skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can relate too, though my situation was also not that bad. Too poor to buy a computer, learned programming (BASIC mostly for the C64) from library books, and electronics from library books, and general details about PC hardware from magazines. This all without having a computer. Then I managed to repair and salvage enough old PC parts to piece together my first 8086 PC, eventually upgraded to a 286. We were long distance calls away from any city so dial up connections were impossibly expensive, so I learned to hack my way around some online services and phone phreaking to get myself onto the internet in 1993. I then got hooked on Unix and the internet and it became my ticket out of our in the middle of nowhere town all the way to living in the developed world.
Suggesting Windows 2000 gave him "no idea what modern operating systems were like" was pretty jarring too.... far from being "obsolete" it was only four years old at the time and from the perspective of the average user not stuck on a 486 lacked only a bit of UI gloss compared with the state-of-the-art XP. If nothing else, you'd expect he might be impressed at the progress the internet had made since 1999
Today I still have a working Pentium 1 with hard disks in full operating order.

As for the 486, I brought it down to my dads when I moved, and switched to using his much more modern system. It did eventually "die" in 2007-2008. My dad threw it out after the clock chip failed on the motherboard. I was pretty bummed because it sounds like a fairly straightforward fix / such a minor issue, but he's as sentimental as I and referred to it as "an old clunker".
Exactly what happened to me in 2006 when I left the country. I wanted to catch up on everything; I had Deus Ex, the Quake series, DOOM etc to get through.

Now if I try and code something, there are too many distractions, yet when you're sitting in a silent basement, your ideas tend to fill your head pretty quick (+ many a hot dull afternoon at school).
Same is true for talent. There's no shortage for talent. There's a shortage for talented people willing to work for "the price we're offering".
I've been programing games since I was 10 years old and games are the only reason I went into Computer Science. I started off at a smaller studio out of college and accepted a salary about 15% less than my friends who went into Aerospace and Finance. I didn't care, because games is where I wanted to be and I loved every moment. I found games interesting, intellectually challenging and ultimately very rewarding. I moved from UI to game play to AI, did some Audio programming, dabbled in graphics, helped with design, etc. There was always something new to learn and do. Fast forward and many of my non-game industry friends were bored with their jobs, not learning new skills and maintaining legacy code. Some friends left the game industry to find greener pastures and more money in other fields and eventually came back due to the lack of creativity and monotony many non-game jobs entail. This is obviously subjective and perhaps the kind of person that is not attracted to making games would find those other jobs rewarding and that is not to say that all game jobs are dynamic and wonderful.

Regarding long work hours and terrible pay, not all employers are created equal. I eventually worked for a couple of different AAA companies before going indie and I had a very good salary and benefits at both companies surrounding by extremely talented developers. I have a few friends who I would say have extraordinary salaries and perks, however, they are very good at what they do. I have worked the crazy crunch times sure, but I think that is becoming less common especially after the EA Spouse debacle and the industry matures. It does still exist at some companies, however, there are many other jobs and industries out there that are just as demanding. I eventually went the indie route mainly just to see if I had the chops to run a small company and be the captain of my own ship. It was a question I wanted to answer for my own personal growth.

Working at a game company just so you can have a "job" is probably not a good idea. Just like I wouldn't recommend starting or joining a startup unless your heart is really into it and you love what you are doing because, yeah, there are going to be some long hours sometimes and there is a good chance you could be making more money elsewhere. If you like games, want to make games and are passionate about it, there are good companies out there that will pay and treat you well. Seek them out.
StartSSL will use whatever certificate digest algorithm you used in your certificate signing request. Most openssl.cnf files distributed with Linux OSes set the default algorithm to SHA-1 - that's nothing to do with Startcom.

Simply specify an explicit algorithm if you want to get a certificate using that. For example, if you do:

$ openssl req -new -sha256 -newkey rsa:4096 -keyout foo.key -nodes

and give them that CSR, you will get back a SHA-256 certificate.

EDIT: They also have a SHA-256 root (in most browsers, though you don't need a second-preimage-resistant digest algorithm for a /root certificate/) and SHA-256 intermediates at https://startssl.com/certs/ - go to the relevant class directory and there is a sha2 directory inside that.
I explained the situation to a lawyer I knew years later and they stated that there were options and the union probably just couldn't be bothered to get involved.

>If you murdered a customer

Oh yeah, that was totally it eyeroll.
So, what is preventing you from doing just that?
Life is short. Computer projects are big. Do the math.

I know this may sound harsh and stupid, but just reminding you to follow the path of love, and not stick to any dayjob.

Left my dayjob in 2012 december. Been following my heart since then, a difficult path, but so rewarding, I couldn't even dream about what has happened since then before when I was still in the mindset that I have to have a steady job.

It's not like that. Once you decide to go forwards, the Universe and the World around you starts to adapt to that projection. Encouraging everyone here to follow your hearts and not accept what is considered normal as your destiny.
Very well said. Even if we achieve a full-fledged AGI, it would be a mistake to anthropomorphize it and assign it human-like intentions, desires and behavior - unless somebody explicitly programmed it that way. The idea of an "evil" AI seems downright silly to me.

That's not to say that an AI could never be dangerous in some scenario, but the "demon" comparisons and other recent hyperbole are, IMO, a bit misplaced.
A lot of your post is you just saying things you think with no evidence, what your "gut" tells you, etc. Not going to respond to those, because they are not very interesting. Let me share one of my personal opinions with no basis in fact: cake is superior to pie, there I said it!

> But what if Brown wasn't attacking the officer but defending himself?

We actually got into a bit of a debate at dinner discussing if you have the right to defend yourself against an unjust arrest -- short version: "nope". In 1900 there was a case that went that way, but since then it was been reversed... and even more specifically overruled in various state ordinances. Even if you did have the right to physical resist (again, you don't, so don't resist arrest) an "unjust arrest" ... you aren't informed of the reason you are being arrested at the time of arrest, you don't have enough information to even claim it is unjust.

> If Michael Brown is struggling to get free after being unnecessarily assaulted by Wilson and then sees Wilson draw his gun then of course he is going to strike the officer trying to flee.

This is put forth as factual "of course". But, it isn't the common case -- most people when assaulted (justified or not) by a police officer surrender, and if it escalates to having a gun drawn... they... you guessed it, surrender. The vast majority of police officers make it to retirement without firing their weapon while on duty.

> First, I'm sure most people believe that if a police officer tells you to do something you do it. That might be really good advice, especially if you have brown skin, but I think it's not reasonable to blindly obey over-aggressive and unfounded requests just because the person has a badge.

You can think what you want, but you have NO RIGHT to EVER resist arrest, that is the simple fact, there is no law on your side, and it will end horribly for you. You submit, you get arrested, you offer NO resistance and then you take action AFTER the fact (sue, try to get them fired, take it to the press, whatever).
Lifehack of using Google Translate
Ah the memories of the TI range of calculators.

We had the TI-85 in our year. I wrote a chat program which used the link cable. With an "enhanced and extended" link cable, it was possible to chat with a classmate sitting several meters away. Teachers knew nothing, as it was a calculator and just a calculator for them.

1998 - chat on a handheld device without data or SMS costs :)
Visually conflating buttons and an input field (search) in the new header concept is a horrible design solution. I really feel like unbounded inputs (giving the user no visual clues of the boundaries of the input until they click into it) is an anti-pattern that I hope will die out soon.

I'm not suggesting I love soundcloud's UI in any way ideal, but neither is this in many other ways.
I know it had 640k extended memory via the startup memory check.

I don't know how much processing power nor memory it had. I had never owned a computer, and my dad left it behind for me after the divorce so I had something to use. I had no idea what was inside.

I'd agree that this would be a very relevant factor if I had programmed a "true" operating system (since most true programmers would probably be knowledgeable with the amount of memory usage going on etc), but to take things a bit more indepth, I suppose I haved't actually coded an operating system, but rather a dos Shell of sorts that is a facsimile of an 80s-style operating system. It merely uses the same commands as dos and interprets them into a visually descriptive feature on the screen (such as a split-screen with directory and file listings for example), as well as a few commands of my own that I added in. My terminology is not fantastic, but I suppose indicative of what I considered to be an OS. A Graphical shell might have been a more accurate term.

I remember the specs of all the systems I've had since then, but with the 486, I didn't spec it out myself, and was merely a kid with a computer at that point.
Yep, it's more or less a shell. I probably should've clarified it a bit better in the imgur description. It's basically a dos shell representitive of my rendition of a "late 1980s OS".
>Obama probably would not be part of the group

Obama is the president of the country blatantly, in the open, violating Geneva Conventions - Gitmo, drone strikes. Not that anybody, who matters, cares though.
I've been screaming the "Let's migrate!" mantra for years. If we want rational politics in this country, we have to stack the polls with rational votes. As it stands, our voice is largely--in some instances, mostly--drowned out by single party voters. A pragmatic solution would be for the people who recognize the problem to migrate to the same city or county and work our way up the political ladder. I'm down; where are we moving to?
7 Exciting Financial Apps Disrupting the Industry
Is 'choosing a surgeon' an American thing or a private health care thing? Personally I've I'm ill enough to be in hospital I get admitted, they assign me a consultant and if necessary he assigns me a surgeon. No choosing involved.
Interestingly real ATC radio comms has a nasty security problem as well: no authentication. As a broadcast medium, anyone can hop on the frequency and pretend to be ATC or a plane. No way to know who is the real one. You can take out your handheld radio right now and pretend to be JFK Tower or SF Approach.
Why Are Psychedelics Illegal?
But the usefulness of game theory is pinned on the accuracy of utility functions.
640KiB !! Probably would have 1 MiB of total RAM and the BIOS shows that it have 640KiB of conventional RAM
YAGNI methods are killing me
Countless hours wasted on playing ZTETRIS with classmates on a TI-86...

It was the time I first learned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect is a thing. :D
Hey we're not tiny. It takes probably about 30 hours to drive from the south to the north. Compare that to any other European country.
Heh. Dreaming Tetris was standard these days...
To me it is really concerning your using the verb "to do" when dealing with "being." Because in the end, it is not what you do what makes you happy or free...
Well, the thing is, western democracies are all for human rights for their own citizens (as long as we're not talking about a right for privacy). It doesn't prevent them from encouraging or committing abuses abroad (the recent torture thing, decolonization wars, the Phoenix program).
Interesting perspective (intelligence services as another form of back channel communication). "Forced transparency".
Only 17.7% of Microsoft employees are younger than 30. Almost half are 40+. Average age: 38.7.

Source: http://news.microsoft.com/facts-about-microsoft/

Don't be scared. Instead, learn to have more compassion on others while you are young. Join a Union. Keep improving. And consider moving into management later or start a small business in your late 30s.
> [...] and then grabbed Brown and pulled him through the window.

How do you do that with a "teen" of that size?
No, he means 64 kB segments, which is what he had to deal with in the menu based file manager he wrote in QBASIC. That much should be clear if you read between the lines (the goto based text adventures etc.).
Is Festival still maintained? Seems like there's other options.

Google sounds nice, but not sure this is really a "life"hack or reliable, as it's going to break when Google changes how this works.
Of course 30 years ago there was "1K Chess" for the Sinclair ZX81 (Timex/Sinclair 1000 for US readers) - which, despite the name, was actually just 672 bytes of code. (The program had to run in a machine with 1K of memory _total_, which obviously included space for the machine's workspace and display file - itself ingeniously optimised to only occupy memory space for parts of the screen that had been printed on.)

https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/1K+ZX+Chess
It sure can be.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cberlingen_mid-air_collisi...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitaly_Kaloyev
Seems like a lot of us have a somewhat similar story. I grew up in the countryside without a tv. When I was between 10 and 13 we convinced our parents to let us buy a used c64. Since we had no tv we had to get a monitor as well which took another few month.

My career possibly started there but I was already infected by a text adventure that a grown up relative had made/adapted. (Or more specifically I was infected by the idea that you could write code and have the computer do stuff for you.)
While memory errors in textures would usually cause only visual artifacts (unless used for data), memory errors in executable code, shader programs, vertex data, and other types of data could easily cause more fatal problems.
Blog post is from 2007! Things have probably changed substantially for both companies since.
> Well, maybe I should publish. I'm not sure how, or what an appropriate context is.

If you don't mind revealing your identity, arxiv.org should be a good choice. It allows online publishing with open access for free without peer-review, and it is used by academic researchers a lot (including myself).

In case you prefer to stay anonymous, you may try to send them an email explaining the reasons for that.
I've seen a 486 machine with a QBasic program to read values from a parallel port, working perfectly on an university (on a Physics lab) in 2000 .

He has been lucky that his 486 don't broke, but sometimes the old hardware is more resilient what you think. The only hard drives that I seen to die, was modern hard drives of >100GiB . However, I have here an Amiga 1200 with a little hard disk of 200MiB that it keeps working fine.
Doesn't it make you appreciate movies in another way though?

Knowing how it's done and how difficult it is, don't you start looking at things such as lightning, cut techniques etc. in a more informed manner?

It's not usually the same movies (or music, or games) that gets popular with the professionals in the industry is popular with regular folks, for this very reason.
I took "be the best" as meaning, be the best in your chosen field. Some people like to see how far they can push themselves because they are competitive. Working at the high end offers opportunities to do that.

Compare with being a designer working at Apple vs being a designer working at Dell.
Yep, I started learning C and ethical hacking, to start with. I do have a decade till I turn 40, but that's not too long honestly.
Sockpuppets confirmed on HN.
Religions can be rely evil and bad. They often are.

You choose whether to follow an evil religion.

You can't choose what colour of skin you are born with or the facial bone structure.
You /can/ change those things later but it is expensive, requires surgery or bad chemicals and is really unpleasant.

Discriminating against religions is a completely different (and much more defensible) matter than discriminating against "race" or ethnicity.
yup that's true. So it's just a meanwhile tip to show how it's possible to use google translate while it work.
Was looking for some alternative when switched to Windows to convert few articles into mp3 and to listen it with my smartphone.
> > But hastening the movement of money creates risk for banks, because it generally means less time to catch fraudulent transactions.

> That's got to be a risk in Europe, too, no? How is it dealt with differently?

This is probably the case of someone trying hard to come up with at least some downsides. Most transactions are relatively mundane, and for an automated transaction between two bank databases, there is, I think, very little that can be done in a day that cannot be done instantly. The part that screens fraudulent transactions is very likely already automated, I can't believe it wouldn't be. It's probably not even the most common/dangerous type of fraud.

European banks have collective agreements about money transfers with each other. I imagine it might be harder to implement these schemes if you are the only bank trying and need to cooperate with other banks. Uncompetitive markets can be strange sometimes.
This really needs a (2007) tag. Virtually everything in there about the structure of Google as company is thoroughly out of date.
You'll find this applies to any creative industry. The conditions will be terrible compared to less creative jobs because the work is fun and everyone wants to do it, creating intense competition.

However, people will find it tough to quit and get a regular job because... the work is fun. It turns out enjoying what you do counts for a lot.
Can't emphasize this enough.

I once got into a conflict with my immediate supervisor which escalated into legal territory. The hows and whys doesn't matter right now, but suffice to say I had every right on my side, but I still couldn't have done it without a lawyer from my union who knew exactly who to contact and what to do.

As you say, unions are a form of insurance system and when they work they are irreplaceable. It's a win-win situation for the company and the employee to get rid of the situations I mentioned above.
See, that's the misconception most people have. What if an API tells you that you have an unspent output worth 0.01 BTC. and you spend it based on this information. If the API lied you could have just spent a 500 BTC output straight to fees with no recourse. If you just know the transaction hash and vout index you have no idea if the value is correct, many wallets reply on faulty information like this with potentially disastrous consequences.
> Make the food in the café free. If an employee eats an average of $15 of food per day (the actual average at Google which is closer to $10) it would cost Microsoft $3,750 per year per employee to offer 3 meals a day. Instead of increasing starting salaries, switch to free food

I'm not sure this is a good idea. I wouldn't want my employer to assume that the extra $3750 (assuming the calculation is correct for now) will go in food. Salary increase sounds much better. But probably thats just me.
Upsource: Repository Browser/Code Review Tool from Jetbrains
for my last company we convinced management that it was the right choice to have lunch provided in the office. We mostly went out to eat a food trucks or popular places in SF where the walk+wait time might be 45-60 minutes then you eat. So the time wasted going out to eat was much more then the cost to bring food into the office.
Do you really think that? Even when something really bad happens? 9-11 type incident or worse.

Only following orders is no justification for war crimes including torture. The world needs to see that America believes that and that it doesn't just apply to Nazi's. America is an example to the world, please be a good one.
I don't understand why the comments on the blog post are so hostile. Lots of people were calling for this person's head, when what they distributed is fairly tame.
Do you mean something like this http://blog.coinspect.co/copay-wallet-emptying-vulnerability
Is it really that different in other parts of the world? Over here a minimum car insurance is mandatory but pretty much everyone pays for increased coverage. You don't want to be on the receiving end of the bills after a chain reaction of traffic accidents.

Regarding unions, it's first and foremost not a question of protection from a determined employer, but protection from specific parts of the company doing illegal and/or wrong things.

As soon as your company has more than 10 employees, it gets a whole lot more complex than "employer" and "employee".
Perhaps they are not using the word "agent" as a CIA job title, but rather in the actual meaning of the word:

An agent is one who acts for, or in the
place of, another, by authority from him;
one entrusted with the business of another.
Totally impressed. Yes, not an os but a shell but still impressive.

Boredoom can easily lead to creativity it seems. And this guy is smart.
Revealing [the] identity of the fake MH17 image author
Yup, that sounds correct.
My philosophy is don't drink at all.
If you are living in a small mining town where everyone else works for the one and only company, then an union makes sense, because it gives everyone a leverage against a monopoly.

High-tech industry is not a monopoly. The only thing unionization would do is to complicate life of capable people who actually work by forcing them to work alongside unmotivated lazy-asses that are employed just because they can't really be fired. I can't pay good people better money and I still have to drag around these useless clowns that religiously observe their mandated 4 coffee breaks and time their arrival and departure with sub-second precision. This is counter-productive. Unionization in high-tech is a seriously bad idea. It's just a way for unqualified personnel to hold on to their jobs instead of developing themselves into someone actually employable on their merit.

If all you are looking for is a legal support in tight spots, then there's an actual regular insurance coverage for that. Just ask your insurance provider.