skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've noticed I use Google+ a lot less these days. Stopped when I first heard about this policy. Not in protest, just a whole lot less trusting of them now. Kinda like I stopped using Facebook when they made previously private data public by default. (Only reason I opened a Facebook account in the first place was their strong privacy policy.)

I'm not putting my foot down, but mulling it over, and I think I'm done with google. They did a good job with plus and I had high hopes, but their ... rigidness... shows what I see as a disrespect for their users.

I'll be moving my mail off of gmail onto paid mail hosts, etc, as soon as we get mail setup for the new company.

In the 1990s I removed Microsoft from my life completely. I think I'll keep a company page on Facebook, and maybe the equivalent on google plus if they allow it, but no more for the personal stuff.

I think there's a huge opportunity for a startup that operates a social network that actually caters to people's desire for anonymity and privacy.
I'm one of those people who wishes they were diagnosed as a kid.

I've been diagnosed by two different psychiatrists with ADHD. I've been on Adderall (XR) at dosages up to 80mg, Strattera, Wellbutrin XL + 10mg Adderall (actually my favorite, but not so effective), and now I'm on Concerta (Ritalin) 27mg/54mg.

The 27mg dose of Concerta is minimally effective without affecting my sleep, so sometimes I need to boost it. I hate stimulants though, and I wish I could get along fine without them but it's just not possible. Strattera worked good but the "sexual side effects" were too weird for me to continue on. Wellbutrin + Adderall worked okay (with the benefit of me generally being a bit happier) but my psychiatrist after moving didn't want me on two medicines that can raise your blood pressure.

I ended up going to 6 different schools between 8th grade and graduating across 4 different cities. Despite that, I graduated high school with a 3.5 and started college as a Sophomore. My first semester in college I got a 1.8 and thrown in academic suspension. The next three years would be really rough. After that, I went to my family doctor and got adderall, and that helped out a lot at first, but it wasn't a miracle drug and I still had to really force myself to concentrate in weird ways to get through school, and that's really where the adderall helped. Towards the end, school got easier and I enjoyed it more, but I could also sit down and do homework.

I've gone off meds completely for a few months at a time almost once a year, and I just can't do it. I wish I would have been diagnosed with it as a kid and had the behavioral therapy along with it instead of having to wing it for the past 6 years, but that's in the past. I also wish there was a non-stimulant that worked really well without side effects too, but for now, I'm happy with the Concerta.
These articles are so common. While I agree that a "shortage" of software dev talent may be harming economic growth, I still think the article misses the point. People capable of becoming excellent devs (which requires high analytical ability, the capacity to read and absorb complex subject matter quickly, strong writing and communication skills, the personal mindset to persevere ande complete projects, creativity and the ability to self-start with minimal supervision or instruction)... well, these folks have a lot of options and may not be impressed with the pay and work conditions that would normally appeal to the average worker.

I get it, you want talented devs. Now tell me why a talented person would become a dev instead of a cardiologist or banker. There are reasons, but this is the real issue, and I'm not sure I've ever seen an article lamenting a shortage addess it (those that do generally conclude that there is no shortage)
Here here. I can not agree more about your statement:
"for some people Scala means just too much incidental complexity for too little power gains"
I've been telling fellow developers this when asked why I'm not interested in Scala: There isn't enough there for the trade-off in switching to another language. If I use Clojure I get the magic of a LISP. If I use Groovy I get all the power of a dynamic language. If I use Scala, I get..... Java++? Not enough for me, there's so many good options for JVM languages, I will happily use Clojure/Groovy AND plain ol' Java underneath the hood if needed.
How do you get out? Crawl under the desk?
It's not just semantics though. If you're against software patents but ok with patents in general, there needs to be a principled way to draw the line between them. The point of this article is that there really isn't.
All Beautiful Pets
Have you looked at any of the ThinkPads? It's pretty easy to get one with a matte screen (in fact, I'm typing on one right now!), and from my experience they're fairly quiet. Not the most beautiful machines, though.
I don't know the particulars of how this is implemented, but you would either have to compile your code for ARM (adding an enormous burden to web development), or have all mobile browsers ship an x86 emulator (which is a massive step backwards).
Paypal also has terrible customer service. Every time I call them, I get pushed around to people who barely speak English, and just repeat things they see on a sheet of paper.

To add to this, think about charge backs. Paypal doesn't even make an effort to fight for you, in the case of a Charge Back. I had a charge back NINE months after a transaction for 2 $500 amounts. Ouch. The worst part is... if you want to dispute the charge back, they charge you ANOTHER fee to do it.

Paypal has been an absolute nightmare - and if there was an alternative, I'd jump on it right away.
HAS AIRBNB ACTUALLY -- REALLY DONE ANYTHING AT ALL YET FOR ´
Forgive me if I've completely misunderstood how GUIs work, but isn't reentrancy a basic requirement for GUIs in multi-threaded applications to be responsive when one thread of execution is blocked?

I mean, I guess they could use a message queue between their thread for window chrome and page rendering, but I don't recall them ever mentioning anything about that in any dev journals that I used to read years ago.
Hedge Funds "Buying" Huge Land Tracts in Africa
Reports of tanks being used against indigenous people in the absence of land rights. Worth a listen.

"With the collapse of the housing market, there is a drive for the new commodity to invest in,
Mittal said. "These hedge funds are promising returns of 25 to 40 percent." Mittal called this the new investment bubble.
If you accept bitcoin, then there is no third party that can freeze your account.
"and the engine behind Google’s profits"

uh? how so?
Some of these are quite cool, particularly the beautification algorithm. But where can these algorithms be found...?
997 > 100 * 6,
330 > 100 * 1,
7000 > 100 * 63
Can Lady Gaga join Google+ since it is not her real name?
Now you can play games on Google+
There's a problem here in going from their specific case to where this may make sense, to the more general case they're trying to make, where it doesn't.

For instance, if you're mapping disk space to memory addresses and have large blocks of data, this would mean that every time you needed to update a single byte, you'd either have to duplicate the entire block (possibly several mega- or giga-bytes) or give up linear access. Yuck. There are a lot of use cases that would absolutely be miserable for.

You can get away with such things a lot further if you're implementing these things at the file-system level.
I honestly think you could make that argument for the pictures shown. But that's just my subjective opinion...
You don't want JavaScript VMs to be running NaCl's verifier on all the code that they generate. That would be a significant performance loss. Remember that JavaScript engines are fundamentally built around self-modifying code, so the verifier would be running all the time.
Ironic that SQL is mentioned here - I think the idea is close to Multi-version concurrency control, which "real" databases have been doing for years now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiversion_concurrency_contro...
BART Cuts Passengers' Cell Service To Prevent Protest
From the article: "In this case, there are software engineers available but not with the skill set the companies are looking for."

Well, at least not at the salary levels companies are offering. If you want MINT/STEM-knowledgeable people to solve hard problems for you, problems that your standard software engineer doesn't have the background to solve, why do you think those people will be content with standard software engineer pay?
I'm not sure what your point is. Google HAS changed the world , what more can you ask? In order for them to continue to change the world they need money (they are a business), and some of their products like Google+ and AdWords are more geared towards making money rather than changing the world.
yeah they are very nice of course. But i am doing GPU intensive stuff and thinkpads (any laptop) will get noisy with that kind of stuff.
You don't have to run them as root. You can run them as a regular user. I'm pretty sure Wayne recommends against RVM system-wide and the preferred method is just installing it for individual users.
So the 7M raised was ok for dilution, but that last 1M was just too much to bare?

Just because it's in a press release doesn't make it true.
I'm sure they will allow you to use a fake name if you fashion yourself as a brand backed by wealthy investors... :)
Shun Paypal. Use Hawala. Save your time and money.
Use Jonathan's card to buy yourself an iPad
> Whatever happened to "caveat emptor"? If you're attending a real estate conference at a Ramada Inn, you weren't defrauded - you're just an idiot.

What happened is that "you were an idiot" is not accepted by many any more.

Many people don't expect to pay for their mistakes, even if that means someone else paying instead, and the worst people for this are the sort of people who make a lot of mistakes.

They'll argue, they'll fight, they'll try force a chargeback on the credit card payment, they'll do anything they can to avoid taking the cost of a mistake - if nothing else works they just keep on and on and on and on and on at everyone involved until someone gives them a full refund just to make them shut up and go away (as the admin time arguing back can become more expensive than the refund and taking them to court for harassment is hardly a convenient option). Some will even sometimes try taking you and/or the payment processor to court. Yes the case will probably be laughed out, but someone has to go through all the hassle until it gets laughed out, then (unless you are in a "loser pays" country) counter-sue to get your legal costs back.

And then there is the negative PR they can try to drum up - if they are successful here that can be much more costly than a refund.

Caveat emptor doesn't work if the emptor is a very loud, very persistent, fuckwit with entitlement issues (or just a scammer). Which unfortunately is a large enough segment of the general population to be a significant problem.
German Hacker Cracks GSM Call Encryption Code
I don't understand. I just read the policy and it doesn't say anything about using your legal name (i.e. the one on your ID). It says:

"Your common name is the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, any of these would be acceptable."

It doesn't seem like their policy precludes Lady Gaga from calling herself Lady Gaga. I guess I don't quite understand where the criticism you linked to is coming from.
~7 billion people, ~2 billion PCs and ~5 billion Cell phones.
Data Backup 3 Adds Lion Support | Product News | The Mac Observer
It definitely depends on customers - for example the normal HN crowd is not the normal retail crowd. Most people are not informed consumers. But, even those guys I worked with back in undergrad have moved on and used the same techniques to sell $100k+ deals. Though it's kind of unfair to call them techniques - it's just their personality. They just get people excited and get them to say yes, whether it's for a DVD player or a $50k project. There's a science to it, but I'm guessing everyone here probably already knows that.
"shortage" is relative. there's a shortage of people who actually know what they're doing who are willing to work for your company for how much you're willing to pay.
D3 for Mere Mortals (d3.js visualization tutorial)
For businesses, there are two other considerations:

1. Cost: you get more computing bang for the buck with desktops.

2. Anti-theft: Laptops are easy to conceal and walk out of a building with. I've heard about laptop thefts at places I've worked, but I never heard of a desktop PC theft.
i'd like to try it as well if any of your could spare an invite please?
I miss the days when Google was trying to chip away at Microsoft and paid websites $1 per Firefox download/install. To me, the article is really a heads up for Microsoft. If a channel for search revenue is available, go get it.
Remember the Group Buying Explosion? This Is the Instant Deal Explosion
Be careful not to accidentally commit a Circumstantial Ad Hominem. His so-called conflict of interest has no bearing on whether his argument is cogent.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2868269

;-)
I think I will be closing my Google account. Google won't miss me but that's okay.
Definitely a nice-looking site.

I can't seem to get it to connect to my BitBucket account though -- I keep getting a "Sorry, We couldn't retrieve any data for this account." message. All the other services worked flawlessly.
If that's the case then I wonder if my search results will end up populated solely by witticisms and novelties. In my experience so far +1 seems mainly used as a polite nod or chuckle, because its primary effect is that it's visible to the person who said the thing you approve of. Something like del.icio.us seems much more likely to identify timeless great content worth sharing -- it's a bookmark to come back to rather than a nod of social approval.

If you were designing a search algorithm it does not seem like you want want to give much weight to an embedded easy approval button (reddit, digg, +1, like, etc.) compared to something that requires more investment of someone's time and thought, like making a del.icio.us bookmark. I mean, half the time you have to go try to remember what your password was, then have them send you a password reset mail, then re-login -- now that's a bookmark I care about.
The Battle Continues: Samsung To Appeal Apple’s European Injunction
Does anyone wonder whether airbnb has actually DONE anything about EJ or for her? Talk is cheap. I wonder if they have done more than phone calls and PR promises.....
In theory yes, as it avoids holes in the databases or files used for storage. It’s also the semantics of ZFS - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
Safecast releases 500,000 Japan radiation measurements
I started on this before hearing about Programming for Mere Mortals (http://stevenf.com/pages/book.html). I was sort of bummed by the similar names but decided to keep mine because I tried to start from the beginning.
Silicon Valley’s take on the downgrade
While this is true I've also found something a little counter intuitive. If you dress and look like a schlep but what comes out of your mouth sounds intelligent, fast paced and impressive (note I said "sounds") then the contrast between what the person thinks you are and what you sound like can actually be an advantage in many cases. Same thing happens when people stumble on the hole in the wall restaurant that has "great food you have to try this place".
While the food might be great many times the contrast also helps.
I Imagine it could be done if you don't mind having a URL that looks like http://example.com/?x=ug893hig8*g
潮州凤凰单枞
依蕾斯怎么样
I've got mine sitting at my desk right now
That they let you accrue thousands or even millions in charges and then lock your account unexpectedly with poor customer service is the rub. There's no warning, just a surprise logistical nightmare that they benefit enormously from.
The Modern PC Turns 30
Long ago and far away there was only one PC implementation for Prolog and like a good little programmer I gave it a shot. It was an 'interesting' ride (interesting in the Chinese sense) but I stuck with it long enough to understand that I was better off building my projects in the languages that Prolog seemed to have been built from. Never looked back; finished the project without further confusion or delay, took that as a sign. Similar to how many on HN seem to feel about Lisp :)
Scanning the Universe in 3D: The Hottest Kinect Video Yet
> And - I'm not a security expert, but how much do you gain if you saw a couple of chars here? My intuition (yeah, shouldn't trust that) says that it's worse if I watch you and know the _first_ character of your password than you seeing the first 1-3 characters of the first word of my passphrase?

Novel thought and possibly worth persuing, I hadn't thought of that. I want to re-iterate this isn't something I broadly apply across all my passwords or even many of them, just that for some users password sharing is a use-case.
I would prefer Joanne Rowling, Mauritus Escher and Clive Lewis use their more common monikors than Google compliant ones. I don't even know DMX's real name.

It feels like Google is trying to enforce something most of us associate with our identity. What's surprising is how stubborn they are about it.

It will only lead to people creating fake names that pass the filters, as "Holden tattboy" demonstrates in the comments.
Mea culpa, absolutely correct.
So I used to have problems starting projects - I would plan/read/design etc and then never actually get around to doing anything concrete; I have overcome that issue. But now I find myself not being able to finish anything. I end up with little software projects that are half-done and abandoned because I lose motivation once I solve the 'interesting' challenges. When there is a clear path to the finish, I suddenly become disinterested.

I have been reading and listening to some podcasts related to productivity, motivation, etc etc and I am aware that "Tips and Tricks" style advice is not the best thing and that I should be trying to build better habits, but damn is that hard to do.

Any advice for how to Get Things Done now that I have gotten past the Just Do It hurdle?
I think blocking BBM and Twitter in UK is wrong
Yes. Good riddance IMO. Firefox has become a bloated beast over the years, Mozilla is nothing but obstructionist these days, and the sooner the entire web moves to WebKit the better.
Been using it for several months now, but would have to agree with this.

It often seems to churn away endlessly shoving meta data back and forth, and has periodically gotten confused about what files have been deleted or moved. Also had an issue where it kept duplicating some files. Toss a directory with a few thousand small files in it and it takes forever to sync. Not particularly light either.

They have a way to go to make it clean and elegant, but being able to seamlessly sync between Mac and Windows machines anywhere, without having to store in their cloud is nice.
French growth sputters to a halt in 2nd quarter
I disagree. By that logic, math should be just as patentable as hardware, or hardware should be just as nonpatentable as math. There are distinctions, just not clear or easy to define ones.

If you're against software patents but ok with patents in general, it must be because you believe that patents encourage innovation in general, but stifle innovation in software. If that's a valid claim, then there must be some way to make a distinction, even if it's fuzzy. Most of the distinctions in law are fuzzy. Like the line between obvious and nonobvious, for example. No one looks at the fuzziness of that line and concludes that the distinction is therefore fatuous.

For the record, I'm not convinced that patents encourage innovation in general. I'm open to the idea, but it seems like the burden of proof is on patent proponents, and I haven't seen any real evidence.
Consumer Sentiment Drops to Lowest Level in 3 Decades
We're aware of this problem, and we'll look into it as soon as possible (we're currently on the road).

Your accout info should be saved, so once we sort out the problem your profile should be accurate.

Also, thanks for signing up!

- Brad (lead dev at Work for Pie)
I can't figure out if at allows seeding backups.

E.g. - backing up your first massive backup locally using an external drive, then moving it physically offsite and beginning the sync online.

That seems like a fantastic feature to me. That way, instead of having - say - a photo library on each of my laptops - I can have a single photo library at a remote location on an external hard drive that's constantly synched with new photos, without the need to upload hundreds of GB in an initial seed.

Plus - of course - being able to access any of my photos from anywhere.

Crashplan offers something similar - but it's purely a backup solution - and doesn't make your files "cloud-like" accessible.
Government's real role, regardless of your ideology: To provide some stability (that in turn justifies/enables investment and, broadly speaking, collaborative effort).

At that level, recent events and circumstances rate an "epic fail".

OTOH, some of the "business models" of current start-ups seem to be skating on considerably less than thin ice. There's a limit to how much screen real estate and specialization you can sell, all the more so given the increasing financial and authentication friction correspondent with increased adoption/participation. (A primary reason iTunes and its app store are "winning".)
Salman Khan on his religion
I followed the link at the bottom, and it made me pretty angry. Hashbo is a very neat example of the kind of bullshit I hate in upcoming software products and services.

The only information available before asking for signup is this;

> Hashbo is a simple innovative, new way to communicate, collaborate and curate.

What the hell is that supposed to mean? Is it a blogging system? Microblogging? A social network? IM? Is it some combination, or a new thing?

People come to a site like this with the question "What is this and why should I care?". At the end of that (quite nice) animation, I have no idea, and that doesn't make me intrigued and curious, it makes me annoyed and frustrated at not getting a straight answer.

Nobody cares about your buzzwords, they care about what your site is, and what it can enable them to do that they couldn't do before.
Why don't you telephone them? There is a telephone number given, along with detailed instructions of what to do in case of a copyright violation.

I'm a little surprised you'd write a blog post and get HN involved before picking up the phone.
AFAIK, right now, this is not supported. You can have multiple shares/folders though, so it's closer to this than say, Dropbox.
Yeah, I suppose the end justifies the means, right?
If you believe in trying to make the best of the finite number of years we have on this planet (while not making it any worse for anyone else), think that pride and self-righteousness are the cause of most conflict and negativity, and are humbled by the vastness and mystery of the Universe, then I'm the same religion as you.
Our whole company has been using AeroFS exclusively for our network drives, and it's worked extremely well! It's great because we can share files of any size, and it seamlessly updates between all machines.
I'm Starbucks illiterate. How did they transfer the value from Jonathan's card to theirs?
It's not that these people would be "totally unaware" if suddenly their searches defaulted to Bing.

I imagine it would be disconcerting in the same sort of way that having rusty water shoot out of your shower for a second or two every morning would be. It's not the end of the world, you don't know how to fix it, but after a couple seconds it's not like it really matters.