skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Still learning is not a barrier to finding the ideas of any particular person antiquated. Look where we are with wearable technology and integration into every part of our lives, and the applications this access has in areas like medicine, then feel free to imagine this ageing pioneer of open software standing in the corner shouting "no no no it has my data it's evil I don't want to be monitored". While he would have an entirely valid point it defeats the entire goal of the technogy.

>and then you arrogantly...
Maybe, and that's your opinion, but sadly you responded to such arrogance with condescending 'advice' attacking my perspective instead of proposing where either I or he could have changed out points.
He may have over promised but his games were generally actually released.
Although I see where your comment is coming from, I think I should nitpick that the posts from actual startups backed by YC cannot be voted on nor have comments enabled. So unless they have the courtesy of showing up in an "unofficial" post, you cannot actually ask any questions, hard or otherwise. I wish I could link to it, but the best I can do is a screenshot[1].

More to the point: call me negative, but I think that fomenting a "post and run" style will lead to a situation in which you find it increasingly harder to talk to the actual creators. I'd rather not see "send link to HN" become yet another item on the self-promotion checklist.

[1] https://imgur.com/q7CsY0U
Did you know that yombinator.com o ly allows you to transmit comments on HackerNews posts, subject to heavy moderstion, not free and open internet speech?
Yeah, I realized that in retrospect. Thanks for not being harsh about it!
People take medications for paranoia not just because they want to stop being paranoid, but because they experience terrible anxiety, depression, or other bad feelings alongside/because of the paranoia.

You can be "paranoid" and healthy, if your paranoia doesn't affect your well-being or happiness, and/or if your paranoia is justified.
But the only value is in the comments where stross explains his workflow and explains why Word is broken. This shitty article fails to provide any information that can't be got from Twitter.
The problem is scope.

TFA is nice. Maybe mandatory when you're providing a service that passes a certain threshold?

But that permission obviously isn't the right answer. FB should ask for permissions to read _all_ SMS to make TFA via SMS a tiny bit more comfortable?

No. TFA solutions exist. Google Authenticator (I wouldn't trust Google with anything, but that's "open" as far as I know) or the Yubico aequivalent are perfectly fine choices for T/HOTP. If you want to send SMS instead (why??), let the user enjoy their platform's copy/paste support to give you the code.

There is not a single reasonable argument, why Facebook (or.. any. Seriously: I cannot think of ONE reason) should be able to read your text messages.

Bringing up TFA is probably (hey, not my native language, I certainly never joined a debating group or whatnot) a failure to argue the point and has a nice latin name or something. Maybe about a true of false Scotsman or what do I know..

If I say "FB shouldn't read texts" that has no relation to "FB should not implement TFA". Nor is it reasonable to imply that they cannot, without that permission.
Rules for Developing Safety Critical Code (NASA) [pdf]
Base64 encoding is such a useful tool. I used it to transfer binary over IRC once.
It need to be reiterated until it becomes the norm.
Public Service Announcement
Yeah I have to agree too, regardless of the statistic it felt like an antiquated joke made by a redneck.

Edit: oh... 2005, it is antiquated.
Fascinating and excellent story. I was originally "eye rolling" at the diatribe against death, but I changed my mind when I realized how few people really have different and thought provoking opinions on what we think about the status quo. The rationality of the argument got past my original response, in time.
This looks similar to the "IPv6 over Social Networks" RFC, published 2009-04-01:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5514
I didn't know that infrastructure was free to build and maintain. I wonder why WorldCom and Global crossing went bankrupt, if they had no expenses.
How the PayPal Mafia Redefined Success in Silicon Valley
Type gmail, hit ctrl+enter, and you get to "www.gmail.com". You'll save the entire round trip to google, rendering time, and a click.
Type gmail, hit ctrl+enter, and you get to "www.gmail.com". You'll save the entire round trip to google, rendering time, and a click.

Personally, I use firefox, so I just type "ne<enter>" to get to "news.ycombinator.com". Its history-based autocompletion is simply perfect.
I apologize for being critical, but that piece is extremely ignorant of what China is actually aiming to do.

Were the city builds part of economic stimulus? Yes, of course.

However China also has a goal to move 250-350 mm citizens into urban living by 2025.

Here's a 2009 report on the subject:

http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/urbanization/preparing_for_...

Without being rude, my link is substantially more weighty / less noisy than yours.
I do this too, and I also overuse the phrase "I speculate" to tag when I'm, well, speculating, I wish other people did too because too often people unintentionally present their speculations as fact
It depends what you mean by work, doesn't it?

I'm quite willing to accept that the value I instinctively place on work and, to a lesser degree, success has a large societal component. When I try to evaluate myself, I cannot avoid those values, and it doesn't help that my predisposition to anxiety emotionally magnifies any idea of not doing something useful with my life, of wasting time and makes it difficult for me to ever be truly relaxed if I feel like I'm in such a situation. That's been the dominant emotion when I think about my day job since I first started having day jobs some four years ago - anxiety.

And it's pretty arbitrary, isn't it? A common justification or explanation of caring about success is that it improves one's chances of being important and remembered. But I am not important; I hope to accomplish something interesting enough in life that people will remember me for time to come, but it's very unlikely to happen, and if I consider that there are ways to optimize for memorability - careers more associated with fame, or writing - that I am not taking advantage of, and that I don't mind that at all, I can see that that has nothing to do with my real emotional goals. I value work not as a means to any end, but because I've internalized it as an end in itself.

Even people who spend money to get buildings named after them - are they doing it to be remembered, or just because leaving one's name on things is part of our societal narrative of success, and doing it themselves makes their self-narrative better track that one?

But... then there are my side projects. The ones that even if I had the capability to work on full time, I wouldn't, because they don't seem important enough in the long run (there the anxiety creeps up again) - yet that I like no less for it. When I think about doing them as side projects, the associated emotions are pleasure, personal fulfillment, and connection. I value the intellectual stimulation I get out of them; I value being able to prove to myself my ability to complete them (which is a different, more idiosyncratic and egotistical emotion than the desire to matter); I value being able to help people, if the project is used by others, and to socially engage with them. I even value the feeling of being (mentally) exhausted after giving the thing my all, very similar to the feeling of having given a physical activity, say skiing, my all.

I think those desires are more intrinsic than the desire to work. Inherently those projects are so similar to work; indeed, I'm lucky enough to be able to perform for my job almost the same activities (reverse engineering, coding) I like to do by myself. But I think they are anti-work, because when I pop a project off the personal stack and onto the work stack, I can't help but think about it very differently. It grows all sorts of context that didn't exist before.

But at least it's similar.
> I follow this advice because I've found from experience that often there is a good reason, or at least _a_ reason, that I don't see.

Exactly. I pulled in devs from two teams recently to discuss confusing modelling of domain objects on one end of our app vs. the other end, as my team were trying to deal with both. The naming involved was completely contradictory, which always makes fitting a system into your head so much harder when you have to mentally translate.

Turns out that each team had very valid reasons for modelling the entities as they did - the front-end team implemented the entities as understood by the business guys who would be using the GUI to configure them, and the other implemented the entities as understood by the API spec they were ultimately being transmitted over.

The initial response of "this is so dumb" was very easy and very wrong. Much of my personal development as a dev has been learning to suppress that initial dismissive response when encountering 'bad' code, instead asking why the code is as it is.

There's always a bit of a fundamental attribution error[1] in "your code is awful" discussions with devs.

(Although I'd say that this points to the issues that can arise from having two teams implement two separate parts of a business process.)

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
Isn't that just the hiring posts? YC companies do regular posts as well which can get comments.

To be fair, you're right post and run is a bad concept, but a lot of that happens already and its simply downvoted before it ever makes it close to the frontpage.
> "What are they taking from you without your consent?"

Most people don't understand the privacy settings nor do they comprehend the ToS (because the reading-skill level required is too high). So what does 'consent' actually mean in this context?

I feel you're being completely disingenuous in your comments here, so I guess you'd probably just blame the user for not educating themselves.
I'm amazed at the variety of clearly ignorant responses that the user is getting.

He's actually better off than those who are answering giberish - at least he knows he's ignorant on the subject (which is actually a good thing, compared to being misinformed).
I agree with the spirit of the parent comment, but do those examples make sense?
I had the same reaction as you, but then I skipped to the end where he said that mathematicians call this a Clifford algebra[0], and with that it all made sense. I agree with jacobolus that mathematicians are clearly not the target audience of this paper, so the mathematical soundless is left as an exercise to the reader if they are so inclined.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_algebra#Introduction_a...
Ask HN: How can I get started?
Hello Hacker News,

I have been standing on the outskirts of this technology world for quite a while. Being a programmer has been my dream for as long as I remembered, but I never actually made any steps to achieve that until now.

Now I find myself in the Bay Area, in a new world to me - different country, different culture, different everything. I look at all these companies, all those developers, and it fascinates me so much. I want to be a part of that.

At the same time, I feel a bit self-conscious. I am just out of high school, and while I do have some skills, they are nothing compared to some of the people around here. Seems that every story I read always begins with the main hero either programming from the very moment they were born, or moving into this field with enough experience to know what they are doing. I have none of that.

I know that simply following tutorials and attending classes is not enough. But I simply don't know how I can move on to improve myself.

Am I simply overthinking all this, and it will all come naturally to me after I spend enough time in this environment? Or are there perhaps specific things that a developer should focus on to be a good developer?
Behold the Humble Block: Tools of the Trade
Wow, I've never seen CommonMark -- hope that comes into common use over everything else!
Making Sense of Your FB Ad Performance with Kuhcoon (YC W15)
It's actually disappointing that he made so little from such a smash hit - I suppose it's because it was free, but it wouldn't have been a smash hit if he'd charged for it.
>>Am I simply overthinking all this

Yes, keep writing code.
Thanks for the link to the essay. The images are interesting, I didn't get that anything was going on until the third one. It's pretty good reading once you pick up on his humor. This passage is a gem:

> The reluctant scion of a domineering steel tycoon, one of the wealthiest men in Europe, Wittgenstein spent his childhood hob-nobbing with the highest of imperial Viennese high society — and society doesn't get much higher than that. Groomed from an early age to take over his father's industrial empire, Wittgenstein instead fucked off to England at the earliest opportunity, to devote his life to the study of the most uncommercial and practically useless subject he could find. Russell proved an ideal mentor, and Predicate Logic an ideal subject.
Awesome to see rapid progress on this. Curious what people's thoughts are as to milestones to where you would trust CoreCLR (on Linux) for a production app.
Depends on your employer. At mine, people who can work well with other developers and help the team get better overall are very much noted, appreciated and rewarded.

But our culture has always been about the team, not individual developers.
Start Develop and Deploy with Docker in few clicks on Last.Backend
They sure as hell would love to see all of your traffic. Facebook wants to be your ISP, no actually, Facebook wants to be your internet.
There are definitely plans to move a lot of government functions out of Beijing into nearby Hebei cities. But the problem is that Beijing is becoming too congested and polluted (the surrounding cities in Hebei are just as bad, so I'm not sure if this will actually work).
Presumably it's to tie an individual to a piece of mail they sent. I assume people worry because its a way to bypass getting a warrant to directly open up mail.
$ echo "<html><body>" >codez.html

$ for g in *.gif; do echo "<img src=$g>$g</img>" >>codez.html; done

$ echo "</body></html>" >>codez.html
It's one of the more useful ways facebook infrastructure is put to work.
If facebook can see this traffic, they would love it, not discourage it.
SXSW Field Report, Day 1: Arrival / Destruction
This is really cool! In so many 2nd and 3rd world/poor countries internet is a luxury, as the price of bandwith is so high. Philippines for instance, a country that mainly provides connectivity through limited 3G and LTE, have a monthly price of about 30 beers from the local bar. In comparison, I pay around the price of 4-5 local beers, for 100/100 fiber.

Its sucks so hard that people cant afford to get knowledge from internet. Especially considering they would benefit greatly as schoolbooks are expensive and in some countries, censored.
> Am I really that rare that I treasure people above all others who will speak to me directly if they don't like something?

You could well be. People vary. One senior dev I work with can never accept direct criticism, he just shuts down and gets very defensive and adversarial.

But then another senior dev's preferred mode of discussion is yelling and hand-waving, and it took me a bit to learn that I had to yell and hand-wave back to get him to listen to me.
what would the practical usage of this be?

Honest question.
Allocation isn't exactly at the center. Capital is at the center. Things like factories, mines, offices, homes, computers, code, infrastructure and other equipment to make things effectively form the core of our economy. The capitalists are at the core of the remuneration (sometimes this is rich guy investing instead of buying another yacht, sometimes this is a retirement fund).

But still, allocating that well is tricky. Imagine if you did poorly, say, if you provided the capital to make millions of loans on overvalued housing, like FNMA. Instead of something useful that would help the nation prosper, the economy ends up with a bunch of houses that weren't as valuable as people thought. Also, the people doing the allocation would go bankrupt and lose everything... just kidding!!! they'd go run to the government whining for a bailout and get it!!! -cough- did I call them allocators? I meant more like leeches.

Those are the stakes, at least. :P
I'd be 50/50 on this point if the camera didn't just up and disappear after an official journalistic entity inquired about their existence...

Then when you consider the (bullshit) form style response from a branch of our own government and the fact that managers at the post office we not alerted to the camera's existence...

As alluded to in the report when they brought up the recent congressional hearings where it was found out that address information on packages had been/is being recorded and stored.... I think the problem has much more to do with the quickly growing trend of extremely subversive surveillance than it has to do with this particular incident or surveillance in general. If its merits were being openly debated by the entities putting it in place then this would be an entirely different story. But when journalistic inquires are met with secrecy and form letters? Go and ask your local police about the cameras on certain corners and I'd bet you're more likely to get a more personable/human answer than was obtained here in this story. Just my take.

Also... I think most people can plainly see the merit in having cameras mounted on street corners if they have ever been involved in a he said/she said style accident at one of those street corners. Not saying it makes it right or wrong but I think it's easier for people to see the merit in something like that where it might actually protect them personally from someone doing something reckless. How often are people genuinely afraid of dangerous packages outside of ticking boxes in movies or ricin scares in the media? I think it's far more likely that the cameras you speak of at intersections would take a dangerous man off the streets (drunk drivers, criminals on the run) before a post office camera. Again, doesn't make it right or wrong in my mind, but it does make it a bigger deal.
CCJS, C-compiler written in JavaScript
"Researcher" is also an appropriate term that also happens to have the virtue of not being pejorative.

Even though they're not popular in the business world, we do also need people who will change their goal when confronted with new ideas, rather than just the ones who filter ideas based on their service to a goal.

We even gave a Turing award someone like that a few years ago.
So the problem is more about the subversion rather than the surveillance. I would agree.
Pandoc filters let you do a lot of things provided you stick to the defined types. If you want to add new types of element, like this does, then the only practical way is a fork.

(except for really simple cases)
Language is a different shoe from what we actually do. HN is not a good place for this, drop me a mail on [redacted] if you are further interested in discussion.
Because of the way data can be cross-referenced in this case. You can create connections between a license plate, a photograph, a specific time and location, and possibly the package you send (image some system inside the postbox itself to tag the package as it is pushed in), including the destination and return addresses. This goes way beyond simply collecting surveillance videos, and if rolled out nationally, would make a major contribution to the total surveillance environment that the security agencies wish to create.
Google Fiber Real-World Speed (wired)
Better act regular!
Why is month/day stupid? What other formats do we use in daily life where the least significant digit comes first? No, what's stupid is month/day/year. ;)
That is correct: in the field every object that was created by homo sapiens sapiens is counted as a separate artifact. So each flake / discard is also counted - when flint knapping, there will be many such artifacts per finished edge.

A more interesting question to ask:

Why?

But around 10,500 years ago, a sudden burst of monsoon rains over the vast desert transformed the region into habitable land.

This opened the door for humans to move into the area, as evidenced by the researcher's 500 new radiocarbon dates of human and animal remains from more than 150 excavation sites.

"The climate change at [10,500 years ago] which turned most of the [3.8 million square mile] large Sahara into a savannah-type environment happened within a few hundred years only, certainly within less than 500 years," said study team member Stefan Kroepelin of the University of Cologne in Germany.

http://www.livescience.com/4180-sahara-desert-lush-populated... 2006

The findings of this study are that the sedimentological and geochemical properties of the lake sediments confirm that the Sahara has been drying slowly from six thousand years ago to reach the present day conditions around 1,100 years ago,” said lead author Pierre Francus, professor at the National Institute of Scientific Research in Quebec, Canada...

Climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, explained that around 8,000 years ago, the Earth’s orbit was slightly different to how it is today. The tilt changed from around 24.1 degrees to the present-day 23.5 degrees.

http://www.astrobio.net/news-exclusive/how-earths-orbital-sh...

So, about 11k years ago the Sahara suddenly burst into life, and about 8k years ago axial tilt changes started the process of removing this burst.

The Sahara is also linked to fertility rises in rainforests in South America.
This is the kind of hacking I find to be abusive. Finding clever uses for things is fine, but not when it's misuse with potential for harm. This reminds me of when someone exploited TinyURL to make TinyDisk.
Please report that bug. The core team (or other devs familiar with Haxe like myself) will be happy to fix it.

Also, consider that 65% of the code in the haxe git repository is written in Haxe, not OCaml. There's a lot you can change, extend or fix without knowing OCaml at all.
While we're at it, wonder if it runs JGo? Go compiled to java bytecode running on a JVM built in Go.

https://code.google.com/p/jgo/
The question then is, do you trust facebook more than your isp?
Hack author here, in my country, Paraguay, you get 10 MBPS for ~140 U$ per month.
I discovered the Internet through my father, because he is a journalist and the press had really early access to this kind of tech, 20 years later I'm still crazy about it.
Thanks for the comment!
You are speaking from a communist ethos that not everyone agrees with.
Well, I don't know the current case but in Turkey they were talking about a new law where shcizofrenic people would be under suvelliance by police (because some scizopfrenic people thouht that police were following them and they attacked the police). So the topic was "the law which will make schizofrenic people's dreams come true". I'm not joking!
Work gives you free time when you are more efficient at your profession than by subsistence farming.
I think you're soooo geek.