skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Social anxiety and going to a conference alone
I'm going to ReactEurope at the end of the week, alone. Nothing special, except I have been suffering from social anxiety for the better part of my life.

I have been doing better the last year after seeing a psychologist and a personal coach. It was a very conscious decision to go to the conference on my own, to challenge myself. However, I am already regretting my decision and I honestly can't see myself getting through these two days at the moment.

How do I cope? What can I do to make thing easier? The things I'm dreading the most are the 'social' moments: breakfast, lunch, coffee breaks, dinner, party, ...

I don't know how to talk to strangers. I can't make small talk to save my life and I'm extremely shy.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who's ever been to a conference on their own, nor am I the only person to struggle with anxiety. Does HN have any tips for me? Thanks.
More likely a dig at Wolframs gargantuan ego.
The problem with simulating failures is that there are an infinite number of them. Should you simulate the effects of omitting each individual molecule in the whole assembly? Or adding one of every possible contaminant molecule at every possible location? What about more than one? It's a combinatorial impossibility.
They are also detained for unlawful data retention (the 1981 "Information & Libertés" law, which is seen by many as very strict regarding personal data).

It seems likely they will get them either directly or indirectly (ala "AlCapone" who got caught on tax related offences, not alcohol smuggling).
But isn't this the ultimate point of "science studies" (broadly put) since the days of Kuhn, Lakatos, Latour and so on?

I mean, Wolfram's bizarre confirmation bias about discrete automata is (apparently) apparent to the computer-y people because we've seen discrete automata and have goofed with all sorts of complexity-generating simple formalisms (L-systems, genetic algorithms, ...) that are impressive for giggles (and some industrial applications) but don't amount to a kind of Kurzweilian Transcendence.

... but we're not all mathy enough to pick apart what string/brane theorists or even orthodox quantum gravitationists are doing and say with (possibly misguided) confidence that it's no hope for a theory of everything. The people who do are continental philosophers who tend to get laughed out of the room, often because they have silly overarching theories (Zizek has a couple of points about quantum physics, but then, he thinks psychoanalysis explains human history) that must be relentlessly mocked.
I'm sorry you had to go through that. Those are "superficial" social issues compared to the deep underlying ideas she had: an obsession with limited government and unfettered capitalism, individual selfishness and a conscious denial of empathy for minority and underprivileged classes.

Her overt claim to cut through "contradiction" was itself directly contradicted by the cult of personality that arose around her. She was defensive and lashed out many times when people questioned her results and was just in general a sloppy thinker. She built her "philosophical" edifice to support her personal political ideology which is simple, deluded and inexcusable libertarianism at heart.
It's worth noting that austerity is strongly correlated with GDP decrease only for those countries without an independent monetary policy (i.e. the eurozone). People have been worried about the zero lower bound but it doesn't seem to have had much of an effect in practice.

http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=29692
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Sorry, I wasn't very clear–it is in the Dragon, but it's not in the pressurised 'nose' part (which I believe is the part that's jettisoned in an emergency, but I'm not actually sure about that? perhaps I'm wrong). Instead, it was in the unpressurised 'trunk'.

See this image: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Z8...

"Dragon also will use its unpressurized trunk to deliver the first International Docking Adapter to enable future commercial crew vehicles to dock to the station."

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/spacex_...

They've previously used the trunk for a payload on CRS-2, CRS-3 and CRS-5. You can see a video of how it works in CRS-5 here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXfOOIYWGF8

(Really cool video by the way!)
Huh. I can't guess what might be wrong from this much information. A lack of actual attempts was going to be my guess but clearly that's not the problem. I know some fairly homely folks who have managed to get plenty of dates.
California Poised to Mandate Childhood Vaccinations
The problem is precisely that Google didn't use Java under its free software license.
To be honest I really don't recommend it. With RW, they will force you to join any nearby Wifi network - even if it requires you to accept its ToS and you haven't done this. So if you are waiting for Amtrak and the opposing train pulls up for 2 minutes, you are switched onto this network. Or if you are in a bus on the highway in traffic and you pass a Wifi hotspot, it will switch you onto it... Even if you turned off Wifi. It constantly turned on Wifi even when you explicitly tell it not to. Google Fi has not done this so far. And, if the public Wifi requires me to accept some ToS, Google Fi will keep me on 3G until I have accepted the ToS and am /actually/ on the internet via the public wifi. So, in the end, RW really pissed me off. Still, it is a cheaper service and as a college student it was all I needed. I stayed on one network 24/7 and had no complaints at the time.

Edit: One thing about being forced to switch to a network is that it is silent and you don't necessarily know if you are connected to the internet or not. So if you walk into a Starbucks that has public wifi and your wifi is turned off, your wifi will be turned on and you will have no internet connection until you accept Starbucks' ToS. This has left me very confused before missing messages, calls, etc.
The first half of the article is a genuine problem. There's just so much distraction going on right now, I wonder how people are being productive.
Mine is simpler: Is it a project, that you would start by yourself anyway, you do now with partners, who bring value, you trust and give you enough equity? Everything else is a no.
The Equation of Time
He didn't say it was bad because he wasn't judging- just stating that there is a cultural shift.
Betting on a scarcity of rare earth elements leads to bankruptcy for Mollycorp
I do a ~40 minute commute, and I'm not sure exactly what eatonphil is referring to. I can think of two possibilities, which are worth discussing on their own so it's not like I'm putting words in anybody's mouth.

One possibility is if you use a lot of data itself on the commute, like streaming audio. That would eventually be problematic (although 5GB is still a good bit of streaming audio). As I hate my audio being at the mercies of networks anyhow, let alone cellular networks, I play things off local storage anyhow, so I'm not sure about this in practice.

The other possibility is if your commute goes through more residential areas. I'm mostly commuting on a highway going through mostly rural areas and my phone has no WiFi to be confused by. But I have noticed my phone can be really annoying to try to use while walking to my car in a reasonably residential area, while it's busy trying to get one of the xfinity_wifi connections, and then failing, then I walk to the next xfinity_wifi connection... end result is that I end up turning off the Wifi radio if I really care. Would be more difficult if this happened in a car. (And some of this is Comcast's xfinity_wifi thing where all their modems now emit a secondary SSID for "other customer" access. It's neat when I'm visiting a friend's house that has it, but I'm yet to find it useful generically out and about.)

RW certainly mostly works. Perhaps it mostly works slightly less than a dedicated cellular provider, but it also costs a lot less. There's some quirks in the cell phones but I'm unconvinced all of them are RW-related. (The only one that probably is is that sometimes I dial, and after a couple of seconds it returns to the contacts screen like nothing happened, and then about a minute later dials the number. Not sure what's up with that exactly.)

Edit: My experience does not entirely match eatonphil's sibling post. When I turn off wifi, it stays off. It does get overexcited about connections being up when they really aren't, which I believe is more an Android thing (Android decides it has a wifi network, RW tries to use it), but of course it affects the service. RW is working on it now. Google probably has twice as many people engineering Project Fi as RW has employees, plus a lot of in-house Android experience they can directly tap for a custom Android distro.

I suspect were I not already a customer of RW, I'd go Project Fi, too. I'm definitely not annoyed enough with RW to incur the personal-time expense of switching, though.
No, because glibc is LGPL.
If the Federal Circuit decision stands, software might have finally encountered the lump it can't digest as it eats the world.

† In the United States.

The apparent legal position following this result seems crazy to me. Even in the world of intellectual property law, there has been some recognition that the interests of interoperability and ability to communicate may outweigh the benefits of monopoly protection as an incentive to create and share. The US, for example, takes this view in declining copyright protection on the design of typefaces (as distinct from font files that contain software describing those designs in one specific way). And in Europe, good luck getting a software patent that blocks anyone from using your file format or communications protocol.

Given that programming to an interface is essentially the way we enable interoperability between different software products, allowing the protection of such interfaces to stand seems absurdly counter-productive. This is particularly true if the protection holds retrospectively for APIs that were previously believed not to be protected in that way by those who chose to write code against them, which would presumably be the case here.

If the US allows this position to remain, it could cripple the US software development industry very quickly if the lawyers start throwing their weight around. In practice, as often happens under the US legal system, I expect it would be particularly damaging to the little guy, while the big players would all cross-license their respective portfolios somehow to make the issue go away.
I decided to move from learning Angular+Ionic last night to going with React.js+React Native and found this good dump of information from Github https://github.com/enaqx/awesome-react

Looking forward to trying this tutorial right now.
> The issue with their ideas was that we weren’t facing a market problem. The customers were buying; they just weren’t buying our product. This was not a time to pivot.

A true gem, it's very important to make this distinction.
I know HN sure isn't helping me be productive from minute to minute! I'm checking it compulsively for new posts. Hopefully its teaching me enough to compensate...
It's always good to read data about this stuff.

One thing that stood out was "Free users eat up support". I would have thought the first thing to offer to paid users but not free users would be support! By all means provide a forum for community-lead free support, but talking to an actual person should come at a cost.
Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
Instead of always looking for ideas, lets try and ask this:
What problem in your industry would be a successful startup if someone decided to solve it?
Most proper Lisps are all proprietary, what GPL scheme?

None of the GPL Lisps compare to what is offered by the likes of Allegro Common Lisp and similar environments.
Aren't the API's used in Islandwood a clone of iOS API's?
I think you're confusing "anonymous" with "uncensored". Nothing prevents these messages from being filtered for abuse.

Not to mention that being a single account, and hence easily blocked, the potential for abuse is minimal compared to the alternative of simply creating a new Twitter account, which would be just as anonymous.
A networked computer can never be confidential. Period. Full stop.
Oh gosh, having worked on a fairly large vacuum system, I can tell you that o-rings are monsters. Very minor errors in dimensions can mess up the seal, and temperature/humidity/wear/elasticity and all that can subtly mess with the dimensions in crazy nonlinear ways. You can simulate the ever loving garbage out of it and an imperceptible change in composition due to an undetectible mixing error when extruding the ring can cause a seal to slightly leak. Mayhem ensues. (And most likely any attempt to directly detect it will destroy the integrity of the o-ring or take so long to render the test useless, since there are usually hundreds of o-rings (or in the thousands - o-rings are all over the place).)

I'm not even talking about jackquesm's note about the failure mode, either. Just real insidious errors in manufacturing that can't be detected in any sort of reliable, sane way. Even the Challenger's o-ring wasn't guaranteed to fail, and indeed most didn't. In fact, most of that entire o-ring didn't fail.

I've seen some really freaky things amplify what are essentially chaotic edge cases. You can certainly figure them out, but you'd never get anything done for any level of affordability in time for any ship date if you didn't just calculate risk and go ahead.

TL;DR: risk is always there because the world's imperfect. At best you just tighten the statistical confidence, but that's super hard.
Onefinestay raises £25m as it eyes international expansion
Thanks! No, it was the one that came up first on Google I guess. Since all that I'm using is change_geometry and resize! I might switch it over to something more lightweight.

Made a note here: https://github.com/pazdera/catpix/issues/1

Thanks for the suggestion, Matt!
Common Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
Other languages are a bit ahead of English in that regard, but their conjugations make it clear who the subject is.
The NSA does lots of unclassified work as does the CIA.

For NSA much of it has to do with security of civilian comouters, as with SELinux.
I can agree with that with clojurescript, but I disagree that clojure itself has this problem.

Clojurescript -should- be calming down soon. It is in a stage of changing constantly ATM but that should calm down once some of the underlying tech is stabilized (like clojurescript bootstrapped from clojurescript).
I think it is about respect. Like my grandparents who will copy any error message down by hand and ask me about them later, but who actually listens and care what I have to say. If they kept asking the same thing and didn't listen I would feel very different about what I am doing.
You should work for free as in freedom, not for free as in beer.
Set a goal you can reach and take a win on. e.g. talk to ONE person. You'll have two days to accomplish this. Take a win for pushing yourself and showing up. Find someone you feel you may have something in common with and that you think you might like. Introduce yourself (hi, i'm dinosaurs, what's your name?) Don't make a big deal out of it, just go for it. You're brave for pushing your limits. Let us know how it goes? (You are not alone, even though sometimes it feels like it.)
The paper is about a model, not any actual data: the data don't support the thesis. Anyway, austerity at the zero lower bound is arguably insane, and imposing it on countries in recession is also arguably insane.
I don't mean to be rude but how can you be so foolish? Have you met humans?

There is no algorithm for "distinguish[ing] the laws that are poorly crafted from those which are clearly interpreted." Law is an imperfect tool for managing human wickedness. No symbolic perfection can force a person to be good. The essence of the problem is that people just like to be cussed bastards. Math won't help.
There have never been any communist states. In western countries communist state refers to states with Leninist-Marxist ideology that some would argue are in fact not even socialist states.

My argument is that we don't have to create a communist software ecosystem because the current FOSS one that you probably use yourself already is very close to communism.

Probably as close as it can get given that it exists within a capitalistic society.
Mathematica is an interesting case study for a general-purpose software package that happens to be more feature-full and functional -- not just "more convenient" or "better UX" -- than any open-source counterparts.

I tend to use some proprietary scientific software, but a lot of it is because academia already has already invested in codebases for, say, Stata, GAMS, Matlab and so on. But Matlab is two steps removed from raw Fortran; and what sets it apart from the many identical-syntax clones are a few narrowly-oriented toolsets aimed at some kinds of engineers.

Mathematica is the only one I buy versions for my home computer. It's very, very good.
Code is a job
It gets far, far worse than that. I had an American Airlines flight which showed every seat except the "premium" paid ones as full. Since I highly value sitting next to my wife, I went ahead and coughed up the $20 necessary to buy two seats together.

The plane flew at about 20% capacity. That diagram showing all the seats except premium ones filled? Complete and utter bullshit. I got a refund in my email a couple days later; I can only assume due to my complaining to the flight attendant about the situation. And I haven't flown American since.
That's true in the lower court, but here, Google is the petitioner, so as the movant, their name goes first. See the docket:

http://www.supremecourt.gov/Search.aspx?FileName=/docketfile...
What makes someone think that vibrant green text on a straight black background is a good idea? I just don't understand it. It's nearly unreadable.
What language features distinguish Mathematica from lisp? Are we just talking about the m-expression syntax, or are there more fundamental differences?
[Help] Little help needed
Dear hackers,

I am a PhD student in the School of Architecture, Design and the Built Environment, Nottingham Trent University.

My research is on ‘Individual Upcycling’ – creation or modification of any product out of used products, components or materials in an attempt to generate a product of higher quality or value than the compositional elements at the household level.

Would you be kind enough to go to the link below and take 10 minutes to complete my online survey?
http://goo.gl/forms/WKFfKXSGzb

You don't need to have previous upcycling experience to answer the questions.

I need around 1,000 people for this main survey proper hopefully by end of July.

Your time and participation will be very much appreciated!
Thank you very much in advance for your kind help.

Yours sincerely,
Kyungeun Sung
PhD candidate
Nottingham Trent University
A large majority of Uber drivers are former taxi drivers, you don't have to lease a vehicle for 45k per year, choose hours of work, and you have more control over passengers bad behaviour (two way rating system).
Unit Testing RxJava Observables
You could easily argue the people selling these books to adults are doing just that.
Newsletter subscription not working: "conection à la base de donnée impossible"
What distinction are you trying to make here? Any system for secure communications will eventually have to connect to some sort of communications network. Are you saying that secure communications with computers is simply impossible?
IoT Whitepaper: A New Approach to IoT Security
(BTW, "DRY" is an inadequate reprise of refactoring. That's always bothered me. "Don't repeat yourself" is one big repeat of an earlier and more clearly and rigorously defined idea.)
Your history is incorrect, though. Apple was authorized by Xerox PARC to use their technology in exchange for allowing Xerox to buy 100,000 shares in Apple before their IPO.
But what would be the incentive for other site owners to use it then? It seems like in this scenario, the only time anyone would want to use the tool on their live site would be when they are sure they are getting an A+, any other sites that don't care about that score just wouldn't add the tool and any changes that might lower that score would presumably being taken care of before rolling out to production.

It seems like it would just turn into unnecessary bragging for the site owner. I wonder if the scoring would still be useful for development though, or if they would just try to fix as many problems as possible anyway.
Despite my grievance elsewhere in this thread that mail servers do not come pre-configured with sensible defaults, I would guess that no modern mail servers are pre-configured as an open-relay when installed. The concern about port 25 relaying being abused by spammers strikes me as an anachronism.

In any event, I found that mainstream ISPs are willing to unblock port 25 if you tell them you are running a personal mail server and have it properly configured to not relay for unauthenticated users.

Aside from that, you'll want one static IP to make your life easy so you don't need to use dynamic DNS.

I think matters such as availability of your server and configuration are surmountable challenges.

But I strongly agree with you about security. Although I really like the idea of this device, the first thing I noticed in the product web page is the use of PHP Roundcube for webmail. I have a fear of running PHP anywhere on my network. The track record [1] is way better than, say, Wordpress, but seeing things like Exec Code, even back in 2008, gives me pause.

[1] http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-8905/...
How exactly do you define race to the bottom? If on pricing alone, I can maybe see your argument. But Southwest has had a pretty consistently high level of service and low level of fees.
"A FORTRAN Coloring Book" - http://www.amazon.com/FORTRAN-Coloring-Book-Roger-Kaufman/dp...
Time to start working around that by using composition not inheritance!

No, wait, that won't work. To make composition work, you still need to be able to share interfaces.
Maybe.

My website has articles and essays on a wide variety of unrelated topics. Ads associated with some topics got lots of clicks, others didnt however most of my pages get lots of organic links.

My advice is to remove ads from pages that dont yield clicks. The links are worth far more than ad revenue.
Uber France CEO taken into custody in wake of protests
Yes.

The benefit is "exposure" or "portfolio pieces" and it's terrible.
A modelable law would have defined that distinction ahead of time, and when that fails, adjust accordingly. Those terms are incredibly vague to begin with, as well.

This particular case could have been anticipated at least as far back as the 1970s.
Wait until 5G comes along. We'll have more competitive pricing /s
The most successful one I'm familiar with is the one employed at Netflix (I worked there on BI). However, they did not abandon the concept of a data warehouse, they just enhanced it with the data lake. Probably about 80% of ad hoc analytics come out the data lake while standard reporting needs are covered by a Teradata dwh. When ad hoc queries become regular needs they build aggregates in the data lake and move it to teradata or redshift where it can be sliced and diced along various dimensions.

I see this same strategy being attempted at some non-tech companies as well. Too early to say whether it will succeed.