skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's the secret: there aren't many bullshit jobs. Sure it can be hard sometimes for an individual to see how their particular cog forms a part of the overall machine, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't do something that others depend on.
'liability' & 'credit history' may or may not be the reason but it's a good justification.

In India, is it easy (or even possible) to deny an unauthorized charge on your credit card? AFAIK, this is possible only after you declare your credit card last or stolen. Any charges before that would be the customer's responsibility.

Before the above is implemented, it is important to have 'zero liability' credit cards (RBI is working on it [1]). The 'zero liability' requirement would also need a reliable credit history of consumers. Not sure if that exists in India yet.

[1] http://trak.in/tags/business/2012/01/10/rbi-hints-at-zero-li...
also any thoughts on lua or ruby
lua: lightweight
ruby: joy of coding
I do enjoy bombasticness.
Some others have provided their inputs, my one is just short: take your devices with you, all the time. Yes, that includes the quick toilet break at starbucks.

I can't remember how many times I heard total strangers asking around "can you look after my stuff quickly?". You can do that for your beach towel, but not for your devices.
NASA successfully tests engine that uses no fuel, violates the laws of physics
How they feel is irrelevant. How profitable they are is the only measure that matters for a commercial enterprise. Anyone can burn through a pile of VC with nothing to show for it at the end... Are they actually producing more?

There is no problem with my reasoning, because the world has settled on 35-40 hrs/week as being about the right balance. 100 hours doesn't work; my conjecture is that neither does 10.
Opportunity just presented itself. But it's dressed up as work.

I mean that seriously, someone can get paid very well streamlining recurring payments in India obviously. But it's going to be hard, like all things worth doing.
After a search, I see that companies need to obtain the necessary clearances from RBI (Indian or international) to charge recurring payments on credit cards. These are only granted to businesses with established track records. So, yes, a SaaS startup might not qualify for it. But as a consumer, I'm actually happy with this RBI policy.
Dissertations for Sale
You must not have worked in a huge organization. They are everywhere: people doing nothing at all, or working on projects that any fool can see will never ship.

A lot of this boils down to a very old question: why do we operate this machine we call the economy? Do we do it for our own interest, or is it an end in itself that uses us? What are we working for here? It's a question that if followed goes beyond economics and gets quite metaphysical.
Ask HN: PebbleTime epaper refresh rate improved? Or illusion due to animation?
So, I have an OCD itch of a question I could not get out of my head. Does the transition animation for Pebble Time looks smooth to you? Has the refresh rate of the colour epaper improved (I could not find any recently published specs on the colour epaper), or is it just an illusion from the cutesy transition animation? Either way, my curiosity is piqued to the max.
You can already hit these problems today. People always think about the current date, although there very valid are reasons to store future (or past) dates.

For example, if you're are a scientist you might want to calculate where planet xyz is in 100,000 years - and store that date on your computer, today.
Yeah, but then there are costs like... umm, I see that smoke alarm at a height of 4 meters above me. I need to go and get the ladder so I can change the battery.

Over here, the standard room height is 2400 mm or 2500 mm, and my house has 2780 mm. I'm happy with the extra overhead space, but there are all sorts of little things. The drywall boards actually had to be ordered separately, and the price increase is not linear. They're heavier to carry - again, not linear - so installing is more difficult. Working on the top parts needs higher scaffolding. To get to the attic, I have this factory-made foldable ladder that opens from a hatch in the ceiling and then folds out with three hinges; it's factory-made for 2500 mm room height so I had to add a 35cm piece to the bottom with another hinge so that it would reach down to the floor and be steady.
Go check your traffic figures. Far too many sites are ignoring mobile because they don't want to invest in the developer overhead to sort it out. Google recognise their traffic has gone mobile, and will continue to grow movin fwd, so to continue to serve shitty experiences at the top of the result is a competitive disadvantage. Seriously common sense stuff. Ironically go ask anyone with an Adsense account how mobile traffic is performing for them. The real estate of screen available for mobile makes adverts much less appealing, and there is even more banner blindness.
Motherfucking Website !
Jesus dude. It was just an anecdote. It's a hell of a thing to call that a "tremendous character flaw" based on like, literally no evidence other than your assumptions.
Google attacks Firefox. Asks users to switch search engine.
Why don't you read GNU manual with `man` in a terminal? (Genuine question)
I'd love to see the numbers on Haskell. I believe (and would hope) that it would fare well.
I used to think that, but experience has taught me otherwise. The buyer of services is what makes or breaks the deliverable, it is they who have the power. Sure, a competent engineer is a pre-requisite but there are situations where you simply cannot win.
I don't know about that. It'd be really easy for a credulous person to read that article and think "oh, some of my execs aren't world class yet. Guess I'd better replace them."

Yeah, once you've lost the respect of your reports (or failed to ever gain it) you can't do your job as a manager or executive, period. But that doesn't mean that great execs are born rather than made or that nobody should put any effort into developing a great manager into a new exec or a new exec into a great one, which the article seems to fallaciously suggest.
The new version looks much better to me on iPhone 6. No longer do I have to zoom in or use landscape mode to read the titles.
My biggest concern with tools in this domain is UI: there must be a native desktop GUI. Period. It must allow creating new notes, taking screenshots etc. by global keyboard shortcuts and systray icons etc. Onenote is top notch in this regard and it's sad there is no alternative in linux.
What are some examples of searches where DDG outperforms Google?
I would tend to say no, or at least admit you're just goofing off. For background time, I have a long list of articles to read that have to do with either my industry or the technologies I'm currently using.

For actual "I need to get up from the computer time", don't read Facebook. Go take a walk, or go chat with a workmate about a current problem and see where the discussion goes.
Why not send their customers a monthly bill and cancel service if the user doesn't pay? The customers just set up a recurring monthly payment in their bank.
It's like they added a percentage width to some tables and now it's "mobile." (Edit: spelling)
C++ on Windows

Microsoft Visual Studio 2012
IncrediBuild http://www.incredibuild.com

Also web development
LAMP, Expression Editor & Visual Studio, and Bluefish text editor
You make a good point and I think it's because sometimes the objective is not clear.

When you study sorting you really do it because:

1) It's a simple, frequent and clear problem that everybody understands

2) People just need to think about it for a while to figure out a correct algorithm normally O(n^2) and think about optimizations from there (that will probably still make it O(n^2)).

3) You can study different techniques to solve that problem: like divide-and-conquer (mergesort), using a data structure (heapsort), divide-and-conquer+randomization (quicksort), not going for comparisons but using the structure of the data (radixsort).

4) You can learn to apply big-O notation for efficiency and compare different algorithms

5) You can study the limits of a problem (not an algorithm) like the omega(n log(n)) limit of comparison sorts and the omega(n) limit of sorting in general).

This also happens with the less clear but also rich problem of the Minimum Spanning Tree that has 2 famous algorithm (Prim and Kruskal) that can be implemented with different data structures having a great impact in efficiency.

So the real problem is that sometimes teachers just focus on teaching sorting but don't explain (and sometimes they don't have it clear either) that it's not sorting but a framework of mind what you want to give them. Sorting is normally already implemented in the popular and not so popular programming languages libraries.
> Credit card fraud raises national debt, makes your economy reliant on derivatives such as insurance and in the end you fall down.

That's not how credit cards work. Credit card fraud is never shouldered by the country, only the banks and stores that fall victim to it. There's no insurance involved, it's a cost of accepting credit cards.

> Also SaaS has nothing to do with recurring CC. Don't you use postpaid services in India? Generate an invoice and give someone a week to pay. I mean if it's good enough for other service providers, why not for SaaS? Just use a shorter payment deadline.

A big factor of having a successful SaaS product is reducing friction and making it scale. Invoicing for an inexpensive reoccurring service does not scale and is a pain for both sides of the transaction.
There is so much wrong with this post. I'll follow your ordering.

1. Program WHATEVER you want. We can't make assumptions about what drives you. If popularity is your biggest drive, then use it. Don't ignore what drives you because you think one way is more honorable than the next. Do what you need to do. No one cares why you do something if you do a good job.

2. Fine.

3. Anyone who judges on stars is normal. They may also be an idiot. But in most cases, stars WILL impress your prospective employers. This may not be a GOOD thing, but it is true. It is just how humans think. Go with the tide not against it, but certainly, the popularity ratings are not all important. Use them to help you advertise yourself but don't rely on them solely.

4. If you are a beginner, there is NOTHING you have out there a prospective employer would not benefit from seeing. Most people I see starting out have so little. It doesn't matter if the project is unfinished. Most projects ARE unfinished. If you just came out of school your prospective employer should be understanding of your priorities.

5. Fine.

Now onto the next list, but a general note first. WRITE WHATEVER YOU WANT. Our entire economy is based around survival of the fittest (for the most part). Create the next best * (language, OS, api, db, etc) or don't, you still learned a hell of a lot (I hope). Jumping into things with which you are unfamiliar is AWESOME. You WILL be rewarded.

Anyway, the next list:

1. As with everything else, if you want to do this, do it. You will learn about lexing, parsing (because God knows most people can't tell the two apart), ASTs, the difference between a compiler and an interpreter. At the very least you will be the more intelligent voice at Your Generic Job when talking about Python's awkward scoping.

2. Write WHATEVER you want. Now, truthfully, you probably won't get far. But if you learn what a kernel is, what a boot sector is, etc, you will be far ahead of most other programmers out there. Will this be helpful in your career? Probably not. But WHO cares! You'll learn some good C skills at least.

3. Write WHATEVER you want! Honestly a simple database is probably the simplest of the three mentioned topics (language, OS). New databases are always being written.

Ultimately, the point is always that although you probably won't beat the existing implementations, you WILL learn a lot about how they work. There is nothing more helpful (IMHO) when learning a new topic/api/etc than writing it from scratch. Move on when you understand the concepts. Certainly, don't use your project in production probably, but it doesn't mean you didn't learn anything!

4. Fine.

5. Fine.

Point is, these lists come off as incredibly narrow-minded. A beginner should do what interests them. While their projects probably won't take off, these are the most important things to show to employers down the road. This will demonstrate your interest in CS, your ability to take on a challenging project, and for crying out loud it gives you code samples. Email me if you have questions.

/rant
Agreed. His blog is good too:

http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/
>on the other hand his explanation to why this happens is laughably silly.

What's so laughably silly about it?
It didn't crash my Firefox. It did run my CPU load averages up and started sucking up memory and ran real slow to the point of non responsiveness for 10 minutes. I had to kill it manually, though. Not impressed.
What went wrong? And what did you end up using instead, and how did it handle the previous what went wrong better?
tl;dr former heroine user was good for a couple of years, being productive and successful, relapsed and robbed a bank, executed unsuccessfully, committed suicide by police.

Who knew, good and smart people can be totally ruined by drugs?
Can you go into more depth? Was it because of the number of users?
I second the request. Some things that makes it specially hard to read on iPhone:

1) It wastes a lot of horizontal space with white paddings on both sides. It may be a stylistic decision but takes valuable space that could be used to show more words in a line, leading to less lines
2) There is no right padding in the text lines, the text touches the right side of the inner container.

All in all it would be better to simply serve the Desktop version, maybe with an slightly increased font size so it is more readable.

And please don't make the same mistake many sites (Slashdot among them) make: trying to ram an ill thought bad designed new version on their faithful userbase just for the sake of change and novelty.

There are things to improve but the best way to determine it is to actually test it beforehand in the same environment it will be used in production. These changes were definitively not tested on iPhone's Safari and it shows.
And then you would of course use a toolbox (or make one) that supports large dates, or even work with other time units (ie. D)
You're happy to have no SaaS startups? Do you think there might be an alternative solution, that doesn't through the baby out with the bath water?
I always found this a strange concept - I had to give examples of when I displayed leadership skills when applying for jobs fresh out of university. I personally find if I am the most knowledgeable on a subject then I will natural assume a kind of authoritative role on it. Otherwise I am happy to sit back (not saying I do nothing, but I will let other people take of the "leadership" role).

People who consider themselves "natural leaders" (usually pushy loud types) are unlikely to be the best person to be leading many, if not most tasks.
Before There Were Stars the unlikely heroes that made starlight possible
My default search engine is Google and for the last couple of weeks I've seen that box several times. It hasn't bothered me enough yet to try figure out what is going wrong, but it does feel pretty silly.
As beautiful as it is, it's also completely unusable for anyone with accessibility options. There's not even a text-only version.
The author is talking about broken builds, not broken tests.
What traditional cable based mice

Logitech G9x is the best mouse I've ever used.

I didn't even realize how good it is until I went on a quest to find an equally good wireless mouse. Let's just say I'm still wire-bound and still looking...

Precision is top-notch, mouse-wheel is great, weight is adjustable, and if you prefer narrow mice (I do) then you can remove the grip-cover[1].

I'd pay a pretty penny for a wireless version of it, but Logitech insists on using different (imho inferior) designs for their wireless mice.

[1] http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FodVs0sQQkQ/TcvJKMXYuaI/AAAAAAAAAK...
Well for starters your mind isn't physical.

And if you think about it, stressing your body makes it stronger. That's why working out builds muscles.
Love the idea! Please just decrease the font sizes a bit? They're waaaay too big to read comfortably in landscape mode on an iPhone 5s. In portrait mode they're a bit larger than necessary and the wide gutters mean line length is too short for easy reading.
No, I vastly prefer the mobile site on my phone.
Really cool experiment but there're some issues:

- SEO sucks.
- You're killing the Web semantic :-)
Lots of strawmen. I talked about burnout and exhaustion, not stress.
I'm running Ubuntu on a Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus (http://www.samsung.com/global/ativ/ativbook9plus.html) with no issues and battery life is good. Nearly all media keys worked out of the box, as well as wifi.
Are the comments rendered differently on the mobile site, or simply the homepage? For what it's worth, I'm still getting the desktop version of the comments on Firefox for Android[0].

[0] User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Mobile; rv36.0) Gecko/36.0 Firefox/36.0)
Leaking what data?
cautiously optimistic. keep iterating..
Programming language uses JPEGs as code
Coffee it is!
Yes, this is a workaround that is not directly supported by any payment gateway in India so far, which means you have to implement the entire thing yourself.
Interesting, sure, but so is math if you're not just performing arithmetic or memorizing equations without knowing what they mean, which many mistake for it. Why would linguistics be any more "useful" to a student to have their 12 years of math replaced with? Instead of replacing math, replace the kind of nonsense in English courses here with linguistics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8812388
> allergy like feeling for EMF

No such thing.
Dear Google please drop your old Internet explorer support
Dear google please drop your old internet explorer support.

You know the f*ing problem...

As a web developers we're tired to write useless fix for this shit. So please drop internet explorer support and save our times.

Thanks
As far as the noise factor goes, the type of Cherry MX switches you get makes a big difference. Blues have the most tactile feedback but are loud. But I use Browns at work and they have good feedback while not being much louder than a "normal" keyboard.

I use the Ultimate (no key labels) of this DAS model: http://www.daskeyboard.com/daskeyboard-4-professional/. It's a fantastic keyboard, but yes it's more expensive. I found it was easily worth the price.
> Can you imagine where half the SaaS startups will be without recurring credit card subscriptions?

In Singapore or the United States. This is the route they take to avoid this problem.

> I really don't think it's about customer security

It is. Even with the security involved you frequently see people responding to the `You won a lottery from Coca Cola` and getting defrauded.

> Who are the right people to contact who can do something about this?

You're asking for a framework that would benefit SaaS startups. Fair enough. This will take time. Recurring billing is important, but what about contracts ? Did you know that you need a signed document for each customer that a SaaS company engages with in India ? It needs to be signed physically. Credit card charges are only the first step. From a broader perspective starting a company from here is still hell.

You either use a 3rd party provider that can set up recurring billing and move the money into an Indian bank account (like 2CO) or move the base of operations to Singapore / US so you can set that up. India is not startup friendly and this will be the case for some time to come. There is very little incentive to make things easier for the little fish.
Sure, I have a number of projects I'll probably mess around with. Will probably let you know via github if anything goes sour. Or if it's amazing as well!
To put the modern hackathon ethos into perspective, simply compare it to the demoscene.

Suddenly, the title of "hacker" that so many pride themselves on starts to feel a bit generous. Especially in context of simple CRUD apps and API mashups.
Again, burnout and exhaustion have morphed into "stress" in your counter argument. I sure you could relate pretty much anything negative to some kind of "stress", which means anything negative is now a mental health issue according to your logic.
Here is a list of URLs used by the NSA to install malware on PCs worldwide
I kinda like the mobile version, it seems to have a bit to go, but not bad.
Harness the power of PuppetDB with Ansible’s dynamic inventory
The padding around the content on the page is a bit excessive.
> You're free to leave any time and do something else,

Unfortunately the loudmouths will remember this come review time, and obtain their vengeance.

Flat companies seem to drive people to do highly-visible hero work to ensure they can garner enough positive reviews, rather than the quiet but essential work that leads to 'dunno what he did all year, requires improvement'
Famous Games Hijacked for Ransom Through TeslaCrypt Ransomware
You're telling someone with a serious medical condition to think the conditions effects away. That's not how it works.
Please label this as 1999, April Fool's Day .
Private browsing mode and deleting your local history doesn't stop Google from keeping its own log of your searches (and any other Google services (gmail, youtube), and pages with google-analytics, and any page with AdSense, etc)

Google clearly uses these logs to "customize" your search results, even when you check the placebo button to "disable" your history in the google account options.

Not having an account (or deleting local history) doesn't matter much, as they reconstruct a PK from all the entropy your browser leaks. (see their recent "we already ID your browser" reCAPTCHA update that no longer shows a scrambled image)
For sure. If it was a proper site I would follow the Google Ajax SEO Spec. https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/...
In this context they're synonymous. A broken build is defined by the tests failing.
well you've gotta admit at least that Microsoft did in fact suck :)

For me.. cyberpunk was cool because of Neil Stephenson, William Gibson, and uhh ShadowRun.. Somehow this meshed with the rave scene and I guess also 'industrial' music which was slowly becoming cool.. but for a while.. it wasn't quite there yet and being a hacker had negative coolness connotations kind of like being into MTG or D&D.

I never thought about the release of the movie "the Matrix" as being the pivot moment after which the consensus view of hackerdom coolness shifted (at least in highschools across america), but you're probably right.
It's a big improvement for me on an iPhone 5.
FWIW font size is ideal for me.
"FB is just a php script" was just a joke :)
E-ink/e-paper displays can actually handle much higher refresh rates than what you traditionally see on things like e-readers. They're usually just programmed not to because it's not necessary to their function and it saves battery even more.

There's been quite a few advances in the field which would probably allow for higher refresh rates with less impact on the battery that would make things like the platforms they show in the video's work just fine. I doubt you could watch a movie or play a FPS on it though.
The problem with that -> there is no well defined criteria for what "established track records".