skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i actually do this kind of thing regularly: consulting big, mighty companies with huge websites (huge from a technical, content and traffic point of view) that are having a hard time or are falling behind.

and yes, it's awesome.
but god damn, it's hard - and at first very unthankful - work.

why? things are the way they are because they got the way they are.

i.e.: you wan't to do something something very sane, let's say you want that a link from the startpage links directly to another page instead of getting dragged over 16 (a real world example) redirects. oh yeah, and you have the full support by the CEO to do whatever is necessary.

now there are two possible scenarios:

a) the person / team who is responsible for the mess is still with the company. he/she will justify - with good, valid arguments - that each of these 16 redirects is necessary. this person has spent 10+ years to work with the company and was doing the best work he/she was able - under the circumstances (which were never easy) - to do. the reasoning of this person is flawless. he/she - the person which "owns" this technical part - will refuse to do it. threatens to leave the company if you do it - oh - and the CEO says that this person is "indispensable".

b) the person / team who was responsible for the mess is no longer with the company. nobody has a clue, nobody knows why it's in there and nobody knows what will happen. if you do it anyway a huge shitstorm will start where everybody is complaining about the "incompetent" consultant.

the easiest option is always not to do anything (also called "lets do something else"), but well - that's the losers way.

so what to do

I) always start with hard cold data (i.e.: perf stats, specs of how many redirect the different browsers follow, ..), because this is the best way to ->

II) get rid of personalities - technical owners are great during product development, are liability and burden during maintenance and restructuring.

III) make sure that everybody understands that things will get worse before they get better

IV) focus on execution (a.k.a. do it anway, no matter what)

V) be aware that - newly introduced - bugs that do not kill the company will not get fixed right away

VI) be aware that there will be major criticism - and a lot of pressure on the CEO

and well, this is only the process for the absolutely sane changes you want to introduce. lets imagine the process for stuff where there would be an actual need for discussion.

it's an awesome job, it's a horrible job, it called consulting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBJMq-isHU4#t=23

update: step LXVIII) take the blame, all of it, but never the praise
> unless you consider invasive personalized ads a benefit.

I do. I'm much happier that my Facebook includes ads for New Relic and MailChimp than condoms and sports.

More generally, I don't understand how algorithms or profiles can be prejudiced. If they're inaccurate, there is a strong economic incentive to improve accuracy over time. If they're accurate, I think that should be defense alone—if your history suggests you are likely to default on a loan, companies should have every right to not loan you money.
When you're referring to days before the civil rights movement, I presume you're hinting at laws which required private businesses to create separate facilities for blacks if they wanted to do business with blacks.
Totally agree. People have lived for millennia on completely different diets due to their geographical location. To say that one diet has the correct amount ignores this fact completely.
Don't believe in any ranking blindly, also

The Corruption Perceptions Index ranks countries and territories based on how corrupt their public sector is perceived to be

It's a PERCEPTIONS rank.

"Very serious problems with crime" compared to what?
If you're looking for an efficient security apparatus, you'll have a hard time topping an assassination market. [0] You combine that with intelligent software agents and crypto currency to create a policy of mutual assured destruction that scales :)

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
I can assure you, corruption is the least of our problems in our country.

As stated by gruturo the real problems are taxes, inadequate laws, infrastructure (for example cable connection is scarce even in the bigger cities) and finally economic issues.

I was born in Italy and I love my country, but I had to move to a different country to be able to work and being payed for my work.
It has yet to be proven healthy.
Body weight "set point"? What's that?
I hadn't thought about how devices can double count uniques. But this is still massive. I thought 50 million world wide was a lot when I saw the headline and got very surprised when I read it was referring to only the US
> You don't chose your co-workers. And now you're forcing me to take my vacation with these people, who I put up with every day at work.

It's not a vacation. Think of it as a company-specific conference. Yes, you can ask people to leave their family behind for a week (or pay for them to join you) if you tell them when offering the job.
Ask HN: Need help to Decipher a Line for school assighment
ZYEMOUSOUSIZWYIXOKSOTZQSOBSYLSWDKHTMOWARMSKSRRSILISFESWBHSTOISQISRRZWSOIRYRMSOUSIODSTLYISWDKHTMOWAWYEWBYXXYWSWDKHTMGYIATOISQISTSWRRMSYRMSIRSVRTGHKKWYRJSTYSOTZOWAXOZJSMOIARYAYJISONHWDRMHTBHQMSIJZMOWATMYEKAWYRJSAHLLHBEKRRYAYMYGSUSIRMHTSVSIBHTSOTNTZYERYGIHRSOQIYDIOXRMORORROBNTBHQMSITOERYXORHBOKKZOWAJISONTRMSXGHRMYEROETSIMOUHWDRYPEXQHWOWAXONSOBMOWDSOTHXQKSJIERSLYIBSOQQIYOBMHTWYRWSBSTTOIHKZRMSWHBSTRGOZRYAYWSRMHTRMSRIHBNRYAYHWDRMHTGHKKJSRYASRSBRGMSWRMSTEJTRHRERHYWHTWYRIHDMROWARYLHWAOJSRRSIYWSETHWDRMSLISFESWBHSTRYDEHASZYEDYYAKEBN

This is the text to decipher please help if anyone can.. or tips how i can solve this
I think the problem is that our civilization is built in the idea of comfort and economic specialization.

I don't think our bodies are prepared to that sort of pattern where you stay inactive for 5 hours, while your brain is still very active, and stop to run non stop for 1 hour.

So we either sit thinking about civilized work, or do short but very intense physical activity to compensate the accumulation of stress. I don't think our far ancestors' metabolism really saw that. So of course people are going to get sick. Nobody on earth has genes suited to work in an office. We're still wired to constantly move, searching for food.

Worst thing, I'm almost sure that this accumulation of stress can slow down productivity. Maybe forcing people to work in 2 or 3 hour sessions, and ask them to go walk for 15min, might have some positive effects. I'd love to try walking on a treadmill writing code. I already tried standing in front of a computer, but my ankles started swelling after 2 hours.
Inside The Silk Road Trial:  U.S. v. Dread Pirate Roberts
Where is the evidence that diet alone can cause autoimmune disease? As far as I am aware, development of autoimmune disease is a complex process involving many factors such as genetics and the effect of infections on the immune system. Certainly there is anecdotal evidence of people improving their symptoms or possibly eliminating them through diet but this is not the case for every patient.
It's simple: because if you live here, you have to pay taxes here. A lot of taxes. And the Italian equivalent of IRS can just come to you and say that you don't pay enough, you're presumed guilty and you'll have to accept to pay a fine or try to prove you're innocent in court (which could take years).
I basically agree with your conclusion, but it sounds like they did not embargo the patent: https://projectbullrun.org/dual-ec/patent.html ("recommended against a secrecy order"). Or am I confused about the meaning? Anyway, it at least shows the NSA was institutionally aware of the possibility of backdooring, and other cryptographers knew about it, yet NSA pushed for its adoption.
what do you mean by "neurotic mile" ?

I think the more you spread intensity, the better it is for your health.
Now that actually sounds like a decent idea.
No, everyone doesn't 'know what it means', not without additional mental parsing. Myself, among many others, read it first as a double-negative, then have to double-take it and reinterpret it. Irrespective, irreducable, irrecoverable, irreconcilable, irrelevant, irreligious, irrefutable - irregardless stands out like a sore thumb.

Or should I say 'irreinterpret it'? After all, you would 'know what I meant' if I wrote that.

Ambiguity is fine if you're writing for poetic effect, but if you're trying to get a point across, it should be minimised.
47 miles, which will take me about 75 minutes. One way, including a bike ride to the train station, the train ride, and the metro ride to my work. I get about 50 minutes working time during the train ride, and it's the most productive time of my entire day.

I do work 4 days a week, 1 of those telecommuting. So I only commute to the office 3 times a week, which is totally OK. I also religiously leave office at 4.30PM so that I can have dinner with my family. Any remaining work I can do in the evening, but those occasions are pretty rare.
As an Italian running a business focused on Italy I can only agree: RUN.
I basically begged to be able to run my online company in Italy. No way. I had to emigrate to Germany instead and I've paid taxes there for more than 10 years. Hell, I even paid for the reconstruction of Eastern Germany.
Just go to some Selection Day in any Italian incubator and you'll witness how fiscal and regulatory issues are discussed more often than the business model itself.
Or try to discuss a start-up idea with an italian and count the seconds before he tells you "how about taxes? how about the regulation?".
It's a broken platform.
> Even Elon Musk as hard working as he is cannot achieve his level of income off of his own productivity alone.

Elon has specific role in "production". If his work/energy/decisions are going to spawn new factory, new technology or new product that is going to improve productivity of millions then by all means his income is justified by his productivity.

> Printing money causes inflation under all cases unless money is literally destroyed at the same rate it is printed.

This is not true. Emphasis on "all cases". If you create money at exactly the same rate as the economy's produce grows than money has it's background in actual "things" that have value.

As for other arguments I think author was trying to convey very complex subject in 30 minutes of video. Of course there will be certain generalizations so he can better convey the message.
Logic is, in my own opinion, derived from conclusions based on facts. Factual doesn't neccessarily mean proven. It does imply that one or more people really believe the thing to be true, though. That's what it is and how it works, and that is the general consensus.

Not understanding the logic of something, anything, typically requires more facts, and acquiring those additional facts may lead to a change in perspective. What was once illogical and mysterious may become entirely logical with the right set of additional facts.

Study a lot of Biology.
I'd be interested in hearing tptaceks response here, as he has claimed in his past comments that "no serious cryptographer" believes dual-EC-DRBG was backdoored. Is Matthew Green not a "serious cryptographer"?
It is optional if the goal is only to lose weight. I personally found it harder to lose weight when I started exercising since then I could no longer fast as much.
Muscle that contracts grown in a lab for the first time
I found this to be insightful:

> ... human neurons are slow yet humans can perform lots of complicated tasks in a fraction of a second. More specifically, it is well-known that a human neuron fires no more than 100 times per second. This means that, if a human can solve a problem in 0.1 seconds, then our neurons have enough time to fire only 10 times --- definitely not much more than that. It therefore follows that a large neural network with 10 layers can do anything a human can in 0.1 seconds.
Mindspark, part of IAC, own Excite and MyWay.

Mindspark are a damn malware/adware company who are infamous for 'smileycentral' and 'zwinky' etc. They're still going pushing adware extensions to the Chrome Web Store.

If you look at their website they look rather legitimate but they're far from it.
As italian, I second this. Stay away from Italy if you want to do business.
This is a very good explanation for the debt cycles and the role of banks, gov't, central bank et al.

There is one point it doesn't explain, though. It appears that the severity of the debt cycles can be reduced and social stability improved if the economy weren't fueled by credit to such a degree ($3 trillion in money, $50 trillion in credit, wow). So why have so much lending? The video does briefly answer that question with the need to finance economic investments (i.e. things that can improve future income, e.g. a tractor).

That is only a partial answer. The narrower version of the question remains: why do we need so much lending for consumption? Is there any benefit at all in financing consumption with debt? It does increase present spending and economic activity, but only at the expense of reducing future spending and hurting future economic activity.
People are losing money by simply having it. Even if you store it in a normal bank account that gives interest rates inflation will eat up the interest and then some.
Read the link. There are over a thousand votes and six pages of comments of people saying "this is a problem for me".
Playing MOBA makes my heart pound and I lose a bit of weight - does it count?
As an expat myself, you would expect expats on average to be substantially more inclined to be critical of their home countries than others: After all we left.

Not all of us left because we were unhappy, but almost all of us left because we for one reason or other saw more opportunity elsewhere (e.g. in my case I left because getting larger financing for my startup at the time was easier in the UK). We're on average likely to be horrible misrepresentative of our countries as a whole.
i'm sure most of those visits are from random search results, not users genuinely interested in the site
http://xkcd.com/1432/
I can comment on this, being from Oregon and living in Italy:-)

Basically, this kind of thing happens everywhere. It just happens more in some places.

Back to this:

> - There are some absolutely excellent open source developers who can be hired much more cheaply than the US.

I can confirm this. I think a valid strategy would be to open up the main office somewhere else, and do some R&D in Italy. There are good developers who don't cost as much as elsewhere.
Very nice research, kudos to everyone involved.

I agree with the conclusions, mostly the very last one.

> To improve further, we need to restructure the page load process

To fully utilise the potential of HTTP/2, we will have to rethink the way we create and manage websites. I've posted more thoughts on this on my blog; https://ma.ttias.be/architecting-websites-http2-era/
The legendary A6...

Ever seen this photo? Dale Bard arrives at the belay station...

http://www.mountainproject.com/images/85/55/106368555_large_...

Though in reality it was a tongue-in-cheek setup :)
Education is a capital investment. Its ROI should be measured in terms of increased productivity per dollar invested, and we should be investing for maximum marginal productivity increase. Based on what little hard information I've seen and my scant anecdata of first-hand experience, I think community colleges are a fairly high-margin public investment right now.
In Italy corruption is not a problem, it is the only tool to solve problems with the bureaucracy.
> the reality of HTTP pipelining is that no-one uses it.

Hmmm, starting to use it seems like less effort than introducing an entirely new protocol.

> the core problem: namely, that a big or slow request can block you from doing anything else

Why is that the core problem?
I'm Italian too, and I came to this thread to make the same comment. Stay away. Running your business in our country, given the taxation laws and other stupid draconian regulations, it would just be crazy.
In 2014 the rate of failing companies was 2 per hour. And we are not talking about just startups here, which have a high burn rate. Many companies that have managed to survive for years have been killed by changes in the regulations during the last years.
Not trying to nitpick, but in case anyone's uncertain (and searching doesn't help), what the parent here means is "rappel" instead of "repel".
Some types of discrimination are not "fashionable" enough. If you are not of right color/gender you are out of luck as a minority.
If the author happens to chime in, that big Dutch corporation wouldn't happen to be ING, would it?
"Which bugs are these?"

My favorite is, at least a couple years back, if you had a KVM guest with an ext4 filesystem in an image file, on an ext4 filesystem, the guest OS could corrupt the host OS.

#winning

Obviously, ext4 is largely a very good FS, but at least twenty people I've managed hundreds of servers with agree that if you do not need huge filesystems, huge files, or directories with tons of files, ext3 is a safer choice.

I'm not saying Linus is incompetent, just that his criticism of other filesystems shouldn't be processed as if his work has no faults.

One thing I wonder is, is it the filesystem, or the C library, that determines things like how unicode is interpreted in paths - his overwhelming rant focus.
Is the mafia still a problem in mainland Italy? Serious question...
My first reaction to this was "MySpace? - some kind of stargazing based website?" before moments later: "Wow! - I completely forgot what Myspace was!"
Which changes?
That "unless" is a big (if not major) part of everyday Internet usage of a casual user, so your argument only supports parent post.
Ask HN: How do you deal with accounting for your EU SaaS?
We are running a recurring revenue business in the UK that now has over 3k users (wohoo!) but are having problems with the accounting side. We're way over the Xero soft limit of 1000 transactions per month but struggling to deal with the best/simplest way of accounting for a large number of small transactions. The product is B2B, so all our customers require invoices each month.

How do EU companies deal with this? I think I want to put a single transaction into Xero each time we get paid by Stripe, but the hard part is figuring out the VAT of that amount as some of our products are VAT-able and some are not. I want to avoid having to write anything but I think I am going to have to...

Is there a "textbook" way of dealing with this? Currently we are just going

Stripe > Load of Messy code that breaks all the time > Xero

and thinking this:

ChargeBee > Stripe > ??? > Xero

Would be simpler but it still doesn't appear to get us 100% of the way there...
In short, it is due to all of the hard links still present from all of the Instagram #throwbackThursday posts

OK I know it is way more than that. Funny when I visited Costa Rica last year and went into a coffee shop I shoulder surfed a few people and wouldn't you know: MySpace profiles. It looked like they were musicians or into musis but either way MySpace is alive and well.
I always wonder, why do we need these middle men?
Don't you have taxes or regulations in Germany?
> Why is it that no other nation on Earth spends as much money on education as the US does?

Because the United States insists on taxing and spending money in ridiculously indirect ways that qualify as "small government", but actually cost more, rather than doing what every other country does and just having the national government spend directly on the relevant programs, but which are somehow too "big government" for Americans.

The average European "big government" is actually much slicker and more efficient because it doesn't build large bureaucracies designed to avoid the need for a small bureaucracy.
horrible. Guaranteed to be abused.
Loved the last jab at functional guys https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/1138/1*zIUcPGRK3us....
Except that Microsoft tested SPDY against pipelining and found that pipelining was essentially just as good. So we're left with a situation where Google could have used HTTP pipelining over SSL (so there's no buggy proxies interfering, just like what SPDY does) and gotten pretty much all the benefit with no extra complications at all, but instead there's old HTTP and a new, much more complicated protocol.

And this "head of line blocking" problem... who said it was a problem, Google? In reality you have 4 or more connections that automatically work like spread spectrum where most resources aren't stuck behind a big or slow request. But even if this was an actual problem, a simple hint in the HTML that the resource might take a while and to put other ones on a separate connection would optionally solve this problem, and with almost no extra complexity.
I'd opt (well, I have...) for the cheapest Digital Ocean VPS running Ghost. Works great.
If you live or have an office in SF, my understanding is that you have PG&E. At least once per decade for several decades, there have been impassioned efforts to implement municipal power in SF, to transfer all of the PG&E assets and staff to SFPUC - not easy to implement perfectly, but an equitable goal.

Now that I've left SF after living there most of a decade, and I live in the east bay, I think it's also a concern that SF gets to own a power source so far away, because of the historical timing of when it was implemented.

The SF Bay Area's intertwining municipalities are a major impedance to certain types of progress, but I also think they are a valuable alternative to a region like NYC where you have a massive city with areas that aren't really like one another.

Anyway, my understanding is that the water power plant supplies muni and other SF public purposes, such as possibly some street lights. I know, though, when I lived in the TL, and we had a power outage, the street lights would go out, so this may all flow together and be metered, rather than be separate, redundant systems.

My point was, we could probably change that. :)
I'm pretty sure Opera doesn't ship with it enabled any more, since the move to Chromium. There were all kinds of crazy heuristics to work out whether to use pipelining or not.
Frankly, I don't see how regulations or laws should protect the user for several reasons:

Firstly, there are already privacy laws yet it doesn't look as if they apply and that Verizon thinks that even in the case of a law suit Verizon will be able to benefit more than this law suit will cost.

Secondly, even if a court determines that the conduct of Verizon in this case is not legal, the verdict will still be special enough to not be applicable in a loop hole case. So I see protection provided by law as limited.

Thirdly, enforcement is rather difficult and not as obvious as, e.g., a daylight robbery, especially for non-technical observers which I presume to be the vast majority of law enforcement personnel.

And finally, (and rather an opinion) I think government is rather delighted to know who does what on the internet, so I don't see a real motive for them to move decisively apart from some half-* voter appeasement.
congratulations, how do you get new customers ?
The first quote sounds about right to me. If you're good at what you do, you don't need to constantly prove it to everyone. I don't understand why you'd be bothered by that.

The second quote is taken out of context. He thinks he's citing some statistic, but doesn't give a source for it. So assume he's wrong until a source surfaces, and then scrutinize that.

You're misinterpreting the third quote, but it also makes him sound silly. He's not claiming that HIV isn't real; he's claiming that AIDS isn't a single thing that is only caused by HIV. That's not really a profound statement.