skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why do you think Google considers its actions evil?

I don't want to sound prickly but you keep putting words in my mouth.

As I said, it's less about the specifics of what they're doing now, and more about the apparent switch of focus from "organising the world's information" [0] to "deliver[ing] online experiences tailored to each individual's interests and social circles" [1] which, I believe, may lead to a bad outcome. And it's obvious many people within the company are uneasy about this too (and do, arguably, think it's wrong) [2]

Does this mean "Google" thinks itself to be evil? Well it becomes meaningless to talk about Google as a monolithic entity at that point because it's made up of individuals.

I'm concerned because going forward I think it's going to be much harder for Google to balance the best interests of their users with their mission and profit motive. When Google launched, our interests were more or less perfectly aligned with theirs. This switch in focus is one of the biggest upsets to that yet.

> Making life difficult for yourself requires no excuse.

If I gave you my word, and then through a series of decisions proceeded to make it almost impossible to keep it, perhaps you would say nothing all the while. At the very least, I think you would have an opinion on it.

But here we have an institution. People build institutions. We can build it in such a way that's it's likely to fail, or build it in such a way that it wont. Surely you can see it's important to make it as easy as possible for Google to do the right thing and difficult, if not impossible, for them do the wrong things.

If we don't, I think history is pretty clear on this one. Sooner or later, a bad outcome is absolutely inevitable.

> I didn't realize that mining personal data counted as evil.

I said a race to the bottom in mining personal data. Is what they're doing now evil? The consensus seems to be, no. Is there a point where we could all agree they've gone too far? Absolutely; obviously, even. So naturally you're going to ask me where the line should be drawn. Well, I honestly don't know and unfortunately I think we'll only know after it has been crossed, by which time it may be far too late to take meaningful action.

Google doesn't need to go down this route. If they choose to they're going to make it very difficult, if not impossible, to hold onto their values.

Me, I think there are plenty of other things they could be getting on with. They haven't finished organising the worlds information yet. Maybe when they've done that, we can talk again about them "deeply understanding" who I am [1].

[0] http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/20/google-ceo-larry-pa...

[2] http://pandodaily.com/2012/01/24/larry-page-to-googlers-if-y...
"Oh, the business of fear mongering."

couldnt agree more. I am using PC with XP/7 for years now and never had a virus. I go online into some questionable websites and downloads sometimes but if user uses a common sense, he wont open that AllPrinterDrivers.exe from unknown source just to install drivers to his printer.

I never needed and I think I never will need an AV.
Pretty cool to see the room. I always liked this photo:
"This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!" (or you will take down the web)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:First_Web_Server.jpg
No suggestions, but I'm interested to hear what you learn in this. I've wanted to do similar, but email broke for me because I can't arbitrarily sort the list. I could tag messages/tasks with P1/P2/etc, but I'd really prefer infinitely-granular sorting. Also, I don't believe all of my email clients support displaying in this tagged sort order. (in my case, I use gmail in browser and android email client).

I'd be happy to adopt a new email client and have all my email forward there, but it would have to continue to support all my standard email needs, like archiving, address book, lists, etc.

I've thought about building a company around this, but it strikes me as a big problem, because you'd need to support all the standard email stuff, and build a bunch of clients, and all that stuff has been done in spades by existing products.
I think it's kinda dumb to ask for code samples, because while a code sample from a honest candidate can be very helpful in determining how good they are, it is very easy for a dishonest candidate to doctor something up. Also when looking at a code sample you have no idea how long it took them to do it or how much hand holding they needed to do it.

Having a coding question (Something clever but doesn't take up a lot of time to do, the best programmers have plenty of options, they don't need to jump through your hoops if they don't want to) on your website and asking for solutions to that is a better filter imo.
Could you support your claim that running times are irrelevant? I understand you want to keep your blog post (or "blarticle") short. But maybe you could elaborate here? I am genuinely interested in your argument.

I think there are other caveat of specifying only the results.

You posted earlier on the halting problem

http://evincarofautumn.blogspot.com/2011/10/solving-halting-...

That post also contains a statement which I believe to be false. You state that the "Haltability problem" (where you are given a program P and want to determine if there exists an input on which it halts) is decidable but its not.

Basically, I can just hardcode any input I of my choosing into P so that it always does the same thing (run P on I) regardless of the actual input I' you provide it. Thus, I can use an algorithm for the Haltability problem to solve the halting problem.

I know that does not pertain to this post directly but the halting problem does. Given a program written in this new language, how can you determine if what the programmer specified can even exist as a program?

In fact, suppose you specify the properties of this new language you current wish to construct (in say, English and assume that everything is interpreted correctly). How do you know such a language could potentially exist (never mind implementing it)?

I also don't even want to think about debugging in such a language. More specifically, I would rather have a library for the example you described because if I make a mistake in my specification, I have ways to find the error in it. But I guess this goes back to my previous question: what does your compiler produce on an incorrect (or outright impossible) specification (i.e., piece of "code")?

Its certainly interesting to read about thoughts on potential new languages but I wish there were more solid theoretical foundations for posts like these. Otherwise, I feel that the same energy would be better spent on improving existing languages with some subset of the features you want.
Use the toggle to turn off the social stuff then.
I wouldn't use QC. I'd use conventional encryption.

Think about what happens given any known plaintext.

Think about the difference between a MAC and a simple encrypted hash.

I'm not giving you random political scenarios or whatnot; I'm looking at this like a simple engineering problem; the benchmark is TLS, not "some theoretical thing that the NSA can't break" or whatever.

I shouldn't have made fun of you to begin with (making fun of people who suggest one time pads is a time-honored sci.crypt tradition that doesn't need propagating). So bear with me. I'm just trying to show you how irritating it is to get a simple encrypted transport right.
It's hard to give a number for Ookaboo's precision because of the difficulty of evaluation. Different raters disagree with each other around a rate of 0.02.
Belief in one's own invincibility is probably one of the stupidest beliefs conceivable, straight past creationism without shedding any speed.

Besides, you wouldn't portray him as a terrorist. You'd portray him as a Muslim.
De-Election: Lamar Smith
Ask HN: Boss claims company will own side project even if built off the clock
Sorry for no karma, wanted to create a new account to ask this question.

When I started working at my current company, the owner purchased a project of mine when I came on board. He mentioned at one point that I shouldn't work on side projects relevant to my job with the company because, seeing that I work remotely, he couldn't be assured that I built them in my free time. He also said that they could be considered company property because of this.

I never signed an NDA or non-compete that elaborated on this, this was just a quick discussion. Needless to say, I've got a new project that I am anxious to get started on. I don't even have time to work on it "on the clock" but I'm nervous about maintain ownership.

Should I log the hours I work on it? Should I inform my manager? Does anyone else have advice on how I should handle this?
>should not be crushing small publishers by demanding 30% of all their revenues

Apple has never demanded %30 of all of anyone's revenue.

Apple has never crushed anybody small with their iTunes stores-- on the contrary, they've created a massive boom in small software publishing, and soon small book publishing.

>suing all other phone manufacturers for some stupid UI element.

All those phone manufacturers stole patented inventions. They cheated, and they deserve to pay. If you don't like the patent system, work to get it reformed... but I promise you you haven't thought out the consequences of that, and you wouldn't like the results.

>The bigger their profit the more they come across as grossly petty and greedy.

People like you have been hating on Apple for the past 3 decades. Always hating with lies and misrepresentations.

Its not any different now that Apple is successful, only one thing is true-- Apple's success has proven your predictions wrong, year after year.

Remember when you said the iPad was "just a bigger iPhone"?

Remember when you said the iPhone would flop without a physical keyboard?

Remember when you said the iPod was lame?

Whose laughing now?

Serioulsy, I'm tired of these ignorant apple bashing posts. HN is going to hell because its overrun with people who practice an ideology of socialism-- pro-google because its "Free" and anti-Apple because they actually innovate and have the audacity to charge for their products.
No one ever mentions price in these articles.

I just tried to have a tablet case 3d printed from ponoko, but the quote was ~$800.

3d printing today is basically useless for anything larger than jewelry for the average hacker/maker. Hopefully that changes soon.
So true. The DVD has run its course.

With more and more emphasis on remote storage rather than physical, present storage mediums, I wouldn't be surprised if a similar phasing out occurred among similar technologies.
Events of World War II Being Tweeted in Real Time
So Google should know everything about everyone's search/social/youtube/whatever? Combining this data creates a very complete psychological profile on someone. Since Google is based in the USA all of this data could then be acquired by the government under the patriot act and used against innocent Americans. Never mind that the FBI (who could also request Google's data) has already done this sort of thing to anti-war groups http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09....

Also, Eric Schmidt said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" which in my opinion is fucking crazy. If I want to search for black panthers/Jewish defense league/Aryan nations/journal articles on explosive synthesis/bacillus anthracis/obscure soviet weaponry then I sure as hell don't want Google logging everything. Never mind that I'm just curious, but it sounds like Herr Schmidt and company are ready to send the Stasi out to get me. I have since switched to ssl + duckduckgo and blocked Google in my hosts file. Time for Google to stop trying to be god.
> The only mail I receive is junk mail

Guess what the USPS admits is subsidizing them now.

How about this: "You send more legitimate mail, we can afford to send you less junk!"

Nicest protection racket ever.
Www.kavo.com : Seo Analysis, Indexed Pages, Seo Report, Domain Info
The simple answer is that after Jobs brought Scully in, he didn't have the power to do the right thing with the company.

But its also the case that people were a lot more ignorant of computers then than they are now. People actually believed that Macs were not as good as windows machines because that's what the teenager at the local computer store told them.
Finally! I had about 100 gigs to restore from another backup company. They sent me a stack of DVDs. Now I have to feed them all to my computer, one at a time.
What? The web is from France? Wouldn't that be a good 'argument' for politicians to re-introduce SOPA/PIPA? I mean ... something that came from France can only be bad, right? [like the other stuff considered harmful, like health insurance and stuff]
A users guide to the Trajectory redesign
They also claim that programming requires "The ability to add, subtract, multiply, or divide quickly and correctly."

I'm skeptical.
Someone Finally Makes "Shit Silicon Valley Says"
Being Nice
What Are the Real Causes of Global Warming?
The folks at Skeptical Science have put together a review of various scientific investigations into the causes of global warming, in hopes of coming up with a definitive answer.
May paranoid early adopters be already conditioned to use free-as-in-beer services?
Okay, I agree with the OP that the Postal Service is acting ridiculous. I've had to reassure elderly people that just because Facebook offered them a too-good-to-be-true offer that turned out to be a virus once, that that doesn't make it much more dangerous than a telephone. Thousands of elderly people are scammed on telephones every year and quietly lose millions of dollars rather than simply catch a botnet virus.

Unfortunately for USPS, negative political advertising is all about getting the other side to stay home and not participate. The other side is already sold on technology and won't listen.

With that said, the OP's zealous belief that owning a Mac and a firewall makes him immune is comical at best.
One nice thing about GitHub and Bitbucket's focus on the project's README is that more software projects are providing a good, instantly-readable summary of their project in the README instead of making you have to go elsewhere to find out what it's all about and how to get started.

One not-so-nice thing about GitHub and Bitbucket's focus on the project's README is that I have noticed several projects that dump all their project's documentation into the README and the examples instead of having proper narrative and API documentation.
switch to Duckduckgo.They don't track you and it's awesome for programming questions. The first result is from Stack Overflow. You have categories on the right side. It's awesome. You can customize everything. The best search engine I ve seen in a while.
I think you've actually demonstrated how something that would be really simple in python, gets horribly complicated in javascript. Or maybe it's just me...
I hope they open source whatever part it is that would make porting Android to the Touchpad easy.
It is ironic that we castigate Chinese SOEs for having a dual purpose of profit maximasiation and seeking the "general welfare of society" (worded differently in China or Russia) and then commend it here. The structures are, at least in writing, shockingly similar.

The problem is that generating shareholder value is objective and empirically validate-able. Having these other systems increased the complexity of the system - bad - while giving it a dual qualitative raison d'être.

Present structure of a for-profit corporation paired with a non-profit foundation is less ambiguous.
Yeah... tablet design is pretty important! Should be in the next release!
Flippa - Focus on net profit. So reduce expenses and increase revenue if at all possible. Automate everything possible; the less monthly time investment the better. Then price it reasonably and gather inspiration from the posts that have done well on Flippa in the past.

Revamp - Very similar to the above: focus on net profit :-) Invest in one-time costs but reduce recurring expenses and increase revenue if you can. Find out who's getting a lot of value from your product and focus on making them happy; ignore the people who say the app costs too much. You can see a 10x or more difference in the amount someone will pay for your app based on whether it really does the job for them. Find out who's on the top of that 10x stack and make them love the app. Then find others like them.
Thanks for putting this up on HN. Let me know if anyone has suggestions on how to improve the guide.
This is exactly right, and why people like languages that support DSL building. You do want to let programmers encode their concerns in a natural way as outlined in the article. But then assuming that the implementation of these all of these concerns is going to handled by some super language strikes me as unrealistic. The hard problem is picking good abstractions for encoding the concerns that are amenable to efficient implementation.
Could you ever love an ad?
Maybe going to the post office was a daily routine? I wouldn't know.
I'm betting that's their CDN swallowing the nonstandard (even though its on spec) http code.

Varnish does the same thing, which is why you can't get a 418 code out of httpstat.us/418, which is on heroku. Same goes for that cat-based one that came up the other week, which is also on heroku.
Ruby driver released for Factual's data platform
We've hit "peak oil"; now comes permanent price volatility
Jailbreaking Is Not A Crime
INCREDIBLE PHOTOGRAPHS OF VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS
> A lot of people don't die from cancer because they don't live long enough, but prevention will never happen. Cancer is inevitable.

Except of course for all those that do live long enough, I don't think the centenarians and beyond die of cancer http://biomedgerontology.oxfordjournals.org/content/60/7/862...

From what I can see at FastStats http://seer.cancer.gov/faststats/selections.php?series=age incidence does go up with age, but there's still plenty of cancers that happen at relatively young ages, and if you look at the trend, going back to 1975 which is not that much really, you can see a marked increase towards 1990 and then a stabilization, which to me suggests it's quite likely that environmental and lifestyle factors do come in play, as similar trends occur in other health related issues (metabolic syndrome). Markedly lower Vit-D levels, our increased consumption of n-6 poly-unsaturated fatty acids and processed foods, all likely play a role.

I short, I agree with gp in that there is surely a bigger payoff in prevention, but that doesn't mean that cures wouldn't be welcome too. I can't agree that cancer is inevitable.

Edited to add links, formatting.
It's not impossible. Levitt discusses issues like this in Freakonomics.

Just because all crime falls over a period of time doesn't discount the effect. It doesn't even mean the effect of income disparity is minor. If the rate of crime falling in countries with a lowering income disparity is vastly higher than the rate of crime falling in countries with high income disparity, then that suggests a link that can be followed up on statistically.
Will Your Corporation hold up when you need it to?
Is the Tablet Market Turning Into a Two-Horse Race?
Historical patterns in financial crises, mostly. Over the past couple centuries, once sovereign debt rises over a certain percentage of GDP, countries have invariably defaulted, with the shock coming very suddenly and with a lot of pain and austerity for all involved.

The book is extremely boring, but 'This Time Is Different' has a lot of data on past financial crises, which as far as I can tell is legit and untampered with. Yes, this time could be different, but I don't see any compelling reason why we'll be an exception to the pattern. I'd argue that US sovereign debt is perceived as safe right now only because other countries are further down the same path and because the market's collectively whistling past the graveyard.

Projected spending on Social Security and Medicare is the other reason - these aren't 'unfunded liabilities', as they're frequently described by conservatives, because Congress is under no obligation to maintain Social Security and Medicare at current benefit levels. But if we were to maintain current benefit levels, it's quite a bit of money we've got no solid plans for generating.

I could be wrong, but I suspect something has to give.

Complete agreement on the need for more vocational training.
I agree too. I think it was naive of anybody to think that this wouldn't eventually happen. For years people have said that Google's goal was to control the information - all of it. I suppose that never bothered me because I know that I control what information I give Google, and I don't feel that Google has tried to subvert that control yet.

I'm a little disappointed that Google is returning Goog+ results above other social networks when the + results clearly are not as relevant, but hopefully they'll iron that out over time.
Coroutines on a server...like OpenResty [1] (a package containing Nginx w/Lua integration)?

The example "asynchronous get" becomes something like:

local myObject = query{ id=3244 };

The query function can be written to handle a cache lookup, a database query that gets stored in the cache, and any other logging you want, because Lua has coroutines. All I/O that gets sent through the "ngx" query object (which can connect to local or remote ports) yields control to the main loop.

"query" is an example of a function you could create; its implementation (with a cache lookup) could look something like (yes, I use CouchDB...):

function query(t)

local result = ngx.location.capture( "/cacheserver/id:"..t.id );
if #result == 0 then
result = ngx.location.capture( "/couchdb/usertable/"..t.id );
end

return result
end

I've heard reports of 50k+ connections/second on a VPS running Nginx, LuaJit, and the LuaNginxModule, and on my low-end VPS it easily handles 2000+ connections per second (with CouchDB queries) with no more than 250ms latency. Actually, that was as many connections I could send at it, so it may be able to handle a lot more.

[1] http://openresty.org/
I think the first time I was asked for a code sample, I didn't have anything specifically ready. I found the idea of sending a piece of code that was part of a larger application and didn't really function outside of it a little weird. I ended up taking some time to build a little command line script that used a few of the classes I had written and provided that as a sample.

Now that I'm on the hiring end, I've been ask for a sample from candidates, but I'm starting to find them not all that helpful. I've gotten a ton of model classes that are pulled out of Rails or Django apps. Which is fair, if you're building a fairly vanilla app on an MVC web framework, a model is probably one the more self contained pieces, but I think it's really hard to judge a candidate by them.

Ultimately, I've found a much better way to get a feel for how someone codes is to have them come in and pair with them for an hour or two. First spend some time showing them the codebase at a high level and work with them on a really quick problem to see if they get the basics, and if they do, dive into something a little more substantive. Has the nice side effect of seeing if you're going to get along.
Intercom raises $1M
Heard about this on Twitter, and in under 3 minutes had this: http://samuelclay.github.com/NewsBlur. Gorgeous and very easy to install. Kudos!
The Mercenary Techie Who Troubleshoots for Drug Dealers and Jealous Lovers