skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 1) Everyone can speak faster than they can text. If you have a significant amount of information to convey, texting sucks. Voicemail can be very efficient.

Voicemail is potentially efficient for the sender at the cost of the recipient's ability to understand what you're rambling.

My phone lets me SMS via voice. I can send a concise, planned message. The recipient can receive something that uses his time most effectively.

> 2) Many people don't have unlimited texting plans and texting can get expensive quickly.

I turned mine off in favor of a data plan and use that for SMS.

> 3) Texting is dangerous and illegal while driving in many places, while speaking and listening on the phone are often not illegal and definitely less dangerous.

Speaking and listening to a phone while driving is dangerous and illegal without digging out and hooking up a headset, while waiting until you stop is not illegal and definitely less dangerous.
Sure, Zuckerberg acted unprofessionally, and so they do probably deserve something. But it's important to realize that they came out ahead by $65m. There's not a chance in hell that if Zuckerberg had simply delivered what they asked and then severed ties in an ethical manner that they would have created a company worth anywhere near that.
I'm curious: you are aware that a universal health care law passed in the U.S. last year, right? Its goal was to make this statement no longer true in the U.S.:

>If you have the wrong medical profile, you could be simply uninsurable. That’s how a free market works.

by January 1, 2014.

Given that health insurance systems similar to the one the Affordable Care Act sets up do provide universal insurance in other countries, it seems that the ACA has a good chance of doing what it's promised to (though I'm sure it will require tweaks and adjustments in the years to come).

But regardless, a conversation about health care in the U.S. that doesn't even mention the ACA seems to be rather pointless.
Great point. I think that would be a good addition. For now you can adjust the slider in real time.
I think the gap is not how much value the hacker generates, it is how much value they get from the corporation.

If you are independent, than you loose out on all the value the corporation provides above & beyond your salary. Things like:
- Taxes on revenue. The corporation pays state/federal taxes on the income you help generate. You would have to pay this on your own, and it can be expensive.
- Limited legal liability. They have lawyers and deep pockets to dissuade lawsuits, and fight them if necessary. Most corporations protect individual employees. You would have to pay for this on your own.
- Sales force. Demand generation is very expensive
- Healthcare. Yeah, very expensive.
- Office space.
- Training, travel, budgets.
- Hardware, etc.

Basically, take everything captured under "General administrative expenses" and divide that by the number of employees in the company. This is the amount of value each hacker gets above & beyond their pay.

This gap isn't insurmountable, and you probably don't need all the services, but it explains much of the 'barrier to entry' for hackers going rouge.
After 11 years, a new "Programming in Standard ML" [pdf]
Actually,

I think that's also a fine rhetorical question - in the sense of a question of who's answer is fairly obvious and which points to a large reality. ("Honest question" is fine way to say "this is not a rhetorical question". That's just to help clarity, rhetorical questions are fine tools of expression...)

Even in the unlikely event that the RCMP is filtering some civilian employees, the overall reality is that far more information flows across the Internet to far more people than one could assure accountability around.

So it is completely idiotic to up a surveillance network which looks so deeply into each person's communication that it would require serious accountability among the watchers. Since that accountability won't be there. Look airport security personnel, then imagine them going through your emails for bad stuff.

It is worth remembers that the abusiveness of a society of surveillance often doesn't come so much from a single dictator but rather from a vast array of unaccountable Apparatchiks abusing their petty but unchecked power.
Yes, the problem is the different 3G band. Otherwise, you can just buy a unlocked iPhone from France (without having the jailbreak it). Obviously, this makes sense only if you go to France for other purposes.
The Growing Brain
I am both amused and slightly fearful that the blog for Discover Magazine would use "embiggen" in lieu of enlarge.
From the post I was responding to:

> No rationing system can change this fundamental fact: some people will die because we don't have the resources to save them.

Don't agree. If access is free then a lot of preventative care...

If you want to argue that Scandinavia distributes health care more effectively, make that argument. The OP doesn't. It merely complains about scarcity.
Group Gifting App on Facebook
Flying money bags! It must have flying money bags!
If you bring your own (compatible) device, you can get a no-contract plan. The prices are exactly the same. If you want a no-contract plan, but don't have a device, you have to pay the un-subsidized price for the phone.
That got a chuckle. You can also substitute lawyer for consultant.
Hiring Demand for Computer Specialists in the Pacific Region
throttles is still much better than not having it or being over charged.
This one is somewhat straightforward, though:

Can I describe to my mom, in one sentence, what it is they do?

What proportion of the company is people who do real, useful shit as opposed to "leadership" or other management? It's tiny, right?

Are they making something that can be genuinely useful or enjoyable for people?

Are they funded by a secretive billionaire or have you heard of their investors?

There are others, but this seems a good start. One or two no answers might not disqualify a company but no to all four would leave me deeply suspicious.
Ask HN:Where to find good help for an idea?
Have a great idea and very passionate about it; however,need help with finding someone to help me make it happen. Any Advice?
Norway, Denmark and Sweden are all richer (per capita) than the U.S. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomin...).
"2. Assume a hacker can in turn be significantly more productive working for themselves."

This premise is fundamentally flawed for one simple reason. When you are working for someone else, you just come to work, sign in, and start coding. The question of actually having work to do is solved long before you ever set foot in the office. When you're working for yourself, a big portion of your time has to be spent looking for work. And that's time you can't spend coding, ergo you aren't making money for it. That's why people working independently will generally earn less than people in a company, all other things being equal.
Well, it didn't sound like a categorical "This will never happen!", more like "Eh, I don't like this about it, so I'm not planning on it yet."
Three brand new CEOs who know all the tricks sit down for a wide ranging conversation about success in Silicon Valley.

I had a lot of fun during this interview but certainly wouldn't claim to know all the tricks to being a CEO (ha!). That topic has already been covered exceptionally well here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2396120

If anything I think the gist of our conversation was about learning from past mistakes and refusing to quit no matter what -- and as a result, learning to make better decisions over time. That and the notion that a good team will always trump a good idea.
HN needs collapsable threads. I toyed with a greasemonkey script that would do this but the somewhat "super pragmatic" layout makes it less than simple.
Thank you as per your feedback as per sample call.
Video is also an entirely different protocol.
Prob nil as the settlement was decided at the end of march
Looks like almost complete defeat to me
Galois chosen by Darpa to help make homomorphic encryption feasible
Even if this were an example of fascism, which it's not, the government is the entity enforcing this tax, not the corporation. It'd be great to not have corporations lobbying our government for ridiculous schemes like this, but the solution is not to attack the corporation. They've not broken any laws, and they're not the ones who created them in the first place. The problem is the government who allows it.
“Build It and They Will Come” Is Not a Software Documentation Strategy
unlike phone conversations, it's easy to encrypt your internet communications

Considering the bill's clear intention is to prevent Internet communication from being private, how long do you imagine encrypted communication would remain legal?
What should have MZ done differently?

More interestingly, in hindsight, if the twins had the choice of hiring MZ or Joe PHP, who do you think they would've chosen?

"Go ahead Mark, we'll get our pound of flesh from you whatever you do" is the vexatious vibe I'm getting. Maybe the film portrayal is adding to their greed. Self-entitled douchebags. What websites or businesses have they built since Harvard Connection? http://www.connectu.com is down, surprised?
It's not "ancedotal evidence", it's just an ancedote. Every Canadian I know prefers their healthcare to the US one. Now that you and I have equally canceling ancedotes, look at some evidence.

http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/how-do-we-rate-t...
Groupon's Secret: Price Discrimination
Hands On with CyanogenMod 7 for Android
Seems like people don't understand it so I'll give try to give some useful advice.

Listening to the call, the first thing I think of is women in offices. Probably some of the most marginalized and unappreciated people in the workforce. Constantly buying each other cakes and going overboard for birthday celebrations. Wherever you can find that demographic (places that sell desserts, salons, etc). You have a good price point for working to middle class women of all kinds.

It's a thoughtful product so I would honestly focus on women. Online you should be able to target them at places where they can buy gifts, etc...

As HN becomes more popular I think the feed we'll get more ASK HN questions than posts.
Your point is right on, one size does not fit all. One searcher's "works" is another's "fails". And highlights how complex the issue is, some people are the "feeling lucky" types and others are the I want to drill in and make sure I am getting what I wanted. The question may be, Are the "feeling lucky" types getting lucky?
Can You Copyright Pi? Lawsuit Over Copyright On Pi Symphony
High-quality sites algorithm goes global, incorporates user feedback
Programming has jumped the shark.
I'd like to see more follow up posts on this subject. Computer vision is incredibly interesting and it would be cool to see you elaborate in future posts on more complex algorithms/approaches.
Normal link [PDF]: http://psx-scene.com/forums/attachments/f6/26802-settlement-...
> It is absurd that a smart hacker is 30x better than a mediocre hacker.

How maintainable, readable, understandable, and extendable is their code? It's well within possibility that changes and enhancements could take 30x longer to develop and test and deploy for a mediocre hacker on a disorganized platform than for a smart hacker on a well-factored codebase. Architecture astronauting is a valid and legitimate criticism, but it's also quite possible to make an application extensible without going overboard.
Yes those questions are a great start. But it takes some expertise to interpret the answers. If you're new to the space all investors are new to you. You get random hangers-on claiming to have invested in skype. 'useful for people' is also hard to check. A company's product may be useful to a niche you have no experience with. 'Describe to my mom' seems to bias people towards consumer startups - it's hard to explain companies that occupy a niche in a specialized eco-system. But many of those are very valuable.

In the end it's an arms race. Crap companies are out there improving their posturing everyday. Bullshit coevolves with bullshit detectors. Which is why this should be the perennial question to discuss every few months. "Ask HN: any crap companies out there?" "Ask HN: anybody fed you a new line of bullshit?" "Ask HN: new questions to ask startups?"

(I don't attribute malice to 'crap companies'. A company is crap if it mistakes the map for the territory, if it focuses on its 'positioning' without changing its product. Other such levels of incompetence.)
Yes, many people use it because they find the idea funny. And it is fun call to get. People always laugh a lot.But there are a lot of very serious calls too. Customers see it as a different way to send a message. Like a card or telegram etc...
I should have been more careful with the term "rich". Most of those countries are a lot more expensive than the US, so the higher nominal GDP doesn't buy you anywhere near as much as it does in the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_...

You are right about Norway, however. (Luxembourg is also substantially richer.)
Apple does a good job of proving their own point when it comes to their Windows software and cross-platform apps.
> Speaking and listening to a phone while driving is dangerous and illegal without digging out and hooking up a headset

It's still just as dangerous, even with the silly headsets. Multiple citations in the first paragraph of the "Handsfree device" section here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones_and_driving_safet...
>It's a security concern for Apple, not necessarily a strategic one.

You want me to believe that the engineering might of Apple haven't figured out the security for apps to make use of the new JS engine without getting full privileges? I think it's just not a priority for Apple.
I agree with this statement, its just the altruist in me wants to beat people who act like zuck with a stick. The entrepreneur in me respects the company he has built and the paranoid conspiracy theorist in me refuses to participate in any facebook data harvesting site which commoditizes me and my personal relationships for profit.

(This is why I make a distinction for Linked-in. Linked-in serves my professional needs and I can financially/professionally benefit from it - but my personal relationships are just that - personal. If I must have a suite of digital tools to manage the personal relationships, then maybe there is something wrong.)

Though, in conclusion, I agree too that the court system should be done with the case when justice is served, not because its a tired story - or that the twins are just as douchey as mark.

I am in no position to make a judgment on what is just, however.
From U.S. to Paris in 2 minutes (2400 pictures in 11 hours)
My interest is in more tech-based medicine (iOS, web, practice software, etc).

The consensus seems to be that I focus on deepening my domain-knowledge and forgo getting involved in the technological side.

Thanks for your response.
Alternatively, working at a startup may not have the same cache when not in the Valley, but you might get a chance to work with some awesome tools that are ahead of the curve that would get you experience for a future job.
With the new ICD schedule arriving soon, an entire new set of codes will have to be learned, requiring physicians to become even more dependent on companies like the one your friend works for.
Site is down. What is this?

EDIT: Ok, I see what this is about now–but ... it kind of sucks that this was posted only 4 days before the event (especially when the blog post was from Nov.).

Being outside of SV but close enough to drive, events like this interest me but it's hard to keep track of them (let alone of their quality). I know lanyrd is trying to fill this space (sorta) but this event isn't there.

I'm just babbling now, but my point is: I want to network, learn, and hack with people in the Bay Area. How the heck do I know what events to come to and when they are?
The Haskell 98 standard prelude is 39 kb big. Computers with less RAM than that were in use in the early 1980s. Since you're obviously an engineer by training, you may now ask why somebody would try to load an Haskell prelude in the early 1980s on a computer that isn't even capable of running a Haskell programme.

Anyway, I guess what I actually wanted to say got lost in the space between.
Very nice. I've been using Heroku off and on for demo purposes but never for production. I'd like to see if Duostack can make me feel more comfortable with that.
Stack Exchange release open source Redis client
Joining a startup is tricky business. The nature of a startup is so dynamic that what you joined a startup for may not be what you end up doing at a startup. So if you joined a startup for something you felt passion of, particular tech or idea. Then be wary as this may change and you might find your self working on something totally different, especially if the control is not in your hands. More importantly make sure you have worked with people or a person you are about to start a startup with because if trust/chemistry is not there then nothing of much worth can be achieved.
Anyone have an exciting summer internship opportunity for a student/developer?
Hi HN! My name is Ali Ukani. I'm a Computer Science major at Northeastern University, and I'm looking for an exciting summer internship.

I'm a quick learner with past experience in PHP, and I released an iPad app shortly before starting college. Currently I'm having fun learning Ruby, and working on my first project.

If you're interested, my resume is available online at http://aukni.fm/5v79 and my email is ukani.a@husky.neu.edu.

Thanks,
Ali
I pity the fool.
My guess is that among video game enthusiasts, "hacking" is linked to cheating in online gameplay, which I think we can all agree is really annoying.

It also depends on what motivations you assign to geohot. I wouldn't have much sympathy for him if I thought his intention was to pirate video games.
Hey Guys, I'm a co-creator/founder of SimpleWorker.com. Can't say enough how appreciative we are of the feedback both good and bad. We've been experiencing pretty strong growth and through this are identifying the sticking points and working through them as fast as we can.

The isolated code issue has been a big issue, and we're addressing this through calls like merge_gem(), and soon merge_mailer(). It's a challenging task, and we see the gaps, but we're improving every day.

Runtime: this is also a top priority. We're working with each and every customer to ensure that their workers execute quickly. 3 seconds vs 30-60 is totally unacceptable and we won't leave you hanging here.

Queue speed: we're prototyping alternatives to http queuing which will dramatically speed up queue times.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for roadmap... Great work on HireFire. I see cases for both. Potentially massive parallelization on SimpleWorker (hundreds if not thousands of concurrent jobs), advanced scheduling needs, etc.

Anyways - we're listening - so any and all feedback is well received. If anybody has needs outside HireFire, in conjunction with, or otherwise, shoot me a line and we'll get you up and running at no cost to start.

Chad Arimura
chad[at]simpleworker.com

http://www.simpleworker.com
This should make Ray Kurzweil happy.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1611007
How Silicon Valley is starting to look like the Wu-Tang Clan
The problem with the cliche "look in the mirror and ask yourself if you are happy doing what you are doing today knowing you could die tomorrow", is that for any day I'm not spending the entire time with family & friends, the answer is NO. You can be sure if I was dieing tomorrow I'd not go to work and spend the whole day lieing on the beach. Unfortunately you can't do what you'd do on your last day on earth, because it doesn't pay the bills. And it is kind of a trivializing question for those who are facing their last day on earth, which I might be somewhat sensitive to because one of the engineers in my company lost his fight with cancer this morning.

So far better to ask the question: "is what I'm doing today getting me closer to my career goals?", becuase the conclusion to that (less melodramatic) question might actually yield actionable results.
And for VIM :-) But its difficult to imagine TDGotchi on this editor. Any ideas?
Looks like the site was overloaded. You can go to eventbrite for tickets: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1535024299
Schmidt, Parker, Andreessen invest in new boutique bank
> Between this and the Honeycomb source I just checked out through git...

I guess you were being sarcastic, but did you know that the Honeycomb source was released by ASUS a few days ago? See:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2042581/asus-releas...
The final judgement has been posted at psx-scene.com:

http://psx-scene.com/forums/f6/settlement-george-hotz-case-8...

Note that this does not include the confidential memorandum of understanding (page 1, line 20), which would contain the meat of what was actually agreed to by both parties.
Have you used the IDEs he mentioned? They are both quite good and definitely viable alternatives to Adobe's products.
Hey. The gem actually has a local environment option which makes it work on a VPS similar to how it works on Heroku. You could try that and see how it works.

https://github.com/meskyanichi/hirefire/blob/develop/lib/hir...

Also, as far as I know that DJ Admin Interface is the only one for DJ that currently exists. If you want to use Resque, I'll be implementing Resque for HireFire soon.
>I'm fine with proofs and am unsure where you see me stating otherwise.

It was an assumption based on your words (epsilon delta proofs and whatever else we did were tedious) and my experiences with people who dislike classes of proof-based math. No projecting here--I enjoyed my analysis class. We a fair number of epsilon-delta proofs.

My issue with your initial response was that you were implicitly blaming the class for being boring and causing you to lose your enthusiasm for math. My point is that its not their job to foster your enthusiasm, especially at that level.

Now of course, we should always be re-evaluating how subjects are taught to make sure information is being conveyed as best as possible. But we have to resist the temptation to immediately blame a student's failing (by any measure) on the teacher being inadequate in some way. If we start the conversation on that note then the space of potential solutions becomes severely restricted.
Or befriend an apple employee and get their once a year 25% system discount. The $400 off my MacBook Pro is proof. Ohhhhh yeaaahhhhh!

Seriously though, I was very lucky that my Apple buddy didn't need a new system that year.
VMware vCloud Blog | Virtacore’s vCloud Express is live
Even then it's not enough. The problem is that the structure of a list is itself linear. Guy Steele had a nice talk about that.

(This only bites you when your lists get long.)
> 2. Assume a hacker can in turn be significantly more productive working for themselves.

OK.

3. All things being equal,

Here. All things are not equal between a lone hacker and a company. You won't get that lucrative contract your employer won.
Yes, it is often being used in the office environment. It's a creative and fun way to send a message. That is an area I am considering putting more effort on (sold a few big companies corporate packages too). I really appreciate the feedback.
Thanks. That was an interesting link.
Seems to be going up and down. Too much HN traffic.
It is basically absurd to say that a party settling a legal case must comply with the disclosure laws for making a private placement in offering a stock component as part of a settlement package.

Why is it absurd? In particular, is it legal to lie about the value of the stock in a negotiation? I'm genuinely curious.