skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Used to work in paywalls (think New Yorker), we used both Supercookies and Fingerprinting.

Most good paywalls that support metering will now use some kind of fingerprinting at a minimum.
The bounty is to be paid in Bitcoin anyway; I don't see how your attractiveness explanation is applicable.

The problem with setting the price in Bitcoin is the volatility: someone with information could attempt to time their contact with Theymos to maximize their bounty. This could significantly delay revealing the information, if the bounty claimant felt the price were temporarily in a slump, and could cost Theymos a lot more than expected if they got lucky.
Wonder what his sentence will be in comparison to the one given bank CEOs for massive criminality

'If You Aint Cheating, You Aint Trying': The Brazen Greed of the Currency-Manipulating Bankers

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/bankers-...
Still, there's no oversight for either type of experiment (Facebook's or the color change). Where the border gets drawn between ethical and unethical is murky even WITH oversight, let alone without it.
In the late 70s, as a teen ager, I was disappointed that I was just a little too young to have participated in the computing boom. I got to program big iron, but all the cool stuff had already been done: early computer vision algorithms, hard drives, semiconductors, the "ultimate" papers (i.e. scheme), the ARPAnet, bitmapped display etc. I loved programming but wondered if really there was anything exciting ahead or if it would now be just more of the same.

My model was of how physics had had an astounding boom from about the 1880s-1940s (roughly Maxwell->semiconductor), and then it just got hard for a small number of people to make big changes.

Of course that was foolish: computing is still roughly where mechanical engineering was in the late 1800s: lots of lore, much disastrous failure, but a marvelous cambrian explosion of experimentation and development of theory.
Most of us aren't going to be able to effectively oppose school districts, teachers unions, governments and political parties. And mostly we don't need to, partly because people mostly don't want to change (in much the same way that pigs don't want to fly), but mostly because we can usually find a group of like minded people interested in what we're interested in (which is quite distinct from finding like minded people who want to force everyone to be like us). The most attainable thing is to try to make the thing we want viable and accessible to people who want it.

Which brings us back to your original comment on MOOCs. (Disclosure: I have purposely still not read your linked Reddit thread.)

It looks like you believe MOOCs provide something worthwhile. Without asking why, I tend to agree with you. But rather than try to convince everyone that MOOCs are an essential part of some large strategy, work at a lower level, trying to ensure that MOOCs remain viable and that they grow in maturity. Just having MOOCs available to anyone who thinks that MOOCs will solve their particular issue is great.

You might work on MOOC infrastructure, or from the educational side, or you might just be a non-annoying advocate. :) Just making people aware of the existence and utility of MOOCs would be a very positive thing.

I used to want to change the world, but I've come to see that the world is already changing, constantly. Once in awhile someone comes along and tries to determine the direction of the world for everyone. That always ends in disaster.

Best if you try to make your little geographical or intellectual or moral patch of the world a better place. Lots of better patches are likely to result in a good world direction, whatever that is.

MOOC on, dude. :)
The Illusion of Stock-Picking Skill
Today's generation is strongly detached from the military, I think that is why.

If everyone had a close family member or friend serving they would care more about the security of military operations.

Like it or not we have enemies still and need to maintain this secrecy to protect our country.
Thank you for the kind words. It was a roller coaster for sure. It's amazing how many people in the world are truly good at heart. And to think I didn't even have to ask for anything, I just put myself out there and people offered help. Amazing world we live in. <3
> What is the most significant portion of institutional investing coming from for SFBA funding? Pension funds? Hedge funds?

That's a different question. The claim that a VC investment collapse would hurt ordinary people through their pension funds is false. There may be other important effects for specific sectors or groups of people.
A Hippocratic-like oath by itself would be useless without a powerful professional organization watching out for our interests. If I take the moral high road and get fired by my MBA boss, I have no course of appeal. If an MBA were to fire a doctor for refusing to compromise on ethics, I'm sure the AMA would unleash hell on the MBA. Same for lawyers and ABA. Actually those two organizations make it difficult for MBAs to manage their members so they have two safeguards we lack. (I've seen this in the bank I work. The lawyers report to other lawyers all the way up to the general counsel, who reports to the CEO and the board. Such structure makes it easy to keep ethical conduct high priority without fear of retribution from the MBAs.)
"I pulled out my Glock from my bag, loaded a round in the chamber, and put the gun to my head. Sobbing I sat there and let my life flash before my eyes and I pulled the trigger."

Wow, this is disturbing. I'm so glad to hear that you could overcome that bad turn. Your story is inspirational and shows that we should never give up.
"Dr. Campaigne has been informed that the reply has been written and is not interested in further coordination."

This seems a bit harsh!
your expectation is fundamentally flawed for many reasons, but I'll stick with the most general: the Internet has no HTTP police.
From my own experience, actually making the purchase is likely to be perceived negatively. He had already successfully demonstrated the race condition allowing the transfer, so he had enough to clearly make his point. That stated, were I in Starbucks' position I'd lead with a big "thank you" before explaining the liabilities and why he shouldn't go so far to make his point in the future.

Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I should state that my team has interacted with Homakov on a number of Chrome vulnerability reports. In my experience he's very sharp, he finds interesting bugs, and my impression is that he's generally trying to do the right thing. However, I can definitely see how his communication style might not come across very well, particularly to a security team that's not used to dealing with the security research community.
Isn't there? A culture, idea or a meme that doesn't spread from person to person in some way isn't going to exist after the people participating in it die. When you get down to it, "natural selection" is just a similar application of population dynamics.

The real differences are in the radically different composition of an organism and an idea/meme/culture/institution, with implications for the way these ideas are transmitted and transformed.
My point is that it was a misleading title. It should not have blanketed "arabica" when it's only one specific kind of arabica, in a specific region.
Freelancing is really tough but it helped me eat. Forming relationships is everything! It all starts with a simple conversation.

And yes, there are humans here. We may post a lot of tech-ish stuff, but we live, breathe, and love as humans.

I'm actually at a crossroad in my career right now. Trying to jump onboard with a new company as I'm miserable where I'm at. I'm only hoping all of the paying forward I've done since then can help me find a place I really love. Have to stay positive and focused. Good things happen when you believe it. :)
Before Rust, it could be said that Haskell has the same philosophy of ensuring almost everything works at compile-time.

Anyway, I hope for a future where programmers will be able to specify all contracts, invariants, etc. in code, and have them be checked upon compilation. And not only for "smart" programmers, but the pretty bad ones, too.
One big takeaway:

When every single "personal finance" site tells you that having an "emergency fund" of 3+ times your monthly costs (rent, food, insurance, ...) is very important, they probably are right :)
Great article. Curious if the tech bubble is gonna burst say sometime in the future, what do you think the best options would be to weather the storm?

Obviously, VC-funded startup's with no cash-flow and only one or two years of funding will be the first to go (dot-com comparison: pets.com, WebVan), then next will probably be any relatively new consultancies (dot-com: Razorfish, coding schools of the late 90's that taught people for MCSE/CNAA certificates).

Next in line to fall is unclear, all the hardware and network infrastructure companies suffered in dot-com (e.g., Sun, Cisco) with layoff's due to no demand anymore to buy expensive high-end servers and routers. But today with the cloud infrastructure, would AWS division, Azure or IBM be able to weather the storm?

On the other hand, peeps I knew who were able to weather the storm were people who had critical domain knowledge in a stable or booming industry at the time (e.g., HPC specialists for defense contractors, Bioinformaticians working for the Human Genome Project, system developers for high frequency trading right after RegNMS). Unfortunately, cycles have also turned for these fields too and demand has matured or waned.

Curious what you guys think are the next "unsexy" but potentially lucrative fields that has demand for IT workers and should yield fruit in the next 10 years that you'd angle for, if you were starting anew? Farm tech, AdTech, FinTech, personal genetics therapy, or even plain old but reliable fields like oil & gas, healthcare or e-discovery?
I always thought that having a yearly subscription to a gym that provides at least showers and lockers is a good idea.

OP's story seems to confirm.
I was 13 when it crashed but you have to remember that that was a very different world back then - 15 years ago we had dial up (well ISDN, which was twice as fast as a 56k modem) pay-by the minute and it was difficult to sell things over the internet, databases were expensive as were servers.

Today I have a far better connection in my pocket, servers can be rented by the hour of Amazon (so you can scale as you grow), stripe is available (at least in some countries) and Postgress is free. We also have much more productive languages than Java 1.2 (now with generics!!).

More importantly still, IT is everywhere. Every business needs, or could benefit from, a programmer. It might be something as simple as converting an access database into a real database and do some queries on it (say get a list of all companies with more than X foozies and send that to sales so that they can call them up and hear if they are totally happy. That query alone could be worth north of 10k month for a small medium business) or it might be to do something more complex.
Heh - I'm kind of there now. Went from 125K last year to about $450/month now. Didn't have as much stuff - but still have truck payments and a couple credit card bills.

Freelancing and remote contracting can be very uneven. Luckily I had a decent amount of savings to begin with when things dried up.

Kudos to you for sharing - and for being a brave and resourceful person to get through it. The standoff scene is a crazy thing. Over nothing.
https://www.justyo.co/ - Apparently they raised 1.5M [1]

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/yo
Uber also doubled it revenue in that time.
I can't speak for the valley, but the market in Atlanta went from lucrative to bleak almost overnight.
This is really eye-opening, thank you for posting! I hope you are doing well now! I'm wondering, as a fellow freelancer, what would you have done differently leading up to the 2008 crash that would have perhaps made life easier? Also seems like you had friends at the time, could you not have couch surfed?
I hope that's a good cage, since they posted a picture of the wifi passwords for a pair of networks inside of it.
intel nuc i5 works oob with clover - also, tonymac is a thief and a fraud
This was a dark time in my life. I believe everything happens for a reason. That gun jammed and changed my life.
John Nash letter to the NSA
There are lots of companies out there. In fact, you can right now incorporate if you've got a few hundred dollars, and some willingness to do a bit of paperwork. Heck, I'm a jackass and I have had a company for a while now. I'm a CEO. Seriously. Being an actual company is a completely meaningless thing. Now, the crazyass valuations and all that, that's a separate thing and that's where we can reasonably speculate if bubble or no bubble and such.
Interesting that he says, "If your password is not completely random (ie. generated with the help of dice or a computer random number generator), then you should assume that your password is already broken."

1) When he says "dice" is he talking about physical dice or something, or is there some protocol called dice that I am not aware of?

2) I feel like even though a computer generated random string isn't completely random, that it could still be effective. Could someone elaborate on this a little bit more? What if you do tricky things like concatenate multiple random strings together? What about functions like urandom (I'm pretty sure that is truly random.)?
The big lesson is to keep an emergency fund of 6-12 months' living expenses.

He shouldn't have been buying a leveraged investment property until he had an emergency fund.

With $100k+/year in income, he should have been finding a way to save $10k+ per year.
"The man led us through a courtyard, around the back of the school buildings, and suddenly there it was: the yard opened up into a wide, grassy playing field, flanked on one side by raised seating.

On the edge of the grass pitch – regularly mowed, yet never used – we were pointed towards a series of bronze statues. The figures showed children in traditional Chinese dress, frozen in play as the pink silk scarves tied about their necks flapped noisily in the wind.

'Fifty thousand Quai!' the man giggled, ecstatic, before explaining to us that the silk scarves were washed and replaced on a weekly basis."

Apparently thousands of buildings are being maintained, cleaned, even silk scarves on statues getting washed -- for nobody to see.

Who is paying the maintenance workers' wages? The local government?
> The examples are in XML because json is, (and I believe at this point), still not stricly an (accepted) hypermedia capable format, thus not adhering the HATEOAS constraint, and thus cannot be restful. But to be honest, I'd prefer JSON over XML anytime.

What exactly is the criteria of being a "hypermedia capable format"?

The linked website gives an example of how the response on a bank-account like API might include links to other actions; XML and JSON seem equally capable here, as they can both encode links.

He mentions on another page,

> Unfortunately, JSON is not a hypermedia format. There is no predefined way to deal with link discovery in JSON.

Is there a predefined way to deal with it in XML? In the earlier example, I had assumed he did exactly what you would do in JSON: make up a field for the purpose.

Though, honestly, that would seem to be the purpose of the "Link:" header.
This Software Engineering Radio podcast interview with Stefan Tilkov discusses the difference between REST and HTTP: http://www.se-radio.net/2008/05/episode-98-stefan-tilkov-on-...

It is from 2008 but probably more or less evergreen.
> but for many, its taste cannot compare to the smooth and complex flavours of Arabica.

The author obviously hasn't had an awesome cup of Filter Kaapi :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_filter_coffee
Architectural Styles and Design of Network-based Software Architectures (2000)
I definitely got a sense of mathematical awe out of that. Thanks for sharing.

I'm always impressed when I see someone who can communicate ideas, especially complex scientific concepts, clearly and effectively, using analogies in a proper way that doesn't just overwhelm the viewer (as a lot of popsci stuff does). It's a talent I know that I need to work on; as a fledgling academic attempting to write papers clearly I struggle with it. Does it simply come with practice or are there resources anyone here can recommend for improving one's ability to make hard ideas understandable?
Sadly this is a real thing and absolutely frustrating to lots of entrepreneurs building companies producing value for paying clients.

Worst part is that it was claimed as some genius idea by some top VCs like Marc Andreessen (who ended up blocking me on twitter when I told him it was stupid)
Slow Food Manifesto
That's strange, N-Trig used to be notoriously laggy when compared to Wacom. I guess the technology has come a long way.
Honestly, it's not particularly difficult to copy programs from the app store. With a jailbroken phone, you can just grab an app off the phone's file system.

I think the real difference is the constant, relentless change in platforms presented to mobile phone consumers. Every year, it's a new phone, a major operating system upgrade, or something else disrupting the ecosystem, so that no out-of-band trade in raw files can take root.

When you have a zombie fanbase chasing the latest glitter, and disruptive changes introduced every six months, it's tough to gain traction when you have expend so much energy just to keep up with the herd.
Wait, is that normal in the U.S.? To be able to save only around $10k on a $100k a year income?
My preference generally tends towards medical - it's generally a "good" thing to be working on and we're around retirement age for the baby boomers. All the low-cost high-impact opportunities in aggregating data and personalizing treatment based on that information make it seem attractive to me for the next decade or so.
Show HN: Unifying Identities of Users
$10k+ isn't "only" $10k.
You probably already know this, but you can set up unique emails through gmail using the "+" character. name+servicename@gmail.com. This will let you keep track of who is using what email address. Although, as this becomes more common knowledge, people could just strip off the anything after the "+" when saving email addresses.
This contains Fielding's original description of REST. It was published in 2000 but adding the date to the title put the title over the 80 character limit.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but I have a question. If liquidation preferences have such little value, why is it so common?

Is it because founders for the most part accept whatever the VCs dictate, even things that benefit the VCs only slightly but still get thrown in because the VCs pretty much get their way no matter what?
If all startups are over-priced, and we are in a bubble, that would mean it is a terrible time to be a VC. Talk to a VC, and they'll tell you they hate the world right now. More competition for deals and inflated valuations help companies, not VCs. It means VCs get less of their "top" deals and they have to pay more money from them, both bad things from a VCs perspective.

And consider a VC that makes most of their money from management fees. This means LPs are literally paying the VC to lose their money. The LPs will figure it out eventually and stop investing, at which point the VC needs to find a new career. Maybe the cycle takes 5 years, but it will happen. VCs want to make good investments as much as LPs want them to.
TF-IDF explained with a murderous kitten
Relational data with Node.js – some experiments
Work from home in NH, and have your employer pay you there through an HR firm like Trinet.
(speaking in general, not the valley)

I was doing a lot of ColdFusion at the time (as I did most of my career). It's an easy language, and attracted a lot of folks that really weren't developers, but could bang out some script. I tried to counsel all I knew to be diverse, learn other languages, etc. Salaries dropped, but not too much, it was the total lack of jobs that really hurt.

This time around, whenever it happens, it'll be the 8-week "bootcampers" and those who specialize in pretty much only "front-end" development (meaning they do Angular/Ember/React/etc but can't be bothered to produce the back-end json) that will have the hardest time, IMO.
That's extremely rough--sorry. Do you have an ad on Craigslist? Seems like everyone I try to hire for a gig on CL here in Seattle is busy.
Can't believe I'm wading into a "bubble" thread:/

Here are my thoughts. Disclaimer: I'm just some guy. epistemological confidence: low.

There may be a bubble in consumer tech. There isn't a bubble in tech in general.

Consumer tech is weird right now because consumers are so weak. Bob the plumber has a laptop (good!), he's using a WIMP interface (not good!), but he knows a little Excel (great!). All in all he's a reasonably empowered internet citizen with a real internet presence.

He closes the lid. BLAMMO! He now has has zero internet presence under his control. Not a single thread, not a single cron job, nothing. He's lost the most basic information organization functions: "share", "receive", "do at this time", "do repeatedly", etc.

Instead he has to rely on others for all those functions. These are really basic functions. Like "baby food" level. If he's so helpless his computers can't handle something as simple as "do something at 5:00 tomorrow" reliably, of course he's going to get taken advantage of.

Pinterest, Dropbox, AirBNB, Slack, Evernote, Facebook, LinkedIN ... all exist because users don't have servers. If personal servers take off, consumer tech will pop. Of course, normal people aren't going own UNIX servers ever. Sandstorm though . . . that's a lot easier to set up than a Linux box.

(I don't think tech in general is a bubble though. "Software is eating the world" seems entirely accurate to me.)
That is how many time to break the answer to the security question, not the passwords. The security questions have a weaker hashing function.
The way we publish research is broken. So much prior art goes unpublished because it is never accepted by a journal. Negative results, meh results, and flawed research all have value. Proper citation is often difficult but can be as important as the work itself, other wise the knowledge graph is fractured.
Why you should open source your tools
In the upper midwest, the Y2K testing/fixing jobs disappeared in Jan/Feb of 2000 and the internet/e-commerce shops started closing in the fall of that year. 2001 was a tough year to look for a programming job and then it got much, much worse after 9/11. The job market didn't really recover until 2003.
Have you considered in those situations stating that with the limited requirements and storyboards that you would quote them per hour say 100/hr?
This could be an entire blog post, but yes, its common in the US to become overleveraged without a sufficient emergency fund.

Its usually recommended to have 3-6 months of expenses in the event of income loss, but its only a rough guideline. In some industries or economic scenarios, you may go almost 12-24 months with a job or significant income (I leave out part time jobs or gig for keeping this simple).

In short, we don't save enough in America (for a variety of reasons), and we don't have a proper social safety net for when that comes back to bite us.

<soapbox>

Have 6-12 months of expenses saved in your emergency fund. This is critical. When possible max out your retirement accounts (a Roth IRA can be used as an emergency fund in a pinch; contributions can be removed at any time penalty fee, but this should be a last resort). Save more. Live below your means.

</soapbox>

https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics

Infographic: https://i.imgur.com/fb7Dtmh.png