skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cat videos? Really? Eliminating the Safe-harbor provisions is killing all and every site that distributes user created content.

Hell, even discussion sites like Hacker News could be affected: what if someone posts someone else's copyright content here, like a user posted the Scientology texts on Slashdot? Would YCombinator be OK with being legally responsible for the infringement? Slashdot had to take it down, but without Safe Harbor, they could've been sued.

Wikipedia, Youtube, Vimeo, Blogspot, Wordpress.com, Tumblr, you can say goodbye to all of them.

More: even if you build your own site - which is outside of the possibilities of 99% of the people in the first place - are you really safe? After all, the hosting company could be liable!

It's ultimately the destruction of the creative freedom we enjoy on the Web, converting it into TV 2.0, where all the content is created by the media companies and your only option is changing the channel.

Is that as important as being able to eat or have a place to sleep? No, of course not. But it doesn't mean it's not damn important.
Isn't a perfect math score very hard to get, something like the upper 1%ile? Do you know your IQ? I'm scandinavian and could do a traditional finance/consulting/management/accounting thing in my home country but the software industry seems far more fascinating. I'm afraid my 120 to 125 iq means I'm too stupid to do well in SV though.
I think software developers would be wise to be a little more flexible. The field is new enough that ideas change all the time. The worst projects I've worked on we're stilted by "we'll bring in a new tech if we need it (but we can always work around needing it)".

Conversely, the second worst projects I've worked on suffer from ADD: "Look, a shiney, new tech. We must embrace it!"

My philosophy is to continually learn new stuff for its own sake (I've focused on languages in the past, but I think it's time to switch to algorithms). I may never use something I've learned, but my tool chest is much more broad (and that Erlang tinkering is coming in handy now!).

I don't think I'm a better developer that a highly-focused compiler writer that knows YACC inside and out. We have different skills for different needs. But I still think the compiler writer would benefit from broadened education.
I'm not sure Google gives out options...I think they generally give RSUs.
I agree completely about money. We all want money but the system is rigged and wealth is something most of us won't get. I'm still very young but I believe it's enough to have enough money to live comfortably, get married, raise some kids, and all that first and foremost. I aspire to be really wealthy but I'm not deluding myself into thinking this is an achievement that anyone can get. It feels like the best we can do is strive for wealth with a healthy respect and understanding of the odds of achieving it and being satisfied with regular step-wise progress over large leaps from poor house to rich.

I've also found that doing anything for the money is a sure path to unhappiness regardless of whether you get it or not. I strongly believe that if you do what youre passionate about the money will come. It won't come magically but it's kind of like that book, "The Secret" except with a realistic attitude because wishful thinking and envisioning where you want to be isn't enough, actions trump thoughts any day.
> I think we all win if NoSQL is allowed to survive.

What does that even mean? Is it some sort of cultural practice or religion we are afraid of losing. So we should look over lost data and bad designs just because something falls under the "NoSQL" category?

I think anyone married to a technology like it is a religion is poised for failure. Technology should be evaluated as a tool. "Is this tool useful to me for this job?" Yes/No? Not "it has NoSQL in its title, it must be good, I'll use that".
This Man Could Rule The World
I would like to be able to read HN on mobile devices more easily. I commited some code on github that achieves that:

https://github.com/nex3/arc/commit/0efaa1b189c4ed54c4f91a7ec...

It only adds a viewport meta tag and some styling which applies to small screens only by using a media query.

Please use it! Afterwards the site will look like this on the iphone: http://minus.com/lGBmQmM4CrdHE

Sidenote:
Why can I commit directly to the github repository? I thought that by clicking edit, I would create a fork and work on that and create a pull request later. Strange. Or is this some kind of open-to-all repository?
> Myth #1: I don't have any time. This is a common excuse (...)

This is a really common case. When you are alone with your startup idea, you often fail to give the right priority to the tasks you need to complete to get to something of value finished. Advisors are the best solution to me. <shameless-on-topic-plug> And I'm working on a solution for all the (would-be) single founders to get help with this issue: http://www.asaclock.com </shameless-on-topic-plug>
EID WALLPAPERS
Did anyone else feel this was a poorly written article? Maybe I'm obtuse, but I found it _very_ difficult to understand. I felt like the writers were too busy sexing up the article to focus on explaining what's going on here...

It sounds like metal traded on the LME must be stored in an LME certified warehouse. The LME-certified warehousing market doesn't appear to be very competitive, as Metro/GS can take its sweet time getting you your metal yet not go out of business. _LME's_ conflict of interest is that it's supposed to regulate warehousers when one of its biggest members (GS) owns said warehouses. The alleged "warehouse strategy" then was for GS to buy the warehouses and create the conflict in the first place.

Did I get it?
I agree. There was no WAL logging, for instance. Most people consider 7.4 the first actually-possibly-not-a-terrible-idea release.

Then again, Postgres -- the project -- did not try to position itself (was there even such a thing as "positioning" for Postgres 16 years ago?) as a mature, stable project that one would credibly bet one's business on.

Lots of early database releases are going to be like Mongo, the question is how much the parties at play own up to the fact that their implementation is still immature and present that starkly real truth to their customers. So far, it seems commercial vendors are less likely to do that.
"If you have a use for one, you could think "is the current price still good enough value for me", and if you have no use for one, then you could ignore it."

It's about the future, too. If you think that the value to you in 2 months will exceed the price today, then it is rational to purchase it now (even if the value to you today is zero). It becomes more urgent when you think that the price in 2 months (when you need it) will be significantly higher.

Additionally, humans are risk-averse, and a known price today is less risky than an unknown price in the future.
Since I've been using Swype on Android, every "normal" keyboard on a touch device seems primitive. Even the iphone/ipod keyboard to type emails, text messages is to slow.
Leadership Word of the Day: POISE
How many people will be running IE6 in the year 2016?

Also, what is the desired end game here? Do we want software developers to have encyclopedic knowledge of browser quirks in 2021? How about 2026?
As a recent grad trying to convince US employers to H1B you and bring you over is hard.

No doubt. I feel very, very bad for the OP, but I am a little surprised at this:

I refused opportunities with Google, Bing, and two startups. I told all those people I wasn’t able to consider any offer, since I had already accepted one (so I thought).

If the OP had done all the required research (and it certainly looks that way), it must have been clear that the H1-B is nothing to mess with. Turning down opportunities until you have the visa in your hand and you've gone through customs sounds crazy to me.

Getting a visa is very hard. It's not Google/Microsoft's first time at that rodeo. Even better, big companies don't change their minds in a hurry. The startup was always much riskier. Funding might change, a new better candidate might appear, the whole company might pivot away from your skillset.

I realize its easy to point out flaws from the safety of my desk chair, and I have nothing but sympathy for the OP. I've been there when I had to leave the US the first time after my studies ended, and it's really hard. But that experience has what bred my heathy paranoia for these things. Always take the safer bet.
I believe that the written offer letter helps you seek damages related to relocation, losing health coverage, etc., due to the expectation of starting a new job. At-will employment lets you fire people without consideration, but it doesn't let you scam them into investing their time and money into the business relationship.
if by 'communicate' you mean 'generate noise', you're right. in other cases, it doesn't matter, they will get to you if they want to. true story.
I like daylight, so I'm a DST fan. In 1973 we had year round DST, But it was abolished the next year. Why you ask? Hey this is the US, to save the children of course. A couple of kids were killed waiting in the dark for their school bus, with a resulting national uproar and a switch back to ST/DST.

The internet company where I work has an interesting solution to the problem. At the fall change they shut down all the servers at 12:50 and restart them at 1:10. Total downtime is 80 minutes. I have always thought that UTC would have been simpler.

Another company made monitoring systems for electrical power distribution, which could not be shut down for the convenience of IT, o it had to deal with a 23 hour day in the spring and a 25 hour day in the fall.
Nice, but it needs a bigger backend library. I entered the "shave and a haircut" riff and received no meaningful results.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Shave_and_a_h...

http://www.peachnote.com/#!nt=singleNoteAffine&npq=60+-5...
Without wanting to sound stupid, when you talk about salaries do you always mention the amount before or after tax? Here in Europe it's almost always after tax.
Not to mention that they may get a retention bonus if they were part of a startup that was recently acquired. This could easily add up to $250k.
Typing in numbers is not the easiest of user interfaces. Why not a JavaScript piano?

http://www.musipedia.org/js_piano.html
Daylight savings and time zones are annoying and DST especially could use some clean up. However, it seems to be a necessary evil. The problem with "Let's just adopt UTC universally" is that now we are pushing the problem of determining whether the person you want to schedule a meeting with is awake when you are from few centralized authorities to each and every individual. Right now, if I tell you that it's 2pm where I am, you can assume that I am awake. If I tell you that it's 6pm UTC, that means nothing until you make the conversion. This conversion gets harder the more UTC is used as the standard. If we still have time zones, then it means you need to look up what timezone I am in, then make the conversion and determine what the local time for me is. If we don't even have time zones, we are stuck with having to look up approximate areas and essentially estimating time zones.

The linked article seems to suggest that I should have written that as 2pm -0400 UTC, which is sort of the best of both worlds. This way your you can make the conversion to your own time much easier. There may be something to this, but I am not sure it is enough to get everyone to agree on proper DST and to get rid of timezones like the ones used in Arizona.
See, rename a field and "all your data" is lost, unless you migrate the data from the old field to the new one

This is not true.

I wrote Objectify, a popular third-party java API to App Engine's datastore. The data migration primitives worked out building Objectify are what ScottH built into Morphia, the Java "ORM" system for MongoDB. With a small number of primitives (mostly @AlsoLoad and lifecycle callbacks) it's possible to make significant structure changes on-the-fly with zero downtime.

This is, IMHO, the best thing about schemaless datastores. There's no longer any compelling reason (at least, in the datastore) to take down a system for "scheduled maintenance".

For more information, here is the relevant section of Objectify's documentation:

http://code.google.com/p/objectify-appengine/wiki/Introducti...
Does anyone know if there is a Greasemonkey script or user stylesheet that lets you get the old Google Reader UI back? I didn't use the sharing features much, but I hate the visual aspect of the new redesign.
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What kind of backgrounds do they have? CS or STEM degrees at ivy league or similar schools? Does people with liberal arts degrees and a finance MBA get those kinds of jobs? (Assuming they can program.)
I never really understood comparing those numbers anyway. As impressive as iPhone sales are, they're not all used for games. Every DS/PSP/3DS were sold with the intention of playing games on. Gaming on my iPhone is terrible, IMHO. Angry Birds can be entertaining, but any comparable game to what I play on the DS is just too frustrating to play on a touch screen-only device.

From my observations, facebook has had a much larger impact on gaming than iPhone has. I have plenty of older relatives that'll tend to a virtual farm on facebook but won't play games on their phones.
Perhaps part of the problem is that, if you are the rare female wanna-be entrepreneur like I am, most of your co-founder possibilities are male. In an ideal world, this would not matter. But in practice, it can be a problem. For example, a coworker and I met up outside of work several times to see if he and I could successfully build some sort of project together outside of our main jobs. I was 26 and female. He was older and had a family. Something about hanging out outside of work together in the evenings without our spouses was just ... awkward. His wife was supposedly fine with it, but I have to wonder if she really was. There was a whole layer of weirdness about it that just wouldn't have existed if we'd been the same sex. It didn't work out in the end, but for reasons other than the social awkwardness. Still, the unusual nature of our relationship didn't help matters. I think that if I were to start a company, it would probably have to be with another woman.
Ignoring passion, does it make sense economically to join a startup in the Bay Area?

It doesn't seem uncommon for very young (25+) top engineers in the Bay Area to be making anywhere from $175k/year -- 250k/year in base salary + bonus + equity. Over 30 years, that's a more or less guaranteed $5m -- 7.5m before taxes from a single income. (Ignoring things like promotions and older engineers possibly needing to retrain.)

If you're not an early employee at the next Google, or a co-founder of a to-be-talent-acquired company, is it likely at all that you will beat those numbers at a string of startups? And if you do beat those numbers at a startup, is it because you're basically doing the same work you would be doing at Google anyway, likely ads or infrastructure?
Feel relieved that you discovered their true character before you actually moved there and joined them and invested time with them. They are probably lying about your performance to have an excuse to rescind the offer --- now you know something about their character. They should have been honest about whatever circumstances changed such that they couldn't hire you anymore.
I don't understand why that was downvoted. These days CSS3 is married with HTML5, it seems like it would make sense to have your page in HTML5 as well. BUT I did talk to the creator and he admitted he hasn't got around to learning the HTML5 elements yet, and that's totally fine.
Omnitouch - a touch screen interface anywhere
Hot girl opens her beer with her boob. Now that’s talent…
Are there any companies which work in this field and need programmers? In Europe?
> 1. You really did disappoint at the end of your internship. I've seen this happen. People get complacent. Take a good, hard look at what you've done and see if there's any truth to it or that someone could get that impression

But why, then, make arrangements for his return instead of just telling him they couldn't promise anything just yet. The response he got just screams "something went awry on our end / the visa is getting too expensive / we found an equally good candidate here that costs us less, but we don't want to tell you so let's just blame it on you instead."
There's a difference between giving someone extra work, likely "shit work" and treating someone like shit. More than one employee at excellent companies has been assigned more work due to having a higher salary than colleagues at the same grade. This is an easy, even somewhat logical rationalization for a manager to make.

The "worst case" you put forward is still far from convincing. In work, black swans are generally positive. If a typical job has a value of x, most will be between .8x and 1.2x, but a few will be 10x or even 100x. Outside the military, where death is on the line, -100x jobs are very, very rare compared to +100x jobs.

Wasting a year and a half in a ho-hum environment is not as big a price as missing a once in a lifetime opportunity due to over negotiation. In the opposite vein, the amazing opportunities often come at a reduced salary. How much less would Warren Buffet be worth today if he'd tried to negotiate a higher salary with Benjamin Graham instead of doing the exact opposite?
Interesting can you share the apps that you have already built?
I'm on Android and I've been in the testing phase of Swype for a very very long time. Swype's major failing is the adding of unusual words. It's not built for real touch typing even though they added that feature in. Also I've given it a very good go since I use my android device for blogging as well and while swype performs remarkably well in portrait mode it feels different in landscape. the distance your single finger has to travel as opposed to being able to use all ten fingers to touch type like you would on a standard keyboard makes touch typing feel like the more efficient method here.

Thus I think swype for phones is fanstastic.. Swype for tablets is great if for some reason you can just use one hand.. But both hands hand touch typing works the best on a tablet imo. And this particular invention enhances that effect a lot.
Would this still apply for people on work visas?
I was thinking exactly the same thing, about the parallels between speculative bets on appreciation and dividends.
I've been in similar position as you, so i feel for you.
I've worked in the USA and Canada for several companies in the past, and also went through several visa procedures (partially). My suggestions is to start an LLC in the UK and contract yourself out to one or multiple (startup) companies. That's what I did. Not only does that evade a lot of visa headache's, and makes it way easier for companies to recruit your services. It also turns you into an entrepreneur, which is a more productive way to live your life ihmo. Who knows you might be hiring people yourself soon.

You have to fly back and forth atleast once every 3 (or 6?) months. But if you're smart you have your client pay for that. (much cheaper then navigating visa-applications)
The only thing to watch out for at the customs is if they ask you what your doing here is that your here for either "sales meetings" or "training of people". Don't say your just working here. and always have a recent, written letter from one of your client-companies on you, inviting you to come help em out with trainings or other interim-solution providing. I've avoided any immigration problems like this for years. Worst thing: they will have you explain it, and then they realize its a grey area and they cant really give you any problems for it.
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The keyboard I believe has changed slightly in different versions of iOS. Plus with portrait + split keyboard, this seems like it would be kind of a hassle.

I'm also guessing you won't be able to get the correct angle to type well either.
This is a thread with all the charm of a Wikipedia Talk: page argument. Maybe we can just let it die.
Sure - I had sort of assumed those offers were for non-US locations though? I've been approached by a number of [american] companies and recruiters for jobs in London.

I'd be really interested to hear about the H1B from the employers' perspective; there must be some HN members who've engaged in the process?
"MongoDB is designed to be run on a machine with sufficient primary memory to hold the working set. In this case, writes finish extremely quickly and therefore lock contention is quite low. Optimizing for this data pattern is a fundamental design decision."

Yeah, well, that's a problem. MySQL and Postgres perform dramatically better if you keep everything in memory, too -- but they don't fall over if they have to hit the disk. (And yes, they can handle lots of concurrent writes, even when the working set is larger than RAM.)

I have no particular bias for or against MongoDB, but arguing that it's peachy because its biggest limitations were designed-in from the start isn't a winner. Some of us want tools that aren't going to fail under reasonably expected application loads. Also, arguing that Enthusiastic Developers are Working Really Hard on fixing those limitations isn't especially compelling (I'm still waiting for Enlightenment 17...)
"I think the most important lesson we can learn from NoSQL in general is that the idea of a one-size-fits-all database is becoming dated."

For programming languages, using the "right tool for the job" has little downside. Perhaps the developers need to learn an extra language, or perhaps there is some communication overhead between them. But unless the components are tightly-coupled, there's not much of a loss.

In contrast, the value of the whole data is greater than the sum of the parts. If you have a website selling products and an inventory management system and an automatic price-setting tool, it's hard to use a different DBMS for each one.

Even for data sets that seem unrelated at first, there may be a lot of value in the small connections between them. This is becoming increasingly apparent and companies are trying very hard to see these connections. Being in separate systems just makes that more difficult.

So, there are good reasons to use multiple database systems, but there is also a much higher cost. Saying "use the right tool for the job" doesn't give any guidance about when it's worth the cost and when it's not.
Growl is amazing and deserves any reward it might get from the store.. For those moaning about how invasive it is, change the settings or don't use it. I personally love it and am glad to purchase versions.
Some consolation, in that case, according to Wikipedia: "if the employer should dismiss the employee, the company is liable for any reasonable costs associated with relocation back to the employee's last foreign residence"
all your iq score really measures is how well you do in iq tests. if you have an interest in and a basic aptitude for programming, you should be fine.

(also, a perfect math score in the sat isn't impossibly hard - the level of mathematics is probably lower than your last school exam. it just takes a lot of practice to do that many questions fast and accurately.)
I disabled nearly all the attention getters for apps I use and I haven't looked back.
This is true, but I think everyone would be aware that fighting a court case as a recent grad will be far too expensive, and doing that from outside the country adds even more on top.
Interestingly, the author of the blog post also says (in the comments) that he will not have 1-on-1 dinners with women because he doesn't want to make his wife uncomfortable!