skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Assuming that the laws are uniformly applied (which may not be true), they are irrelevant to the differences between people's incomes.

That's not true at all. The law has huge impacts on how things are distributed. You're making an assumptions premised on how our existing system of property law works. E.g. "If Person A invents hoverboards and everyone buys them, creating billions in economic value..." Our current system is, of course, completely arbitrary.

Say Person A invents hoverboards, then Person W00001-W10000 engineer the production design, mine the raw materials, assembles them, packs them, transports them, and sells them. Say $4 billion in economic value is created as a result.

Objectively, all we can say is that the $4 billion in economic value is the product of that combined activity. If nobody transported those products to the market, there would be $0 of economic value. Apportioning "credit" for the resulting economic value, and thus income from the proceeds, is a completely subjective process. It is no less subjective just because we do it indirectly, through a system of arbitrary property rules that leads to a particular allocation.

Our system of property and contract law gives very strong protections to: 1) people who originate the last 5% of a valuable idea; 2) owners of capital. The "inventor" of the hoverboard almost certainly had 95% of the research already done for him, he just took the idea the last step forward. Assigning him 100% of the credit in the form of a patent is, of course, completely arbitrary. Moreover, in a capital-intensive business like manufacturing it won't be the inventor of the hoverboard that makes all the revenue from it, it will be the investor that supplied the production capital. Again, that's a completely arbitrary allocation.

That is not to say that there are not utilitarian reasons to prefer a set of rules that yields one allocation rather than another. Maybe giving the patent monopoly to the 5% guy yields more overall productivity than giving it jointly to the top 5 researchers who did the other 95% of the work. Or maybe we just do it that way because its the easiest system to administer. Either way, we're mired in utilitarian arguments, and whether its "fair" to "restrict" someone is wholly irrelevant to the discussion.
Paradox CEO Calls DRM a 'Waste of Money'
What you are scared of is some hypothetical situation that there so-far is no evidence it could or would happen in the future? When you do web searches, your personal emails start popping up within the results? That actually happens, or is going to happen? When?
Windows is slow because of the spinning disk. That's why simply replacing it with an SSD gives such dramatic speed improvements.
In my experience, much of the time when a company says they're looking for people who are "excited" and "enthusiastic" about the job, it's because they want to pay less money, and think that if they find someone "excited" that they'll be more likely to get away with it. If it's coming from technical people who want to hire other technical people, they may not be thinking that, but you can bet that's how the manager types view it.
This is interesting, does it count if you're bootstrapping looking to go on to raise VC? As I'm 'bootstrapping' now?
Use recursion. Fixed:

asynchronousCache.get("id:3244", function doThing(err, myThing) {
if (myThing === null) {
asynchronousDB.query("SELECT * from something WHERE id = 3244", function(err, myThing) {
// We now have a thing from DB, do something with result
doThing(err, myThing);
});

return;
} else if(err !== null) {
// Handle error.
return;
}

// We have a thing.
});
Pretty relevant example, as Eastman Kodak just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection just last week.
The Future of Medicine: The Doctor Called, and He Wants an Appointment
I thought that this was going to be a node.js bashing.

What a let down.
There's the problem of who will buy the robot-produced goods (and fund the robot factories), when the large masses earn shit because of being replaced by robots.

Henry Ford had a lot to say on this very matter of paying employees well in general.
The real problem is levels of abstraction that let you do anything, but not necessarily quickly.

Compared to the old games, where you could do only one thing, but you could do it fast.
> This is something you can opt out of (to some extent with privacy controls, otherwise with logging out).

And conveniently, most users will never bother to change their defaults.

My concern is not only that my particular interests are being tracked.

My concern is about the worsening of the power asymmetry between the general public and their (for lack of a better word) rulers (i.e., govt.+corporate complex).

What good can come of the fact that the rulers will know the zeitgeist of society at arbitrarily fine levels of resolution? (The feel-good answer is that if they know, they'll cater to the wishes of those whom they nominally serve, but I think there are enough examples to show otherwise).

For instance, can't an outsider's campaign to a high public office be squished more easily just before the cusp of him/her becoming "too big to ignore"?
Facts and logic are not going to stop the bloggers from creating FUD and link bait.
We're building an economy that the average person doesn't have the skills to -contribute to-. Much different.

The economy is still 'for' the average person, because its point is to -produce- things, not to employ people. If the requirements for human life become easier to produce, that can only be a good thing for those humans (i.e. everybody).
Rent alone (in SF) will _easily_ put you above 1500/month
To send and receive USPS mail, you need... a mailbox. To send and receive email you need an internet subscription and a computer. Internet access can be impossible to find, or very expensive, in many areas that are serviced by USPS. Saying "It doesn't cost anything to email someone... who is across the globe" is only true if you both have the infrastructure, equipment, and service necessary.
Why do we force developers to become managers?

IT organizations should hire accountants and/or other professionals to keep track of stuff. (budgets, costs, projects, assets, etc. ) These professionals should have the information organized in a way that the decision makers can use it.

Leading the IT organizations should be the individuals with the best vision, technical knowledge, business knowledge, soft skills, etc. They shouldn't spend their time doing clerical work.
> You are a senior software development lead at an A-list firm. I ask you to solve a fairly basic coding problem which takes a college grad 15 minutes, but you get stuck on it for an hour. You stumble your way through various possibilities, write atrocious code and then mumble an apology about how you “don’t have the opportunity to write code these days”. You would have been red-flagged in a real interview in the first 5 minutes.

In my experience doing 50+ real interviews, even good programmers can fail a white board coding question. Experienced candidates tend to fail it harder, since they tend to be more rusty at interviewing than new grads. It's a different experience to real-world programming.

A good analogy is a micro-benchmark. What are you trying to measure here? It's quite possible you end up measuring how a candidate does under pressure rather than actual programming skill.
On a serious note, I would guess that having your commit history and cross referencing it with the issues db (seeing things you closed or breaks caused by your code) might be quite interesting to a recruiter and a source of some pretty targeted (read: expensive) advertising.

[edit: not to mention company lawyers looking to sue some NDA violating employees]
Yep, Programming Is Borked
Self publishing for the artists among us
Agree, I'm sure that the stats would fully back you up on that. Even the people that achieve their first goals, how many still go on to become competent, or abandon the idea, because it's too hard? I agree with you that people don't do hard things, or at least don't commit and stick to them.
But =)
I still think people should try if it tickles their interest. Because some people succeed. My theory is try 10 things and fail at 9 of them. IMHO the failures were worthwhile in search of the 1 success. And you have to learn something from 9 failures, right? But, I recognise, this is just my opinion. I'm sure a lot of people would not be happy with a 9:1 ratio.
Google Works on Internet Standards with TCP Proposals, SPDY Standardization
Agreed. For example ban on competing browsers embedded in the iOS SDK is simply a monopoly protection, and has nothing to do with customers' interests.
> The knowledge that we take for granted -- .jpg is safe, .vbs is not

Not always: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms04-02...
Tutorial on how to permanently delete your Facebook account
I hope this isn't too pedantic, but I wish the author would stay away from calling Node "concurrent". The whole point of Node is that it's asynchronous but not concurrent: there is a single thread of execution for your whole program, which is what lets you ignore locking, etc.

In fact, when you program for Node it's really important to keep this in mind, since (contrary to another statement from the article) not all libraries are asynchronous. If you select a synchronous db driver or write a long-running loop, it will block the rest of your program.

In general, though, I thought it was a good piece. I'm sure many heads have exploded on first introduction to node (and JS in general).
Yes exactly, thanks talmand for the clarification, i was thinking about the case in which the user is not logged in the mail but google fetches data for your search from all your personal data just because you're logged on.
But being a fan of a team from a particular community is silly when nothing about that team truly represents that community other than a management team that has money to recruit leadership and players. How many players and coaches on a team are actually from and grew up in the community for they are currently representing? It's even more ridiculous in baseball where a person could come from another country or soccer where they will spend their complete budget getting a poster boy from the UK.

I can understand picking a player and liking the team because of that player, but do most people then stop liking the team when that player is drafted to another team? Seems the norm is to like a team, and then if a particular player is on that team it's a bonus, otherwise they still like a player but ultimately root for the original team.
"But many of us are also fans of GitHub, and recognize that there is a great community of developers there (particularly in the ruby community)", that's an interesting comment. Does Google care about Ruby?
Google's data collection levels have just passed the author's cutoff point to (consider a) move to some non-Google services.

There's no new discussion here of any specific bad thing happening because of it, so, same argument, different day.
I know that the search quality team loves getting specific examples of bad search results. I know this both from talking to them and from seeing how they interact with people on forums (HN in particular :-) )

See, for example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3277867

I don't work on search quality, but I can pretty much guarantee that if you send specific examples to the search quality team, either through the feedback form, or some other means - heck send it to Matt Cutts - it will be looked at and used to improve search quality.

The more specific you can be, the better.

"Searches for bikes suck for me" isn't very useful :-)

"When I enter the query 'blah blah blah', the following urls (url1, url2, url3, ...) are completely irrelevant to me." Even better, say why you think the urls are irrelevant.

If you submit reports like this, I can promise you that the search quality team will take them seriously and will praise your name (if possibly only internally :-) )
"Reply All" shuts down German Bundestag Mail (Google translate)
That's like arguing we shouldn't oppose Internet censorship because censorship is just a kind of regulation and other regulations make the Internet possible.

Besides it's totally possible for billionaires to exist without a state or regulations. It's just that they would look more like feudal lords than the relatively benign fellows we have today. So it is a matter of limitations in the legal framework. It's just an issue of which limitations are appropriate and which are excessive.
You are right. It is exciting to solve those problems. I wish I had more opportunities to do that.
Threading in emacs would be most excellent. Or, failing that, some sort of multi-process system under the hood ala Chrome.

I hate it when an inferior process locks emacs up.
I personally wouldn't have known "Move along" was a Star Wars reference, though I knew about the 404.

For the still confused, here is the quote: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076759/quotes?qt=qt0440731

and here is the clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzcWPKAv2Ow
Nine Principles for Federated Data Governance
Were you implying that your solution was simpler?
Analogous to "Peak Oil", would this suggest Apple is approaching "Peak iPhone"?
What's an easy way to improve how African Americans score on IQ tests?
Startup Makes Peel-Off Solar Cells
Another way to put it is that they want to get more value, whether the company pays under market or well over. All other things being equal, you wouldn't hire the person who's more excited and enthusiastic about programming?

Honestly, if when describing the way you spend perhaps the majority of your waking hours, you have to put excited and enthusiastic in finger-quotes... then I'd suggest a career change.
I haven't seen any numbers on Android/iPhone returns. I can understand that counting activations might inflate the numbers but is the return rate so high as to make a real difference?
No, but google wants to dismiss github as being viable for communities outside of ruby. Especially when they compete with github on some level.
Web Design for Developers
Or something from Ted Kaczynski?
This actually took longer than I expected to make it to the front page of Hn. I kind of wish it had waited until all of the repositories were filled out though.
An open letter to Google with respect to their new privacy policy and SPYW
Most people are average at everything. Even if you have multiple scales, it doesn't change.

For one, people are not willing to work in all the "scale field", even if they are above average (i.e: I'm above average at preaching. Too bad I don't want to be a priest).

Second, you can be above average in a field that doesn't matter (i.e: oh, I'm an above average haiku writer. Too bad nobody pays for this).

Third, most fields are so saturated but merely being above average doesn't matter anyway. (i.e: oh, I'm above average at singing. Too bad only the top 1% or less makes any money of it).
I'm not the original poster, but it's really annoying to me that Google has changed its default behavior so it returns results that don't necessarily contain all my search terms, often higher on the page than results that do contain all my terms. While this may be helpful to the clueless, I'd love a "yes, I really know what I'm doing" user pref that lets me switch back to the old behavior.
Although your argument is perfectly valid, one should not underestimate the value of the Bachelor's degree as just a piece of paper. I'm not trying to be facetious but a lot of employers filter, and sometimes hire, applicants based on their education level. In these cases, some employers assume these people have the skills. The important point here is that skills can be acquired in post-secondary education or on your own. However if done on your own, you face a hurdle of not having the college degree.
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وريال مدريد بث مباشر
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وريال مدريد بث مباشر
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وريال مدريد بث مباشر 25/1/2012
مشاهدة مباراة ريال مدريد وبرشلونة بث مباشر 25/1
مشاهدة مباراة برشلونة وريال مدريد بث مباشر
Maybe I'm being dense :-) but I must be missing your point..

How would a macbook not imply OSX? Have you tried to buy a macbook without also buying OSX at the same time? Not seeing distinction you are making between MS and Apple..
Still butthurt that Google rejected you?
I'm not sure what's meant to be there normally, and a google on the topic seems to only bring up a french house music DJ, who's website is davidguetta.com, not davidguetta.co.
LaCie’s Unbreakable USB Thumb Drive..If you dont believe us check out the video
Google and online privacy: All together now
How long does it take for a cockroach to die?
I have a great disdain for these kinds of BS titles, they cloud what really happened and make me feel like I'll just get dumber than I already am if I try to read the article.

That said, they didn't create light out of nothing, they created light out of the vacuum. The vacuum is something - at least its fluctuations are, so they didn't create light out of nothing.
I tend to agree with the post, but I find the one-language-to-rule-them-all thing too compelling to fret too much over asynchronicity. Although it'd probably lead to lots of synchronous code, it would be nice for it to to be easier in nodejs to be synchronous sometimes and asynchronous sometims.

I would refactor the code to something like (still not as simple as synchronous):

asynchronousCache.get("id:3244", function(err, myThing) {
var useResult = function(err,_myThing){
// We now have a thing from DB, do something with result
// ...
}

if (myThing)
useResult(null, myThing);
else
asynchronousDB.query("SELECT * from something WHERE id = 3244",useResult);
Drake To Perform at 2012 NHL All-Star Game
When oil is $50/gal then the minimum wage must also be way higher, or your ditch diggers will not be able to get to work, or eat.
> a single keystream is not a secure message exchange protocol

I have to build protocols around making sure to not re-use parts of my One Time Pad. Around making sure that I validate messages. Asking for a re-send of a message. Destroy the One Time Pad because it's been compromised, etc.

But at it's core, using a One Time Pad is a secure message exchange protocol. I'm surprised to see you contradict that.

> and that conventional cryptography has well-tested ways of linking confidentiality secrets to integrity secrets and of marshalling and canonicalizing messages

I'm sorry - I don't know what you mean. Can you explain it to me more simply?

Cryptotext = Plaintext XOR OneTimePad.

Plaintext = Cryptotext XOR OneTimePad.

As I said, I have a lot of work to do to handle my One Time Pad... But the fundamental mathematics are secure. And you seem to be saying they are not. What do you mean?

> None of this has much to do with QC,

Agreed - that's why I called it a tangent.
I agree with the general point that you can’t give a blank check for anything, but I think your specific point about cancer is off-base.

Some quick google-fu teaches me that in 2008, $90 billion was spent in the US on cancer treatment. During the same year, $2.4 trillion was spent on health care in general. Given that cancer is [at least as of 2007] the second leading cause of death in the US, this proportion doesn’t seem blatantly wrong; I would want society to tackle some of the other well-documented inefficiencies in our health-care system before cracking down on chemotherapy.

IIRC one of these inefficiencies is that terminally ill people who would rather get cheap palliative care than expensive, aggressive, and uncertain treatment... can’t get the cheap care covered by insurance.
Abstraction can be very expensive. You wouldn't have to wait on your Windows app if it didn't have to share memory and storage with other apps. Web sites spend a few orders of magnitude in performance in order to abstract out operating systems, low-level programming, hardware form factors, physical proximity, deployment, and a host of other things.
Google Inc + World Bank = Empowering Citizen Cartographers? – The Ushahidi Blog
Hey you can buy a used 5 series/boxster/etc in good condition for about the price of a new subcompact. It's not that unwise.
URDU SEX STORIES: Chachi Ki Mast Jawani
As much as I love my parents and my close friends, I really, really don't want their postings or links to influence searches I do. They, as a whole, are not relevant to any search I have done in the last year.

On twitter, I follow a lot of area experts and could be relevant in those specific areas, but many of them have wider interests. Some of these interests would negatively influence the search I do.

I really wish they would concentrate on customer service (human) and dealing with the spam links and implications of the must-post-first journalism model that is a basic creation of their payment model.
There's no "hacking" necessary because there aren't nearly the same protections (in the USA if you're wondering) on someone's email as there is on USPS mail. To be fair, even laws about FedEx, UPS, DHL etc. mail are less stringent than USPS mail, simply because they're not federal agencies.
Threading is actually already implemented on the "concurrency" branch. But for it to really be feasible, the code that's running in the thread needs to start using lexical scope, which is so new that not much code has adopted it yet.
The difference between a stream of bytes and a "message" is crucial, and if you don't understand it, the best reason you shouldn't do your Drobo OTP scheme is that you don't understand crypto well enough to implement any cryptosystem. Just use TLS.

(I don't mean to be offensive. I don't understand bioinformatics, for instance, and probably shouldn't build mission critical things that rely on it.)
Disciplines of Social Media: Pinterest & Instagram
It is still sustainable. The USPS is being forced to prepay its retirement benefits 75 years into the future (i.e. for people that aren't even alive yet or are just being born).

It has been profitable to the tune of a couple hundred million a year. The issue is that it can't afford to pay 5.5 billion that congress mandated that it pay each year. It is 20 billion in the hole, but only because congress made a ridiculous demand of it that no other organization, public or private would be required to make.

Citation: http://www.cnbc.com/id/45049636/Fixing_the_US_Postal_Service...
JSRuntime is now officially single-threaded
Where is your pricing information?
I agree with your sentiment, but this is actually a matter of philosophical debate. Nothing: A Very Short Introduction by Frank Close is an enjoyable treatment.
Xbox 720 Will Be Six Times as Powerful as Current Gen
I guess if you're including "installing a new OS" within the scope of "configuring" then maybe I get it.

Even for the tech-savvy among us I think referring to installing a new OS as "configuring" is a bit of a stretch :-)

But I won't argue that the macbook hardware is solid.
Agreed. I rent a room in a house and my rent is about $600/mo. including utilities. (this isn't hard to find, unless you want to live in a highly desirable area of SF. I personally have found I can get all the benefits without living in the epicenter)

Insurance, phone, and gas run about 200 dollars a month. The rest consists of food and drink, by far my worst habit and biggest expense, varies between 700 and 800 per month. This puts me anywhere between 1500 and 1800 in expenses per month. I suppose if I were to amortize unforeseen costs (the occasional 300 dollar repair on the car, occasional shopping for clothes) those figures would creep a bit higher.

It all depends on where you're coming from I guess, I grew up with frugal parents who placed value on family and good times around the dinner table as opposed to expensive clothes and cars.
Yes, you're largely correct in that description. Hopefully Hsieh does a better job in Vegas.