skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was fine before already if you are using a browser with nice reflow. I am not sure what exactly changed but the front-page now seems to have extra padding on the sides making it annoyingly narrow. Same for /threads. /item pages are still their good old self.
This is how Gary Tarolli designed first 3DFX chip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU
It's not like people will stop getting an internet connection. They will still have it. They will open other websites as well. The traffic from a particular website is not significant anyway so I don't think they will go to/prefer websites with free access only. Facebook right now has no competition, they would have used it anyway and it something better comes along people won't care about the few MBs/month it costs them.

ISPs have already been giving free WhatsApp plans and all, nothing changed for telegram et al I suppose.
Github does render asciidoc using asciidoctor. What is missing in that that is possible in Markdown?
3. Found your own company and do your own thing.

I realize that this is news.ycombinator.com, but it's really sad that everything needs to end in entrepreneurism, startups, and money.

In hacker culture, the hack used to be the end, not money or power.

The Theo Deraadts and Werner Kochs are the real hackers of this world. They could have worked for anyone from Google to Facebook and have big paychecks. Instead, they accepted having more modest means to do what they love: hacking on code and being in a position where one can uphold their ethics (and the hacker ethic).
I guess from US you see that as something negative; but from outside this culture, it actually seems to be one of the best american qualities, to be honest. You're really lucky if you don't know what's it like to live in a country where all the poor people are certain that things will never change for the best and therefore do absolutely nothing about it.
Mmm, I didn't get 1) from the article at all. Rather, I got "men and women can be equally aggressive, but women are punished (socially & professionally) more for it than men". Re: 2) -- not the whole article was about gender. It was about the negative effects of having an argumentative workplace overall.
Sorry for the late reply—I wanted to give you a serious answer and didn't have time earlier.

The criteria for "substantive" are what the HN guidelines (along with https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html) say about which stories are on topic: intellectually interesting (as opposed to sensational) and so on. HN's culture is well-enough established by now that I think most community members can probably agree, not of course on what interests each of us personally, but on a working set of candidate stories that roughly fit the criteria. That's our hypothesis, anyhow.

HN sees perhaps a thousand new stories a day. Most aren't "intellectually interesting" in HN's sense (i.e. gratifying intellectual curiosity), and the weeds have grown too thick for the upvote system alone to reliably surface the potential gems. To comb through /newest looking for them has become too much work.

Some interesting stories (again, "interesting" in the HN sense) do fine under the upvote system. Breaking news, stories about fashionable technologies, and anything controversial reliably attract upvotes. But the quieter and deeper submissions are often not immediately recognizable. Those deserve closer attention than they were getting, so we've been experimenting with different approaches to finding them.

In the spirit of "do things that don't scale", it's mostly us trying different things manually for now, but what we're looking for is a mechanism that can be opened to anyone willing to put in the effort. The upvote system will work exactly as it always has, but we're hoping to add a new one that complements it and compensates for its weaknesses.

Since it requires significant effort to look through the story stream hunting for out-of-the-way pieces, one idea (my favorite) is to make this a new way of earning karma on the site. But first we have to find something repeatable that will work.
Designing for the Reading Experience (2013)
Yes, I think that the idea that a hackathon can be "won" is silly too.
question-answer.tar.gz contains JAR files like Javelin.jar, which code vanished from the public web.

Ephyra also contains some components that have been adopted from the JAVELIN system., though the link is dead:
https://web.archive.org/web/20081203004045/http://durazno.lt... and it seems there exists no archived source code of it. https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://durazno.lti.cs.cmu.edu/... (not archived). Javelin was used in the TREC competition, and there a lot of papers about it e.g. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~llita/papers/lita.javelin-trec2005.pd...

I wrote the maintainer of Ephyra an email.
The keyboard can't get OTA updates unless it can communicate with the update server. That means it has either WiFi or 3G or the tablet gets the files and uploads them to the keyboard. Probably the latter.
Cisco AnyConnect, while a commercial implementation, is incredibly hard to filter by firewalls (including those in China) because it works over HTTPS (and very few people/countries outright block HTTPS), while IPSec is fairly detectable.

I agree that while VPNs are painful to setup, the results are worth it and can really simplify access to protected systems, such as not even exposing services like SSH to the public network. Commercial hardware VPN routers have a very good track record--avoid software VPNs if you can (or use dd-wrt if cost is an issue). What's more is AWS also supports connecting to a VPN router. It may be worth it to co-lo a VPN router and access protected assets (including AWS) via a VPN router (you can of course serve public facing traffic directly from AWS).
As @jauco said try Asciidoctor - http://asciidoctor.org/

In addition to default asciidoctor style, there are other themes available - http://themes.asciidoctor.org/preview/ (See bottom right for theme switcher).

You can also take a look at Pro Git book styles - http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2 which was written in asciidoc - https://github.com/progit/progit2
Its these damn nodejs script kiddies
That's just basic utilitarianism. What exactly are you objecting to? That 2 dust specks in 2 people's eyes isn't exactly twice as bad as 1 dust speck?
Ask HN: What are the top 8 things startups are using Machine Learning for?
Hi! I am studying ML, and I want to build a portfolio of practical projects so that I could get a job in one of the Silicon Valley startups. Ideally it would be several websites that could demonstrate some of the most useful algorithms.

What are some of the most common practical tasks that startups apply ML to?

What kind of projects would be good to have in my portfolio?
While the algorithm course at my university consisted mostly of calculating complexities and was much more difficult in general, there is also Sedgewicks' Algorithms book, which covers many of the topics in this course. So "algorithms" is certainly the correct term.
no, but you need the type of thinking that goes into predicting/implementing/evaluating/debugging the performance of a sorting algorithm (unless you are doing some kind of simple CRUD app for years, which is a perfectly fine way to make a living)
Never had a problem with it, both on WinXP from 2001 to 2008 and with Ubuntu since then. I never changed the default settings. All just worked. They've been all HP laptops.
The github wiki software supports asciidoc and many other formats - https://github.com/gollum/gollum
You contrast "lazy poor" (that support the status quo) with "busy poor" (of which one in a million manages to leave the poor class).

The quote contrasts "known poor" (exploited proletariat) with "delusional poor" (temporarily embarrased millionaires).

Those are orthogonal: there are enough temporarily embarrased millionaires out there that will never "make it" while self-aware exploited proles can be quite the force.
Hey there, one of the young guys here, trying to weasel my way into a job, I have a few questions for you If you don't mind.

You said this:

More likely I am not impressed because your code is terrible and I am shocked that it took you so many weeks and commits to do what you would be expected to finish in 1 day at our office.

I have a github account, and I use it to host a few of my projects. Right now I'm working on writing a operating system. It's been somewhat successful so far, but as operating systems are a deep and complex field, and I'm definitely still learning, there's a lot of embarrassing mistakes and bad code throughout the git log. For example, I just recently learned how to properly write makefiles , and a day on my project was just on writing a somewhat simple in hindsight makefile (because I was reading the man page at the same time). Should I just not host said projects on my github?

Also, when you look at a github profile, what do you look at? Asking because I can probably get more followers if I make more node.js whatever, but I really like my C and I tend to go for more challenging projects then popular ones. Is that a bad idea?
I too am a CS student attending a university that particularly flaunts their levels of startup incubator availability. Ignore them, do your own thing is what I found works for me.
There are two types of hackathons: The Sun and the OpenBSD type. Most of what is talked here seems to be more of the former, but that term can mean two entirely different things.

For starters, the OpenBSD one can't be "won".
Welcome to the future of CS. As technical fields cross into the phase of commonly understood knowledge, the ability to exploit imbalances rises. Opportunity exists everywhere, but we as insiders with our vast technical knowledge are distracted by our awe of capability. We fail to exploit the low hanging fruit that a capitalist might immediately sense. We would rather pursue deeper knowledge within our domain to be masters of our craft.

People selling cell phone mods don't usually know anything about electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, or manufacturing; yet they somehow can pull millions of dollars of profits out of plastic cases and LED mods simply by dangling a few slices of pizza in front of a hungry college student.

Point is, exploitation is everywhere -- don't be exploited, and computer science is at the stage where it's simple enough to follow some rules and slap a few APIs together to build a decent mash-up that's never existed before... that a fraction of people are willing to pay for, and "make bank bro".

I hate it. It's not just you feeling this frustration. Just see the writing on the wall, and know that app dev / pipelining of data feeds is going to be as "easy" as programming a VCR in the 90's.
Open Letter to Mr. Cook (Apple Computers)
This is the same as the net neutrality issue. Some of the animals are more equal than the others.
> I really wish we could replace our 12 years of mathematical education, which I think is overall quite useless[2], with 12 years of linguistic education

I wonder why it is that people can never just say "you, know, X is quite important and maybe deserves more of our attention" and instead have to go all bombastic and pretend "X is the most important thing in the world and our modern society couldn't exist without it".
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9205798.

If we keep this, then we might do as you suggest. My worry is that the community might be divided on what counts as good. But if users mostly agree, we're happy to follow.
Last summer when I was an intern I totally bought the hackathon culture. Then I went to one and was absolutely appalled at what goes on inside hackathons. Big talks about the next cool app, and raising money from VC coz I went to Y school and know Z. One of the apps that won was a chat app for hackers in 2014. There were some good people too, but they were hard to find and very few. Since then I have started moving away from the so-called hacker culture and just ignore hackathons. Fundamentally the whole concept of hackathon just sounds bad to me now. You code and don't sleep or sleep in some random place at random time. I would take good sleep any day over learning some fancy new technology. I would prefer hackathons to be more where a set of people show something interesting they have built and then people can discuss merits/demerits and start contributing to them. Sprints of open source projects comes to mind. The likes scikit-learn under python for example.
90% for automation
Yes, its all flat and community driven ... until one day you come to work and get informed by Gabe ALL of your team is being fired, with no warning.
Gaffer on Games – The Networked Physics Data Compression Walk-Off
Nope, there are ready-made libraries for every fairly common language out there.
Well, I made an initial decision to keep Red Stamp Mail very affordable. It wasn't built to make money, but rather to help people. But I did not want to make it totally free for various reasons - I wanted it to at least cover its operational costs.

So the subscription price is very low - $18 per YEAR. This means that most marketing channels are simply too expensive (customer acquisition cost > customer lifetime value).

I gave Google Adwords a very serious try, but the results were unimpressive. Other guerilla-ish marketing attempts also did not succeed.

So basically the most effective channel is ranking high in search results for relevant terms (e.g. "email for seniors").
Facebook limits number of messages you can send. After passing some secret threshold, your profile would be put in 'restricted' mode.
As a member of the team that "won" that hackathon, I agree.

Interestingly, one of my least-favorite parts about "doing well" at hackathons like these is that I don't get the opportunity to go around to other tables and see what everyone has else made, and talk with them about it. Sometimes, really cool projects and people go under-noticed (I've been there as well).
My personal experience mirrors that of OP's, recently things seem to be getting worse. I am also thinking of switching back to Windows. When I first switched a few years ago it was an amazing experience, so I am apprehensive of the theory of it gaining mass.
> on the backs of those working harder than ever

As a software engineer — no I don't. Sometimes I feel bad about earning a lot of money doing what I love, but at the same time, I know for sure that I don't exploit anyone, and that I got where I am only thanks to my own work. Yes, it's unfair that the world needs more software engineers than artists right now, and if I loved art more than code but that doesn't mean that I exploit anyone.
2012 is calling and skiing for it's domain name back

Love it :-)
But even the 11" models cant replace tablets. Imagine a scenario, you are travelling in a train or a bus-you cant open the 11" laptop/netbook, while traveeling.
And as far as the debate about tablets replacing desktop goes, that might be possible when tablets get stronger/better processors
Easily twice? 1 minute of Googling found already this, suggesting the true number would be mere fraction of that:

http://www3.cancer.gov/intra/dce-old/pdfs/ciabp.pdf

If someone knows better sources, please do post!
Indeed. My 16 MHz Atari could handle homepages just fine. My 1.8 GHz laptop has troubles now and then and we should not speak about my 2 year old quad-core phone.
It's getting harder and harder to buy traditional high quality mouse and keyboards for PC. Microsoft and Logitech used to produce them.

But the look at the current portfolio of Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/mice and http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/keyboards

No traditional keyboard with cable and normal key-layout, no normal mouse like the IntelliMouse or Comfort Mouse 6000 (discontinued because of firmware lag bug).

And Logitech portfolio: http://www.logitech.com/en-us/mice-pointers/mice and http://www.logitech.com/en-us/keyboards

Logitech discontinued their best cable based mices, MX500 and MX518 too.

Notebooks used to have good keyboards too, like the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad T40/T60/T400/T410 series. But recent notebooks from Lenovo//HP/Apple/etc. all have these flat keys :(

What traditional cable based keyboards/mices and business notebooks with normal keys should one buy? The above mentioned products are already so rare one that Amazon.com lists them with a ca. $200 price tag (they used to be reasonable priced in $20-$30 range).
Now Available Cydia for iPad Air
When I built a new house with a plan builder (3BR + home office), the cost to go from the default 2400mm (8') ceilings to 2700mm (9') was just under AU$10k.
Best buzzwords in tech
You can ask a leading question or series of questions about what bad thing(s) might happen down the road as a result of what they did - which could hopefully lead to them having a greater understanding of the 'why' of the best practice, and less likely to repeat it in the future.
I don't know about you, but I could maybe keep that pace 3 days. Maybe 5. But 2.5 months?
Has HN's CSS been updated for mobile?
It looks like some CSS for small screens has been added? It makes the homepage more usable in portrait, but too big in landscape mode, which is how I usually read it. It looked fine (same as desktop) last night.
Thank you so much for the pointer to the git-scm-book (in the context of asciidoc/pdf output etc). Sadly the pdf-version, isn't exactly well laid out. It suffers from similar issues that a lot of html-to-pdf-based tools (although I assume it's sgml-to-pdf in this case?) -- horrible breaks, and it also "feels" wrong wrt. some spacing/etc. Generally standard LaTeX will look (much) better than this without tweaking, IMNHO.

On the other hand, they also have an epub style sheet, and it appears (a little oddly) that the layout of the epub is better than the pdf.

FWIW most "heavily optimized" custom LaTeX styles I've come across tend to feel like being slapped in the face with MS Word -- and I think I've yet to encounter any that actually improve on the "standard" styles in any meaningful way (with possible exception of the APA style, which is ugly, but as it has to conform to APA, it's ugly by design. And looks better than most other APA conforming styles I've seen).

Still, having a starting point makes the job much easier -- so this is a great resource.
For "utilizing introverts" a mailing list is good enough.

"utilizing".. fucking clowns.
You most likely do. The hardware you use is probably manufactured under much more severe conditions that under those you work. And what about the raw materials required to produce that hardware? Some of those are probably mined under much more harsh conditions.

The same goes for the clothes you wear, the food you eat etc. (though, to be fair it is easier to consciously buy better food and clothes today than hardware).

I often felt bad working in the software business because of the issues with hardware manufacturing. You can buy locally produced clothes and food, and you can often figure out under what conditions they are made under. With hardware, not so much.
Blog post about motivation among programmers
An alternative would be like what `LaTex` does, a `\usepackage` or similar directive that declares in the source what extension this document requires. Maybe a central repository like CTAN as well.
I wrote a short-ish blog post about motivation. Is that the case for you as well that you suffer from motivational peaks in your work? What do you do about it?
The best approach here is multi-layered with each layer providing another level of protection.

The best way to think about it is to start with the protection of the end-user device, then work on protecting the access from that device to your external network, internal network etc and finally protection of 3rd party services you use as a company.

For the end-user device the important things are probably a secure password manager, full disk encryption, local firewall, antivirus, requiring a password to log in and locking the screen when you leave the machine.

We then move on to access to your external network (i.e. the user facing portion of your service which probably includes admin only tools). A good way to protect this is by requiring strong password + two factor authentication + access from a whitelisted range of IPs. The whitelisted range of IPs is either your VPN network or your network of ssh server hosts used as SOCKS proxy hosts.

To protect your internal network I think the best practice is to require all access to be via a limited set of bastion hosts again either over your VPN or over SSH.

Finally for all 3rd party services you should were possible require two factor auth be enabled and also educate your users on best practices around password strength etc.

Once you have all this setup the next layer is automated / human monitoring. This becomes easier if you require all elevated privilege access to happen via ssh socks proxies and bastion hosts because you can just implement monitoring of new /failed logins to those. You can the setup manual and automated rules to block users. For example, N failed logins block the source IP, login for an unexpected country manually disable the users public key until you verify it was them etc.

Overall the key idea is to help your users stay secure while still making it convenient for them to do there work.
> What exactly are you objecting to?

That some arbitrarily minimal amount of subjective pain can be presumed to be actually distinguishable from the general background unpleasantness of being human in the first place.

Edit: Rephrased to remove gibberish resulting from temporary brain/keyboard disconnect.
The really funny part of HPMOR is that, while it was intended to demonstrate rationalism, what I got out of it was that rationalism doesn't actually work.

I'm unwilling to post spoilers, which makes this unfairly undiscussable, but the meaning of the original prophecy did not--could not--come down to rationalism and could not for reasons that were repeated a few times through the fic. I can't tell if this was intentional on Yudkowsky's part, and I don't really care, since it really changes nothing about everything else.

For the record, though, when I disparage utilitarianism, I promise it isn't just "Eliezer's".
Oh it has FMRI results.

I wonder what dead salmon think of high ceilings? ( http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf )
Ask HN: What is wrong with Reserve Bank of India?
This is a bit of rant but I'm also wondering if there is anything we (the Indian tech community) can do about it?

If you're an Indian startup, I'm sure you must know that the Reserve Bank of India has the worst policies when it comes to charging a credit card.

1) In India, you cannot create recurring subscriptions as the RBI prohibits charging the credit card automatically. Not one Indian payment processor (I've talked to a many) gives you the option to create recurring subscriptions. Can you imagine where half the SaaS startups will be without recurring credit card subscriptions?

2) Add to that, Paypal to Paypal transfer within India is prohibited by RBI. Why? Because certain people used to evade tax by purchasing goods directly with their Paypal balance. So, instead of catching the tax evaders the RBI found it easier to ban the whole thing. They could have made it mandatory for Paypal to report every transaction (as they require a a PAN card) but banning it altogether was easier, I guess?

3) Even big companies like Uber had to recently discontinue Credit card purchases because of these inane credit card policies of RBI [1]

4) I really don't think it's about customer security (since the rest of the world seems fine with it) but rather some "Babu" type mentality which is to ban the whole thing rather than make the efforts to make it work securely.

Anyway, enough about the problem. Now what can we do about it?

I know Modi really wants us to "make in India" and wants to promote the IT industry. Who are the right people to contact who can do something about this?

[1] http://qz.com/296483/indias-credit-card-rules-just-took-the-ease-out-of-uber/