skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"This question has been asked before and already has an answer."

This is the single MOST ANNOYING thing about stack exchange. WHERE was this question asked before? How about a link to the original question? Hello?
Or preferably, the stupid site is out of luck and loses a user.
OWebl v0.2.1 Release
I hear those siege engineers during the Napoleonic Wars didn't have any certified licenses either. The gall of some people.
You can be sure it's not Imperial
> But, oddly enough, I have yet to hear anyone calling for open-source hard drives...

Fruitless debates about HDD firmware (and many more) are an undying hobby of some people in the wider coreboot community. These days the topic comes up every week or two.
You see this sentiment come up about every few months here. We're not rigorous enough. Or we can't estimate our build time well. Or we don't have any liability. Or we don't have a codified set of morals that govern us.

BS.

We're still exploring the space, and most of the time the things we build are good enough to work - just like the first wooden planks across streams were good enough.

We also do have the capability of designing and building the software equivalent of suspension bridges across the bay, using tools and processes like Ada, Coq, formal software proofs, etc.

Most engineering projects don't live up to your high standards, either. I knew a Blacksmith who would make circular staircases, and would regularly have to work around floors which were 4-6" higher or lower than specced. Or bridges which were put into earthquake zones, but not designed to withstand earthquakes. Or highways built with inappropriate foundations that buck like a bronco with frost heaves after the first winter passes. Or cities built under the freaking water table.

Ease up here folks. Our tooling and processes are still undergoing growth, as we take in the incredible scope of what we are capable of. Rome wasn't built in a day, and the understanding of stoneworking, woodworking, and city planning which enabled the building of Rome certainly took more than the < 100 years we've had.
Relevant:

http://www.edn.com/design/automotive/4423428/Toyota-s-killer...
What is the APR on that "only 10% of your income?" It isn't really "generous" if 10% only ever pays the years interest without repaying the original sum.

In the UK the interest rate is 1.5%. You're forced to repay a minimum based on your income. Below £17,335 (approx. $26,500) you pay nothing, and as your income grows as does the minimum repayment (so people making more repay faster).

PS - UK University is also much cheaper. It varies by course, but £9K/year ($13.7K) is typical. If I look at the first State College on Wikipedia (University of Alabama) $19,652/year (based on 4x semesters, inter-state resident) is what they charge. Then there is other fees: $325 mandatory dining fee, $400 enrollment fee, $100 parking, and so on. I've also heard that a US student pays $1K in books (!) which is insane (I purchase three books total which cost about £200 over the entire course).
Maybe they actually believed the many developers who told them writing tests actually saves time?
I like how Microsoft made a point with Cortana to put what it knows about the user in a "notebook" that you can browse and edit. Whenever it does something smart, like suggest that it track a flight, it lets you ask "How do you know this?"

This doesn't make anything harder to use, just more transparent.
However, something is clearly going wrong in terms of:

1) How security infrastructure is constructed in the first place

2) How security experts have communicated to and educated the public

The way computers are put together and software is distributed makes them insecure by design. This puts the public (non-experts) in a position where they feel helpless to do the right thing.

On top of this, a pervasive attitude amongst security experts is that laypeople are hopeless idiots. The science, medical, and public health fields have to deal with misconceptions and misinformation all of the time. When I compare outreach from those fields and computer security, I wonder if more shouldn't be done.
Much like Javascript's "==" operator gives you type conversion for "free", it's not clear to me that getting two-way binding for "free" is a good thing. One-way binding is significantly easier to reason about.
Indeed, note I said "easier" and pointed one of the easier ways enabled by lack of OS partition encryption.

I'll go even farther than parent: If your adversary is determined enough, you should assume that any physical access to your machine, for however short a period, means you should never ever use it again - and that you have no practical way to know if said access has indeed compromised your machine. See e.g., Thunderstrike.

corollary: You can never be sure that your machine, which has passed through 10 different hands (factory, tester, packages, store, courier, ...) is not trojaned to begin with.
Not to mention the real solution to this problem is to not have so many people take loans they can't pay for an education that isn't worth what they're paying for it. It's a lot easier economically to just not go to college than it is to advocate everyone steal money to go to college.
Concurrency Kit (http://concurrencykit.org) also has ck_epoch. Performance comparison to the URCU implementations available at http://concurrencykit.org/presentations/ebr.pdf
Huh? How exactly are they stopping you from sending an encrypted message?
Pretty sure it makes you a liability everywhere.

Plenty of white hats have gone down for reporting publicly.
The essay "Free Your Technical Aesthetic from the 1970s" [1] by James Hague is appropriate here. See also The UNIX-HATERS Handbook; much of it is outdated, but I think some of it is still relevant, particularly the part on the shortcomings of pipelines.

I think it's unfortunate that even if a good open-source PowerShell clone is developed (or PowerShell itself is open-sourced), it will probably never gain widespread acceptance outside of Microsoft shops. Tribalism so often trumps actual merit. But if someone did a PowerShell-like thing on top of Node.js, I could see that taking off, particularly if it were integrated with the Atom editor and its package manager.

[1]: http://prog21.dadgum.com/74.html
I know a lot of people without any of those that have a lot of character.
> This would absolutely happen, but the first step towards that would be a 2008-like situation all over again, because banks would suddenly have to absorb massive unexpected losses (as they did in 2008), and all of these would cascade.

Except student loans in America are almost nothing like regular loans. Until 2010 they were backed by the government which made issuing them as a bank as easy as printing money--you collect the interest while it's paid and then let Uncle Sam take the losses when someone defaults. (Even in this article notice that it's the DOE that's coming for the loan. ) Post 2010 the loans are issued by the government so you cut out the middleman taking all the profit. Either way there won't be a 2008-like situation.
I feel the delay too.
"the studies reviewed do not
provide a basis for inferring that increasing the severity of sentences generally is capable of enhancing deterrent effects."

I find it very disturbing that this is not included the basis of legislation and investigated further.
Nice. I like that you let people download easily.

One thought: the font for '1' and 'l' are too similar, and often confusing.
The Thing That’s Annoying You Isn’t Necessarily the Problem
And I thought monitoring WiFi devices was pretty easy with current probe management frames. With this it will be even easier to follow unique set of apps walk around since all of this have to be sent in clear.

Then for exploiting we just need one vulnerable application and then magnify a signal and BAM! We get to crash (or takeover) whole neighborhood worth of devices in one smooth swipe.

I just don't see anyway to make this secure. Then again people are constantly using open public WiFi connections and sending sensitive information over them.
My (new) bank USAA has some password policy which I forget, but I vaguely remember the green bar growing longer as I typed in my proposed password.

To log in to the site I have to supply my login/password, then on the next page my 4 digit pin, then on the next page the answer to one of three rotating security questions.

On the phone app, after the phone was authenticated the first time, I only have to enter my 4 digit pin to access my account. IIRC, that policy is at my option.

I'm not sure if that's all a good thing, or theater, but that's what they have.
The issue with student debt is critical, but one can't take these individuals as solely victims.

I went to a cheap state university and got a degree in CS. I had no debt after 3 years and my income is higher than average.

If I had gone to an expensive private liberal arts college, I wouldn't have the same outcome and could be a victim of the process.

Students must recognize they are also reaponsible for their debt.
I read this piece, but it ended rather abruptly without providing any real information. Kind of surprised out made the front page.
> I would also add that there are significant benefits that follow from keeping one's word, from not defaulting on the obligations one chooses.

Tell that to companies.

How many people, during the credit crunch, had their house defaulted on even in spite of never missing a single payment? The bank just decided the physical property was more valuable than the debt, and kicked them out.

I will absolutely keep my word when dealing with other people. I don't care about companies and businesses, because they are amoral and I will be amoral towards them. You're a fool if you treat companies like they're people, they don't treat you that way...
The private loans were still backed by the feds which is why the DOE was coming after the author. Writing student loans was a nice guaranteed profit for a while (it changed in 2010 when they started cutting out the middle man).
It might be because the textarea is listening for a keyup event, and you're used to seeing letters when the key is on its way down.
Wow, his only justification is he didn't want to work to pay back the money he owed. What a shitty person.
I think the author misses the point. As far as I see it, Unix tools are optimized for one thing: the human user. If `ls` is bloated, it is only bloated from the system point of view. As a user, I only see a small command that is quick and consistent (to a reasonable extent) with other tools. I don't need to know about 39 flags--that complexity is revealed with time, as I need to accomplish more complex tasks. For now, I only use and "see" two or three. And if more is needed, the program is small enough to be reasonably well documented. `man ls` perhaps with `grep` is all most people need.

This brings me to the second point. "Streams of text." Just like `ls`, streams of text are an optimal format/convention for humans. Many other things are better at being more compact or more efficient etc. But as formats and conventions proliferate, streams of plain text remain: readable and universal. Humans will ALWAYS be able to work with text. It is something that all humans kind of agreed upon--which cannot be said for any other formats or standards, which can offer various technical benefits at the expense of longevity, universality, and readability.

These two features (`ls` being relatively light and text streamy) leads to the "bootstrapping" effects sought after by the first generation of Unix developers. Learning about pipes and filters in one part of the system is applicable to all others. These tools scale with your level of expertise. They grow with you because despite the small quirks, there's a remarkable consistency of interface: text! Consequently `ls` (along with many other core tools) is implemented in the same way across a staggering variety of platforms. It has survived decades of alternatives touted as "better," "faster," "more usable," etc. etc. etc. That is the remarkable achievement of *nix / GNU etc. approach to creating human-centric software. As we architect ever more complex systems, we would do well to understand why and how Unix has endured, warts and all.
Arguments in the U.S. about rail often center on the vastness of the U.S. compared to individual European countries.

However, Europe is about the same size as the U.S. (or bigger depending how you compare) and has generally better rail across the entire territory, this renders the argument fairly moot.

Do you understand now?
I don't own a TV, let alone watch Fox News.

His legal actions, including judgements against him, more than suggest my claim. If you're going to choose a poster child for the plight of bisexual black men, please pick one that doesn't also happen to be a grifter.
Thank you. The smileys below the error rate show how happy the tutor is with the user's typing.

There are four smileys:

(｡ʘ‿ʘ｡) - Very happy; error rate is 0% and speed is at least 40 words per minute.

(ʘ‿ʘ) - Happy; error rate is 0% but speed is less than 40 words per minute.

(⊙_⊙) - Unhappy; error rate is greater than 0% but does not exceed 2%.

(⊙⁔⊙) - Sad; error rate exceeds 2%.

Also, see https://github.com/susam/quickqwerty/blob/1362e6d4edd9932b31... and https://github.com/susam/quickqwerty/blob/1362e6d4edd9932b31....

Typing speed is measured in words per minute. Five characters count as a word.

Error rate = number of errors made / number of characters typed correctly * 100%, rounded to the nearest integer.
To be fair to Stack Exchange, that's a behavior that's been around forever; at least since USENET. It is very annoying, though.
A programming dashboard, ranks you against other hackers
Yeah, that's super cool.
TedTalk: Don't eat the marshmallows
Let them rot in the rubber vacuum of hell.
I feel like I just got put on a list for browsing fetish websites
I do believe many companies are employing this practice with freemium apps. There is something bigger happening here with freemium. At first we all called it "race to the bottom" pricing. And if felt like that. If felt like the value of our apps were dwindling to stay competitive.

But let's just look at how things were for a second. If you sold an app for 4.99 you making a promise to the consumer that you would deliver value equal or greater than your price. And you if you didn't keep that promise it was up to the consumer to get a refund or suck it up. This was largely a pre-internet thing. The internet has made distribution a non-issue. Now you can get your products and ideas out there for little to no cost.

What we are seeing is an opportunity to show initial value to our users and offer higher value at a premium. This increases the reach of our work and helps us to find those 1000 true fans. Of course, we have to nurture those relationships. It's a lot of work.

I don't think there is anything wrong with premium pricing. People are use to it still. Why aren't we just focusing on the value we bring to people and whether it's premium or freemium none of it would be an issue.
Maybe the problem was that I had reached beyond my lower-middle-class origins and taken out loans to attend a small private college to begin with.

Basically, yes. Lots of people who are better off financially than this guy somehow go to state universities and survive.
There is an article by the Public Domain Review[1] where they present an old book about sketching on a blackboard.

I've been wondering how often would a regular teacher make such elaborate drawings. Considering this completely arbitrary and small sample, I guess the answer is "often".

[1] http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/blackboard-sketchi...
This is pretty cool. Does anyone think this would work well for some network topology mapping?
Yes, very true. And I am also comparing the startup flavour of software development (which I am involved in), rather than perhaps other flavours, such as finance, health care, etc.
I'm at unit 12 and my wrists are hurting :) But it's good practice.
Gosh how good it feels to be typing normal words again :)).

I think it can really improve typing performance if you exercise like this.

It feels like I type maybe 30% faster right now after 15 minutes of training.

Good job.
Speaking for Germany, an engineer will simply have a university degree. There is no additional exam. Similarly, most software developers will also have a university degree.

The term is actually regulated by law and it depends on the country and sometimes on the state. In Bavaria, for example, in order to call yourself a software engineer (or, for that matter, any kind of engineer), you need to have studied a STE(M) subject for at least three years, at a university or similar [0].

[0] http://www.gesetze-bayern.de/jportal/portal/page/bsbayprod.p...
Numerous people have already recommended Hofstadter, so I'll skip to:

The Moral Animal, Robert Wright. It looks at how natural selection applies to human cultures.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber. History of economic systems. Everything we know about money is one of many alternatives tried somewhere at some time.

Where Mathematics Comes From, George Lakoff. Presents the radical notion that math is not a truth we've discovered, but a byproduct of the organization of our brains. It looks at the evolution of the concept of infinity as an example, and so it resembles David Foster Wallace's Infinity and More.

I think these books all have the theme that what we think of as reality is just the current point on the random path of our culture's concensus. If that's not mind blowing, I can't help you. (-:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Animal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Mathematics_Comes_From
Opinion: No character is built on quitting and lack of forethought. This generation needs to be wise enough to take a proper loan with the idea of paying for it. Times are not like they used to be.
There are many people in their twenties clearing > 200K at Google/FB/Apple. A lot of them don't call themselves [JS/ML/Scala] engineers and build systems that scale well, have good leadership abilities, and can have a good sense for politics and product.
This is such patently absurd rhetoric, that it almost doesn't deserve a response. Almost.

I took out student loans right out of high school because I was raised by a mother who lived on welfare most of my life. I saw a college degree as the ONLY way for me to end the cycle of poverty that I grew up in. But what I didn’t count on was paying an absurd amount for out of state tuition and despite being in forbearance, the loans accumulated interest. So my $30,000 in student loans has blossomed into approximately $60,000 (even with a bankruptcy), with little to no hope that I’ll be able to ever pay it back. I will die with student loan debt and it’s ridiculous.

People who don’t understand the cycle of poverty in this country, like to throw around terms like “entitlements” or “self indulgence” or “lazy” and it’s bullshit. Quit applying your situation to every other situation in existence. If anyone in this thread is self indulgent, it’s you.

Colleges set you up for failure. They are money making machines who whose main purpose is garnering new students at whatever cost. Most are not interested in your success (in school). Most aren’t even interested in the quality of your education. Our country needs to wake the fuck up and realize that a quality education, free of encumbrances, is the only way that we’ll ever make this world work.

Knowledge is power and the fat cats in power are so afraid of empowering everyone with knowledge, that they have made the entire system into a house of smoke and mirrors. There is a plethora of resources available to everyone. Life isn’t a zero sum game. There is plenty to go around and we should all share in the benefits.
> But if someone did a PowerShell-like thing on top of Node.js, I could see that taking off

I think it should also use React.
I thought it was an art project or a master's photography exhibit for a bit. Like the one where they photographed a model frog in an aquarium against various landscapes.
> the government (acting as a bank) would expect to make a loss on all loans issued, as the number of people who default would outweigh the amount of interest collected on the remaining loans

As far as I know, you can't get out of paying a federal student loan even if you file for bankruptcy.
Your comment may be a response to the quote in isolation, but isn't really one to the quote in the context of the article.
The yellow box above the question does give a link to the previous answer. Is that what you're talking about?

EDIT: also, more annoying is-

"I want to do this. How do it do it?"

"No, don't do that. Do this other thing instead."
The point is that Metz->Dijon, two cities almost next to each other, takes as long as Lille to Montpellier, two cities on opposite ends of the country due to the centralization of the rail system.

So I'm checking the itinerary I received:

Take the Thalys -> Paris Nord ~ 2hr

Navigating around Paris to Gare Paris-Bercy ~ 20 min

Then actually, I can't find train service to Montpellier I just get the iDBUS

Towards Milano (stopping at Lyon-Perrache) ~ 6.5 hours

then Towards Barcelona (stopping at Monpellier) ~ 4.5 hours

That's the fastest route I can find. TGV doesn't even seem to be an option on the sites I'm checking.
I only skimmed the article so I don't really deserve to comment but this was my impression. He took private loans to go (initially) to a private college then went to acquire more debt in graduate school and then thinks that it's the System's fault. He straight up says he thinks the affordable path that most of us take was beneath him and that he deserved to go to a private college.
The Third Wave - Alvin Toffler

Listen Little Man - Wilhelm Reich

Praise to Hell - Gunduz Vassaf (actully I read this book in turkish and I don't know is it translated to english but I still want to recommend this one)
The Third Wave - Alvin Toffler
Listen Little Man - Wilhelm Reich
Praise to Hell - Gunduz Vassaf (actully I read this book in turkish and I don't know is it translated to english but I still want to recommend this one)
It isn't like he didn't know how much money he was borrowing when he took out the loan. He wanted something, so he took out a loan to get it. Regardless of what it is for, he made a deal.
When the Fed is giving away money at 0%, charging 10%, 7%, 5%.. does not seem generous.
Show HN: AlephBet – open-source JavaScript A/B test framework for developers
Why punish students who believed the marketing instead of punishing the schools and professors who sold students a degree that isn't worth the cost?
> The big difference with software engineering is that the costs of failure are so relatively low that we prefer to go full steam ahead instead of trying to find ways to reduce uncertainty.

I think this is an excellent point. Software is treated with a different level of rigor and respect on safety-critical projects. Same for embedded systems where the cost of updating a system is prohibitive.

I do think that there is an engineering discipline in software, just that most people aren't practicing it.
That map has a glaring error -- China counts Monday as the first day of the week, not Sunday.