skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Stripe failed payments
I contacted stripe and looked at the help but didn't get any real answer, so I'm perplexed as to why people who enter their credit cards for a 14-day trial, the payment fails every single time.

Are they using one time credit cards or doing something on their end?

Won't getting failed charges hurt their credit rating? Wouldn't want that to happen but seems like some users are being dishonest with me.
Show HN: FFT Demo Page in JavaScript
One word: overdesigned.

One of the reasons I disliked HL2 so much was because my experience of it was so controlled and funneled. I felt like the designers removed my agency, and tried to ensure that there was one right way to solve a problem, to the point of punishing me [1], or worse, main-routing[2] me when I sought an alternative route.

[1] One location early on requires you to break into a tunnel to come up behind and flank a guard shooting down at you with a mounted gun behind a screen. The problem is that the fact that a flanking tunnel exists means that the designers had no reason to make him possible to hit; it is actually possible to kill him head on, but it's difficult, and you will almost certainly take a lot of damage in the process (the punishment). The tunnel is just too damn convenient though, and breaks the suspension of disbelief; it's too obviously designed in.

[2] I invented the word main-routing to describe a situation where, when you're exploring shady nooks that you spot out of the corner of your eye, they look like they go somewhere interesting, so you go back to the main route to find out what the main stream does. But instead it dead-ends, and in fact that shady little corner you were exploring was the only way forward; what you thought was a secret shortcut was just the main route again, in a different guise. This is a double-whammy: not only does it break suspension of disbelief again, but it also punishes exploration. It teaches you that nooks are either dead ends that are pointless to explore, or that the main route will dead-end itself and you'll be forced to explore the nook. Either way, you have no choice in the matter, so you're better off sticking to the main route until it forces you to explore.

I really did not enjoy HL2. It was a cripplingly disappointing experience, especially after having played Deus Ex, which greatly increased my expectations from a game. Going back to playing a mute scientist with an alleged PhD yet whose only mechanism of interacting with the world is violence was like going back to the 90s.
There are two approaches. One approach starts with the data and asks what algorithms can we find to infer something about the data, and the other approach starts with an algorithm and tries to find a dataset on which the algorithm infers something good. This is even more general than machine learning; in many cases you either have a problem and are searching for a solution, or you have a solution and you are searching for a problem. Often you need a mix of both (a bidirectional search if you will). It looks like this book is a mix of both.

In the end though the only thing that matters is whether a particular procedure has predictive value. Even with the most principled Bayesian analysis the model or prior are strictly speaking wrong (usually both), because the real world is complicated, so even there you're only left with testing predictive performance in practice. Careful probabilistic modeling is only valuable insofar as it lets us focus our search for inference procedures on those that are more likely to work in practice. A good counterexample is deep learning, which does not (or did not) have a solid probabilistic justification, but works extremely well in practice.
According to the article, it appears that the better nursing home advocated costs more to build, but doesn't cost more to run. Capital is usually easier to get from donors and the government than operating expenses; capital lets you put your name on the building and get your picture in the paper. That makes me slightly optimistic.
Wonderful: https://www.evi.com/q/what_is_the_meaning_of_life
> I was asked to ... see if I could help this person .... they understood the issue but decided to leave .... To this day they assert they were 'forced out' ....

Off-topic rant: For the love of God, will everyone please STOP with the use of they as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. History shows us a better way: Decades ago, feminists coined the term Ms., which has all but totally replaced the old-fashioned Miss and Mrs. Those concerned with gender neutrality should do likewise, instead of inflicting ambiguity and inaccuracy on the rest of us by (mis)using they.

</rant>
JavaScript in  is executed on the main thread (should be in a worker)
Wow! I did not realize there was more on the website. Thanks!
IMO securing Presidential communications is of paramount importance to national security. Even the non-classified stuff. But there's little reward or glory for doing that. It's really a "small" task.

Compare to spending billions of dollars building gigantic data centers, tapping fiber everywhere possible, recording every scrap of communication metadata that exists, actively subverting computers, doing quid pro quo spying on our allies domestic communications in exchange for them doing the same to us. Etc. Etc. Etc.

The grandiose profligacy is unending. That's how bureaucrats get promoted and get job satisfaction.

Actual "National Security" for the President, well, that's obviously beneath them.
7 Surprising Challenges of Implementing BigData
Is Linux anything like what it was like in 1994?
Sounds perfectly alright to me. Remember that there are levels of classification. Unclassified (the lowest level) could be running through Gmail in plain text for all anyone at the White House cares. Anything of even minute importance will get a classification status.

(Also, Re: the NSA—they do the government's COMSEC, securing the classified data. OPSEC, the risk/reward policies regarding what data should be classified and so on, is a more distributed policy-making task, though they might have a hand in it. Requirements on a document's classification levels given its content are set by top-down Executive Orders.)
When providing us with content or posting content (in each case for publication, whether on- or off-line) using the Services

Perhaps this is in anticipation of a new service, but this isn't really applicable to the typical sale of content, since you don't ever "provide" PayPal with content or "post" content using PayPal's services in those cases. PayPal is not a middleman in the way Apple or Steam are.
I can recall fiber proposals from the late nineties in Blacksburg, back when bev.net was a big thing. The proposals to route fiber around the town died in process; I don't recall why, but it surely involved who would pay for it and who would profit.
The article goes on to mention "Iranian hackers" and "Chinese hackers". Obviously all those enemies of the United States are up to no good and the US must raise a cyber army against them. Just for defence, of course. Like drone strikes and boots on the ground.
The world's hero Snowden is under russian protection, so take it easy...
I beg to differ, but we can probably compare data points until the cows come home.

Anyhow, even a large-ish application such as Oracle or a control system doesn't actually use ping or dd or troff, or most parts of what a modern unix-OS is comprised of. Most things suid are usually unnecessary, which if nothing else does decrease the attack surface.

Most web apps probably needs nothing unix-ish at all. A chrooted PHP app mounted noexec makes me sleep better than one running in a complete operating system. And most server side Java apps re-invents everything unix anyway, from mail processing to cron jobs, so they generally don't shell out as often as you'd think.

So I would argue it's actually pretty common that your applications have a limited set of dependencies. Especially compared to the hundreds of packages in any minimal modern unix install.
Wanting good pay instead of meaningless breakroom toys makes you a "mercenary?"

I'm all for working hard and leaving a position with everyone feeling like I made a difference, and I'm still close friends with many of my former colleagues and bosses. But at the end of the day my compensation for doing work others want done is my salary and the cash value of the provided benefits.

The cash value of a pool table in the break room is essentially $0, and a recruiter pretending it's not is trying to pull a fast one.
In your case, PGP would be the best and not so hard to implement.

If you don't want/know how to use PGP you can also publish the SHA1 sums of the files available on your download page. It's better than nothing.

The second alternative is weaker because an attacker would simply need to change the binary and the sum on the website. In the PGP case, the attacker must get access to your PGP private key, and provided that you use PGP reasonably (no private key on your web server), this is harder.
It's probably so Paypal can legally rehost imagery used by sellers when showing customers a page to pay for a seller's wares.
I did the digital nomad thing for 5 years and 9 months, across 70 countries: http://www.trott.in/accounts/1/worldmap

It was incredible, and I would recommend it to anyone.

And, it's never been easier to do ... if you haven't got much tying you down then give it a shot, take as long as it still feels rewarding. You'll know when it's time to go home.

I've now settled back in Australia this past year (much to my surprise) and am equally enjoying having a fixed address, a great friendship group and relationship, and having time to really focus on my startup. I wouldn't change a thing.
Fun fact: hackers are never American citizens somehow. It's 'cuz Americans are all model patriots. Obviously.
More about prestige than security.
Thanks for the reference. The website, and the company behind it, are almost as interesting as the Coca-Cola story! I guess they're still active and offering hosting and web design, but definitely stuck in the year 2000.
I think the instinct is to bomb that corner, because by this point the game has taught the player that secrets often are found by bombing a corner block and either rolling forward, or going up. When you bomb the corner, it tells you the type of device needed to destroy the block.
Spend 2 seconds googling how to change your name. Seriously.
> what makes "Russian" hackers more exciting then just "Hackers?"

It's all about what ultimately happens to the information harvested. If it's some kids in mom's basement doing it for lulz, that's not very concerning.

But, presumably, Russian hackers, even if not actual Russian government employees, would pass on useful information to their government. Even if non-classified, that could be very damaging to national security.

From the article, the attacks were relatively sophisticated. Which makes it more likely that "state actors" were involved. The article also claims that the two most common state actors are Chinese and Russian, and the fingerprints of this operation pointed more to Russia than China.

YMMV. As you say, "attribution is a very difficult and often impossible process".
I don't think that solution is viable within the constraints the parent post is talking about. There are many problems that come up with millions of users. Proper load balancing in that case is not simple and mostly dependent on the business logic.
Lessons I Learned from Co-Founding a Tech Startup
In most U.S. cities, broadband providers need a franchise from the city to build systems, and a condition of that license is building in every neighborhood within the city, not just those with demonstrated interest.

Google simply will not build Fiber in places that aren't willing to waive that requirement. Conversely, other broadband providers would serve many places if cities were willing to waive those requirements.

Here in Baltimore, Verizon was ready to build FiOS, and in fact my building and a few others nearby has it because Verizon was able to do it without getting a city-wide franchise. Fiber deployment to the whole city fell through because Verizon wouldn't commit to wiring up the vast low-income areas of the city where people couldn't afford to subscribe anyway.
Show HN: TravelGreen, offset your Uber rides
Some things are really easy and cheap.

Paint the zimmer frames red, for example.

One symptom of dementia illnesses is that your vision is affected; you stop seeing some things if they're the wrong colour. Red is the last colour to go, so you want all cups to be red on a contrasting colour table so that the person can see it and drink from it.

Having red zimmer frames means people see them and use them, reducing falls and increasing mobility. (Falls are really damaging for older people. It's kind of surprising how much life is shortened from a simple fall.)

Apologies for .doc

http://www.bcf.nhs.uk/docs/14053_1922582528.doc
To me, WoW taught me a lot for startups, especially PvP, because arena games were simply intelligence vs. intelligence fights. I think there is no other game or competition where such a broad range of skills is required in such a short amount of time (team play, application of knowledge of your character, of all other characters and their skills, use of surroundings, application of knowledge of game mechanics, very fast reactions). That's why it was so much fun chasing the gladiator title, pure application of skill (got it in S3). I've never seen something alike before, just startups I feel have the same kind of "game type".

A bit of a shame that the vanilla feeling is gone, I think it would have been important to keep the game hard, so that powerful items are very, very hard to get. It seems like they wanted to make high end content accessible to everyone in order to grow the user base, but it seems like the opposite effect was reached. Reminds me of the startup wisdom, if you want to be everything to everybody, you end up being nothing to no one.
This is my first web app so feedback is greatly appreciated.
What about Redis Cluster?
Explicit error recovery is not hell, it's a blessing. Much easier to understand and to maintain than exception handling.
Room Price Analysis – Scraping with Python and Scrapy
Sounds more like Sisyphus, who was punished for lying by having to roll a boulder up a hill, when it would roll back down and he'd have to repeat the task.

Purgatory, as described in Inferno seemed like a reasonably well populated place, if not exactly a party.
Because there was a time when services were deployed in a discriminatory manner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

So because of historical discrimination it's common for government to require providers to serve everyone in a area instead of just the profitable areas (e.g. people that would buy $100 IP+TV packages instead of basic 5Mbps internet).
Really? Last I checked there was no BIOS support to recognize them and Intel was only giving support for embedded CPUs. Ta, I'll have a look
Its only going to get worse.
Did you ever think the government knows more than it can tell you?
There's no general algorithm, but you could probably prove it, if you tried really hard for your given example. :D
I've done a few 3-4 month trips in the past. I was fortunate to be earning a good day rate as a freelancer before I left and I was young, with no responsibilities and no need for a life plan. It was easy to quickly save up a little money, and travel can be really cheap, especially when you don't care about sleeping in a nice bed.

The first couple of times I travelled a lot. Too much. Moving on every day or two. Seeing the various famous sites to see along the way. It was a great adventure, but I didn't learn that much.

One day I was talking to someone on my daily train commute out of london and she was telling me about a friend of hers that was travelling the world by boat. I thought it sounded amazing, and I always wanted to sail, so I booked myself in to do a leg of the Clipper Ventures [0] yacht race - from Liverpool (England) to Brazil (took about 4 weeks).

When I arrived in Brazil I didn't have a plan at all. I booked in to learn Portuguese while stating with a local family. The 4 weeks I lived there changed the way I look at travelling. I learned about the local culture, made friends, and learned a lot about myself in the process.

In a lot of ways tourism is a much easier route than immersing yourself in a culture. Being totally alone in a country where you can't speak the language is pretty soul expanding.

I've only managed one (big) trip since then (with my now wife) through Central America. We stayed with a family in Nicaragua for a couple of weeks at the start to learn Spanish. We loved it. The hosts are always amazing (we ended up doing it a few times during the trip). Also, it's really cheap. I think we paid $100 / week for accommodation, food and school (for both of us).

So my main bit of advice would be, try to be a local, not a tourist. It's scary, but incredibly rewarding.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effh9W_xHSg
drunk driving simulation too wow

https://youtu.be/r0IZ_TEzg7M?t=22m28s
Thanks -- I like this, and I've never heard the -ty ending before.

But just a nit on my part: "and" is usually meant to signify a decimal point, so I think the ending should read "echo hundred echty-fox".
I'd say it's a legal and business problem, only the solution happens to be technological because of the scale involved.
Posting an Amazon affiliates tagged link to HN is kind of tacky. HN isn't here for you to make money off of its users' clicks.
I understand your rant, and I've been around for a while, I explicitly use the gender neutral pronoun because of a post I made here where someone took my LinkedIn history, gender of the person, and subject and back tracked it to an individual who later, and quite reasonably, chastised me about sharing in public.

Since that time, I've paid more attention to whether or not I can share an example at all given how easily the Internet allows one to deduce such things. Not surprisingly, the Internet doesn't like obviously fictionalized examples either so it limits my sharing to things about me and things which I can make reasonably opaque.
House Committee to Propose Full Funding for A-10
With clothes and computer, and pretty much at the drop of a dime, I started traveling abroad and have done so for the past several years, around S. America & Europe, staying in places for at least a few months each. When you find a few overseas places that feel like "home", you can go back and forth between them when needed. Luckily, I knew some people with startups in the US who needed part-time VAs and thus this is what I've done this whole time. I've literally spent between US$400-600/mo since deciding to live overseas. Since my work is part-time, and at times sporadic, I often don't make much more than what I spend.

So on one side, it's totally doable to live in tons of cool places on the cheap (it's become a game of sorts to live frugally). On the other hand, when you travel w/o extra funds, you cannot do an about-face when you need to (ie, you cannot retreat from a bad situation) so you then have to find ways to stick it out, which can easily mean enduring odd living quarters, strange neighborhoods, shady people, etc. I've had thousands of both amazing and not-so-amazing experiences I would not have had, had I stayed in the States doing the same ol', same ol'. My hope is that I continue to have thousands more such experiences and most importantly, to do it wisely now that time has taught me what not to do (and now that my job responsibilities are gradually increasing).
Because my PFT showed the lungs of an 84 year old (twice my age) prior to treatment. Then after giving up treatment for self treatment for a while I had it done again and have lung function above average. Also, my decision was not on a whim, it was based on research. And finally, your prenatal vitamins do not contain much iodine - it should be milligrams, not micrograms (yep, I know about how much you're getting).

In this case, just try it should not do any harm. 250mg of magnesium is not a big deal. My doctor said iodine can screw up your thyroid - that's an old medical myth, but I've had mine checked a few times and the levels are very much in range.

So I stand by "just try it" along with YMMV because not everyones condition is the same.
MongoDB is as durable as anything else if you aren't planning to use replica sets.

Under load it seems to have stale reads on replica sets but I believe that it is being targeted for 3.1. Even rock solid databases like Cassandra suffered from the same issue.
> Wanting good pay instead of meaningless breakroom
> toys makes you a "mercenary?"

No it does not, but focusing on the pay first and the environment later does.
> What you're saying makes sense, except that I would expect 15.10 to always be more current than it is before 2015-10 arrives. In reality, it's often not more current than the released version. If there is a new version of a package in sid, why isn't it in the "bleeding edge" ubuntu next-release? (I'm sure it's a good reason)

I'm not closely following Ubuntu development, but they have 6 month release cycles and they do the "sync from sid" early in the cycle, AFAIK first 3 months or so, so you can expect 15.10 to have what was in sid on August-ish. This may further skew when

1. Debian is on freeze. For example, Debian was on freeze starting from November '14, which means practically sid was also on freeze. Debian import freeze date for Ubuntu 15.04 was February [0], so while normally you would expect 15.04 to have latest versions of february; in reality they were latest versions of october. (there are, of course, exceptions). When you consider import freeze of 14.10 was August '14 [1], you can see why 14.10 and 15.04 have very similar versions.

2. Ubuntu is importing from testing for LTS releases, instead of sid. This shouldn't matter in an ideal world, where the difference between testing and unstable is 5-10 days, but sometimes packages got stuck in sid so bad that it may cause a difference in what lands in Ubuntu release.

3. I'm not so sure on that but if I understand correctly, they do a complete import of Debian in the beginning of the release cycle, and then maintainers can do ad-hoc imports for individual packages until the import freeze date, so the packages that land in the release may also be older than what was on sid near the import freeze date.

I guess you'll see much newer packages on 15.10, though, since sid will be full-speed during the 15.10 cycle, so nothing to worry about for now :)

0: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/VividVervet/ReleaseSchedule

1: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UtopicUnicorn/ReleaseSchedule
Ah I see, my original comment said "Legally they must...". Yes, that was not correctly worded.
Dead ends are there for a reason to create a sense of a larger world. They are usually blocked by some logical obstacle, and rarely actually lead to a short alternate area, but not an alternate path. Half-Life is linear by design, surely you must agree that a linear path that tries to create a bigger world is better than one without. Those paths perhaps broke the illusion for you, but at least there was some illusion and without the paths there would be none.

I agree with the first paragraph, the first game was better since it didn't constantly trap you in rooms, where you had to wait for dialogue to play out, which were just glorified cut-scenes. For example, in the first game if a friendly character tried to convey some dialogue you could ignore/kill/avoid him, but in the second game you can only wait.
It's basically just the hardware you connect it to thats the limiting factor with optical network. Which incidentally is also why actually getting optical fibers to everyone is so damn cool.
How is it non-concrete if it requires physical hardware and achieves practical results?
How does the photosynthetic algae zooxanthellae that's found in many corals differ from the algae in the salamander?
Tips for Landing Page Optimization
Mountains vs. Molehills