News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

joliss

Thanks, very interesting stats!

>> financial incentives to incarcerate...

> Do you have any sources for this?

For private prisons, the Corrections Corporation of America reportedly spends over $1 million each year on lobbying. [1][2]

Beyond private prisons, there's lobbying from prison guards' unions. For example, the California union appears to have substantial political influence, and in 2008 successfully spent $1.8 million to defeat a ballot initiative that would have reduced the prison population.[3]

Further, in some municipalities, cities use fines as revenue-raising tools, and arrest and jail people who fail to pay. See e.g. the Ferguson DOJ report.[4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrections_Corporation_of_Ame...

[2] http://www.diversityinc.com/diversity-management/who-profits...

[3] http://criminology.fsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/volume-10-issu... p. 750 (PDF page 274)

[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/03/0...

Re:The responsibility we have as software engineers on Sunday May 24, 2015 @01:10PM (#9596801)
Related: Mike Monteiro's talk, "How Designers Destroyed the World":

https://vimeo.com/68470326

Perhaps a mod can replace the submission's URL with this? ^
Re:How famous people rate Google Play Store apps on Friday May 15, 2015 @08:43AM (#9550182)
To get someone's (or your own) Google+ ID, you can also click the profile picture and copy the oid parameter out of the URL. (Pulling it out of "View Source" didn't work for some reason.)
Related visualization of how kid's range has shrunk over four generations: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/2b/4e/b3/2b4eb36f9...
Re:Ask HN: Internships for a 13-year-old? on Friday April 03, 2015 @01:36PM (#9317212)
There doesn't seem to be much in the way of real intership programs for your age group.

However, your resume is super impressive, and you're clearly gifted. I'm going to bet that there will be people who will want to support your ambitions and create an ad-hoc internship for you. So here's my advice:

Treat your internship search like a job search!

Cold-call and cold-email CEOs of NYC-based startups that use Rails or React. Medium-sized and small companies might have an easier time accommodating, but it can't hurt to try bigger companies too just for kicks.

E.g. try this line for cold-calling: "Hi, this is Lachlan. Are you $CEO_NAME at $STARTUP_NAME? Yes? Cool! I'm a 13-year-old middle school student, and I built a web app with Rails and React last year. I'm looking for an internship this summer. I was wondering if that's something you'd consider."

Regarding child labor laws: Businesses with employees tend to already have a lawyer they regularly talk to (for contracts and compliance). They should be able to run the labor law issues by their lawyer for you - maybe you'll have to wait until your 14th birthday, maybe it's possible to structure it as a "trainee" program that falls under different laws, maybe something else. So I'd just bring this issue to their attention and leave it up to them to figure it out.

Re:Ask HN: How to move beyond “freelancer”? on Monday March 30, 2015 @01:17PM (#9290953)
Yup, thanks - I've updated the parent.
Re:Ask HN: How to move beyond “freelancer”? on Monday March 30, 2015 @11:18AM (#9290077)
The most profitable advice I've gotten for charging good rates comes from two sources:

1. Jim Camp's negotiation book, "Start with No": http://www.amazon.com/Start-No-Negotiating-Tools-that-ebook/... One key takeaway: You can refuse to compromise on your rates, provided that you can afford to walk away if necessary.

2. Patrick McKenzie's (patio11's) advice for moving beyond the "freelancer" title, in particular http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro... and http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/17/ramit-sethi-and-patrick-...

I used these strategies to double my daily rate as an Ember.js consultant from $1k to $2k, and it was a fairly straightforward exercise in the end.

Re:OpenSSL Security Advisory on Thursday March 19, 2015 @01:00PM (#9233229)
I found the matching git commits for each vulnerability: http://www.solitr.com/blog/2015/03/openssl-vulnerability-bre...
Re:The infernal semicolon (2012) on Thursday March 05, 2015 @01:52PM (#9152978)
I use a semicolon-free style (only protecting leading ([+-/) with var declarations like so:

    var foo = 1
    var bar = 2
Is there an issue with semicolon-free var declarations that I should be aware of?
Re:Nexus 6 on Wednesday October 15, 2014 @12:39PM (#8459519)
Full specs: https://i.imgur.com/S0ifg2B.png

Of note: Nano SIM, 493 ppi display, 4K video recording.

(The specs on the Google page have a button to expand them. It's a bit hidden and not linkable, hence the screenshot.)

Re:Don't link to line numbers in GitHub on Thursday July 17, 2014 @06:48AM (#8046801)
ProTip: Hit the y key on any GitHub page with source code.

It'll instantly expand the URL to its canonical form, e.g.

https://github.com/sass/libsass/blob/master/parser.cpp#L29-L...

to

https://github.com/sass/libsass/blob/fca1f75a14fe5336c7b1a4b...

which stays valid indefinitely (unless the commit is deleted from the repo).

P.S. Hit the ? key for more keyboard awesomeness. :)

About: http://www.srl.inf.ethz.ch/jsnice.php

Apparently this is a machine learning research project.

It seems that this would be quite useful for looking at the code of closed-source webapps. Would love to see it open-sourced or available as a service (via an API perhaps). Think auto-deminifying browser extension.

Does anybody have access to the PDF?

I'd be interested in effect size in particular. The abstract only says "profound".

Re:Explicit Trusted Proxy in HTTP/2.0 on Tuesday February 25, 2014 @06:38AM (#7296988)
Before people start associating this with actual HTTP/2.0, it is worth emphasizing that this is a separate document. None of this "trusted proxy" MITM nonsense is in the HTTP/2.0 draft: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-httpbis-http2/?in...

Thankfully, it seems fairly unlikely that the trusted proxy thing is going to get anywhere: It serves the interests of Ericsson and AT&T, but not those of the HTTP/2.0 spec authors (who are from Google and Mozilla) or server and browser vendors that will have to implement HTTP/2.0.

I named it after the `Makefile` pattern, since it contains a build definition. We have `Rakefile`, `Cakefile`, `Gruntfile.js`, etc.
Re:Broccoli: First Beta Release - JavaScript build tool on Monday February 17, 2014 @12:48PM (#7253255)
I wrote this, am happy to field questions here.

Can a mod put a more helpful title, with something like "JavaScript build tool" so people know what it's about?

Re:Samsung and Google Sign Global Patent License Agreement on Sunday January 26, 2014 @10:34PM (#7128616)
These types of agreements might mean that we move from "software patents held by tech giants" to "software patents held by a cartel of tech giants". That would be worse.

An agreement like this might avoid the next high-profile lawsuit, but instead of fixing the patent system it's tapering over the most visible symptom, creating a patent oligopoly in the process.

Maybe I'm seeing things, but I'm just having Google's ongoing anti-poaching scandal fresh in mind.

Re:Your best passive income? (2014) on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @04:57PM (#7098807)
I'm getting organic search traffic for niche keywords, like 'free solitaire online'. http://sudokuisland.com seems to have a decent amount of keywords already, but perhaps you can think of more. Organic search is probably the only way to get traffic at the scale you need for an ad-monetized game.

My plan is to improve the PageRank and DomainRank, and eventually to make the product better (since Google presumably picks up on that through bounce rates, time on site, sharing). So that'd be the general strategy I recommend.

Another metric you can optimize is the number of times a first-time visitor returns, because it acts as a multiplier on your traffic. Say you get 100 organic first-time visitors per day, if each visitor returns 5 times, you'll have 600 total visits per day.

Re:Your best passive income? (2014) on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @04:53PM (#7098773)
I have no idea. I was surprised at how high it was.
Re:Your best passive income? (2014) on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @09:22AM (#7095337)
My free-to-play Solitaire web app, at http://www.solitr.com/.

It's making a bit over $1,000 in monthly ad revenue. Traffic is at ~3k dailies.

I did this as a weekend project 2 years ago, and at some point migrated my blog to it to pick up DomainRank. Other than that I've mostly left it alone.

Re:Going Beyond Vulnerability Rewards on Wednesday October 09, 2013 @08:43PM (#6524956)
I like the intention -- making software more secure is really worthwhile.

The reward scheme is dubious though: I love working on open source because it's intrinsically rewarding. But if you try to pay me a few bucks, chances are I'll lose interest because my day job pays better.

Extrinsic motivation killing intrinsic motivation is a known phenomenon in psychology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation_crowding_theory It means that splashing money around to get people to do stuff can have the opposite effect. Also see the book Drive by Daniel Pink: http://www.amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivates...

Re:Keypress: A Javascript library for capturing input on Sunday September 29, 2013 @12:37PM (#6465629)
How about single-letter shortcuts, like GitHub does? Press the ? key on GitHub to get the shortcut list. Some might not be as comfortable (e.g. / on a Swiss-German keyboard, as you say), but they'll still mostly work.
Re:Cooking up a half-baked bad idea involving ssh keys on Sunday April 07, 2013 @06:10PM (#5508980)
Exactly. Travis CI uses this to let you ssh into your build VM.
Re:Don't Copy-Paste from Website to Terminal on Sunday April 07, 2013 @05:55PM (#5508932)
My idea was that if you're pasting a single line, then at least you can review the command you pasted before hitting enter.

Older »