skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quite often when I Google something, I end up on an SO page with exactly the answer I needed, and it's been closed due to some BS. And there's a bunch of comments about why it's closed.

I think the moderators have gotten more and more zealous. Everything is looked at with the guidelines in mind, instead of common sense. I suspect there's a certain type of person who likes to apply stringent rules to everything, and common sense people just have enough and decide not to run in the elections.

If SO was a billboard I could understand the need to only have the interesting stuff on. But SO doesn't have a space problem. If someone has posted a question, it's likely they're not the only noob wondering what the answer is. If the question is useful to people, Google will lead them there.
At least for me, OOXML compatibility is the largest blocker - I have some documents which just won't open correctly with LibreOffice.

Though this is becoming less and less of an issue, I still keep Office 2007 in a virtual machine just to turn them at least into PDFs.
I considered that option, but the comment history pushed me in the other direction. I plead Poe's law.
It's also wrong. FreeBSD supports the best there is: Tarsnap.
Pretty much all load balancers have health checks - active where they reach out to each server, or passive where they observe the responses of existing requests if they can.

One of the issues is making your active health check more like a doctor's physical than "'tis but a scratch" self-reporting. But also ensuring you're not dealing with a whole bunch of hypochondriacs.

Passive health checks at least have the property that they fail servers when the servers are unable to serve, even if the active health check does not consider some subsystem in its response. But alone they can easily be fooled by really fast non-error responses.

Anyway, saying "name of brand of load balancers" solves this problem is only covering the most basic cases. General solutions are at best only the first step of the full solution. You need to think about the edges - which I suspect is what Rachel is advocating.
I like the thinking outside the box BUT too much on the wrist.

This would be annoying and uncomfortable against your laptop or any wristrest.

I think people need to think much more about what _wearable_ means.

Epaper displays, long battery life, and soft breathable bands and no buckles.
It's true, Microsoft is suddenly a palatable company without the greedy, vengeful, angry attitude of Steve Ballmer. With the anachronistic culture of the founders now entirely purged, I see no reason why they would not become a credible competitor in many markets. They are hungry to prove they are relevant again, giving them the incentive of a startup, while they have essentially unlimited cash.

As much as some part of me squirms when I say it, Microsoft really is a player again.
I agree that the gendering sucks, but I'll say that the Lego Friends sets are a great match with the Castle sets. Banquets, anyone?
> 6,900 users with a reputation of 10000 or more can delete questions.

I have 20k reps and I can't delete questions. This is not correct.
you were asked three things and couldn't answer any of them.

Except that that is incorrect information.

I can answer a number of points directly: I have my account password. I can (and have) accessed it from a non-Tor IP, the same that I've been using recently, and from within the same IP range that I've been using for quite some time (though now long I don't know -- the space is dynamic and subject to change).

I can and did answer last login dates, questions about email contacts, and general questions about email filters (none of which would be likely if I didn't have local copies of email -- in other words, they're tough questions to answer if you don't have access to at least some of your account.

And there are numerous other questions that I wasn't asked that I could answer. Including as I've noted, my PGP key to which I can sign or respond to challenges. Multiple other accounts that I've referred to frequently in my G+ postings (including this one, also reddit, Ello, and Diaspora, among others). Which, though Google isn't (or shouldn't be) in a position to check, all use different (and difficult) passwords.

So: no, I can't answer all the security questions. Then again, I'd challenge you to go through account recovery procedures for your own online account(s), and to see how far or successful you are with these.

Some time ago close friends lost access to their email account they'd had for years with a very large Internet services provider. It turns out that the password they'd been using was a poor choice -- I'll just say short, based on a limited characterset, and based on personal demographic information that could be pretty easily guessed at, or simply brute-forced.

Oh, and they'd been a paying customer for years before the system switched over to free, which meant that there were both credit card numbers and I suspect street addresses on file. But the CCs had long since expired and been retired.

After a few months, it became apparent that there was simply no way to recover the address.

Which means that any accounts that _weren't_ notified were still sending to it (think financial services, etc., as well as friends and other services tied to it). And that the account could be used to send spam.

I've got a few friends whose Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, and other accounts appear to have been similarly compromised.

As I state below, the question "who are you" is a really difficult one to answer. Google's Eric Schmidt stated early on that G+ was designed to be "an identity service". In the sense of "we're going to use this to identify exactly who you are in meatspace and stick with you no matter what" I've got no interest in that.

But in the sense of "we want to be able to consistently and correctly provide access to the self-described entity who should and has been using a particular account", well, yeah, you could say I'm down with that.

And on that count, at least for the moment, the company is failing spectacularly.
For spreadsheets you pretty much need Excel or Calc (the LibreOffice equivalent). I'm not aware of any cloud based solution that comes close.

For text documents though I agree with you.
Does it support IMAP IDLE? I've had to do some ridiculous workaround by forwarding my work and gmail accounts to icloud accounts just so I can get push working and none of the other email clients I have tried support it.
Well, the illusion of that, since in reality it's almost impossible to make the kind of huge returns they advertise.
Mostly to keep the app simple and still deployable on the free Heroku plan. Sure, it could handle multiple locations, but then it would quickly outgrow the free tier
Commerce is king in the US, so it's "alright" for politicians to accept money from outside sources as long as it can even slightly be cast as "pro-business."

Many common Americans don't agree with this necessarily, but there are enough that do or have been misled by propaganda that the "pro-business" agenda is given free-rein in this country.
SO Careers requires an invite?

and one more question, is this your first job? Or first job as remote?
Why we still use Flash
In his situation, it is always an option. The business is not going to come crashing down simply because he decided to get some sleep.
The rules the parent commenter is referring to are federal, and extraordinarily well-known, because several generations of businesses have tried to come up with ways to skirt them to avoid taxes.

As far as I understand the rules, the "most heavily weighted factor" you cite is in fact not an IRS employee classification factor at all. A contractor can still be classified as an employee even though they bill through an LLC. BigCo's worry about this so much that they will sometimes withhold taxes from LLCs.
Staying in aerospace/defense industry as long as I did (11 years). It is a dysfunctional soul-sucking environment that affected my health, both physical and mental.

I escaped a year ago and am so much happier now.
Coal is currently important, but not that important. As a finite resource it's also going to be gone in ~2 thousand years (big error bars on that though) which is a fairly short time period all things considered. For perspective let's ignore all non-renewables + wind and solar and just look at Hydropower.

Hydropower use reached a record 3,427 terawatt-hours, or about 16.1 percent of global electricity consumption. That on its own is enough to provide useful power to everyone sure we would not be using it for home heating but lighting, computers, and refrigeration would easily make the cut even if AC would be far too expensive for most people. aka, most people get a setback but not to the dark ages. Toss in just wind power and you could meet the world’s electricity needs at perhaps a 10-30% increase in electricity costs.

In the end there is a huge inertia in the current system; dropping coal in say 10 years would be possible, but ridiculously expensive. Dropping it over the next 100 might just happen without anyone noticing.

PS: Solar is really interesting as it's cheaper than coal in some areas, but inertia and changes in the supply curve are keeping their prices linked. We are heading to a supply shift so peak costs might actually start taking place at night.
how it works? looks like a VNC .
Always sad to see this myth live on. It is simultaneously as self-evident as it is nonsensical.

1) Yes you get better with practice
2) Some faster than others
3) Some with a higher peak than others
4) It is neither necessary, nor sufficient with 10 000 hours effective practice (some win the world championship in high jump after less than a year [Donald Thomas 2007], others will never become chess champions, or even ranked among the top 10 000, after 30 000 hours' dedicated practice)
5) Even the original study just put 10k hours as the AVERAGE practice time for THOSE few that eventually became masters (i.e. were super-talented), with a range of 3k-30k hours needed.

However, always good to see people wanting to expand their skill set through dedicated work - admirable

(but has NOTHING to do with the fundamentally flawed 10k hr roule)
Why Bloggers Need to Do Unscripted Interviews
Unless this malware wants to hide a lot of data on the drive this way, the same problem applies. For a long time hard disks have had spare blocks for invisible replacement it that's possible. Not to mention addressing yield in magnetic platters, you can save a lot of money by having the drive map and not use just plain bad sectors (in the bad old days they came with a printout of the bad sectors).

And of course once you compromise the boot process, it's game over. Even for someone like me who uses drives as "small" as 146 "GB" for one of my system, a lot more than a few megabytes, probably more than a GiB would have to be stolen before I'd notice (well, those disks are underprovisened with LVM, but, really, can you even buy a drive with less than 100 GiB today? Not as of a few years ago, as I recall).
University Bans GitHub Homework
Please note, closed questions can also be removed from the site.

I have a single Gold Badge in the SO world. It was awarded for an answer that I gave which earned more than 100 up votes[1]. Sadly the question to which I responded has since been closed (for years now). When content that I worked hard to create suddenly disappears from the site because moderators deem it to be "not a good fit", you start to feel it's not worth your time ...

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/25/great-answer?userid=...
Using the donor data is a really smart idea. How did you get from donor data to candidate positions? Did you assign manual positions to different kinds of donors and then aggregate them by candidate? I'd love to know more about how you got and analyzed the data.

I worked on this at YC Hacks last year -- http://www.hipvote.us/ . The idea was to get a push notification when a bill came up for vote, read a summary, and then vote on it yourself. After deciding, you got to see how your congresspeople voted, and you could check your similarity to them over time. We also ran into the "meaning" problem with bills, and the incumbent problem.
No major flaw in that thinking. In fact as pointed out elsewhere in this thread it's one of the major checklist items that the IRS uses to make this determination for w-2 vs 1099 (employee vs contractor). Different states however may have other criteria that pushes someone one way or the other.

http://www.careerusa.org/resources/career-files/100-resource...
> I believe this should work: https://github.com/magcius/keylog

Interesting. Only works if the RECORD extension is enabled, however. Seems some distros have that off by default and have for years.
Also 5+ years with Swift would be a real advantage.
> That FAQ is meant to avoid getting answers that I don't need.

1) Answers on questions aren't just meant to serve you, they're meant to serve people that find the question later. It's incredibly important to note when there's a better way altogether to approach a problem.

2) Askers on SO often exhibit the XY problem. Saying you're not interested in other approaches is not simply dickish; it's ignoring (often) good advice that other people are donating their time to give you.

Honestly, your entire interaction on that question is a prime example of why so many moderators go to the other extreme and become trigger happy. Because anybody would get burnt out dealing day in, day out with people having the same sense of entitlement that you have.
There's also the syncthing port and owncloud sync support via mirall.
Because it's slower, more compute intensive and unnecessary?
Canada isn't as dependent on petroleum as Venezuela or Russia, but that resource is extremely profitable when prices are high so it often out-paces other industries in terms of margins.

There are other natural resource industries unaffected by this. Saudi Arabia isn't flooding the market with trees or minerals. There's also a large manufacturing base.
Our World Is No Longer Flat
but is that enough to make people switch?
It's not inconsistent. The variable "True" now has the value False. 3 == 3 yields the value True, which is not equal to the value in the variable "True" which is False. You should try:

>>> True = False
>>> 3 == 3 == bool("True")
Bullshit. How often do those "critical deadlines" end up not meaning anything other than some MBA chose a date at random? And if the business truly does hinge on meeting this one deadline, why is he he only one on it?

As for your sob story, why in the holy fuck did you put off the work until the week of the meeting?
> the Stack Overflow staff and moderators seem to take the attitude that the long-term content of the site is much more important

Perhaps the Stack Overflow owners realize they can muscle in on the programming language documentation business. With the ongoing increase in programmers who learn a programming language at the same time as they're paid to write production code in it, the promoters of some languages will inevitably skip writing documentation that fully describes what it does and instead set up a basket of Stack Overflow users to plant lots of answered questions, which also gives the initial appearance of an existing community for that language. Eventually languages will even be designed and implemented without any thought given to documentation that explains it from beginning to end, but instead only the intention for it to be learnt in Stack Overflow-sized chunks, keyed to search engine keywords instead of documentation subheadings. And part of Stack Overflow's business model may be to host the primary documentation for these emerging types of programming languages.

Dr Dobbs magazine described this phenomenon as a "conundrum" and used Groovy as an example of this new type of language: "The endless variety of features requires considerable documentation, which is simply not available, especially for the advanced features that give Groovy much of its benefit. And so, if you jump in today, you'll find the language is easy to learn, but hard to master". http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-groovy-conundrum/240147731
Note that this is FreeBSD-CURRENT only, i.e. the development branch. This does not affect FreeBSD releases.
"Economics" :-)

Seriously, this is precisely the problem that economics tries to solve, and it is evolving into a mature discipline with a reasonable level of empirical validity, but the way psychology has evolved in the past few decades.

There are several main policy-oriented disciplines:

1) sociology, which studies society as if economics didn't matter

2) economics, which studies society as if morality didn't matter

3) political science, which studies society as if neither economics nor morality matters

I'm caricaturing, of course, but the differences between the fields are due more to historical accident than anything else, and if you're interested in focusing on the math then economics is the place to be.

There is a lot of very interesting work being done in "heterodox" economics right now, particularly by people like Steve Keen, who is focused on relaxing the assumption that the economy is at all times in quasi-equilibrium, which is foundational to the neo-classical paradigm: http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/

Keen is interested in dynamical economic models, which necessarily require you include things like banks and money in the model (these drop out of equilibrium models, mostly.)
That's a backup solution which you can also run on Linux without an issue. Dropbox is more for collaboration. It's often the only tool in its class used by smaller publishers or marketing companies. They don't have an ftp or webdav server. And it sure beats emailing files around.
BB(111) is not computable by "just computation". The issue is you have to prove that the programs that don't halt, don't halt. There is no general way to do this (Halting Problem). In fact once you get to a large enough n, BB(n) will be undecidable in whatever axioms you're using. We already have a simple proof of this by taking any known undecidable statement and turning it into a Turing machine halting problem.
While other VCs seek Unicorns, Indie.vc is all about that cashflow
It'll detect if IMAP IDLE is supported on the provider and use it wherever it can, so IIRC:

Gmail / iCloud: Yes
FastMail: Yes
Yahoo: No
AoL / Exchange / Hotmail / Live: Can't remember
+1 for exercise.

Also as you give up coffee/sodas, don't give up fluids altogether.

Keep a bottle of water near you at all times. Enough people I know have ulcers or kidney stones from pushing through late shifts.
If you're gonna quit, why bother killing yourself for the next 3 days? Take your time and do the work well, on a reasonable pace.
What Airlines Don’t Tell You About That Free Bag
"Win8 apps that use the AppBar are going to need to be rewritten to avoid it. The AppBar is really hard to bring up in touch mode..."

This was always the infuriating part of making a Win8 app, the guidelines were terrible and you could either follow them to try and feel like a native app (with a sucky UX) or you could tweak them or invent your own, which made your app feel like a one-off with a steeper learning curve
Our Lost Cousins, the Neanderthals
GetLambda – AWS Lambda GET Request in One HTML /w JavaScript File
http://FivePointsSpy.herokuapp.com
RoboMotivator: My First AI Powered Twitter Bot
How it works:
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RoboMotivator records all retweets as positive feedback, and analyzes the quote based off of proximity of nouns in a quote. By regularly retweeting RoboMotivator, he better learns his target audience and will be more likely to tweet topics relevant to the interests of his followers.

I can help if you see any bugs: @andhofmt | www.andrewdhoffman.com
Show HN: 0h n0 with levels
SQL Server, Windows Server, Sharepoint Server, Exchange Server, Dyanamics NAV, Dyanmics AX, Dynamics GP, Dynamics CRM, Dynamics Marketing, Lync Server, Biztalk Server, System Center Server.

Windows Desktop, MS Office, Visual Studio, Xbox (platform AND games), Skype.

All of these are profitable. Then you have Azure, which I'm not sure if it is profitable, but will most certainly be. Very profitable.

Geesh, how are these guys alive even? They should give Dynamics AX for free, otherwise they are toast!
And they'll achieve peak shaving in the process.

Peak shaving is if you powered your own home off of your battery pack during peak times. The whole issue is that gamers -- who are essentially ruining "the commons" and pissing in the drinking well -- are instead abusing a system.

Again, no home battery pack is helping the power company. The rates are hugely subsidized to encourage green energy. The people who abuse it simply ruin it for everyone else.
yes we have enough proof of that concept... I do not believe you. It's a urban myth that rewriting always make things faster. Especially when looking at a C(++) code basis. Rust will maybe make the code safer but I doubt it will make it faster.
I can similarly only speak for myself, or perhaps myself and my colleagues in this case, but our experience with Google's on-line suite has been less happy.

As a handy collaborative text editor with some basic formatting, it's fine. For longer documents, technical documents, anything that needs professional levels of review and revision control, or basically any other "serious" work, it's not even entry-level.

Likewise if you want to share some tables with light formatting and maybe some simple calculations, the on-line spreadsheets are fine. However, anyone who does significant number crunching using a real spreadsheet isn't going to last five minutes.

In short, if you find the real-time collaboration useful and need only very simple formatting and manipulation, these on-line suites are fine (and of course this probably does cover a fair amount of useful work). If you need anything more sophisticated, they aren't really competing with the heavyweight desktop applications at all.
really cool data in those distributions, definitely spent way too much time flipping back and forth from one tab to another. Maybe unsurprisingly, javascript is every groups' most reported skill and full-stack engineers tend to be more senior. It'll be exciting to watch as your data set grows
I really thought you were talking about a curriculum vitae there, but I suppose it's "close vote".
At $100, Office is a pretty easy purchase. It's still quite a bit better and less likely to have file incompatibilities.
I would like to defend Tim Post's meta-answer because it's quoted out of context. The OP's question was about the reduction in quality of questions being asked on SO, which I myself have noticed in my particular area of expertise [0].

I don't think Tim comes off as "elitist"/"cool kids" (also Tim is genuinely a really nice person, not at all uppity or "elitist" [1]). There is a rising deluge of utterly shit quality questions being asked on the site. As an "expert" I just can't be bothered any more trying to assist users who are missing so much fundamental knowledge and understanding about the tech they're working with. Hell, some of them can't even tell me which version of IIS they're using. It saps too much energy and is the reason why my own participation on the site has taken a nose-dive over the past couple of years.

I do agree with the comment throttling timer and "@user" behaviour in comments, I think that was one of Jeff's personal things he got implemented much to the frustration of many folks on the site. I like Jeff but some of his ideas about how to solve certain types of problems were a bit peculiar.

I still love SO, I still visit daily but it sure burned me out as an "answerer".

[0]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/*iis*

[1]: Disclosure: I'm an ex-diamond mod on the site - I would like to think I played fair, erring on the side of giving folks the benefit of the doubt and that their questions were asked in good faith (and with a tiny wee bit of upfront research).