skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> While the goal of Code 7370 is laudable, faced with competition from younger programmers, many of whom have handled computers since they were toddlers, will it make any meaningful difference for inmates? For now, it's too soon to tell.

Of course it will make a meaningful difference for inmates (if only because in terms of all things one could do in jail, this is probably in the top 1% in terms of intellectual stimulation), and of course they could become high quality professionals after this. Especially given the fact that the training seems more intense to me than any of the bootcamps from which a lot of today's web devs come from ("four-day-per-week, eight-hour-per-day, six-month course" - most bootcamps are a few weeks, or a few months at the maximum).

This sort of line of thought is so harmful. There's nothing magical about programming that makes it different from any other industry. You don't need to have been immersed in it your whole life to be an outstanding professional. It's not the case for chemical engineering, it's not the case for mechanical engineering, it's not the case for electrical engineering, why would it be true for computer engineering?

Especially given the fact that of all the subfields in computer engineering, there's nothing deeply complex about HTML/CSS/JS because it relies on so few prerequisites (if you're writing low level assembly, it requires a deep understanding of the machine's architecture; if you're writing graphics code, it requires a solid knowledge of linear algebra. But there are no such foundations for web development).
Now... if only I can convince the higher-ups to move our sensitive data to Azure where it will likely be more secure than out self-hosted solution is now. That's becoming a hard battle to fight with all the bad vibes people have about "the cloud" right now.
site is dead
This question seems like it came straight out of the book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
I'd love to see a LIVE usb stick of this. I'm not really willing to nuke my file systems on my personal laptop only to find out after install that video or wireless card doesn't work right.
I did not personally downvote you, but you were likely downvoted because the HN community generally does not favorably view comments which only contain jokes/humor (or comments which complain about being downvoted).
The Great and Dusty Intentions of TODOs
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites Interest Groups and Average Citizens
Uh, I still have separate URL and search bars, what are you talking about?
On an aside: what javascript really needed was async/await instead of generators. I have no clue why something as abstract as generators is being pushed.

I mean the bane of javascript is the whole async programming with callbacks. Instead of solving the specific problem, this solves some problem which I don't see most apps having. Can someone in the know how care to explain?
Seen worse - http://www.fabricland.co.uk/ !
It's subtle, but there's a difference between abandoning something because people don't have the problem you're trying to solve and abandoning something because people don't think your solution is good.

Take your Uber example. If you'd done user interviews pre-Uber, it's uncertain whether anyone would have said "yes I want to call a black car on my phone" or not. But I can pretty much guarantee that people would have said "yes, sometimes I have trouble getting a taxi to come pick me up".

User interviews at this stage are about validating the problem, not the solution.
This is a political editorial, and those are off-topic for HN. If anyone can suggest a more substantive article on the same topic, we can change the url.

Edit: I originally wrote "masquerading as news", but someone emailed to complain that such language suggested deception where there wasn't any. I didn't mean it that way, and have tried to make the point more clearly.
Hah, I didn't consider that! I expect that GCHQ happily share the data with the NSA so they don't need to get it from direct taps. So I think it's more likely they were who they claimed to be.
Pleasantly surprised, I was expecting this to be an article about so called "Electromagnetic hypersensitivity." Or some other pseudo-real condition.
It's expensive comparatively. The convenience heroku provides is vastly overweighs the price.
I know a couple people who use Twitter as a personal "online diary"; like a microblog. Nobody knows who they are; they post anonymously and are not connected with no one that knows them. These people are also, frankly, not very technology literate, because, though they try to hide themselves, they don't realise their social media apps are linked to their phone number and emails and some phones send this info to other phones.
>Let's take it a step further! Just let us put bare functions in namespaces without the dance of the static class.

No. C# is an object-oriented language. It doesn't have functions, it has methods. Methods are always attached to a class. Even anonymous methods (lambdas) are compiled to be a method on a class (like c__DisplayClass1).

"Bare" or "global" functions have no place in C#.
I've used Boost Fusion associative maps, in conjunction with a bit of glue code and an appropriate JSON or XML library, to provide pretty seemless serialisation and de-serialisation for both XML and JSON for a while. For XML it's a little tricky because you have to have a means of mapping the simple flat relationship between a struct and its fields, to the various relationships between XML elements, subelements, attributes, and CDATA etc. Here's an example of what my declarations for XML look like in some code I wrote last year.

BOOST_FUSION_ADAPT_ADT (
xml_encoded<Description>,
XML_ATTR (string, "summary")
XML_TEXT (string)
)

BOOST_FUSION_ADAPT_ADT (
xml_encoded<Event>,
XML_ATTR (string, "name")
XML_SUBTREE (shared_ptr<Description const>, "description")
XML_ATTR (optional<unsigned>, "since")
)

The #defines for each macro are short, and beyond Fusion there's only a small support header

Here's a talk from CppConn describing a similar use case, but for binary data formats https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbZdZKpUVeg
This is offered through a great program at San Quentin called The Last Mile. I got to know one Chrisfino Kenyatta a bit (a founding member of the program while he was an inmate) when our company was at RocketSpace, where he works.

One day shortly after he started at RocketSpace, he asked how I was doing and I said "eh, surviving". Not knowing his background, I was caught a bit off-guard when he told me he had recently got out of San Quentin after 19 years, and gently reminded me that I was doing a bit better than just surviving. He's a great, great guy.

He did a Tedx talk about his experience that is well worth watching. http://www.tedxmarin.org/2014-speakers/chrisfino-kenyatta-le...

Totally coincidentally (though thanks to Kenyatta for being such a great ambassador for the program) we are interviewing a Last Mile member for an operations position at our company, ePantry, later today.
http://xkcd.com/927/

I fully expect to get down voted here, but I really hope the damage is minimal. Please be gentle since inside my link is a valid point pertinent to this post, which summarizes my thoughts concisely. :-)
People who want the accounting nitty-gritty should consult the most recent GAO report ont he program: http://www.gao.gov/assets/670/662944.pdf

It's worth remembering a few things in relation to this. One, while this profit is only nominal, interest income will continue and will thus generate a real net profit soon enough, like sometime next year. Total net income to the treasury is anticipated to be about $5bn, assuming no more defaults. Two, Congress originally expected to write off as much as $10 billion at the time it set up the program. The actual default rate has been only about 2.25%, which is very good. Three, the program is often mischaracterized as a giveaway to wind and solar manufacturers, it's also the backstop for a $6.5 bn investment in two new nuclear plants in Georgia that are currently under construction, the first additions to the US nuclear fleet in 30 years.

Bloomberg had a good analysis of the program's history last year, with many interesting facts (eg the administrative costs of the Loan Program Office are covered up front by applicant fees): http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-10/one-of-world-s-bigg...
20mps? Really? A couple of years ago was high speed. If you want that every development in infrastructure is available to everybody in a couple of years you are not really a minarchist.

A level playingfield? That does not even mean anything.
They weren't, originally. They were shortly thereafter.
Focus groups are about getting feedback on a draft of a product. They're completely different from what I'm talking about, where you're getting feedback on your thoughts on what problems exist.
IAB Statement on Internet Confidentiality
Software Created That Self-Repairs to Thwart Cyber Attacks
That says nothing about the importance of the code. The arrest was illegal because the FBI didn't follow proper procedures (getting warrants, etc), not because of his innocence or lack of thereof, which wasn't decided upon.
> Citizens expect government websites to be secure, trustworthy, and reliable.

Yes, just like those involved with government. Ha!
Indeed it's the "read-only" customers that are the valuable ones. Advertisers don't want to reach people composing 140 character witticisms or bots spitting out links, they want to reach people who are searching for commentary on #subject, have an interest in @celebrity or @publication or are sufficiently bored/distracted to be spending time poring through semi-curated lists of links, observations and slogans that are probably lower in quality than decent branding collateral anyway.

When it comes to following, the issue which has always kept me away from Twitter is that entities and subject-oriented feeds I'd theoretically be interested in following still seem to spit out vastly more noise than signals, and enforced extreme brevity and URL shorteners don't exactly increase the efficiency of parsing the crap
I was just about to post that - but here's the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_(SSN-23)
Since it apparently doesn't affect sexual performance much, would it?

Also it might be the case that the infection vector is something relatively new to us, something not present in the ancestral environment, like the tap water idea of ChuckMcM - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8608780.
Hi - we've actually talked about a number of implementation ideas for this, and probably should add a github issue for this.
Well, the reason I posted this today is because I posted a link to house.gov where you could look up the personal finances/investments of each Congressional representative. I also posted the link to the Senate version. They must be highly interesting to hackers because both links immediately got lots of upvotes -- about 30 for the HoR version and about 10 for the Senate version, within the first hour.

My link was titled "House of Representatives Personal Finances" because I thought it was more descriptive than "Financial Disclosure Reports Database" which says neither whose info is being disclosed or what type of financial info it is. I carefully considered and tried to choose a title that was more descriptive but NOT clickbait.

After getting over 30 upvotes and reaching spot #5 on the frontpage, one of the moderators changed the title to be the on-page title. I dunno if my post was also hit with some kind of voting-ring penalty or changed-title penalty or something else, but almost immediately it dropped to spot #31 (on page 2). Right next to a post that had the same number of upvotes but was 8 hours old instead of 1 hour old.

So maybe it didn't bomb because of the worse (original) title, maybe there was some kind of penalty going on as well that could explain it. But after the title changed and it immediately went from spot #5 to spot #31, it then in the last couple of hours has received only 1 additional comment and no additional upvotes, and now I can't even find the post without going to my profile page and looking at my history.

That's the example that happened this morning that was the proximate cause of this Ask HN post, but it has been on my mind for some time as I have seen it happen to other good posts too, where the title had been changed by the submitter to something more descriptive, then eventually a mod sees it and changes it to the author's title and suddenly there's a lack of interest in it and it rapidly gets pulled into the undercurrent.

EDIT: Forgot to include the actual link, it's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8607463

Wish I had other examples to show you, but although I've seen this happen several times in the last couple of months, it's not a daily thing and I never thought to record the links. But then I'm not on HN all day so the frequency I'm sure is higher than my own personal witnessing of it
Rosetta mission team makes final plans to save Philae lander
Indeed, but if only the outer pipework or the isolation has been damaged, then a pure fiber-optic measurement will not detect the compromise.
When the Oxford Nanopore MinION comes out of the early access trials, you will actually be able to do this for a cost of somewhere around $1000.
Why Warren Buffett Just Bought Duracell
To clarify. Because of this lawsuit, Apple moved facetime away from being peer-to-peer to now being routed through Apple's servers. Since they have to use the centralized model, opening up the protocol for others to use would also require using Apple's servers to play nicely. So Apple would be footing the bill.
What Do the Glyphs at Chipotle Mean? They’re Mayan–Sort Of
Oh come on! How is this sigma counting relevant? What would you prefer, a drug that improved the condition of 1% tested patients (p = 10^{-6}) or a drug that improved the condition of 95% tested patients (p = 0.05)?

Take any drug, test in on millions of patients, here is your six sigma. What problem did you solve?
generator = async

yield = await

Also, async/await themselves have a proposal accepted into ES7: https://github.com/lukehoban/ecmascript-asyncawait
What kind of off-brand password manager doesn't let you transfer your password database to a new device? You should only ever need to remember/type in the master password.
Do the Most Hipster Thing Possible – Move to Des Moines
THANK YOU for publishing your configs! I only host a little unimportant blog site, but I want to do my part to be current. As someone keenly interested in this stuff but lacking the time to research it myself, a well-commented Nginx config is enormously helpful.
Do you mean that you store the password to your password manager in another password manager?
Maybe you are referring to aquifers other than the Ogallala in terms of poisoning? Since Pickens seemed to have been trying to sell Ogallala water, it'd be strange time to unleash it.

http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-06-11/there-will-be...
It looks like the library dynamically fits the chart inside the dimensions you provide when instantiating it. So you probably could (on zoom) instantiate a separate graph based on same data inside different height / width constraints.
Actually everyone involved in this transaction is very happy with the outcome. The buyer is happy to get the domain that they want, and the seller is happy to make money.
Personal Data Security Breach at Staffordshire University
The Japanese regularly eat algae. Are they less intelligent?
C++11 and C++14 definitely looks very nice. Kind of makes me want to go back and code some C++.
And what I said stands. The rules are well-defined and easy to follow. The guy knew he was doing something wrong. In general when committing a white-collar crime, better consider where you're doing it. Building a git repo and sneaking it out of the company could lead to a lot of pain.

But hey, if you're an honest person, maybe you'll be a good fit.

By the way, I'm not arguing for/against what happened to him once he crossed the line. I'm merely pointing out that he did knowingly cross a legal line, which as we know can get quite messy.
Go Hack Reactor!!
Can you share your presentation in HN ? I would very interested in the talk.
FreeBSD 10.1 released
There's a big difference between "provided a degraded experience in non-Chrome browsers" and "actively blocking non-Chrome browsers by means more invasive than UA checking"

Remember, there isn't any kind of really legitimate API for 100% determining which browser you're running in. There's a lot of ad-hoc methods which usually work.

These folks spent extra effort to block it from even TRYING to run in FireFox.

How are the FireFox devs supposed to see the bad performance that they need to fix for Inbox to work right if they can't run it at all?
What exactly do you mean?

Are you talking about undercutting Amazon's price? The prices are that hight because of taxes, nobody can undercut them on Brazil.
Oh, in Perl 6 there are, grammars[1].

[1]: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Perl_6_Programming/Grammars
"No reason to dumb more capable platforms down to the lowest common denominator."
In place update is useful in the success case - agreed.

In the failure case however, even with a fleet of only 20 instances, a rolling update that has issues after the 10th instance puts you in a world of pain.
Hi - one of the authors here. We've had the pie chart request before. We will probably never implement pie charts. I agree that there are cognitive issues with them, and given that at least for our immediate needs there are better alternatives.
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=fdms.gov

Has TLS 1.2 intolerance.
Show HN: Licenser – quickly add an open source license to your project
Can you not have end to end encryption of the frames that go over the wire? I guess it's immensely expensive when you're transmitting at 100Gb/s.
Cha La Head Cha La!~~~~

KA ME HA ME HA!!!!
Craft an Effective SEM Landing Page
Please explain for the masses!
Ravti (YC S14) is hiring our first developers
We are looking for a senior and a junior developer to join us in modernizing commercial HVAC management. We provide commercial property managers with a platform that facilitates all of their HVAC needs: including a marketplace between them and their HVAC service providers. We have enterprise customers and actually charge them!

No industry specific knowledge is necessary but you should be interested in solving real world problems.

The technologies we use include: Ruby, Rails, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, iOS, Obj-C

For the junior position, you should know your way around a rails app. You will be provided as much help and mentorship as needed, but you should possess a go-getter attitude as well.

Candidates for the senior position should have experience building and maintaining non-trivial applications and be well versed in rails best practices. Having a working knowledge of concepts from books like PoEAA and DDD is a huge plus.

Most importantly, we want you to bring your ideas! Your opinions and decisions will be monumental in shaping the company moving forward.

We're based in SF and, at least for now, will only consider candidates who are living nearby or are willing to move.

To apply, email ginter@ravti.com and include anything you think is relevant: github handle, blog, personal website, resume, etc.
I'm a tiny bit disappointed with the inclusion of exception filters, but I suppose it is pragmatic feature.

I'm fond of a pattern where error codes can be implicitly converted to Exceptions[1].

It's often argued that exceptions are for things that your program cannot handle and error codes are for things that it can. But, in my experience, whether or not a bad condition is an error or an exception depends upon the layer in which the code lives.

Also, a side benefit of this scheme is that most of the exceptions show up in the class browser, or can be explored through reflection.

[1]https://gist.github.com/noblethrasher/ba37ed6176ebeb679dd2 -- In my example, the error code is an integer, but it could be another class that holds more information about the operation.
The ars technica article I link here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8607062

discusses police departments purchasing equipment that will work with phones that can't be forced to 2G (partly in anticipation of carriers switching 2G off).
Really? Lookin' at it right now. Got a screenshot?
First off: Unlike a bank or lending institution, the government can easily make up profits elsewhere. It's probably more like a grocery store-lose money on one thing to get people in the door, make that money back somewhere else. Sure, there are people that will come in, buy the one thing on sale, and leave (solyndra), but you care about the average, not the outlier.

So, the economic impact that may have increased tax revenue for the government and overall strengthened the economy in addition to loan and interest receipts. While that's hard to calculate, at least one small point may be representative: Tesla replaced Oracle the NASDAQ 100 in 2013, making up almost .7% of the gains the NASDAQ 100 has had in the last 18 months. Would that have been possible without a DOE loan? Maybe, maybe not. Still, it's clear people are and will be profiting (both short and long term) off of Tesla's rise, paying in money to the government when that happens.

But really, does it matter? We are talking about a government program that was successful within a margin of error.

The goal of the programs wasn't to turn a profit, and although it wouldn't be politically expedient to say, I'm sure they assumed a high likelihood of loss on the loan program. The goal however, was to spur growth in clean energy industries without assuming too much financial risk by the government (i.e. by just giving away hand-outs).

The mere fact that the loans have been paid back does signify that those goals were likely met, as failing companies don't have much incentive to pay back loans, and successful companies (arguably) pay taxes

The reality that the news loves a whipping boy and incompetence in government and institutions. Solyndra was a gift in that regard. It's also evident that it was also a statistical outlier, but anecdotes will always reign supreme over statistics when it comes to the news.
Can someone recommend a good web hosting site
SO my friend got asked to find a good free web hosting site, he normally find good hoster, he found a good one for www.sosteam.be/chauffage/# and workinchina.biz/, but the owners of this new site he got dont like anything he showed them so any recomendations ?
It's a proof of concept that cross platform toolkits that include browser engines can be used to write cross platform browsers in an arbitrarily small amount of code.

It sorta like the qt browser I wrote in ~100 lines to debug a QWebView issue, but much more pleased with itself.
That is true, but we can't translate 10% longer time taken on performing some task into 10% less effective IQ.
Startups Can Now Buy Insurance to Protect Themselves Against Patent Trolls
I'd really appreciate any feedback!
ever meet anyone who uses Rackspace Cloud? http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/
Pricing Teardown for a Software Consultancy
That drop in rank had nothing to do with the title. A moderator penalized the post, and a bunch of users flagged it, presumably because they thought it was off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8608939
It's worth noting that Corning is a successful American manufacturer!
Well it depends how you do it. There's certainly some mileage in doing it like that properly:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lukeh/archive/2007/10/01/taking-linq...
Window Washing Skills Beyond a Robot’s Reach
I'm starting to think Oculus is becoming a gimmick. It needs success in order to be successful. That's tautology to an extent, but it's really that simple: If it hasn't had any success, it's not successful, and success is nowhere on the horizon.

It's a cool experience, to be sure. And maybe someday it will be mainstream enough where everyone has an Oculus. But that day seems very far in the future.