skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did he argue that he has the right to misuse content, or did he simply joke about it?

People joke about doing things they would never dream of doing. Heck, people lie about doing things to show off to people all the time - especially when younger (though not exclusively, by any means)

Are there any examples of him actually misusing this data?
Backspace also takes you up one directory, I didn't know about Alt+Up.
I would have joked, but not in the same way. Calling his own users 'dumb fucks' for trusting him is insulting and implies that he's unethical.
Good to know. Now I can sleep easy knowing that the Teletubbies are not gonna to take over the world by morning.
Ask HN: $3.4M / year on shareware - even remotely possible?
Hi, I'm new to this site so apologies if I'm not posting to the right place or the right way.

I saw a discussion about shareware which led me to this article:
http://www.hackvan.com/pub/stig/articles/why-do-people-register-shareware.html

which is quite old (1990's), but still something in there caught my attention. This person claims that he spent two days to develop a product (saying it wasn't "a significant investment" of his time) and it generated some $34K in a year. So I was thinking, well if he develops a product like this every two days, in a year he could have 100 of these, even if he only worked weekdays.

Unless I'm missing something, that would be $3.4M for a year's worth of work!

I realize times may have changed a bit, but don't those numbers seem to be completely in the realm of fantasy? Did that person get really lucky or is he some sort of marketing genius?

Thanks!
Heh, spying is a strong word. Without GA I would have had a harder time figuring out that more of my users are from Spain than from the US for one of my projects.

Thanks for the info. I knew of their API but haven't used it yet.
Alright,

I see you settled for $65MM, that's about fair, even if the lawyers take half of it.

Next time, please get yourself a human hound to sniff out people. You seem like an all too nice and too trusting person.
I'd love to know how well this is working for them.

I think the first problem is easy to solve inefficiently but finding a very good solution takes an inappropriate amount of time. The second problem is rather boring.

Perhaps asking open/creative questions makes more sense? Here's some ideas

- Write a script that saves you at least one minute of time every day

- Draw a picture of the future of the internet/technology/whatever

- Build a tool that amplifies people's need for cloud storage
>Fictions are, by definition, not even pretending to be accurate.

This fiction is set in reality, it's just that the specific sequence of events hasn't actually taken place.
A Faster Web - It's Not about the Network Anymore
It is impossible (and a fallacy, I think) to judge A as lesser than B when it is impossible to definitively state the consequences of B. You have zero idea of what B would have looked like or felt like, only an estimation. You're comparing a known truth (how your non-violence makes you feel) to an estimation of the truth.

In simpler terms you have no way of knowing if listening to the impulse to fight back would have led to legal charges, serious injuries or death - for you or your opponent.
If You're Building For $1B, Is “Focus” A Farce?
I solved a puzzle for ITA. It got me an interview, and made good discussion fodder once I was there.
And the coffee goes to...

Joel and Yesenia of Microsoft BizSpark.

The meetup is changing venues and will accomodate 350 people at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View. I'll be updating the meetup page shortly.

BTW, BizSpark is also hosting SuperHappyDevHouse40 (the party for hackers, thinkers and robots) this Saturday in Mountain View – more at: http://shdh.org/40

Joel, Yesenia, I owe you big. Thank you so much.
Rare and refreshing. Too many hours of my life have been spent hacking broken Excel spreadsheets with recorded macros.
Using setTimeout to speed up the onload event
Thanks Joel. As I said, I owe you a big one.
Something else to question: is the GSM/CDMA split partially to blame here for intensive carrier lock-ins? I like to follow the US carrier market, but from the perspective that in my own country the last CDMA network was shut down in 2008. Here I can choose to buy a carrier branded phone with a subsidy, or as many people do - just buy a phone outright and pay month-to-month swapping carriers as simply as swapping the SIM card.
by Ian Sinclair. Not related to Sir Clive Sinclair.
How do you reduce false negatives without increasing the rate of false positives? Do you have any suggestions on how they can do this? The balance of standards of an interviewing process is a really tough problem. Surely the solution you'd suggest for them is more than just "be perfect"?
People are wired rather differently. Yes, you don't procrastinate to HN, Facebook, OKCupid or whatever's your online crack, but on the other hand the programming itself is an order of magnitude worse (and feels twice as bad). Maybe with a few programmers in the world I could "co-flow" enough to get up to speed, but that would still waste the other person's productivity. Considering that nice little XPers should swing a lot, this makes this probably the worst "agile" practice I know of, beyond even TDD.

Like I said, some people might be wired differently. Although in this case, it's hard to imagine getting a > 200% productivity increase out of two people to make it worth it in the long run.

For short code golfing sessions, sure. That's been called "could you help me with this code?" for a long time, before that nice alliteration was invented.
It'd be nice if one of the JS benchmarks actually POST'd the results back to the server, with current browser, and had a UI that allowed comparing the results for different browsers on different tests.
I'm guessing people just don't appreciate the long-form "magazine journalism" type articles anymore. They just want hard-won, Scientific-method backed double-blind studies with tl;dr abstracts rather than meandering, possibly inaccurate at points, theories of the human condition.

"I feel like you can 'support' any position you want if you've got the entirety of human history to pull anecdotes from."

Well, that's the whole point of unscientific creativity: the license behind the posit. Stripping it of it's theory, it's just "Lennon and McCartney may or may not be equally culturally significant apart than the two together", but how do you measure that in the modern day? How do you measure creativity even if it supposedly is so unquantifiable on an objective basis as to almost appear to be magic or, to some, just pure luck? In fact, is there even a measure to what we consider "creativity"? Is Stallman + Steele creating emacs in the 70s "creativity"? Is it duplicatable in a lab? Could Stallman have done it alone and vice-versa? Tough questions that, unfortunately, will require academic resources to conduct.
> Now here is the question: when I copy your song, am I depriving you of anything?

Yes, because there's a chance -- say, 5% -- that you would have bought it. So, you're depriving me of wealth and money.

Buying music, software or any other digital good is a contract, a promise: I promise you a copy of my music, you promise to pay me money and don't copy it for others. If you don't like the conditions of the contract -- fine, buy elsewhere!

But if you agreed to the conditions, violating them is immoral.
Seems like it would be possible to have really big events outdoors somewhere given the nice bay area weather. The great outdoors would easily be able to accomodate a few hundred limited only by the power of your microphone sound system.
Nice! What other black markets could benefit from this kind of visibility into pricing? ....hmmm, OK, maybe let's not go there.
Under a number of assumptions, the plane should now be heading away from you, at an angle of about 19.2 degrees from the vertical, and the altitude does not matter. A more precise estimate of the angle is 90 * atan2(sqrt(76 * 76 - 25 * 25), 76) / atan2(1, 0).

Key assumptions are that there is no wind, the speed of the plane is a constant 500 mph, the speed of sound is constant at 760 mph (actually untrue in real life, see http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/elevation-speed-sound-air-...), the airplane is maintaining a constant elevation, and the curvature of the Earth is irrelevant.

In that situation the actual elevation of the plane doesn't matter. Look at the triangle formed from where the airplane let out the sound, where the observer is, and where the airplane now is. If you double the height of the airplane then that becomes a similar triangle with all lengths doubled. So we may as well assume that the sound traveled for 6 minutes, so the plane has moved 50 miles and the sound moved 76.

It is easy to verify that at any point in time the rate at which the airplane is adding to the angle between where it was and where it will be depends on how close it is to you (the closer the better). From this it is easy to show that the maximum has to happen with the original position of the plane, the observer, and the current position forming an isosceles triangle. And that happens when the observer, the half-way point for the plane, and the current position form a right-angled triangle with opposite 25 miles and hypotenuse 76 miles. So the adjacent is sqrt(76^2 - 25^2).

The rest falls out of the definition of atan2. (Assuming no careless errors.)
Looks like a heavy focus on compute-intensive tasks. A* is definitely worth optimizing since it will help games.
> Why is it so unreasonable to bring people in on an intern-like trial basis?

We do that, in addition to an interview process biased towards false negatives. We still find it expensive to make hiring mistakes, enough that we are still circumspect about candidates.

Not only does it take a lot to build up someone new, it's emotionally costly to tell them at the end of the evaluation period that they didn't make the grade -- and still give them full support and a real chance the whole way, in case they can turn it around. It does happen; sometimes it just takes time for ambient culture values and priorities to sink in before people "get" what's important to succeed.

It's much harder to do this trial period with option to buy, than for interns who are going back to school, where the expectations and time frame are clear. It also seems that the most capable candidates aren't as interested in being hired on a trial basis, since they have other options willing to commit more fully to them.

These are a few reasons it doesn't work as well as you might hope.

(* note, not talking about google here)
The iPhone didn't make competitors take the open route. But if not for the iPhone, Verizon certainly would never have considered allowing Android devices on their network, let alone subsidized and championed them.

The gist of the article is that all phones are stymied by service providers. Even Apple, for all the ground it's gained for its own interests, has been hamstrung by arbitrary carrier requirements and restrictions.

You may have faith in the market alone to deliver unencumbered Android devices. I do not. The short history we have to this point has shown the US duopoly interested in competing only on how much functionality each successive device can gate off.

The carriers have every financial incentive to carve out functionality and wall it off behind premium fees. They have an incredibly strong incentive to not allow themselves to become commoditized data pipes. And they have demonstrated repeated preference for sharing the market over 'playing to win' at a lower rate of profit.

If the US duopoly is willing to collude on gimped android[1], as all evidence has shown, there is no market threat in not shipping an unencumbered Android phone.

[1] it needn't be official collusion; merely a lack of strong competitive moves in an area, as long as the other holds the line. E.g. the situation with US plan pricing, data plan policy and pricing, tethering charges, texting rates, feature-phone features prior to 2007, etc.
Self-control is pretty strongly correlated with high intelligence.
This has been a discussion. The laptop is mine. Everything I work on is on network storage, so I work on our cluster over SSH. The laptop is mostly just a client, with nothing stored locally. (Email is the only thing I can think of, and that's IMAP.) Also, we're a 5 man department, so there isn't much bureaucracy getting in the way of things.
Jobs and Wozniak made hardware to steal long distance. Blekko founder Rich Skrenta wrote the first PC virus. YC founder RTM wrote the 'Morris Worm' that took down the internet in 1988. MySpacer Tom Anderson and Napster/Plaxo/Facebooker Sean Parker each had FBI visits (at least) for their teenage unauthorized computer access transgressions.

There are people who are sticklers for every rule from an early age, and then there are those who do impressive things. The overlap is very small.
> Therefore, this matrix may not even be leaked, but somebody might reconstruct it from relatively small number (I don't remember exact required number, but i recollect that it is at most thousands) of keypairs recovered from devices in circulation.

According to Wikipedia, you only need to collect 39 Dragon Balls to reconstruct the master matrix.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hdcp#Cryptanalysis
"what happens on the internet stays on the internet, forever"
Have you checked out the tab sugar extension for Chrome yet? I think you can save your tabs as groups and quickly pull them back up. I messed with it some; it didn't really do what I was looking for but might be more in line with what you're describing.

http://tabsugar.com/
Both Kraken and Sunspider provide results in a form that you can copy and paste, and a UI for comparing results from different browsers. (But they don't let you view results from previous users, which I guess might be what you're asking for.)
Actually backspace is the equivalent of pushing the back button. Which is often similar but can give different results. Boy I miss OSX sometimes :)
Half the juice of the iPod touch is Apple's wildly successful distribution channel, iTunes/App Store. Games are huge on that device.

Android's app offerings, especially in gaming, aren't nearly as mature. There's also more junk in their store (though obviously the App Store has its share of junk, too).

So absent phone functionality, I'm not sure how exciting a phone-less Android device could be, except for geek noodling and hackery. I'd buy one for that, but I'm hardly the mainstream audience they'd need for success.

Meanwhile, the iPad is very satisfying for web browsing alone. It just feels good to directly interact with a large region of content. The apps are again a big part of its power, but more power comes from its satisfying physical UI. It's an idea worth stealing, but competitors will need to make their OS integration airtight to truly challenge the iPad.
NO.

This is very very bad form. People WILL remember you for this, and not in a good way.

A few things to consider...
At this stage of your career it's not critically important that you work for any specific company. Having a job and getting some general experience in a level 0 position is going to be pretty much the same any place you go (unless you are maybe comparing a position at Facebook to a position at Coders, Inc., but it doesn't sound like that is the case).

You will more than likely get some experience, figure out what you want to concentrate on in your career, and then go that route in a year or three.

Pick a job offer. Turn down the other one gracefully. Tell the hiring manager of the job you decline that you'd like to keep in touch with them (and do so).
What The Worlds Biggest Bank Heist Tells Us About Cloud Security
I've had two rounds of interviews at Google and I would not characterize a single one of the individual interviews I experienced as requiring "random knowledge" or "quick answers to logic problems".

I think there is a real danger here of extrapolating the experiences of one or a few people to a statement on hundreds or thousands of interviews/interviewers. At the rate Google is interviewing candidates it should be expected that some interviewers are not good interviewers.

After doing a lot of research on the subject (to prepare for my own experience) I can say with some certainty that based on reports from people that actually went through the experience, interviewers asking for brainteasers or "random knowledge" are in the clear minority.

(At least for software engineering interviewing. The questions for product managers seem to be a whole other beast.)
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Same reason Eric Schmidt get's ripped for his privacy comments.
I remember a somewhat disturbing piece I read a couple years ago that pointed out that a disproportionate number (as compared to the general population) of C*O's are borderline (the article used the term "subcriminal") sociopaths.
I agree the problems you're referring to are real, but it seems to me Americans are more aware of them than you might think (BTW, I live in NYC but I'm not American).

They elected a president who's decidedly a pragmatist (I think McCain would have been one as well, though not his VP candidate..), and one of the most talked about issues here is the disappearing middle class. My view is that they ultimately do have a good system in place to discuss and hopefully improve on these problems.

Their core strength is flexibility. I still remember talk of Japan overtaking the US in the 80s, and Japanese companies are still strong in the markets they dominated at the time - but the Americans have moved on to lead in software/Internet industries. That's not coincidence, in my opinion.
The whole logic is flawed for these reasons :

1) He was able to build a product that sold for 34k bucks in a year in 1990, at that time the software market wasn't nearly as saturated as it is today.
2) It won't simply be possible today, with the number of freewares, opensource projects,piracy,warez, etc., available to do any kind of task.
3) Therefore it is much more harder to find products to develop that would find and hit successfully a real shareware market

As a personal note, i suggest you to focus on the mobile market apps, especially for iphone and android, that will become huge. That's my 2 cents. But i would bet two hundred bucks that i am not wrong with this prediction.
Backspace takes you "Back". If you open C:\ and then click on Downloads, pressing Backspace will take you to C:\ and pressing Alt-Up will take you to C:\Users\YourUserName. Of course, if you are currently in C:\ and open the Windows folder, pressing either Alt-Up or Backspace will open C:\ again.
This has a shocking ring of truth to it. Reading it gave me a sensation in my head not unlike the satisfying, chunky "clunk" of my middle school combination lock sliding open.
Would you think differently about it if you were immortal?
What StatSheet wants from Twitter
sorry to be pedantic, but the lower bulk won't absorb bumps and drops. It will however reduce the impulse, because the lower mass results in less force

impulse = F * dT
F = m * a
I'd probably think differently about lots of things if I were immortal.
Yes, but the black market price is usually cheaper than the dispensary price.
Not that you are wrong. But when do we start & stop using 'spoiler' tags?

A week after the episode was on TV for the first time? A month? A year? And with movies?

I guess it's right to not use the tag when talking about Star Wars, for instance.

I guess too that The Wire's 5th season was enough years ago to don't use spoiler tags. I've learned this the hard way (Dexter 5th season finale, amongst others) and stopped worrying about this. It's the Internet, there will be spoilers no matter how careful you browse.

Again, the only thing I can think of where using spoiler tags was absolutely necessary is in unreleased shows/movies/narrative
As a long-time user of the Up button, I completely agree.

With the new system, the parent button (i.e. "Up", as NumberFiveAlive pointed out) is always in a different location, labeled with different text. How confusing! Microsoft replaced the notion of "I want to go up" with "I want to open folder X". Great for new users, not great for me.

The new system makes a lot of sense for people who don't understand nested file-systems and just want to open Folder X... "oh look, there it is, click". Also, the old Up button doesn't make a lot of sense in the context of a hierarchy laid out horizontally, so I can see why Microsoft would want to revamp their interface.

For those of us who do understand that directories contain other directories, the option to enable the Up button again would be a welcome "new" addition to the address bar. Sometimes it's more convenient to click on a button than to reach for a hotkey.
But you knew that was coming, right? It had to happen. It's a Greek drama in which their fates are sealed.
[from link:] "Throughout that entire time, Steele says, neither he nor Stallman took a break or made any small talk."

Well, of course not. This was the 70s, and we are talking about Guy Steele here; so they were probably far too busy scheming to make smalltalk.
Embedded systems programmer here, SIL-4 rated, working on critical systems for the transportation sector. ANSI C is absolutely a requirement in this sector, without question.
You're quite right, of course--but I think that, in any case where the person actually has access to a study they mention (and isn't, say, typing this reply on a phone while in gridlock on public transit), they would simply cite it, as it would strengthen their argument at no cost. Thus, you can take any assertion, including mine, that mentions that "studies say", as simply positing that there could be studies of such a type, and exploring the any implications made possible by that assumption.

In this particular case, I believe the best I can give you is that I heard it from a science podcast of some sort.
Right, I'm asking for a way to see results in aggregate. Admittingly there's a problem of differing hardware (which I somehow overlooked).
Yeah I'm aware of that and plan on working a metered usage for minutes into my app.
(And, in case anyone is confused: iPhones don't know the word anime.)
Thanks a bunch for the help. It would be nice if this were documented somewhere besides reading the source code though :( And none of my googling turned up m2.data.

I'd actually guessed that it might be making columns full, but I'd expected to see a step-ladder up and down memory pattern as fectors were allocated, gc was triggered, vectors were allocated, etc. I didn't observe such a pattern; memory usage was almost constant.

Anyway, thanks again for your help -- I'd offer via email to buy you a beer if you're ever in SF, but no email, so...
The trouble with the specifics is since it's a work of fiction, there is no way to tell what is real and what is made up. Hence, reputable historians and sociologists should study reality from reputable sources.
He may have been trying to say "Wow they trust _me_. Why would they trust me with anything?" But when you’re talking to close friends, not millions of people, you tend not to worry so much about phrasing.