skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Had Google actually engaged the industry rather than throwing something at them...

This has been their M.O. for the news industry -- create some gee-whiz tool on their own or with minimal industry input, and see if it sticks. Sometimes the tool succeeds (second iteration of Google News), oftentimes it addresses a marginal need that no one really cares about (see Living Stories, see http://livingstories.googlelabs.com/) and almost always the tool completely fails to help solve long-term business problems, which is the number one concern of the news industry.
Nice validating read. All of the points quoted in this are discussed in detail in Richard Wiseman's "59 Seconds" book. He references scientific studies associated with all of these points.

According to that book #5 is a big no no. Wiseman claims (and shows with references) that conducted studies suggest that visualisation actually has adverse affects on a person's ability to actually achieve a goal.
He's not writing a blog post to "do better." He's just conveying his thoughts about doing better vs. feeling better.

Nothing wrong with that.
It happened to a friend of mine (almost exactly the way 'ghshephard spelled out). In fairness, partly because of hearing that story, I didn't buy my vested options when I left my last startup; those options paid out when the company was later acquired.
I agree. Very sad to see this die. It's something the world desperately needs and I had hoped a co like Google could make it happen...
Not a big fan of the Harry Potter series, book or movie, but have plenty of admiration for Rowling. Her execution has been tremendous throughout. She's pioneered so many new markets, at least i think so. I really wish the record labels and movie studios would follow her footsteps and consider a different business model. Its time to give much love, respect and appreciation back to the consumer. (Sorry for going off on a bit of a tangent)
For some reason I thought that was the e-mail field was for in our profiles - I guess it is private. Thank you for bringing this to light. I've sent you an email.
I can think of kinder possible terms: inexperienced, young, needing health insurance, broke, out-of-your-legal-depth, suggestible, susceptible to Kool-Aid.

There's a huge power disparity between a company and an individual. I suspect that there are many many cases where the individual got screwed for different reasons than naiveté.
No, it really is not the other way around "quite often." Legal English is quite specific and not particularly or regularly ambiguous.

This is a common misconception held by most people. It is wrong.
Can someone recommend any particularly awesome ones?
Not true. League of Legends is competitive, popular, and free to play. The developer, Riot Games, recently sold for $400 million. They just hosted their first major tournament which had over 200,000 concurrent users streaming the final match.
Diagram: Amazon Web Services Architecture
How can automatic banning/deletion of content ever be a good idea?
Do you really see a real problem here?

Closed-minded people want to get results that are accurate to their opinions, preferences, etc. The best way to make them satisfied is to re-use their search/browsing history and return results biased toward them. There is nothing wrong with that, we all do that in normal life to some point choosing people, events and places similar to us.

Open-minded people will always look for alternatives, they will like to see options, thus still looking for valuable information but according to different points of view. And this is why there are different newspapers on the market - some of them present the one and only vision of reality, others prefer to start a discussion about the real meaning of the facts.

And in the same way different search and recommendation engines will be enriched with such options, so we can have a choice. Otherwise we will leave looking for a service that does.
I went through that. The best part is that you have to know what the kids of your former high school classmates look like to pass. Given that I haven't seen most of them in 15 years, I have no idea what their kids look like. It was utterly aggravating.
> Right now that's indeed true. If later on there were to be
> a lot of intervening comments, it'd be more difficult to
> tell immediately who the response was directed to.

Not really. Making relationships between messages clear is kind of the point of tree-structured comments.
I fell in love with Arch about 2 years ago and have stayed loyal since. :)
I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean. Could you please rewrite it in legalese?
It's not a question of them expiring. It's that the company issuing them had an opportunity to rebuy them at cost. I.e. your vesting schedule is completely meaningless. It's one of those situations where someone uses a word that has a specific set of associations (i.e. "I vest 25%, that means I get them right?") and then attaches terms that make it mean something else entirely ("yes, you get them, but I can take them away at my option without compensating you").
Yes. In those experiments goal is to figure out the most likely failure mechanism, not the estimated lifetime.
They probably registered "Sosumi"...
Bummer, I had linked a workout app called CardioTrainer for Android to Google Health to store fitness information in the cloud.
That is definitely true. But how many compiler and VM jobs are there? How many web monkey jobs are there? It's like automotive engineers, as opposed to mechanics and drivers.

Now, I realize that we're being trained as automotive engineers, but most of us get jobs driving. I think the blog post's advice is much more useful for that.
Upvote what you want. Personally, I would rather see a single page that shows where all the UNIX-related names came from. That way we'd have one single story and be done with it.
You are confusing the term 'conspiracy' with 'monetizing our platform' :-)
Joe Kraus: Google Ventures Plans 80 Seed Deals in 2011
Everything You Think You Know About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Is Wrong
Difference in specialties. I'm in my mid 40's and I've been programming since I was 18. The very first time I had to configure a web server was about 5 months ago when I got nginx running on my laptop.

Ask me about microcontroller programming or writing code to control the real world and I'll talk your ear off. Ask me about web stuff and my knowledge stops at PHP.
Hacker Civil War Heats Up
Fund an A.I. project on Kickstarter
That is the key point.

If painting a version of a photo in oils is allowed, then this is allowed.
The author references a previous letter that describes what he's doing in jail. Can anyone find that?
Yahtzee and some of the Australian Gamer guys have had success mixing gaming and bars with the Mana Bar http://www.manabar.com.au/ in Brisbane, Australia.
General question: these reports often state that YC took part in the funding. Does this refer to small investment as part of YCombinator, or some follow-on money?
In all fairness, even if someone is your boss, they are a piece of meat. Cause we're made of meat. Unless there's something you want to be telling us..
Indeed, university professors, programming languages researchers, compiler and IDE developers and others do certainly need theoretical knowledge.

Could you speculate for me as to the number of job openings for compiler writers as opposed to the number of jobs for web monkeys like me?
Visibility.js
I guess I should be happy they try to do a lot of things, but it sure puts a break on the idea of being an early adopter of their products. It seems like you should wait a couple years before taking something from Google seriously. This sets up a really crappy catch22 dynamic.
I did say a big-iron language, did I not? Java and C# are certainly valid.

But, for example, it's not unreasonable at all for you to be expected to know how to set up and use Redis, even at a Big Company™.
It's less of an issue than you'd think. People become incredibly vested in their accounts. Hundreds of hours of playtime earning items and real money to buy others. Not many players will risk their time and money investments by trying to cheat.

Aimbot is still an issue as you can make throw away accounts. If a game supports the concept of "high player level" servers it's less problematic.
Book publishing isn't quite as bad as music publishing, as far as I know. Even so, much of the revenue goes to the middle men. I don't think many people appreciate how difficult and rare it is to make a living as an author. A lot of the people who wrote the books you're staring at in a book store have day jobs. More so if you're looking at, say, computer tech books.

Self-publishing of books and music is already revolutionizing these industries, and will turn them upside down once it becomes the norm. More control, more money in the creator's pockets, and a closer relationship between creator and fans. It's a good thing all around.
Apple expecting huge demand for updated MacBook Air in July
Apple drags Samsung patent fight to Korea
Thank you everyone for the responses and information! We'll be looking at Kickstarter for sure and I'll try to report back here with our experience, if any.

Thanks again.
I've been using Puppet for Linux servers and SCCM for Windows stuff... what's missing for me is good out of band configuration verification.

Is there a good replacement for Tripwire out there? It's a great toolset for change management and security, but is too expensive for my current endeavours. I played with an open source tool a couple of years ago that kind of sucked.
Web-monkeys need to get of their shell more.

There's a gigantic world of computing out there, with good jobs to boot, that has nothing to do with web 2.0.
In this case perhaps the audience should grow up and learn about the side of the world that doesn't follow strict formal logic. Hackers shouldn't be afraid of aesthetic arguments, with all of the desire for elegant solutions they profess.
^ Ditto. I thought pointers were being shown in a negative light at first, but now I see the point. In my opinion too, manual memory management is a very important part of developing highly scalable applications, but should only be done if absolutely needed - which is fortunately rarely the case nowadays as most people just develop for the Web, and can afford to throw money at the problem. But for embedded systems where resources are limited and inputs are very limited, it is still very useful. In the early years, it was C + inline assembly for further optimization - where you try your best to avoid assembly. I guess now, it's a dynamic/interpreted language, plus C/C++ for further optimization, and avoid C/C++ like the plague as much as possible.
Does it really count as alliteration with only two words?
I generally come across errors if I attempt to install a port with yaourt that has many dependencies that are neither in the main repositories, such as the Yi text editor written in Haskell. Though I recognize that it is probably better than installing things without informing the package manager.
Well, you probably can't count on employers who stand to profit by your loss.

But you could, for instance, join together with other employees whose interests are more aligned with yours and join a union.

That is if there were any unions in the IT field.. and if they weren't nearly universally despised due to the omnipresent anti-union propaganda in the US.
Making server-side JS obvious & popular - that's something only Node.js was seemingly able to do :p
I find it interesting that most of my non-technical friends actively dislike Facebook. Their growth comes from new markets while their existing user-base grows increasingly dissatisfied.
Got A Product-Related Website? CSN May Be Interested In Acquiring Your Site
Well, I meant more Microsoft migrating data from one of their services to Google :) -- but yes it's cool that they offered a data migration path in that instance.
I don't think you actually learn much from doing any of these things. For example, most of the developers I meet set up apache the following way: google a bunch of conf files; bash at it until it works; never touch it again. In any case, what good does it do you to rote memorize how any one piece of software works? What if Apache didn't exist, what if it was 1999 and all these shiny Web 2.0 APIs didn't exist - how would you write a web server or communicate with other applications then? Seems like that's the sort of knowledge you want to have, and precisely the sort of handwavey theoretical stuff you have the luxury of spending time on in college.
My guess would be that they run backups over night
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler%27s_Books
Whois privacy makes the registrar the legal owner of your domain, not you. I'm not OK with that. http://www.circleid.com/pdf/solidhostnamecheap.pdf
This kind of thing has been happening for years in Palo Alto. Life goes on.
Congrats to MongoHQ.

I often wonder why the hosted Mongo services aren't offering dedicated servers yet. It seems like an easy opportunity to provide service, automation, and monitoring value add at a high price point. Is the thinking that most customers who would opt for the dedicated instance would just run it themselves to save money?
I wonder if the Guardian will be their next target.

The log itself:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/24/lulzsec-irc...
I don't really have much to contribute on the story itself, but I suddenly realized that my former CS472 Artificial Intelligence project partner and friend from Cornell works for Silver Lake, which has led me down an interesting path of daydreaming now that I'm starting work with a Valley-based company in a few weeks.

It would actually make for a great short story or novelette to see former classmates on opposite sides of a deal like this. A lot of very smart engineers go straight into jobs in technology sector investment banking, private equity, etc. soon after college that could eventually put them on a collision course with erstwhile friends.
Are you asking some regulars to buy it ? Well, I hope the owners don't read you, because if they do, welcome to the restaurants bubble.
How long until pg starts up FoodCombinator to help restaurant entrepreneurs disrupt the food industry?
We hope to help solve at least the backup component of this at: http://lockerproject.org/. This just helps reinforce, in our eyes, that we need to push hard to get this in front of people as soon as possible.
Particle Debris (Wk. ending 6/24) Heroic Thinking
Site Admin To Pay $185,000 Damages For Providing Keywords
This post basically shreds the original paper. The classiness is the icing on the cake. If his version is 15x faster than the original Go version, that would make it about twice as fast as the super-optimized C++ version from the paper -- the one that was "was heavily dependent on several Google internal data structures and could not be open sourced". Lots of brainiacs at Google probably now have egg on their face courtesy of Russ Cox.
How does the food industry need disruption? Payment processing and things like that are one thing, smaller parts like menu ordering, recommendations, etc are things already being tackled all over the place...but how else would you disrupt the restaurant system? Genuinely interested in the topic and opinions.
I'm stunned that a site full of developers might be hostile to a site that has facebook's track record with developers. Stunned.
Somewhat related... there is a very interesting documentary just released about the break-up of AT&T, how it led to our modern communications networks and the man who was responsible:

Long Distance Warrior: The story of Bill McGowan, MCI's legendary CEO

PBS Trailer: http://video.wttw.com/video/1949293907/
99% Undeniable Conclusive Evidence That 9/11 Was An Inside Job
EVE Online players try to take down CCP servers in protest of Micro Payments.
There are exceptions to the rule, but in general if performing experiments is cheap and easy, it's easier to solve a problem than if performing experiments is a million times more difficult and costly.
The First Crowd-Sourced Military Vehicle is Unwrapped
This is an incredible amount of leverage for the non-founder employees of YC-backed startups.
I find the copyright and trademark information to be confusing:

"Harry Potter and Pottermore Publishing Rights © J.K. Rowling. Harry Potter characters, names and related indicia are trademarks of and © Warners Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved."

So she owns the publishing rights to Harry Potter and she created everything about the series (names, places, characters) but somehow Warner Bros. owns the trademarks and copyright for the characters and names? Seems like she may have had to relinquish (or sell, rather) a lot of rights to get those movies made.
I don't know why the above post is getting down-modded. The point is definitely a good one, even if it was stated flippantly. As has been stated in previous threads on this subject, the image captures the creative work of the creator of the horn, the creator of the suit, etc. The photo is itself a mechanical transcription of a handful of other people's creative works. For the photographer to insist that his arrangement of other people's creative works is original, while somebody else's re-interpretation of the photo is not, is just wrong.
No lawyer would include a plain English version because if you do so you risk ambiguity. There may be differences between the legalese and the plain English version. In that case your entire contract will be ambiguous and you are risking costly litigation to determine the exact meaning of the contract. Even if there are no differences it is guaranteed that if it comes to litigation some other lawyer will argue there are differences.

One of the most important goals of a contract drafter is to avoid all ambiguity and to provide certainty.

So I think the only answer is that if you do not understand a contract, hire your own lawyer to explain it to you. There are a lot of solo practitioners or small firms that will gladly do this for you for a small fee.
I would like a visible toggle switch for the filter. It's ok to filter stuff out but I'd like to know what the generic result looks like. Of course, that might be a philosophical mess because what exactly is the right algorithmic balance? Still, the toggle would create awareness about the extent of the information filter. The real danger of a filter is people thinking that their version of the news is the best version.

Random aside: one of the most annoying happenstances of the modern interweb is the prevalence of those ads that follow you around especially because they're really poor at being relevant.
The acquiring company controls the offer and structures it to maximize their benefit. The acquiring company does not benefit from paying people who no longer work at the company; they're incentivized to maximize the payout to current employees, in particular to aid retention.

In theory, the board of the acquiree thus has a "yes/no" decision to make, and whether or not it screws non-employee common stockholders, the "yes" decision might be in the greatest interest of the maximum number of shareholders.

It's a lot more complicated than this, but if you want an illustration of why it will cost you 6 figures to lose a court case over this issue, there you go.
Even more interesting the outside energy also includes information, as it is needed to figure out which are the slow and the fast molecules.

But in the end it is a bogus idea (even as a thought experiment) since quantum mechanics comes into play in real life.
The songs and album name are also slight derivatives as well, he wasn't just slapping new album art on the original.
Humans are not social creatures like dogs. Dogs are pack animals. We are not. That is a bad analogy.

If you want to know a human to the uttermost, put him under tremendous stress and listen to the thoughts he thinks in his head. That is who he is.
Foursquare Closes $50M at a $600M Valuation
Still seems low on details, but maybe this one?

http://forums.truecrypt.org/viewtopic.php?p=94607
I think this is the guy:
http://florida.arrests.org/Arrests/Matthew_Bumgardner_548009...

Google searches for '"Matthew Bumgardner" arrest' or '"Matthew Bumgardner" truecrypt' were unhelpful. It appears that this story hasn't had any media attention.
key paragraph:

The venture firm plans on investing in 80 seed deals this year.
They're earmarking $100k to $150k in deals that will ultimately
raise $500k to $1 million in seed funding. While Joe won't disclose
how many deals have been seeded, some startups they've invested
in at this stage include, Hipster, Smarterer, Shopobot, Copious
and Schematic Labs. For Series A and B, Google Ventures plans on
20-plus deals with investment amounts of $3 million to $10 million.
The venture firm also plans on four to six later-stage deals,
with check sizes between $10 million and $40 million.
Congrats MongoHQ!

I am about to use your service.
Solving chicken and egg problem: VisionSync Dating API
Winklevoss Twins Addicted To Facebook And Litigation
OTOH, people could mine already-manufactured stuff from landfills; see World Made by Hand.

Speaking of cyclic history, I also liked "The Peddler's Apprentice".
About: http://thenextweb.com/dd/2011/06/24/new-dating-api-could-bec...
Skype for iPad leak
Congrats, I'm a big fan! Careful on the 100% uptime though
There is a correlation between price and value and there is a correlation between price and how much company makes....so there should be a correlation between how much company makes and value provided to a customer.
I'm probably being dense here, but is "more quarterly focused" a euphemism for "more revenue focused"? In long form, "more focused on quarterly earnings reports"?
Was this is US-based company? The way I understand ISOs in the US, they must be exercised within 3 months of leaving the company ("The option may be granted only to an employee [..], who must exercise the option while he/she is an employee or no later than three (3) months after termination of employment" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_stock_option).

If so, perhaps you got lucky :)
Daily Deals Added Value Services are Turning into a Hot Market
Is this really something that happens regularly, to the point where you have a name for it? I've had several issues with the facebook platform in the past, but if breakage is really this common why aren't they doing anything about it? (And why not do code releases on Monday at the very least?)
Searching for all posts by Bella1 that contain "Matthew", "jail", or "letter" doesn't find a previous letter. The closest thing is this post that provides case information (such as the case number, etc):

http://forums.truecrypt.org/viewtopic.php?p=94607#94607
I agree. While most of the items on that list are web based, they are easy enough things that can be worked on while taking classes. Working on projects like these get you into the hacking/diy mindset that really differentiate the top and low level CS students. Will every CS student need to build a web app or use MapReduce? No, but learning new technologies and getting your hands dirty teaches you to ask questions, start something, and learn as opposed to being complacent with your current level of knowledge.
It seems like the real impetus for this kind of law (in the US) is that lawyers would oppose it. The article touches upon this at the very end.
حصريا على مدوناتنا نتيجة دبلوم الزراعة 2011
Ask HN: Domain names expiring soon, make sense to switch from Blue-host?
I have a bunch of domain names expiring and I'm thinking of switching if there are cheaper and more efficient options.

Are you happy with your provider? Is it easy to switch whole accounts with domain addons?

Suggestions? Thank you.
Valid point, but if you were writing code meant to run on the web, you should be expected to know a little bit about the server stack that will host your application.
What are the best practices for maintaining Puppet code in version control? Do people usually keep separate branches for different kinds of machines (e.g. webservers, SMTP servers, etc)? Is there a discussion about this documented somewhere?