skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's much worse than that. You'll erase everything, and likely won't be able to hold on to the new skills unless the plasticity was temporary.

Brain plasticity evolves in very specific ways. Simplified you could say that a young brain learns "short-term" things. It learns things (and learns how to cause things) that last tens of microseconds at and just after birth, then over the years moves to seconds, minutes, hours and longer.

But circuits are massively redundant. Until you lose about 90% of the part of the brain that fulfils a certain function, you won't notice a thing. Go over that, and ...

Every memory, every skill, everything in your brain is built on the basic premise that the shorter term neurocircuits work a certain way, that they have solidified. Every memory made when you were 10 years old is filtered through and interpreted by circuits established when you were 9. Memories made when you were 11, get filtered through the 10 year circuits, then the 9 year circuits, then ...

So if a neurocircuit changes that was built when you were 14 years EVERYTHING after that is gone. Every memory younger than when you were 14 years old gets filtered through the now-scrambled 14 year old circuits, which will transform it into noise, which the rest of the brain will promptly ignore.

This is why you regularly have demented people thinking they are much younger than they actually are, failing to remember they have kids, and so on. They suddenly start doing what they did at that age as well, leaving for work at 6am despite being pensioned for 30 years, in many cases to companies that have long since ceased to exist. Not recognizing kids (and especially grandkids). Note that this is usually emotionally very, very hard for those kids.

So if you successfully reset your brain to the plasticity it had when you were 14, every memory, every skill, every detail after that will disappear. The next day you will wake up, likely terrified, in a room you think you've never seen before, wondering where your mother is, not knowing what the hell a cell phone is. If there is damage that did not just do a one-time scramble of the circuit, but actually keeps it from re-solidifying, you will wake up like that every day of the rest of your life, not remembering the day before.

It also works in reverse : you can teach kids about long term effects (e.g. money) for months, and it just won't stick. Don't be fooled they'll be able to repeat the lesson back to you, but they can't apply knowledge that improves their long-term situation because it gets erased.
How I requested my photographs from the Department of Homeland Security
Ignore them. You can't serve everyone.
Google really did drop the ball on messaging.
Hangouts was supposed to progressively regroup all these messaging capabilities in one service, but the SMS integration alone has been so bad that Google rolled out a separate SMS app after deleting it in the first place (the new version is an improved Material revamp, but it still serves the same purpose).
There is probably a very interesting insider story behind this cock-up.
In the mean-time, I hope that Google will learn from these attempts and improve Hangouts in meaningful ways. Sundar Pinchai has already alluded to the fact that Hangouts and Photos are going to be treated as entirely different teams/services than Google+, which is probably a good start.
Hey Matt -

Adwarekiller gave a good answer, and I'll add some of my own notes.

* Distribution is mostly consolidating. A lot of adware companies used to both buy their own distribution through either pay per install or revenue share agreements and then monetize those users themselves. Now, the ecosystem is fracturing into companies that actually perform the distribution and companies that monetize those users.

* Large distribution companies:
- IronSource (this article)
- InstallMonetizer (YC funded as adwarekiller mentioned)
- Web Pick Internet Holdings (InstallRex as adwarekiller referenced them) http://www.web-pick.com/
- Cross Rider https://crossrider.com/
- Ad Peak http://adpeak.com/
- Conduit & Perion http://conduit.com/ & http://www.perion.com/

* Large monetization companies:
- Future Ads & Traffic Vance for banners and pop ups https://www.futureads.com/ & https://www.trafficvance.com/
- Lead Impact for pop ups http://leadimpact.com/
- Advertising.com for banners and text ads (yes, an AOL company powers a lot of adware) https://www.advertising.com/
- Ad Peak http://adpeak.com/ for banners, text ads, pop ups, and ecommerce (like Superfish) (they seem to do a lot of both distribution and monetization)
- 50onRed (as adwarekiller mentioned) for banners, text ads, pop ups, and ecommerce http://50onred.com
- Superfish for ecommerce http://superfish.com
- AdOn for text ads, pop ups, and email http://www.adonnetwork.com/

Both Yahoo and Google are in bed with the adware companies via search reset deals and white labeled SERP pages.

There are a lot more companies in the ecosystem. It's massive. A good rule of thumb right now is that if a company advertisers they have cut a deal with an adware company (either directly or indirectly). As you can see from the above list, there is also A LOT of VC money in the ecosystem. The reach extends further when you consider companies that get benefit, like CPXi (http://www.cpxi.com/), AppNexus (http://www.appnexus.com/), OpenX (http://openx.com), or even Amazon Web Services, Google Apps, etc. since these services usually power the business, too.

http://www.benedelman.org/ is a good source to learn more.

Here is a breakdown of IronSource's install tactics: http://www.benedelman.org/news/021815-1.html

If you'd like to talk more, let me know.
ah yes I see the point now
Well, your skills are a lot into corporate world, there is little application for all this in startups, so keeping focused on these will mean you will stuck in politically-laden, bad planned, bad executed projects forever, in Colombia or elsewhere. Go learn Javascript or Objective C, and freelance, starting with odesk.com then moving on to some better sources of work, then you will be probably hired to a U.S. startup (or even find youself in such a comfortable position freelancing that you won't wish to move on elsewhere).
I remember another polyglot website back in the day, which was more prosaic than this overview. It was absolutely fantastic, but I can't for the life of me remember the URL.

If it hasn't been updated, it probably won't have things like Go, Dart, and Rust anyway.
Ask HN: Is There a Market for Another SaaS Help Desk Software?
I am halfway through building a SaaS Help desk/customer support software but now I am having some doubts whether it is really worth the time I am putting into it. Right from the start, I knew that this is a really crowded space but I still decided to start building my app for two reasons -

1. I think the current help desk platforms (barring maybe Groove) are too complex and much more suited for bigger support teams. I thought that creating a simpler app (with less feature-bloat) specifically designed for smaller (1-5 people) support teams could be my app's differentiating factor.

2. I wanted to move away from per user pricing and instead switch to a flat price of about $25 per month. Also, instead of a free plan, I thought of providing an open source (self-hosted) version.

I am quite happy with how the project is turing out, but there's this nagging doubt that I might be better off making something where there's less of a competition. My aim is to make $1.5-2k per month.

Do you think there is still a market for another help desk app?
Isn't that because the HSBC stuff happened in Europe and not the US? Or have I mixed up cases.
American justice is blind to everything except money.

Didn't VISA Master Card and Paypal get fined for blocking wikileaks recently?

Isn't this just about the same thing?
What is the United States doing currently that deserves sanctions?
> generics as a powerful tool for using types to erase inessential details.

That's the key - generics are one way to accomplish things, but they're not the only way.
Google does indeed use my data in order to personalize search results. I remember being impressed to see that for a query that could have several different meanings, the search engine gave me results centered on my engineering field, which was what I was looking for.
I am not that convinced that it blindfolds you to some services or opinions though. So far I have only seen differences in understanding the context of the query, which I don't see as an 'undue bias' but an added value (especially if you read the anecdote about the 'history of aviation' query in this thread).

Some other thoughts on the bubble : http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/the-preference-bubble .
Paperless Techniques to Stop Wasting Away Your Time
I'm not sure, but if adwarekiller's numbers are correct that could put them up there.
For years I worked as a concierge programmer, and it was the most fun that I ever had, mostly because of the one-to-one relationship I had with my clients. All of them were in the same circumstance, which is that they had inherited a large amount of money, and they had an idea for a website. I was able to offer 2 different skills: my skill as a programmer, and my experience in the world of startups. In all such cases my clients were non-technical and inexperienced in the world of startups. They had no interest in being angel investors, instead they wanted to dive in and use their own creativity to find out how hard it was to build a business around software. They tended to be reasonably interesting people, and I enjoyed working with them, and I enjoyed shaping their vision into something that could exist in the real world. All of the projects eventually grew (for a time) into something larger, at which point I would help put together a team of what was needed (typically some mix of backenders, frontenders, QA, writers, and customer service support).

I did make good money during those years (2002 to 2009) but what I recall most fondly is how much fun all of it was.

I think that world has now largely died out, as even the earliest stage startups now belong to a scene that is somewhat professionalizing. But the earlier web was unprofessional, and that was the best thing about it.

Still I find, even now, even in New York City, there is some of the same energy among those dreaming about doing very early stage startups. Certainly the creativity and excitement is still there. The problem I've run into lately is the large number of people who are so sure that their idea will someday be worth billions that they do not want to pay cash right now, they only want to pay in equity. And that kills all of the fun for me.
This is more like AirBnB than Reddit.
Most executives at non-webdev companies don't know anything about Rails, except what their staff and consultants tell them.

If a fair number of those executives learn too late about the technical limitations of Rails, they probably do feel burned, and word gets around.
Above a certain level I don't think your thesis is currently valid.

For a "bank bank", "playing with people's life savings", the lower level transnational stuff, yeah. Although I don't get the impression that the current stuff doing that is prone to disastrous failures, and I believe the system has some slack here and there to reverse errors, i.e. transfers of money vs. buying and selling financial instruments. The current infamous failure in this area, which was WRT to the latter, was at Knight Capital.

But above a certain level, at which point we're not so much "playing with people's life savings" (or, rather, if they have a clue, only a small portion of them), the situation can be a lot more fluid. E.g. changing trading strategies, which can be driven by the capriciousness of governments. The current state of the art doesn't make it practical to embed the US tax code into source code amenable to automated proof, especially before it changes again, right??
I'm a UK-based contractor (albeit mostly working with Python) and without fail I have at least 10 new recruiters add me on LinkedIn every week. What are the chances this author is in a flooded recruiter market?

Edit: The last time I sat in an office in Shoreditch there were contractors there doing frontend, project management, design and product ownership. There was a conversation one day where the eluded to 'backend contractors always being in work' and it being a bit of struggle for the others to always find work. Have the Rails devs here felt they were always in work in the past?
They cache them before the email is even read. They also cache images across gmail accounts.
Methylation of cythosines decrease transcription rate. Meaning a gene becomes less active. Methylation state is heritable.
They have pretty annoying sales people. Contacted me out of the blue and didn't leave me alone until I responded in a rather impolite manner.
TBH that's a pretty small part of the market though. 99% of all LOB apps are CRUD stuff and integration.
Contractors are usually double what you would pay a salary person in the US too. It is because contractors have less reliable work and pay more taxes than salaried employees.
<3 Rather useful, and glad even lawyers (at least one) geek out over this
Pay is good. If you're good at it, it's pretty amazing. You can pull £650/day on contract if you know your shit. If you don't but can drive Visual Studio, £400/day is easy.
I consider not seeing the previous history a feature. When I say something to a group of people currently in a room, I only address these people and this message is not necessarily intended for anyone joining later.
At least it's not "military-grade encryption".
Gmail banned in Indian government offices
Ya I have to 2nd this one, why on earth would germany impose sanctions?
> but I'd seriously doubt that there are any industries at all that rely upon people using someone else's IP.

A VPN is not a proxy.

Plenty of businesses rely on VPNs to keep their staff communications safe when those staff are working away from the office. This is not an unusual or weird requirement only used by the security paranoics -- it is everyday standard practice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_network

> A virtual private network (VPN) extends a private network across a public network, such as the Internet. It enables a computer or network-enabled device to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if it were directly connected to the private network, while benefiting from the functionality, security and management policies of the private network.[1] A VPN is created by establishing a virtual point-to-point connection through the use of dedicated connections, virtual tunneling protocols, or traffic encryptions. Major implementations of VPNs include OpenVPN and IPsec.
Sorry for the formatting, but the edit functionality doesn't work.
Hired.com Expands Its Technology Employment Platform to Boston
http://rosettacode.org/ ?
I love how they cherry pick quotes out of context to make their point. From the linked article:

Ironically, the US government sent a letter to China expressing concern about its new law. "The Administration is aggressively working to have China walk back from these troubling regulations," US Trade Representative Michael Froman said in a statement.

But if you actually looks into the quote, it doesn't have anything to do with crypto backdoors. From [1]:

“China’s new regulations on the use of information and communications technology in the banking industry go directly against a series of China’s bilateral and multilateral trade commitments. For example, the rules would require technology transfer and use of domestic Chinese intellectual property as a precondition for market access—both of which China has committed not to do,” said Froman.

The rules aren’t about security. They are about protectionism and favoring Chinese companies,” he said. “The administration is aggressively working to have China walk back from these troubling regulations.”

[1] http://9to5mac.com/2015/02/27/china-technology-rules/
This is great stuff, but seems relatively out of date.
$1,151 on Udemy in My First 4 Months (And Why 2015 Is the Year to Teach Online)
> That's not the same as being a propaganda source for government, unless the only viewpoint anyone is allowed to express is the one approved by the government.

In the west (especially the US) I'd say the media is a propaganda source for big businesses, and the only viewpoint anyone express is the one approved by big businesses.
I didn't know this sort of thing had a name! I made a similar (but now that I look back on it, much less informative) chart using d3 here: http://neugierig.org/software/datavis/lines-spent/
I don't see anything wrong with writing security software that is insecure as long as you don't pretend it is secure....

Except this one very much pretends to offer protection, apparently oblivious of the problems with their design.

They should point out very visibly that this is a tech-demo to promote a completely different product, and not an app that anyone should actually use.
When you say "performance oriented" what do you mean anyway?

But even humoring you here, I would argue that the very, very vast majority of contracts out there are not "performance oriented" and so the point may be moot.
There is also http://rigaux.org/language-study/syntax-across-languages.htm..., but it only compares the syntaxes.
This: http://rigaux.org/language-study/syntax-across-languages/ ?
HN Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8980255
I like that "it will be a terrorist threat" can now be used to stop absolutely anything and everything from being built/done.

That new bridge? nope - terrorist threat.

Elementary school? - na.

New car manufacturing plant? nope.

Hospital? uh uh. The bad guys will get it.
Favicon Slider – show a text message in your favicon
Amazon Web Services to Reboot 10% of Infrastructure Due to Xen Security Advisory
Dear Amazon EC2 Customer,

One or more of your Amazon EC2 instances are scheduled to be rebooted for required host maintenance in order to deploy important updates. These updates must be completed by 3/10 before the underlying issues we are addressing are made public as part of an upcoming Xen Security Advisory (XSA). Following security best practices, the details behind these issues will be withheld until then. Security and operational excellence are our top priorities, and therefore we occasionally need to do host maintenance on short notice. We have built the capability to live-update the vast majority of our fleet, however we have not yet enabled this capability on some of our older hardware. Fewer than 10% of EC2 customer instances will need to be rebooted in order to receive this update.

===
Just so happens that my business' entire infrastructure on AWS (19 servers) falls in that 10%....
In the UK, taxes are generally better for self employed people when trading through a personal service company, because you can control the flow of dividend payouts.

Contractors (on a 6-12 month contract) actually do get paid better significantly than permanent employee counterparts.
How is that ridiculously low?

The UK has always lagged well behind America in dev pay and has only been accelerating in pay for the last 5 years. 5 years ago a senior dev position outside London was around 35k. Now it's up to 45k and I'm starting to get emails with 50ks mentioned.

To make '20k' you would have to earn £900 per day, when the going rate outside London is £300 p/d, and even as recently as a year ago it was £250 p/d.

You earn £900 p/d consulting, not developing.

I've always blamed the 'BBC micro' effect for our lower pay, we had a lot more exposure to computers as kids in the 80s and so reached 'peak developer' a lot later than the Americans did. Also in the UK the idea that the peons could be worth more than the managers was anathema until the last decade, a class divide throwback.
Water is wet?

To be more constructive, did we need to study about this? This seems like common sense to me.
Just updated my guide to modern web development Feedback appreciated :)
Well then, I look forward to it happening any day now.
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Storj – Decentralized Cloud Storage Based on Blockchain
I like it, though I think it's likely to create a lot of garbage, what with spawning a goroutine on each Put, I suppose that's probably not an issue for most programs.

I find defer pretty expensive, I don't use them that liberally anymore, only when they're really called for.

Bug: defer fh.Close() without error checking in put(). This can result in data loss. It would also be nice to at least have the option of doing synchronous stores, possibly even with an os.Sync().
Great Products are Aspirational
As a Canadian I haven't heard of any but the current government is massively anti-science so if there were any projects they would have been stopped.
I wish it were just interns... Example follows.

The Finnish security company F-Secure revealed a secure cloud service, called Younited (https://www.younited.com/). It did not catch on. The active user amounts stayed at near zero level so it was sold to a company called Synchronoss.

F-Secure initially hoped that their good reputation, and the fact that the servers are located in countries without draconian spying legislation would be enough. They seriously hoped to make a star product out of their secure cloud service.

Well, secure against whom? Simply installing the applications and completing registration process revealed instantly that the service is insecure. Yes, in compliance sense "everything is encrypted", but the keys are clearly held server side. The customer has absolutely no control over the key management and storage, meaning they are at F-Secure's mercy, and F-Secure can technically open everything for authorities.

Now the actually interesting part of the story: The problem isn't the implementation. The problem isn't that they marketed it as secure. The important alpha users on this product area are way too savvy, and stayed away. As per the standard innovation diffusion model, they did not drag other users in. Not marketing the service as secure would have yielded better results!

It's funny how even serious software security companies screw things up. Even when they are attempting for a strategic new product positioning, and even when at near clear blue sea situation.
I find that it's similar in the US. Contractors do pay a tax that's paid by an employer (half of the Social Security and Medicare Tax, about 7.5%), but they can also claim more deductions.

With long term contracts that provide reliable work, contracting pays well. But without benefits.
I, ROBOT – YOU, MORON. How else will automated news work?
Download any instructable from instructables.com as pdf file
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> It seems in the United States salaries for permanent employees are higher, but that contractors don't get paid double.

My experience hasn't been the same (I'm a consultant), but I can only speak for myself.