skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Had similar issues with oDesk, which is now as I know is owned by the same company as freelancer.com. Though it has time tracking and I always tried to bid only on projects with hourly rates, I got stuck with non paying client which dissapeared from the face of the earth, and even when submitting that project is canceled from my side because of no show they are not closing the project. Not to mention I was not paid at all.
After this incident I decided to move away from oDesk and similar platforms. As the hourly rates are low, and getting repeating clients with whom you already have relationship to work outside oDesk is easy.

Also there is an issue with 3rd world developers who are making impression that freelancers should be paid dime on a buck.

From client side there are different horror stories when clients are scammed into accepting low-rate bidder, and get burned heavily, and then either turn back from these platforms, or turn to accepting only bids from local country.
Global reach, or global vulnerability? It's hard to call it "Kim Jong Un"'s reach when there unaffiliated hacker groups that could have done the exact same thing... it's everybody's "reach". Evidence for this fact is that when real experts try to figure out whose fault this is, they are completely unable to leap to the conclusion that this has to have been the work of a nation state. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8783170 , and contrast with Stuxnut, which was widely acknowledged to be nation-state-level work, demonstrating that there is a level of skill that meets the bar in question.
You don't seem to understand this problem space.
Well, a platform like freelancer is designed intentionally such that you can't, or at least shouldn't, build contact with clients off the platform. Otherwise you and your clients have no use for freelancer.
What People Buy Where
Official North Korean News Agency
Many people around the world believe 9/11 was an inside job, and even that Al-Quaeda, as an organization, was essentially manufactured through the CIA through its control of the American media, as a false-flag pretense for war. Presumably, the Sony hack is the beginning of another such false-flag pretense. North Korea is part of the "Axis of Evil," which is essentially nothing more than the US' own kill list for sovereign nations it doesn't like. One must assume that some sort of war with Iran and North Korea are inevitable, so long as the US has the power to do so.

It's only a non-sequitur if you don't believe the CIA has orchestrated, either directly or indirectly, most major political events around the world in the last 20 years, and nearly every, if not every, war since Desert Storm. Otherwise, the connections are obvious, especially after Snowden.
Ask a nerd
Makefile Tutorial by Example
The Next Phase in Financial Services: What Low-income Americans Tell Us
How to Use Social Proof to Influence Visitors and Increase Your Sales
Interesting opinion. What are the applications?
Spacetime curvature placemats
I think denials of state actor hacking is bewildering. Its seem more credulous that a previously unknown hacker group (the GOP? Really?) suddenly take down Sony in such an elaborate fashion, especially when a movie literally protraying the murder of NKorea's leader is about to be released (In June N Korea vowed to "mercilessly destroy" anyone involved with The Interview.) Groups like the Lizard Squad who perform Sony attacks tend to have a history and reputation. This group has no history. That itself should be a huge mark against those who go against the FBI's claim.

Not to mention we have a massive history of NK and Chinese cyberwars against the west. Often both countries working hand in hand, with the NK hacker team reported to be headquartered in a hotel in a Chinese city under the auspices of the Chinese government. Shenzhen I believe.

I think a lot of this "debate" is centered on how people feel about the USG and specifically its foreign policy. I think a lot of black-hat and grey-hats tend to idealize autocratic regimes like Russia, China, N Korea, Syria, Iran, etc because they are "counters" to US foreign policy, so they often will take an anti-US spin on things. This isn't technology or informed commentary. Its just the same lazy outrage politics that has taken over any other type of discourse on the internet. From a rational perspective, this attack obviously points to the NK regime. Its fits their MO, their history, and, if we take the FBI's claims as true, their technology and capabilities.

The same way many anti-US/anti-Western commentators were telling us that those weren't Putin's troops in Crimea or in Eastern Ukraine. They kept saying "more proof" when it was obvious no amount of proof would convince them. They just had an anti-US bone to pick and liked the attention of being contrarian.

I also think its emotionally comforting to pretend there isn't a massive multi-party cyberwar going on, all the time. I think people want to believe its just some bad apples, not nation states and their leadership ordering attacks left and right, with impunity. Its a little scary to think what is possible from a determined attacker and how little of our industry and practices are focused on security.
I found this site around 10 years ago. Still going strong.

One reason I don't think the Sony hack is by North Korea is that whenever they oppose something, they usually talk about it loudly, and clumsily, through official channels such as this.

I may have missed it, but I've seen no reference to any official statements recently on the subject. Perhaps their M.O. has changed of course.
Freelancer is awful. In fact all of those sites are. I made my living off Freelancer for a few years and I can't count the number of times they severely screwed me. I move to Elance which, although much better, has it's own issues. I try to find long-term clients on those sites and move the business away from them as quick as possible and that seems to work well.
This website uses a 2048-bit key. 512-bit RSA keys are considered generally insecure and easy to crack. 2048 is the industry standard. Your point is probably still valid, but we don't know how high we can go.
I don't think that this part is really an issue: if the compiler by default adds the checks and only remove the checks very conservatively..
At https://sprint.ly we use Buffer to manage outgoing posts. It's worked really well; especially now that they have the new scheduler: http://cl.ly/image/1I2g153e3c31.

We publish fairly regularly on our blog, so anytime we post something new, we schedule it in Buffer at the same time (using this schedule: http://cl.ly/image/3J1V3Q25242I)
7 strange questions that help you find your life purpose
Propaganda and fearmongering.
Tesco and Big Data Analytics, a Recipe for Success?
Consequently, what is “major” about this is the gap in your understanding.
Oh, really? Tell that to Microsoft. /s
I agree totally. I love the ability to write blog posts with interactive animated content. We take for granted that the web platform can do all this, but it's rare to find content that takes advantage of it. Mike Bostock and Amit Patel's sites are notable counter-examples.

I'd like to do more posts like this, but I can see why they aren't common. This one took me forever to finish. Easily eight times as much effort as a regular text + code samples blog post.

I think I'd get faster as I did more in this style, but it's really hard to for me to stay energized on a single concept long enough to finish posts like this.
Course Review: Dark Side Ops – Custom Penetration Testing
First let's see some actual substantial proof that we can be verify before drawing conclusions. The US doesn't exactly have a good reputation when it comes to having "proof".

Stupid fear mongering sensationalistic news.
Does everyone contribute links to buffer, and blog posts? Is it managed by the company at all, or do they trust you to just post?
It's meaningless for a reason.
https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/asic-faq.pdf
Playlist synthesizing interface for the connected generation
Line CEO steps down amid pivot from messaging to lifestyle
When you starting to work on project getting e-mail is just matter of receiving/sending deliverables for the first time. If the client is good usually he/she proposes to move away. As when people find devs/designers etc. which they can trust, usually they stop looking around for new ones. Except you are getting on board with some shady company which makes cheap websites for small businesses
Why tech valuations are bullshit
Yes, I appreciate it's not constructive. To be honest, they've been fine for me for a long time, it's only recently when I've been scammed and now have to deal with their support team I've realised how much they're not "for the buyer" or "for the seller", they're very much just for themselves. I've had awful customer service from ISP's, mobile phone networks, online retailers and many more - but all of those combined wouldn't add up to equate how terrible the service I've had from PayPal. You know a company is shady when there are dedicated hate websites setup to warn people against using it.

I'll be moving to Google Wallet + Stripe in all of my personal expenses and personal projects where possible.
What does bigint mean here - arbitrary large integers or are there some limits?
The readme should provide some more details.

Also please don't set std namespace globally in the header.

[link redacted]

Anyway a lightweight library with a simple interface is very welcome.
Judging by the source code, the domain has been turned over to the operators of isohunt.to.
I also use Buffer. I add my posts and I can have them go to any of my social services I choose at a later time.

Simple to use and worth a try. :)
The arrival of hand tracking will help make VR headsets a lot more interesting. Leap Motion has a VR attachment: https://www.leapmotion.com/product/vr

Here's a sensor based product: http://controlvr.com

Finally, the Nimble VR Kickstarter project got acquired by Oculus even before funding was finished:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nimblevr/nimble-sense-b...
There was a 51% attack against a gambling site before http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/06/bitcoin-security-gua...
It's not about finding a large prime, it's finding prime densities, gaps, sequences, etc
I think it is only accessible in US.
Doesn't work in India.
For one, do-notation doesn't fit very well with C-like control flow operators (break/continue/return), which Rust has.
Inside the aggressive studio effort to bring Google to heel
Shake It Off Around Europe
> Had similar issues with oDesk, which is now as I know is owned by the same company as freelancer.com

Are you sure? Elance and ODesk "merged", but I thought they were still competitors with Freelancer.
This is the scariest thing about BitCoin, this efficiency bubble. What happens when the world's miners decide that a different crypto-coinage is more profitable?

I don't believe that the difficulty parameter in BitCoin adjusts very fast (every 2016 blocks or ~14 days) and you could have transaction speed disruptions. If a block doesn't solve in 10 minutes but instead an hour, you'll have a lot of very unhappy people waiting for transactions to seal and they'll abandon the network after selling off their assets. That's just the time aspect, you mention the transaction fee aspect, and that will drive people away as well if they start to creep near what legacy financial systems charge. The declining block reward in BitCoin guarantees that transaction fees will increase because of the limited capacity of the consensus network's data-storage/transaction block.
The US shouldn't attempt to convince their citizens of anything before attacking another country?

I mean, Obama has straight up said that he plans to attack NK. At least to me that seems a very reasonable interpretation of the fuzzy political language of: "we'll have a response at a time, place and method of our choosing".

I don't dispute that NK comes off loopy. Or that a joint investigation seems unlikely. That doesn't automatically follow that the FBI report is faultless though.
GWT and MOZ are both tools that marketers should be using.
LokiJS v1.1 “Jul” released on the astronomical winter solstice
I try to stay away from sites like that in the first place, because I see wasting a lot of time building a reputation before getting actual work. It just never made sense to me.

The sites like Freelancer and oDesk are saturated with highly competitive, cheap developers from Asia anyway. It's annoying. Nothing against Asians, but I wouldn't try to dive into a pool of them to get work. It's unrealistic in most cases, because they eat up opportunity like machines -- in large numbers.

Better off just cold calling.
ODesk is the least bad of the general sites. There are a few niche networks that are decent also, e.g. TopTal.com.
I don't think they're "debunking" anything as much as asking certain questions that lots of people have.

I think it's worth having that discussion. Nobody is proposing any conspiracies - just due diligence.
Just curious: has there been anything on patterns in primes? There are so many constraints that I even wonder how there could not be patterns in the distribution.
I wonder if they control the domain, or have just agreed to host content for PB while their servers are down?

Making a few dollars off it as well with the adcash link. Probably getting a lot of hits from curious individuals seeing if it's up.
> In the long-term, VR will be big. In the short-term, augmented reality will be the way to go imo

augmented reality is a much harder problem to get right than vr (hmd vr that is)
I'm not saying a language must die because its old. Modern C++ is not bad - but you have to restrict your development into the "good" subset, and avoid the bad stuff from before. IE, use references and smart pointers rather than news and deletes.

With C, there is no alternative. It is still malloc and free, still buffer overflows and integer overflows galore, and the C language standards group is not moving to make the kinds of radical changes to modernize it the C++ one is.
Discovering that AB tests are pretty awesome
The Best and Worst in a Tumultuous Year for Science
I try and spend 20-30 minutes everyday going through the "new" tab and up-voting the new submissions I find interesting (think of it like volunteer work). Somehow I tend to up vote Ask HNs more often than posts that are links to website.
I have the opposite problem here: When I write Ruby now, I go "my God, look at all these allocations!"
Have you seen Brogue? It's level design is pretty incredible. I do love Spelunky but I think Brogue, from a design and technical perspective, is better.

One area I've been experimenting in is constraint-based solvers in my generators. It requires keeping track of rooms or regions but allows the algorithm to express ideas like: this room has a health potion but the boss cannot be within 2 rooms of it. You can of course get more creative with your constraints. I'd like to build up the ability to have sophisticated (for some value of sophistication) puzzles built into the dungeons I generate.
too bad they don't have an Android app yet :(
As my PayPal hate comment wasn't too constructive, here's some more constructive feedback from someone who has designed a fair amount of landing pages:

- Change the heading font to something sans-serif, it feels very default, and look at typographic hierarchy, all those fonts are white and make it look a bit of a wall-of-text.

- Safari hasn't looked like that for a long time, get some up-to-date screenshots, your making your product look outdated already.

- Two screenshots one over the other is making the page needlessly long, use a carousel or similar so you have just have one that you can scroll side to side.

- You want people to sign up but the box is buried down the bottom of the page, work out a way to get that raised up.

- The pricing plan structure feels a bit empty, if you're not offering more functionality for more money, try and make the higher end ones more persuasive by doing something like indicating what kind of savings you're getting by choosing a more expensive plan.
Thanks :) Atm we're only on FB & G+, but as soon as we figure out how to create a twitter page for non-people, we will do that. Here are our handles:
https://www.facebook.com/solon.rocks

https://plus.google.com/+SolonRocksYourParty

https://twitter.com/YSchuchmann

https://twitter.com/grexception
That adcash stuff is trying to get me to install fake versions of Java/other software. Be wary
I take the complete opposite approach. It sounds more like a conspiracy theory to take the FBI's word on this without significant evidence. Just like with any other alleged crime, the skeptical view (innocent until proven guilty) is best.
Redditor does some research behind the  Sony Hacking Scandal
Welke voeding is het rijkst aan suiker? – Leef Nu Gezonder
These links are awesome. I've considered an "incremental digger" model like Nuclear Throne's before. I like that they're "realistic" in that they sort of simulate how creatures would have created the dungeon. I haven't played with them enough to see if I can get fun results out of them, but now I find myself wanting to try.

> Keep in mind the basics of a good story: an escalation in tension and difficulty, spaced with breathers for rhythm and flow.

It's out of scope for this article, but my little game tries to do some of that. Once the dungeon is generated, it chooses a random starting place for the player. Then it calculates the distance to that tile for every other tile.

When monsters, treasure, and quest goals are placed, those distances are taken into account. Harder monsters and better stuff are placed (roughly) farther from the player, so it feels like there's a general progression in difficulty and reward as you go farther through the dungeon.

There's definitely a lot more I could there.

Now that I think about it, one simple refinement would be:

1. Place all of the monsters first.

2. Recalculate distances and treat tiles near monsters as being "high distance" based on the monster's strength so that paths that go through monsters become "longer".

3. Now place treasure according to that.

That would give you dungeons where monsters "guard" better treasure, and stronger monsters protect better loot.
Which was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8731040
Have you missed the Lulzsec series of hacks against Sony? Lulz It's not like they hacked Google here. Sony probably had lower security standards than your average start-up company. And their first request was a money reward, not to stop the movie from being published.

Also the US gov and its intelligence agencies have earned their share of distrust here. I would be more worried if HN as a whole would automatically trust the US intelligence agencies after all of their lies from the past two years. The US agencies are like the boy that cried wolf. If they want us to trust them when something actually happened, then they should stop lying all the other times, too.

All actions have consequences, but the US gov has acted way too many times as if they do not. The recent execution of the two cops is also a consequence of the US gov acting lawlessly and saving their murderous cops from prosecution. I have no doubt the person that did it had mental issues, but I don't think he would've gone and executed two cops without the murderous cops being saved from justice by the US government (two times too many).
The haiku effect.
The transaction volume has gone up, but the value of a bitcoin (in USD) has gone down, so the total volume (not in bitcoin but in USD) is about the same.
There are actually already a few startups exploring this space. One of them [1] sent some employees to speak in November at the New York VR Meetup [2]

[1] http://www.floored.com/

[2] http://www.meetup.com/Virtual-Reality-NYC/
One of the first production deployments of Rust is such an application: https://www.skylight.io/

Their Ruby gem is actually written in Rust.
The government has no credibility anymore, conspiracy theories aside. This is the real problem. Even if they are telling the truth, nobody believes them.
I think it comes down to whether the person directing the hiring process knows anything about programming or not. At large, development-heavy companies, the person hiring may actually have been a 100% software developer at some point, before taking on management responsibilities. Then there is a big doughnut hole, where the company is large enough to need developers, but too small to want to promote any of them, and that is a wide wasteland of frustration before you get down to small companies and start-ups whose business is so strongly focused on tech that they can afford to have a full time developer, but not so much that they can afford a bad one. Those tend to be split between companies that hire for competence and those that want to hire someone that they can use up fast and burn out. If the latter have fewer numbers, they need to hire more people, so their influence in the hiring market is larger.

The mix is very heavily influenced by geographical locale. Around me, the market is mostly the large-but-not-huge companies that hire a lot of software developers but never promote them. So there's my bias. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, et al. do not have a presence here, so they cannot improve the behavior of other companies with their competitive pressure.
Finding ROI in Higher Education
The reason to not buy the claim is that tracking down hackers is an extremely difficult task.

North Korea is a "best bet" to report, much like the previous "Google Hacks" were probably China. But in the world of hacking, you never really know.
Putting some thought into culture helps you avoid problems down the line. First startup I worked for was fun. It was a frat house basically. Looking back, I cringe when I think about how shitty it must have been for the few women who decided to work with us. It's embarrassing actually.

It's not a "perfect environment for meritocracy" and the playing field isn't level man. The sooner we get over ourselves and that idea, the better.
I always forget to upvote articles (sorry).

I upvote comments that speaks the truth and not the politically correct thing to please the HN crowd.

I sometimes upvote comments that have merit but I know will be massively downvoted (any criticism of PHP falls in this category ;-)
> I didn't find the rust guide helpful at all.

Is this today, or months ago? Note that a few months ago I _completely re-wrote_ what was then the Tutorial, and it's now the Guide.

If you have any specifics on the current version, I'd appreciate some GitHub issues :)
oDesk and Elance are owned by the same company, but different from Freelancer.
Yes, I am. I have worked on pulseaudio and gstreamer in the past (because of fundamentally broken parts I had to patch and merge upstream to get it to work) and GObject or just no type system at all is a nightmare in a huge project. I'm also contributing to frameworks 5 from KDE, and those libraries are a hell of a lot saner and they are still using Qt functions over std ones that have arisen in the last three years with better syntax, but it sure as hell beats having to spend days manually tracing all your allocations and having to write out every version of a function by hand because you can't template anything.

> separate compiler

Go has its own compiler and runtime, yeah. Rust compiles to strict native and uses LLVM. C++ uses the same compilers as C (GCC, etc). In any case, both Rust and C++ can be distributed as final binaries with no runtime dependencies besides potentially dynamically linked Rust std libs (libgreen, etc) and a C++ stdlib. Feel free to bundle those, in the same way you would have to bundle or trust the end users libc implementation.
The FBI having "proof" that they can't disclose is just as good as nothing, you can pretty much do any claim as long as you can just say that you can't disclose all information.

Please, this is the same people who said Iraq had nuclear guns, a much more serious claim.