremely cheap, and I never had any problems paying. I was never tempted to try to find a taxi instead, although if I was there for more than a couple of weeks the pollution (autorickshaws are open at the sides) would get old fast.
"On what planet?"

Followed by what I'm taking to be a very American centric idea of how a taxi ride is completed.....
Not to steal your thunder, but TUT (Templated Unit Tests) does this as well, and I've found it works very nicely even in embedded and cross-platform:

https://mrzechonek.github.io/tut-framework/

It's lightweight, easy to setup for separated tests or built in tests, and simple to use. Doesn't add anything to help with mocking, but you can do that yourself.

EDIT: To followup, I created a C++ template that leverages TUT and binfmtc that I could use to rapidly iterate with. I used it for working out solutions to problems in "Thinking in C++"; it's posted at http://hardcorehackers.com/~npsimons/Template.hh
I agree with this but want to stress something else.

A really great formal language actually frees you from "every detail, no matter how obvious". That's the heart of abstraction.

Good mathematics is heavily abstracted because it forms a superhighway between mathematical concepts that allows you to lift and transport intuition from one context to another without forsaking formality.

To some degree these abstractions must always be built from nitty gritty details. In mathematics it's a matter of didactics to find the most efficient bootstrapping process. In computer science it's a matter of library and language design.
This is important stuff - I did first grade twice, because I was a "slow starter" in a lot of ways. My mother had serious concerns about how well I'd do at school, for the first few years (even after being left back -- it didn't help that I was incredibly shy and didn't really want to interact with the teacher), but once I started reading I read voraciously, and got better & better at school as time went on, so by the end of HS and then in university I was at the top of my class generally.

There's still a pile of stuff I wish I'd learned much, much earlier -- like "how to get good at something" (besides just muddling your way into it), and that the basics of skill acquisition apply to social skills as well... so now I'm explicitly teaching these things to my kids, along with a healthy dose of fun and silliness along the way.
Is there a local competitor in India?
Their privacy statement is short and clear:

https://jawbone.com/legal/privacy

~1400 words.

I liked this section:

When you use the Jawbone Companion app we connect with and upload to our servers the address book and calendar on your device along with other data that we normally collect through our mobile apps described in the app usage data section below.

I wonder how calendars are used.
CCA (Corrections Corporation of America) has scaled down their lobbying in past years; it peaked in '05 with $3.38m. Since '04, they've spent $2.3 million in campaign contributions and $21 million in lobbying [0].

The GEO group spends much less (but they are global, serving Australia, South Africa & the UK as well): $1.143 million in campaign contributions and $3.56 million in lobbying since '04 [1].

0. http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000021940
1. http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000022003&cy...
this just happened to me in southern california. i spent at least 10 minutes with the driver at the end of a ride trying to pay him because i had no cash, and his credit card terminal had no reception because we were up in the hills (he tried several times, fiddled with settings, etc). he then called dispatch to ask some questions, and finally just wrote down my info and let me go without paying. and now i have no idea if he's going to charge me or not.

you won't go "out of your mind" if this happens because when it's happening it seems totally normal and you will take it completely in stride unless you are late for a flight or are just a complete asshole. i was going back to a wedding and was kind of drunk and didn't really care. it's only when you analyze this on a macro level as a business practice that it seems insane.
Vienna Summer of Logic keynote recordings now online
The whole article is based around the argument that "old cars are acceptable why not old software?"

Am I the only one who thinks that whoever asks such a question shouldn't write about software and should (politely!) be given an introduction to software 101 ?

:)
I think it's only a problem if the system is plugged into a network. Granted there aren't many uses for a non-networked system these days.
Docker and VMWare
Let's rephrase this:

Quality software should not rot.
I think Djikstra would not be bothered by this. His arguments tend to be that even with such a search process it's the very providence of formal language to give someone the power to guide that search.

In other words, you'd need formal language to be able to specify what you truly want, then would "translate" it to natural language to execute the search, the processor would search for the proper formal language expression, and then you would verify.

Or you could just skip all the intermediate steps.
An overview of data serialization techniques in C++
Why Every Man Should Be Strong
Applications for YC W15 are open
Cars and operating systems cannot be adequately compared, however. A car, at its base level, is a method of transport. Although motor vehicles are heavily computerized nowadays, they still have that explicit and relatively simple purpose.

Cars have a relatively standardized method of operation, and they don't have the same problems of forwards obsolescence. You're not going to have some new binary format stop you from changing tires, extensions or breaking changes to the API meaning you can't install a new air filter, or any of that.

Cars don't have the same level of being an indeterminate and chaotic system that operating systems do, as computation is fundamentally far more abstract and prone to such radical change than automotive engineering is, which is grounded on higher plane physics, mostly.
Wouldn't this imply that the "buy" instruction is stateful?
Why Working at Google Is Not My Dream Job Anymore
Yahoo’s fantasy football debacle – and why it was being compared to Obamacare
Low tech solution: http://asset-c.soup.io/asset/2982/0993_c492.gif
Doug Englebart’s Grocery List
Yes. In the future intellegent machines will wipe out humans. They would not be very religios about that, just very efficient.
This is so true. Even the lawyers have trouble with the language in these documents. I've often had to work with large legal documents and it's not unusual to find serious mistakes in them. Once I was doing a deal that involved some nested partnerships and I realized that the lawyer (one of the best in town) had made an arithmetic mistake that would have mistakenly allocated an excess $70,000 to me over the course of the project! The attempt to express numerical relationships in english is just too easy to screw up.

Another time a contract had a weird compounded interest increase in percentage ownership that, the way it was written, kept increasing the percentage every year so that by the time the contract was over the other party would have something like twenty million dollars more equity than I did!!! I didn't trust the lawyer that wrote it (again one of the top lawyers in town) so I walked away from that deal, ignoring the claims that it was just a mistake.
This is dumb, car analogies are inherently dumb. Nobody wants their car to learn new tricks, they just want it to drive. Nobody is mad that their 10-year-old car can't post pictures to Instagram.
It's only a matter time before someone creates the next Blaster [1]. An unpatched system connected to a public network is virtually guaranteed to become infected.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_(computer_worm)
That failure is an option doesn't in any way change that socioeconomic status of parents is the best predictor. I.e. kids from rich families fail less than kids from poor families.
Love the new application page. It seems a little weird that the "Are any of the following true?" question wasn't changed to just be checkmarks though. Also seems like "Half or more of your group can’t move to the Bay Area." and "One or more founders will keep their current jobs." could be inferred from the new founder bios.

One final nitpick would be to move the timeline at the bottom of https://apply.ycombinator.com to the top.

Otherwise, really cool.
Show HN: Countly – Open-source mobile analytics platform
This is the status quo for politics these days. Our elected officials are masters of the switcheroo. They ask innocent, logical sounding questions to pry for information they will then use to destroy something they don't like.

You can't ask "what's wrong with this request" anymore. You have to ask "why would they be asking for this? What do they get out of this information?"
It's going to be a selection bias of:

1. People who are fit (or want to be)

2. People who are technical (or are interested in quantified life in general)

Technical people who commute from SC to Silicon Valley have far less bus options and routes than SF (SC has three each way for Google which ends at 9:25). That forces a lot of the number 2 people awake earlier than they otherwise would be.

I think SC is probably the same, if not average getting up later than other Bay Area places, due to the large student population and short walk/bike commute for those who work in the town.
This really brings out the difficulty in intentionally conserving ambiguity: translating "temptation" and "evil" as "desires that are against our better judgement" and "ideas associated with the Devil" is engaging in some heavy editorializing over the original texts, which are terse and can credibly cover a wide range of meanings.
I had to look up Chelsea Manning. I was aware from the news that Bradley Manning had issues with gender, but wasn't aware he had changed his gender association. What's considered the current best way to describe this, that Bradley Manning released the documents (past tense) and now Chelsea Manning needs support (present tense), or that Chelsea Manning released documents and now needs support? The first way feels like it's more useful for expressing the situation to those that lived through it, but may be ignoring the identity of the person in question. Referring to the person through the later moniker in all instances may be confusing to those that miss the change as it happens, but may be less confusing to future generations.

I guess this isn't new though, we have Cassius Clay / Muhammad Ali.
I don't think forms are the answer. I think it should be around 9 or 10, honestly. I'm not too sure what would replace forms though.
I use WindowsXP to run some software that I can not longer use on windows 8. I have chess software and some old games that no longer work on windows 8 and it would not run well on a virtual machine as it needs real access to a hardware video card. I don't use Windows XP for anything else and I am ok with it . I only use it for games not for doing my banking , sending email or browsing the web.
I see what you mean.

How will the feed be filtered for each user? Does it "learn" from what I click or like? Do I have to manually specify what I want to see?

Or is it just one feed for everyone?
> Even the level of security we had before 9/11 was misguided and caused more deaths than it saved.

Even if I grant that it saved no lives, it's not obvious to me how it caused any.

> Here's all we should do: leave security policy up to the airlines themselves.

Airplanes filled filled with thousands of pounds of jet fuel hurtling overhead create externalities, with costs borne by the community. While customers certainly would consider safety and security in choosing an airline, those killed on the ground in Lockerbie and in the WTC and at the Pentagon did not make that choice.
A bot making company to abolish all jobs and probably myself.
These congressmen are representatives of their districts, so I'm not sure why we are surprised when the congressmen speak up for the people that are in their districts.
Very good one, especially in this context
This is relevant: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonhartley/2014/08/25/burger-kin...
Lots of people object to what you are saying, but I'm relieved to hear someone say it. Many 'specializations' are actually worlds unto themselves, with endless amounts of things to learn. They are fun to explore (for a kid of a specific bent) and there is no reason not to explore them as early as possible, just as I wasted no time in taking my toddler on hikes to see parts of the world different than where we live. In my own life, there were many things I regretted learning about until it was too late to devote much time to them.

It seems to me that the biggest advantage to being a generalist is that as parents, we can identify what a kid is good at, and can start him down that road. Things go wrong when a parent is not himself enough of a generalist to figure out what the kid likes, and just pushes him toward something random or prestigious.

As for those that object to what you say, I wonder why they insist on putting words in your mouth. Perhaps they don't believe that a young kid could be interested in any deep topic without coercion; which relieves them of the responsibility to try to find what this topic could be. But my attitude is that as a parent, I may not find it, or maybe it's not there, but the potential upsides are large enough that I will keep thinking about it.
To me, there's a world of difference between sharing my personal commute between home & work, and using my drive to show traffic patterns.
Relevant question from Reddit's AskScience section (which is heavily moderated and thus very high-quality):

> How (if at all) do architects of large buildings deal with the Earth's curvature?

http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/29jrhq/how_if_at...
To be honest, I don't think laziness is a problem, either (or at least, THE problem). The problem is the utterly impossible goal of 100% security from all possible threats with a nearly unlimited mandate to do so. The goal is improbable, the consequences dire, so the result is the mad scramble to do visible things. And so we get security theater instead of reasonable precautions and courage in the face of a statistically insignificant threat.
Karma points won't make your life better, but saying what you want to say would. Which is one of the first steps to real world "Karma"
This article is an Appeal to Novelty fallacy. He never gives a reason why explicit language is better - just that it occurred later in civilization.

Beyond this, natural language programming doesn't preclude explicitness. You could still have portions of limited explicit language or even portions of actual code if that is insufficient.

Natural language programming gets us two advantages:

1. Easy entry (presumably what the author cares about)

2. A language which is composed of an infinite number of DSLs - but without the pains of limited language scope and in which DSLs are actually easy to write. This actually fixes the problem author was taking about - using a language for a purpose it clearly wasn't meant to.

And if you think natural language programming is going to get rid of symbolism in language, I've got a U+1F309 to sell you.
So for a $10 ride you are tipping $200?
Which project should be “the one” to work on?
I have multiple start-up projects (early demos) but I am having a problem deciding which project should be the project on which I will spend majority of my time.

I can't work on multiple projects simultaneously so I've made the decision that I'll work on only one project :)

What questions should I ask myself?
What criteria should I use to pick the right project?
What else could be important in my case?

I need your help! :)
It has been tried, by everyone who votes for a third party.
1. A Space Travel. Would pay Roskosmos or NASA for a travel.
2. Build a whole new industry - Flying cars. I know, I know it's very complex story, but I would invest a billion on this!
3. Build a competitor to SpaceX and make it even better.
4. Find a Foundation to help people those need help, like Bill Gates does.
5. There are more... but for now I'll keep them for myself.
Excellent Product. Easy to sign-up and from London it feels and looks as the machine is next to my feet. One suggestion though is may be to include a live chat support to bring some human feel and love :) and differentiate from the competition.

Congrats.
I missed a lot of sleep for my books at that age. It did have some of the negative qualities of an addiction, and still can drag me in -- I broke my toe last week, and tried reading a novel to keep my mind off the pain, and finished it around 5am. And realized I was exhausted, and my shattered toe was throbbing madly, and I hadn't even taken any pills for pain.

These days I mostly read serial online fiction, because it comes comes in metered doses; e.g. http://pactwebserial.wordpress.com/

My parents quickly realized that "go to your room" was totally a non-punishment for me, and they couldn't reasonably do anything to stop me from reading after they'd gone to bed.

I'd suggest working with your son on flexible solutions -- it could work to ask him to always read more advanced stuff (with more challenging vocabulary, plot, etc.) at bedtime so that it takes more brain-work... that makes it a bit more likely that he'll put it down when he's really tired.

The main thing (I think -- my oldest is only 5) is to see if he himself thinks there's a problem, and (if so) help him hack his own lifestyle, acknowledging that you don't know the answer, but you can help experiment & track the results.
Five Business Lessons I Learned from Launching a Porn* Site
I don't imagine there are too many people who worry about what others think of the OS they are running on an offline machine.
America isn't a planet? A lot of people are going to be surprised.