skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What always strikes me when reading articles/entries like this or the Paper Tigers article itself is how opaque the unique difficulties people in subcultures or minority cultures face. Not only that they exist, but why they exist: Usually, the issue is so nuanced as to be seemingly unalterable.

Take, for example, incarceration rates and the likelihood of incarceration by race. At face value it's absurd that being born a black male means you are more likely to go to jail than a white male born at the same exact instant. It's just as absurd that other minority populations are seemingly systemically disallowed from positions of executive authority in businesses.

Obviously the reasons for these difference are incredibly difficult to parse and weight; how do you go about correcting this aberration?

I guess learning things like this make me frustrated and confused.
Ah dang, U.S. only. Sometimes it feels like the internet is only for Americans.
Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 billion
Well the meta comment is that nearly every single product Google has 'shipped' lately has been met with 'man this sucks.' followed by a period of iteration, followed by either its death (Wave), zombieness (Reader), or appreciation (Docs). I don't know if the "press" (and I use that term lightly because the community is a mix of professionals and amateurs) really has a process for dealing with this sort of release cycle. People like game magazines with their deadlines were accustomed to getting early beta/late alpha stage games so that they could have a review in print when the game shipped 12 - 16 weeks later but even then there were some interesting failures (when they published a review for a game that ended up never shipping).

For me, the interesting thing about Google's music service (other than Amazon totally toasted them in the execution of this strategy :-) is that they are wading into lawyer infested waters knowingly. That makes me wonder if we're coming to the 'end times' when folks can see the rights strategies (for music at least) finally settling into some new normal for the 21st century.

Now I don't doubt muscians could still shoot themselves in the wallet like authors did with the book deal [1] but they are a bit more willing to taste test this new world.

[1] http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/03/google-books-decision-p...
That can only happen if the British authorities approve, though. So if the US wanted him there is, legally, no practical difference trying to extradite him from the UK or Sweden.

So it seems unlikely.

I think the rumour started as part of the general theory that the Sweden allegations were a conspiracy by the US to discredit him.
Eric Brewer joining Google
if there was a denial then I'd be inclined to believe that, but as far as I know there hasn't been one

In the US system, the defendant is given the presumption of innocence and isn't obligated to issue public denials and such. So regardless of whether or not he did it, he's probably better off just not saying anything at all.

The fact that he's active-duty military changes a lot of things about the process too, but apparently not in the direction of making it into a public media trial.
That's absurd. The general public doesn't know or care about the difference between Android versions any more than they know about the difference between iOS versions.
Meh, after reading the article this seems OT.
From his tweet: "I will be leading the design of the next gen of infrastructure at Google. The cloud is young: much to do, many left to reach."
Government would be broken with no secrets. However, right now most governments are more broken and in a more harmful way from the amount of secrecy they have, and from their resulting lack of accountability.

I can see how people think that Assange represents a non-optimal extreme, but it's miles above the status quo. None of the costs you cite are worth a damn if governments lack motivation to act for the interests of their citizens.
>What's terrible is how long he's been held without trial, however.

he'll get his trial as soon as :

- the treatment of him sends enough of deterrence message to any would be leaker (if Guantanamo is any indication, Manning has at least a couple more years to go)

- he is ready and happy to plead guilty. For example, in 1936-38 in Soviet Union people in mass were pleading guilty to any charges they were asked to just to end it and be shot quickly. Manning is kept on suicide watch for a reason - even this ultimate escape from whatever happens to him is unavailable to him.
We allegedly still have the presumption of innocence in the US.
> It's not like people are personally asking icey or you dozens of questions a day.

On here, no, but in real life, yes, I get asked dozens of questions a day people could easily answer themselves if they just Googled. There's a reason programmers start getting annoyed with people being lazy; they're making you do their thinking for them and you get sick of it.

> I think most people are like that. Why be snarky about it?

Because one gets tired of doing other people's thinking for them when they're capable of doing it themselves.

> and I still occasionally ask a question without thinking to google it.

That's the problem, that happens to me constantly by people who just don't think; it's rude; your process should start with Google before bugging someone else who's just going to Google anyway.
they believe lisp is secure because its rare.
thats kinda strange like driving a trabant.

(and its still hackable).
The Next Big Thing in Information Security
For Linux backups, you might be interested in this article, if you haven't already read it:

http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

The combination of cron, rsync and hardlinks, makes for incremental backups with versioning and minimal storage space, all over ssh.
Hands-On With Google Music Beta
My point is that the conversation still seems mostly to be about how to get the things we think we want. I want to talk about what we should want.

This passage in the article stood out to me:

Things that somehow come naturally to people who go to school in the suburbs and have parents who are culturally assimilated.? I pressed him for specifics, and he mentioned that he had visited his white girlfriend’s parents’ house the past Christmas, where the family had "sat around cooking together and playing Scrabble." This ordinary vision of suburban-American domesticity lingered with Mao: Here, at last, was the setting in which all that implicit knowledge--about social norms and propriety--had been transmitted. There was no cram school that taught these lessons.

What's beautiful about this "ordinary vision" is that it's a portrait of domestic tranquility and love, simple and unpretentious, not that it's some sort of cultural transmission conduit; and it's totallly perverse to even frame it that way.

Another:

One succinct evocation of the situation appeared in the comments section of a website called Yellowworld: "If you’re East Asian, you need to attend a top-tier university to land a good high-paying gig. Even if you land that good high-paying gig, the white guy with the pedigree from a mediocre state university will somehow move ahead of you in the ranks simply because he’s white."

The second, conditional sentence is the one that seems to get all the attention, but I've always felt that it's the first one, the premise, that deserves criticism. The article makes a head-fake toward it, but then lets it slide. This is the real problem with our culture: not that we aren't getting enough of the highest-paying or highest-status jobs, enough wealth, enough exposure, or enough recognition. The problem is that that's all we care about.

The tragic truth about putting everything into breaking through the "bamboo ceiling," I suspect, is that it doesn't actually look any different on the other side of it.

None of this is to say that wealth, exposure, or recognition are inherently bad or wrong. 1 Timothy 6:10 says "Love of money is the root of all evil." Not money; love of it. It's our preoccupation with wealth, exposure, and recognition, our search for these to the exclusion of all else that leaves us with nothing truly substantial inside.

Yes, the author briefly mentions artistic pursuits in passing, but it's still in the framework of external measures of success. What's the takeaway?

And though the debate she sparked about Asian-American life has been of questionable value, we will need more people with the same kind of defiance, willing to push themselves into the spotlight and to make some noise, to beat people up, to seduce women, to make mistakes, to become entrepreneurs, to stop doggedly pursuing official paper emblems attesting to their worthiness, to stop thinking those scraps of paper will secure anyone’s happiness, and to dare to be interesting.

"[Be] interesting," he says. Interesting to whom?

I have a different message: Be interested.

Yesterday's xkcd explicates it better than I can:
http://xkcd.com/896/
I forget who said this (and I may be mangling the quote too), but you know success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.

Your ideas aren't really worth anything (I'm generalizing here - if you dream up the cure for cancer, hooray!). It's your ability to execute on and realize those ideas that are worth something.
Not necessarily and depends on many variables. Counter-example: I would respect a guy who slept with few girls and has a stable relationship much more than someone who goes to a bar every night, takes advantage of half-conscious, drunk women and somehow boasts that as an achievement.. I think that's what most "pick-up artists" try to do.
As long as they call it "Shenanigan Class"
From Big Data to NoSQL: The ReadWriteWeb Guide to Data Terminology (Part 1)
This seems very promising - thanks for the link!
Is he leaving UCB?
re: "I'll risk a 50/50 gridlock in decision making over having someone tell me what to do everyday at "my" company any day."

why not just make sure that you're the majority owner of your next company.

I can see the resentment this situation is causing you. But it might possibly be because the CEO isn't pulling his or her weight. If they were pulling CEO weight you might - perhaps - feel differently.
I starred it, but it doesn't look like anybody working on Chromium cares to fix it, and nobody's posted a reasonable workaround. So much for HTML5.
From his tweetstream again: " am not leaving Berkeley, just taking and extended design gig ;) [technically, two year industrial leave]"
You (yes, you) should contribute to open source
I spent 8 years in the trenches. If you want to argue with my position I'm open to a discussion. But merely saying people who don't agree with you are "primadonnas" is a bit superficial.
Great advice. Thanks.
Certainly a more "specialized" review, the VentureBeat review looks like it was done by a complete retard, seriously sync /= upload (and upload is slow if you have big files you know? audio snob, yeah right).

Dammit, I'd like an invite, specially since I wanted to build something similar for a while (not so cloudish though) Google got it right for me apparently.
Bitcoin did not take $6/BTC. Now time for HUGE correction
The American Medical Association and state governments tightly restrict the market supply of physicians. This keeps physicians salaries high in the name of safety and quality. However, the market is prevented from trying different models.
Great question. The biggest change comes from the per-CPU-hour to per-instance-hour transition. My most popular gadget consumes minimal CPU (spent lots of time optimizing this) but uses anywhere from 29-50 instances. Why? Well, to give you an idea, my midday peak traffic is around 160 requests per second.
Thanks, I tried to get to it, but it said that Twitter is over capacity.

Too good of an opportunity to pass up for Eric. I wish him the best.
I was really hoping Sony would be smart enough to adopt Skype one day as their game chat system but oh well.
We still need raw materials, but the value of raw materials only makes up a small fraction of the total value of a modern economy.

In the past, raw materials were the majority of the economy, and this meant they were worth fighting over. Nowadays raw materials worth very little compared to things like having good infrastructure, an educated workforce, etc.
I chuckled, and clearly I should have known better from the URL, but I did downvote you to try to keep things serious around here.
I believe you can use a feature called "Always On" to avoid the cold start problem. I noticed such an option in my billing settings for $0.30 / day.
I'm loving my WP7. Oh well maybe next time :)
Yes it is. It will teach you things like managing your own taxes, cash flow etc.
ASK PG: PG, do you read HN all day - or limit your time on the site each day?
Just curious if you read pretty much everything that gets posted or not?

Do you have a different view than us plebs?
From left to right on my deak

A ball, my phone, my laptop, three pens, a mug and a lottery ticket.
Oh, right, let's talk about oil and US being in Iraq for a second. How is that not a seizure of resources with force?

Pardon me, Iraq is too far for a typical HN-visitor, let's talk about various police enforcements stealing drugs from sick people and throwing those people in jail. How is that not a seizure of resources with force?
This and the picture of a laptop in a slide during the Ice Cream announcement made me wonder if this means Android is coming to the laptop form factor, and/or other 'PC' form factors. Certainly would be interesting.
What's next, MS? LinkedIn?
I don't know much about cameras, so I don't know how accurate it is, but I love the idea. Kudos for this idea and the execution seems good. I like.
Newton was not the first person to detect gravity, but he took notice. Guess what we did? We wrote a paper about "discovering gravity" and instead of publishing it we passed it on to an assembly line that produces paper-publishing scientists.
The FSF doesn't intend to relicense your contributions under a non (L)GPL license, so it really isn't necessary as long as your contributions are under that license.
Reasonably accurate.

add.: it gives a good foundation regarding teaching exposure itself, but, apart from not explaining (nor visualizing) that focal length and perspective are two separate attributes of optics, it also misrepresents the meaning and function of the ƒ value in a very common way often repeated even by seasoned photographers, in that it suggests (and indirectly claims) that ƒ only has to do with the aperture of the lens, and that ƒ is an indicator of what depth of field you will have. In reality, ƒ only tells you how much light is passed to the film plane; it does not tell you the state of the lens' aperture, nor does it say anything about the depth of field. This misleading explanation regarding ƒ is widespread even in literature.
Gotta save a few bucks to make sure they can run the company into the ground a few nano-seconds longer.
‘Crowd’ backs start-ups, artists
Google announces smarter apps with the improved Google Prediction API
...can you legally disallow someone from modifying the sections of their RAM that your program is loaded (by loading a plugin)?
PaaS PHP Fog Launches To The Public
Are you saying that YC companies aren't ready to perspire if inspired?
Yahoo's download limit reached, here's Google's cache:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:07l8NZL...
Maybe some day: http://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=498

(Native Client is also a possibility.)
Ask HN: I'm a product/project manager. Is it possible for me to get hired in SF?
I've been working in a product/project manager type of position for two years now at a major telecom company (starts with a C, ends with a t. Take some guesses). I've helped design and bring a couple of products to market, including automated ordering of services and products through the company's website, ordering features from handsets, consultant order handling and routing orders for large businesses. I don't touch code at all in my current role, but I've been a ton of different roles from a PM type (managing resources and schedules, goals and deadlines, etc), user sentiment research (conducted demo sessions with end users, gather requirements, fed it back into the development cycle) and defect triage.<p>I'm an excellent communicator, I can speak with development and QA as well as business types, and I follow the tech scene pretty closely. I haven't done any coding for the better part of three years, but I'm trying to teach myself Rails. Is it possible for me to be hired in San Francisco or the Valley? Are there jobs for the "type" of role I fit into/am looking for? I've been applying to as many jobs as I can so far, but I've had no luck.
I don't think I agree with either one of your points.

1. About Mexican officials -- my understanding is that the ambassador did everything right -- unfortunately it cost him his job. Mexican officials were embarrassed, and they rightly should be. Hiding the truth of their situation and brushing it under the rug won't make anything better. The fact that it's in the open now hopefully will motivate.

2. About the government becoming less open -- they are incredibly closed off as it is (to the outside), how would they be any less open? If being more closed internally due to fear of leakage is worth the cost of potential poor communication across agencies and thus raising the risk of poor execution in times of crisis -- then that's a decision they have to make. Truthfully the risk has always been there, Wikileaks' actions don't change anything other than bring awareness to that risk. Personally I don't believe that fear is worth it.
So did NewsGrange :http://newsgrange.com/hands-on-with-google-music-on-the-web-...
"Write tight."
There's a difference between launching and being ready.
That is extremely uncompromising. Somebody asking the air a stupid question is always refusing to think for themselves? You're assuming unwillingness from the equivalent of a brainfart.

Nobody was even asking you specifically. Is it really easier to call people names than to just move on to read other stuff?

..bugging someone else who's just going to Google anyway

No, people are often asking if someone knows the answer off the top of their head.

Anyways, this thread has outlived its usefulness. Over and out.
This comment is all the better for being both a description and instance of the advice.
Why can't you start with a free app and later upgrade to paid, if you need to?
The whinyness and narcissism of these guys completely astounds me. Boo hoo I went to stanford but I don't get to date hot girls. Or FU Im so angry because my parents suck and look I date hot girls.

Here is some advice - everyone's parents suck in one way or another and you were lucky you werent born in Africa where 30,000 babies die every single day.

True happiness comes from within. Not from achievements and not from material possessions.
Haunted 3D Review
A Freemium Model That Works
Such acts make privacy concerns about Facebook et al. look trivial in comparison. Pulling last weekend's drunken photos or wall messages off your profile is not that onerous. Good luck tracking down all the forks of your git project and tampering with their history!
Too Much to Do? Take on More
Could you expand on the 'f' value thing?
Spotify doesn't work in the U.S. Sometimes it feels like the internet is only for Europeans.
I think it's hard to talk about because it's often systemic, invisible, and cultural simultaenously. Even when it becomes visible, it's easy for one side to blame the culture and the other side to blame the system, when both are probably to blame, and there's a symbiosis between the two.
This is a wonderful integration; never expected so many of my friends-of-friends to have great places to stay!
It's kind of a nice idea and a decent start. It doesn't seem to do depth of field very well (f8 should make the background pretty sharp at 43mm; f2.8 at 200mm should have a completely blurred background).

It would be nice if it showed non-Canon terminology (Canons say "Tv" while almost all other cameras say "S", for example), at least as an alternative. It should also visually indicate the value being automatically chosen in the different modes.

No P (program) mode. This is actually the most useful shooting mode on many DSLRs, especially for novices. It lets you trade off aperture vs. shutter speed.

__Advanced Nitpicking__

No auto ISO mode. (Great feature of Pentax cameras -- it's like M but the camera picks the ISO that will work.)

No ISO-priority mode.

It doesn't allow for things like camera shake and the child's motion (you might pick 1/60 of a second to capture the child sharply, while needing 1/250, say, for the pinwheel).

It's not worth allowing ridiculously high (small) apertures (e.g. f29) -- if you're not going to do diffraction, so I'd stop at f22. It would be nice to have faster (bigger) apertures than f2.8 to really show the benefits.

It shows autofocus points, but they don't do anything. It would be interesting to allow the user to pick a focus point and assume the metering is weighted on that position, but that's getting pretty advanced.
"There has to be some middle ground between Apple's style and Google's style."
Isn't Apple's approach actually the middle ground? Traditionally when you bought software in a store you were looking at quite a bit more curation then Apple does now.

"You shouldn't have to make an anonymous reviewer think about puppies to get your app passed."
You don't. I guess it could help if your app was in a gray area but I don't see it helping that much.

"I'd just like an app market where Apps are guaranteed to not be privacy violators, trojans, or capable of damaging my hardware."
While we're going all wishlist let's go scammer free and get an astroturf resistant rating system with much higher discoverability.
I think a key observation is that working with a REPL just makes dev feel so light and quick.

I love it and have found it to be a big part of the joy of programming.
There are huge legal doubts. The first thing to consider is whether a person kept in the conditions that Manning was is able to properly defend themselves.

If I was a member of the jury I could not in good conscience return a guilty verdict to any organization the holds it's prisoners in the conditions that the US Military holds their prisoners.

The 5th amendment is very important and Manning's decision to use it is not an indicator of his guilt. Guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt and it must be for laws that are just. A plaintext log from a convicted felon does not push the bar over that threshold in my opinion.

When the commanding officer of ever jury member has instructed them that he is guilty it would raise doubts in my mind as to whether the laws that allow a trial to take place after such instruction are just. Also, the fact that you need to give up many of your rights in order to be eligible for treatment under the UCMJ raises many issues. The economic pressures and well as indoctrinal issues due to mandatory schooling and the content of that schooling raise questions as to whether Manning was of sound mind and free from duress when signing the UCMJ.

It's important to note that in the mandatory school system a class on critical thinking is not required, unlike some non-mandatory systems like IB where critical thinking is a required component.
This will make many people realise that they don't have nearly as many friends as Facebook would let them believe.