skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Microsoft has already started driving Skype into the ground,

In what way has "Microsoft has already started driving Skype into the ground"?

They don't control the company yet and haven't had a say in any of these decisions?

What specific event are you referring to?
"With the visibility API, you can gracefully pause or degrade the timer to a much longer poll when the tab is in the background."

Note that this is already enforced for setInterval in some browsers -- I think Chrome changes the minimum interval to 1000ms from 4ms when the tab is in the background.
From a technical point of view, what are some critical tasks can you do on a mac that you couldn't do on a windows or linux machine?
"why would you crawl the site any other way?"

I could see crawling pages most likely to have changed first as those pages would most likely lead to fresh content.
11px font with 19px line height? Uf, not for my tired eyes.

Fixed with this CSS snippet:
p {
font: 16px "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, monospace;
}
What really drives the poor
Go play with Spotify ;)
Fed interviews suck too. Drug tests, polygraph tests (which we know is bogus science), months and months of waiting, just to be turned down.

I think Google's the only company with a worst interview process.. "Come interview for a job, which we'll offer you 5 months down the road. No, we can't tell you what you'll work on until after you've started working for us."
Yes, there's a shortage of engineers in NYC, but that's largely because of high demand. Google and banks and startups are all struggling to hire.
My go-to bookmarklet for poor article design: Readable (not Readability). Someone posted it as a Show HN a few months ago and I haven't looked back since―it's incredibly fast and very customisable.

http://readable.tastefulwords.com/
This event was impressively organized, even though the software was very alpha and untested and hard to make work. I posted some photos here:

http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/micro-controllers-sod...

I should also add, the headline here on Hacker News is misleading. Yes, the demo connects the Verbalizer to Google Search, but you can do a hell of a lot else with it. That's the whole point. You could argue that it's basically a glorified microphone, but one that's got a bunch of points of control added to it. The 2 women sitting across from us connected a heat sensor to to the Verbalizer, so they started getting heat data from it and feeding it into their laptop. They didn't have time to do anything cool with that input, but clearly, this is an area that is wide open for experimentation.

By the way, all of the equipment was given to us for free. Even the sodering iron was given to us for free. I guess Google was throwing around some marketing dollars. This is the most impressive free event I've been to in months.
I don't think the parent is trying to justify the overall ridiculousness of the process, merely explaining what their rationale would be for even going down the IE-only path in the first place.

I'm not sure if anyone can justify the need for ActiveX in this case.
I don't want to sound like a guy from the 1990s, but it's nice to see so many women interested in hacking. Looks like a great event, kudos to the organisers.
Ah, interesting -- is this documented anywhere? I did see mentions of Chrome downgrading background tabs, but did not find any specific numbers.
Curious... I knew you were talking about Godaddy just by reading your description. Now... that's branding!
Maybe because that's how they are sorted in the hashtable/database they use to queue urls? Or maybe because they want to index the shortest pages first, so that they are processed before any duplicates with longer urls (i.e. get /articles/ before /articles/index.php)
Successful roll-out of self-driving cars ought to pay for one or two. Even if they gave away the software, they could probably make billions per year from licensing content like maps and streetviews or the patent portfolio. Or license the software for a few bucks or a few hundred bucks per car. At $100 per car that would be on the order of $10B. And think of all that ad revenue from commuters who dont have to watch the road.
That's not what he said. I can't find a full quote buried under all the editorializing, but it was a lot more nuanced than the lazy exaggeration of "ATMs are killing jobs" you'll see in all the search results.

edit: Here it is:
"the other thing that happened, though, and this goes to the point you were just making, is there are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM; you don't go to a bank teller. Or you go to the airport, and you're using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate. So all these things have created changes in the economy, and what we have to do now -- and that's what this job council is all about -- is identifying where the jobs for the future are going to be; how do we make sure that there's a match between what people are getting trained for and the jobs that exist; how do we make sure that capital is flowing into those places with the greatest opportunity. We are on the right track. The key is figuring out how do we accelerate it"

More "machines are taking over jobs and we're failing to retrain the people who lost them" than "ATMs are killing jobs."
I work at Facebook, but am not part of the platform (or platform integrity) team. In general, since we have so few engineers (in the hundreds), we have to resort to technological means of solving problems like spam and bad apps. I can't speak for these specific cases, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a nonzero false-positive rate for spam/platform abuse detection, but it's the tradeoff that they are willing to make in order to catch most of the bad cases out there.

You think it's hard to contact Google if your Adsense account got shut down, or Ebay if your Paypal account got disabled. And that's even with thousands of people in Adsense; imagine what Facebook's sub-100 platform engineers can do with millions of platform developers.

I'm just speaking out of my ass, but while I think it's unfortunate that there are false-positives, it's a necessary tradeoff for a small company like Facebook with very few engineers.
Exactly, a few employees + dollars to try some things out is nothing.
This is the sort of Top10ListWisdom rubbish that's almost tautological in nature and worthless when it actually comes to running a business.
By themselves.
Funny you should mention OTA I was speaking with a vendor just last Monday after some testing and he said there are plans to have our central system be able to push new firmware directly to the device, no humans involved. It's still in development from what I could tell more OAW (over-a-wire) than OTA. But as I said a lot of devices are old with limited memory and a lot still use EPROMs for storage rather than flash so the EPROM has to be removed to be flashed using a EPROM read/write tool.

But still the Bank of Canada or any bank or institution which makes a country's currency has to give the physical currency to someone to scan and input the data into an application which all takes time.

The vendors are certainly aware of new formats (series) but as I said they can't do anything until the actual bill is in their hands, I don't know the exact process but I know the vendors of the bill acceptance devices have to wait like everyone else. I'm sure a lot of it is due to security, giving some company a $100 bill and risking it being counterfeited.

The vending/casino business is not known to play nice so I don't think LUA or any sort of cooperation would go over well, I'm surprised IGT even allowed SAS to be licensed but I guess money was made.
What do you consider as poor social skills, if I may ask? I spent most of my time in high school behind the computer, and never played sports (I find sports not mentally stimulating enough relative to the effort). I'm pretty introverted, don't like associating with a large number of people, would rather write code half the time and play video games half the time on a Friday night than going out to a club, hate socializing, and simply cannot make small talk.

However I'd be willing to talk about computers, maths, and philosophy and logic all day long, and I also seem to be good at finding people who're somewhat like me. Maybe it's just my luck, but through high school and college, I've never not been able to find at least a few people who're interested in most of the same stuff I'm interested in, even as my interests have changed.

In other words, I'm a typical nerd with what would I suspect traditionally be called poor social skills -- yet I'm pretty happy with whatever social skills I have, and it's overall been far from a disaster.

edit: note that this wasn't an American high school, and I remember others just letting me be.
Find faster, save time Google search with logos
I suspect that ActiveX enabled browsers allows them to further reduce support costs, e.g. installing a 32 bit version of IE8 allows the Flash driver to be installed thereby reducing calls from grandpa whose new system came with a 64 bit version of Windows 7 and therefor uses the x64 version of IE by default - not to mention that ActiveX also allows ATT to install more powerful software on the customers browser for support and tracking purposes.
This seems to be a good rule for calling any cable/phone ISP.

The last time I mentioned using a Mac the support person ignored that I had already tried pinging certain gateways to check connectivity, and proceeded to condescendingly walk me through going to Applications->Utilities->Network Utility so that I could run ping from a tab there.

Of course I quit after 15 min of this, tried to access again in a couple hours, and it was just a network failure in my area, anyway. Geez.
That struck me as well. The organizers were 5 guys and 1 woman, so if you look at the photos it looks like the room is majority male. However, of the attendees, there were 9 men and 9 women. I was curious about that. We were all, in a sense, handpicked to be at this event -- after we signed up they sent us an email every day saying "Are you sure you still want to be in, please reply by 10 PM or you are kicked out." (I'm paraphrasing, they were slightly more diplomatic.) We failed to reply on Sunday night so we got kicked out. Then on Monday they told us there was an opening (someone else failed to reply and got kicked out). So we got back in. But the point is, everyone who was there was, in a sense, picked. So I'm curious if the organizers deliberately engineered the 50/50 gender split.

The whole thing was videotaped, and we had to sign a release form for the video as soon as we walked in.
I am with you all about all the negative reasons why not to like GoDaddy and Bob Parsons. Just looking at the guy and his macho-posters I really do not feel like I would even want to hold a 5-minute conversation with him. It reeks of BS.
That said, I do have (or force myself to have) a lot of respect for the guy. Earning money is not easy. Building and maintaining your company is not easy. Establishing a brand is not easy. Being a billionaire is... whoa. I do think we have a lot to learn from him, despite the fact that we may not like him.
I have far better experience with Google Voice quality when calling phones, but also find it disconnects with gvoice-gvoice so prefer Skype when possible. But with Skype-Skype calls, video conferencing etc and the ease of use with older family members, Skype has become so useful quite frankly I'm afraid that if Skype dies we'll put thrown back into the land of having no single point of guaranteed communication between all types of computer users. I hope that Skype succeeds for this reason alone.
1. This is a great idea. The only thing that has prevented me from already implementing this idea is the nature of IP locationing, which seems to be spotty at best.

2-4. I was under the impression that Facebook ads, by and large, were not very effective. How are they compared to Google ads in terms of ROI?

Thanks for your ideas, though. I'm not very good at the marketing side of building a site. I always build an app that basically caters to what I want, and then have no idea of how to grow it from there, so I like to hear from others.
I agree, this list doesn't sound all that insightful. But it did make me want to look him up on Wikipedia, and I found his history to be interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Parsons

He started out as a self-taught programmer in his late-20s and he founded his first business when he was 37. Also find it interesting that he came from a really humble background, along with a strong military background too. Reminds me of "the anatomy of determination".
I'm surprised. A lot of this is good advice.

Always stay out of your comfort zone. Never give up. Never stop improving. Measure everything of significance.

It's not a quick fix or a cure all, but I think it's helpful to internalize whichever of these points resonates with you and actively apply it in your life. You have to execute and that's the hard part.
The "thread" is that there is a mess, and main cause is gumment messing up the situation.
Maths is supposed a field where students think and solve problems. What happens, is that with the current educational system and the student only-interest is to get a good grade, they don't solve problems. Instead, they work on memorizing most of them. Teachers follows the same direction, by giving exams that they have covered or are available in some series.

This encourage stupidity. Students don't think in problems. They remember them. That's why, students rank bad in the national exam (BAC), even though you'll find it 10 easier than what they get in high schools.

Most of the students grades decrease in BAC (by 5-10%). Mine increased by around 20%. No intelligence involved from my part, it was a lot easier and simpler.
After reading the first half of your thesis I really like that model. However, I would take 'effort' and split it into two parts: the effort needed to create a new model, and then the effort needed for integration. It seems like a lot of the time people figure out what the new model could be, but they never go through the work of actually integrating. This can lead to all sorts of cognitive disfunction and psychospiritual crises later on, perhaps even full-blows psychosis if their anxiety is extreme enough. You kind of do this in the text, but not in the picture. The picture is pretty muddled in general, but I think the overall idea seems correct.

I would also choose more concrete definitions for each of the terms you're using, and specifically I would define each of them in such a way that they form a logically consistent system. Fuck the dictionary. (E.g. I would probably say that wonder is intrinsically coupled with the desire to know more, whereas awe isn't. Doing something like this would make the flowchart vastly more actionable.)

Anyway I like this model, I think it probably needs to be cleaned up a bit, but conceptually it seems like you've pretty much nailed it.
Commercial high-speed rail is almost 50 years old.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen

I really don't understand why the US hasn't built at least one route in that time.
I use a similar system, except that instead of remembering randomly choosen words I use pwgen to generate a string of symbols and then construct a story from them (human brains are pretty good a remembering stories.

Say I get IJC8M9yh I would then make a sentence like Ingrid, Joel and Carol Ate Margriths 9 year horse.

(The example given is more tricky than most, since I had to add an extra word). The idea is to take each letter and convert it into a word, leaving numbers and special characters as they are (or use them creatively, as in the example above) and if the letter is a capital letter, use a proper noun in the sentence.
Although it's not officially documented, Snow Leopard's sandbox is already quite capable and easier to use than the norm; it's nonsensical to list "sandboxing" and "mandatory access controls" as wins for other operating systems. Lion will make it mandatory for all App Store apps and add features like a secure open dialog (where the OS handles the open dialog and gives the app access to only user-selected files) and an easy-to-use privilege separation API (to make it easier to take advantage of the sandbox); the result is much more advanced than anything mainstream in Windows or Linux. Lion will also get rid of previous limitations on DEP and ASLR; in particular, it randomizes dyld.

The article also seriously underestimates the benefit of the centralized App Store model (which has an equivalent in Linux, but not Windows); despite all the horrible rejections and review issues, if it becomes the usual way to obtain Mac applications, it will greatly reduce the chance that users will come into contact with malware.
> The Unix Design is significantly less granular than that of Windows, not even having a basic ACL. The UNIX design came from a time when security was less of an issue and not taken as seriously as it did, and so does the job adequately. Windows NT (and later OSes) were actually designed with security in mind and this shows.

This comparison doesn't even make sense, comparing a decades old UNIX design to a comparatively newly designed OS (Windows NT). POSIX permissions have stood the test of time for a long time and by far were much better than what was available in Windows for the longest time. Off course Windows NT has improved on what was available at the time.

That being said, Mac OS X since 10.4 has had ACL, so that argument goes right out of the window. ACL's are enabled by default and they function as designed.

touch testing
chmod 700
chmod +a "otheruser allow delete"

su - otheruser
ls -lahe testing
rm testing

> They often share vulnerabilities with core libraries in other UNIX like systems with samba and java being two examples.

That is because they use that exact open source software. This is a simple no shit sherlock kind of deal. Luckily those are going away and won't be in Lion. Java will be an extra download, like Adobe Flash and Samba won't be included by default because of the GPLv3.

Apple's policy regarding third-party software vulnerabilities could definitely be improved, and they already have, but it could still be better. Ultimately many of the third party tools they ship are never used by consumers and even though they may be exploitable they aren't accessible to an attacker (looking at you PHP ...)

> They are extremely difficult to deal with when trying to report a vulnerability, seemingly not having qualified people to accept such reports. Even if they do manage to accept a report and acknowledge the importance of an issue they can take anywhere from months to a year to actually fix it properly.

This has been fixed recently, they have a new head of security [1] and have increasingly shown that they are getting faster at closing bugs and bringing out updates to fix issues. Look at the Pwn2Own contest iPhone bug, Apple was notified and an update was made available that fixed only that one flaw.

Do I think they are doing the best of job? No, MSFT has them beat by a mile with their security response team (really impressive), however the above sentence makes it sound like this is still the case which is no longer true.

--

It is a pretty good article in that it shows that there are certain issues that Apple could definitely improve upon, but completely ignoring any development to OS X for the past couple of years doesn't look good at all especially when the flaws you are attempting to point out have already been fixed.

[1] http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/apple-hires-new-security-c...
I think of printers as devices which produce hard copy 2-dimensional images. Star Trek coined "replicators". I think it fits pretty well even if the current versions are only 1.x of a pretty big n. "Robots" better fits the advanced articulated milling machines.
The assumption that ATT needs to do it, is like assuming that a website needs to use cookies - it doesn't follow the money. The article implies that this process costs ATT millions, whereas logic would make the continued existence of such a practice unlikely and analysis of ATT's cost and revenue structure would indicate that it probably has the opposite effect on their bottom line.

ATT's homepage for DSL customers is Yahoo, and it is heavily Flash dependent. The same logic that serves as part of the justification for Apple's iOS strategy underlies ATT's decision making - reducing options to reduce support costs and enhance user experience. It is better if Grandpa's introduction to the internet has everything working when he lands on your homepage for the first time.

Again, ATT knows their market segment.
Plant a New Language in Your Mind
Hulu Plus App for Android
Car Prototypes Can Do 2,000 Miles Per Gallon
>Personally for me, malware is a minor threat with the impact being negligible as long as you follow basic security practices and can recognize when something looks out of place.

Likewise, with proper security knowledge, the holes that Apple leaves unpatched for months are "minor threats." For example, disabling Java in the web browser when there's a known vulnerability. It's an inconvenience, but so is having to always be on the watchout for things that are out of place.

Apple is not fantastic on security, but they are good enough for the current threat level, as long as you take basic security precautions.
It is funny CS enabled Valve to make a ton of money eventually
Wouldn't a simple ⌘+ be easier?
I think a bit part of it is really talent acquisition. Sure the technology in these startups is awesome, but from Google's perspective what they're really buying are the people who made it in the first place.
It requires education, but not necessarily schooling.

My friend's father worked on some later Apollo missions and ended up leading a Titan engineering group with no college degree. He was a damned good engineer, though. If it were possible to earn mathematics degrees by test taking, he'd easily have had a graduate degree.

In the beginning he was a technician (which didn't require a degree), and once during crunch time he literally fixed a buggy electrical component an engineer was showing to his boss in front of his eyes. In his words after that one lucky break, he never looked back and just kept working his way up, excelling and proving himself in each position. After a point, the fact that he had no degree made his managers take more notice of him. Clearly a man who had to work his way up through several levels he wasn't supposed to be eligible for had something unique.

It's difficult, especially in the defense industry, but sometimes talent wins out over credentials.
Of course they aren't. Thomas Jefferson wasn't on the battlefield, he was in the Continental Congress writing things to inspire people.

Y'know, like... here.
One of those books so many people reference without having read. It's almost weird that it's the WSJ that's referencing it.
By your standards no one has clean hands, which makes your standards unsuitable for achieving the moral superiority that you so clearly desire.
I suppose everyone has to learn for themselves (it doesn't internalize from a list), but there is value in the lessons. It would probably stick better in story form.

For instance, I cannot tell you how many times success came after getting very close to giving up. I left college after one semester to find work, and taught myself basic SEO. After ranking my local pizza shop to number one to prove I could do it, I started cold calling the big businesses in my neighborhood to do work for them. My awkward self called thirty-ish businesses, on a list of thirty five, then gave up. My girlfriend encouraged me to try one more, and sure enough they bit. Without this experience my life track would have been substantially different.