skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I've noticed that too. After my first sync with Yahoo! Address book years ago, I ended up getting Facebook suggestions to people I didn't really know but who were in my Yahoo! address book.
That's kind of hit or miss.

I wouldn't be surprised if a small or new company emailed me about nearing the API limit. They're trying to build a relationship.

But a Fortune 500 like Yahoo or Google? They couldn't care less about someone trying to use their free API. You're just one of thousands to them.
Regardless of how bad what they were doing was, I don't think any of these except #2 are really realistic.

A good email explaining what they were doing, why and how they are going to correct it in the future should be sufficient.

Damage control should be "Oh crap, sorry we were just so dumb that we overlooked it" (which is most likely the case)
Flat out honesty is the best way to go here. (unless they were up to no good.. then well they deserve what they get)
We host a number of low traffic apps on staging our servers, that would push us into the $999/month plan. Which is like 2-3 times as much as we pay for the servers... So for us errbit is worth the time it takes to setup.
The irony!!

From the the heading:
"The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence."
I tried to be classy and write a brief thank you card to a company a while back that I had a first round interview with. I should mention that they're a well known startup and active on HN. I called them after the interview to request their mailing address since it wasn't listed on their website and they looked at me as if I had two heads and had asked them some extremely offensive and personal totally off limits question.

The person I spoke with when I called was not the interviewer, but they immediately _DEMANDED_ to know who I was, why I needed it, what I was going to be sending, to whom it was going to be sent, why I felt it was necessary, etc. They then very hesitantly gave me the address after placing me on hold for a while. I probably should have just taken the hint and not sent them anything, but I went ahead and sent it anyway.

I never got called back. I don't write thank you letters anymore.
Slowpoke's comment really resonated with me, so perhaps I can provide some concrete examples.

8 years ago, I graduated from my Software Engineering degree at Swinburne University in Australia. As part of my degree I had to sit through 3 years of engineering maths.
In our first programming tutorial we were taught how to write a program to display “Hello world”. It was immediately obvious to me why we might want to write a program that displays messages on the screen and what sort of problems this would be useful for solving.

In our first maths tutorial we were taught how to add, subtract and multiply complex numbers. To this day, I still do not understand why I would need to do that. Where do my complex numbers come from? What do they represent? When I add them together, what does the answer mean? The only problems that I can apply my maths education to, look exactly like those on the tests: what is (-3.5 + 2i) + (12 + 5i) ?

It is possible that in my job I am besieged daily with problems that I could use complex numbers to solve. But if so, I am totally incapable of recognizing them!

Fourier series were a particularly egregious example – the subject started, when the lecturer came in and wrote up 3 boards of dense maths, and said something along the lines of “… and this is the formal derivation of a fourier series!” It was as if somebody had tried to teach programming by explaining the algorithm a complier uses for translating source code into machine code. Then expecting the students to just figure out how to write actual useful programs, all by themselves! I believe this is what Slowpoke was talking about when he said: “The problem, as I still see it, is that nobody fucking tells you why. They throw it at you and expect you to deal with it. No further explanation - "It's math, we ain't gotta explain shit."

The way we were taught fourier series particularly hurt. Years later, I found out by myself, that the things are actually incredibly useful. As it turns out, that there are these things called fast fourier transforms, that programs use all the damn time, to do fantastic stuff!

So, to give a very concrete example of how maths education in universities could be improved: If only the first lecture on fourier series had instead explained what they are used for, and why they were so important that we were going to spend 5 weeks on them. Then perhaps I would have had a much better understanding of what they are and how to use one. It helps so much, to be able to think as the lecture is writing boards filled with formulas: “Shit! Now I can use this to do X!”

Thanks for taking the time to listen. It’s such a shame that maths is being taught this way, because mathamatics is both so very useful and very important…

Edit: Actually I reflection I sat through 3 years of maths, not 4
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> that the schmoozers and bullshitters would always rise to the top

The opposite of introvert is extrovert, not "schmoozer/bullshitter".
Bill Simmons started www.grantland.com for the express purpose of having a place for long-form sports pieces on the web. I've found articles on the site to be hit or miss, but I enjoy the Bill Barnwell pieces on gambling and the occassional Chuck Klosterman piece.

I've also had good experiences with the longer Wired articles I've read. The pieces on Stuxnet and this article (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_hideandseek/all/1) about a spy were especially compelling.
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I wouldn't conflate 'bullshitting' with bullshit. The ability to schmooze is largely about communicating personal emotions and resonating with others in obvious ways. You acknowledge their feelings, regardless of how trivial it is, and now you're connected. But I've seen some people use this in very bad ways. Almost in predatory ways.

However, despite how much I hate being forced to schmooze with someone (say on an impromptu conference call) or be able to talk about nonsensical things in a clever funny way when meeting a new girl or being out in social situations, I resigned myself that what I really hate is being UNPREPARED.

So for me Toastmasters, learning simple comedy routines, exercising, dressing nice, knowing current events and some pop culture, recent sports news; all give me confidence to speak smoothly, conversate well etc etc. I'm more referencing dating and meeting people than office situations but it's all the same thing -- getting people to like and notice you.

So prepare and improve yourself how you can. And if you are okay labeling yourself an introvert then learn to play the guitar and take dance classes. No words needed with those but they will tremendously help your social life.
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All software couldn't possibly work perfectly for you....? So fix a problem you have or one you think you will have soon. Alternatively, go have a chat with a prof or business person or whoever and ask them what problems they would like solved.
Actually in Canada the law is inherited from England, Scotland and Ireland and IIRC is up to a judges discretion as to whether the common law applies. This is due to the fact that many of the people originally immigrating to Canada came from Scotland and Ireland.
What's wrong with Quora?
Probably because most lifestyle businesses don't ever make more than a certain amount of money and investors are looking for the the most+fastest ROI.
To be fair, exposing a snake oil salesman is a morally sound undertaking.
Employees are payroll taxed, that is different and regardless of the company's income, net or otherwise.
This reminds me of the debate on Path's address book upload activity. I don't think it was malicious. It could be covered in a TOS update. But I rarely read the TOS for a site. When I do, it's a serious investment of time to understand what they're trying to say.

I think we need to simplify TOS language and standardize on a set of images to represent privacy, affiliation, and payment terms for a service. I would actually read an at-a-glance TOS summary.

What if you could parse a website's TOS and generate the summary? Startup idea :)
R+aft is an actual word.

If I created a drink called Coca-Colada, I'd probably have a legitimate grievance if someone claimed I was ripping off Coca-Cola.

Or how about a bowl to wash off coca plants, marketed as a Coca Collander? Are they still going to sue me into oblivion?
I just went through the presentation. It's an interesting experiment, but seems completely unsuitable for teaching the example I gave from Spivak to a first-year college student with no prior exposure to CS or formal mathematics.

It might be useful to someone who has a extensive background in functional programming, but it's in a completely different universe than the one most mathematicians live in.
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This is hot.

I propose we give featherless the honorary title "Xcode Jesus"
Something I have come across when dealing with frustrated investors. I have heard it said since and it still gives me butterflies :/

Some more background on the term: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prejudice_(legal_procedure)#Com...
They got rid of an asshole for a mere $5k. I've seen people pay 100x more than that in extreme cases.

A great bargain!
Big institutions threaten to create a drag on todays economy, Hollywood threaten our entire society by threatening freedom of speech for their own short term selfish gains. All it takes is one government to use them as an excuse to censor and become a dictatorship and it could do magnitudes more damage to society and the economy than the finance industry ever could

Corruption between the two could be a driver to seek that dictatorship however...
I wrote this article if you have any questions.
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There's a dozen or so people right in this discussion that are repeating it with a straight face, that this behavior is normal and acceptable.

I know for a fact it is illegal in Europe, know for a fact it is a violation of their contract with Apple, and I am almost positive it is criminal in the US as well.

Therefore the names and affiliations of the engineers here who are claiming data theft of private information is normal are very interesting to me, and I am noting them carefully, as should we all.
Sure, but then again, so is Google's, Wikipedia's, Reddit's, Mozilla's, The Pirate Bay's, Torrentfreak's etc...

While I do believe Mr. Sherman isn't coming from the best of places, I think that there was quite a large amount of misinformation coming from various interested parties, and I have always felt comparing SOPA with China or even censorship is nothing more than alarmist rhetoric.
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No, because this actually has nothing to do with FOSS.
Umm... Firefox addons mainly, stuff like Ghostery, Ad Block, cookie blockers/clearers, I have Firefox set to automatically start in incognito mode.

Also the option to not track me which I'm assuming Google obeys. Theres always those perm-cookies which probably get around all that of course, I think there is a addon for those but I haven't gotten around to installing it yet. Might do that now actually, thanks for reminding me :)

So I can really only be tracked by IP address, but that changes from day to day thanks to the way my ISP works. So someone can't build a historic IP dataset against me either.

So one off IP, OS, and browser is really all they can pull off me as far as I'm aware. If they want any more well I guess they can pay me for the privilege, not bribe me to give it away.
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What's undisciplined about working 6hrs a day, which was about standard for most of human history? Parents (especially immigrants) make incredible sacrifices so that their kids don't have to kill themselves with work, not to be an example.

And some parents just don't like their kids and use "sacrifice" as an excuse to have fun at the office.
not to mention his occupation:

Cary H. Sherman is chief executive of the Recording
Industry Association of America, which represents
music labels.

CEO of a record label has about as skewed of a view as the pirate bay.
The Embedded and Mobile Linux Trends Shaping 2012
> If I created a drink called Coca-Colada, I'd probably have a legitimate grievance if someone claimed I was ripping off Coca-Cola.

Not if you used their logo verbatim in yours. Look at the screenshot TechCrunch features: http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/flickraf...

> Or how about a bowl to wash off coca plants, marketed as a Coca Collander? Are they still going to sue me into oblivion?

Again, if you used their logo, probably. A collander isn't in direct competition with a soft drink, though, so it's a pretty poor analogy.
Lack of any product and engineering development on it is a clear warning sign that Yahoo is liable to cut the site. If it made them money, they'd put more work into it. If it's only making middling amounts of money, and they're not putting work into it, then they likely don't see growth potential and see it more as a burden than anything.
>>>“Old media” draws a line between “news” and “editorial.” Apparently, Wikipedia and Google don’t recognize the ethical boundary between the neutral reporting of information and the presentation of editorial opinion as fact.

That is utter bullshit. This piece is full of such falsehoods.
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I think it depends somewhat on the language. For Ruby I prefer Emacs and don't see much benefit in autocomplete. But for Objective-C & Cocoa, which is admittedly a somewhat extreme case, autocompletion is a godsend.

But autocomplete is only one feature among many I appreciate in a good IDE. I'd also hate to give up a good visual debugger with integrated breakpoints, direct links from compile errors, etc. I know you can hack a lot of this together in Vim or Emacs but after 15 years of doing just that I don't miss it when I'm using IntelliJ or XCode.
It's true that by the end of the fight, SOPA and PIPA were drifting farther from their original policy of privatized censorship, and the messages from various sites didn't adapt as much as they could have.
"If your finances are in order and you have money in the bank quitting that job isn’t quite so scary."

The pivotal point of this philosophy, and yet you make sound so wonderfully trivial.
There's no understood expectation that Pinterest is going to leave any links you upload to them alone - they are responsible for the data just as much as you are.

I find this much more tolerable than Facebook and most search engines' practice of clicking you through an encoded link, which adds latency for no good reason.
Yeah, I like the fold commands, which I barley discovered a few weeks ago. I typically do "set foldmethod=indent" then pres "zr" multiple times until I'm at the fold level I want. Then I can just do "zo" on the parts of code I'm interested in.
To get his money back, of course.
fair point, google promises neutrality in its search results. Wikipedia has a disclaimer about the reliability of its content.
To anyone more familiar with the law: is this the type of thing that could be recovered later?

I think the lawyer was smart enough to ask for an amount that he'd be okay with, but kept it small enough to make paying it easy enough to not warrant the startup being distracted.

But say the amount was more and the amount was low enough to pay the guy off, but high enough to be concerned about. Maybe you still pay it right away because you have to in order to get your funding, but is there any case law that supports recovering this money later on because the startup was essentially held hostage by the lawyer?

It seems fairly reasonable that a contract made under duress could not be enforced, or could at least be brought up at a later date.
experiences will vary, so I'd just ask you to follow your heart on this issue.
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> How do you get into the Social Networking business and not see this issue coming before the first line of code is written?

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair)
good article, good transparency
That's like taking your favourite language REPL and putting it to work in real life :)
Half of the world sucks cock. What's your problem with it?
The responsibility entirely rests in a large part on the shoulders of the geek community - the enablers. I find this entire thread surreal. These were the obvious issues that were front and center way back when chat servers showed up. Some have been raising this issue both publicly and privately since early 90s if not earlier and were marginalized precisely for being bad news bears.

Here is to RMS and his kind.

At this point, if you want a solution, you need to contact your representative and demand data and electronic privacy laws like that which is written in the constitution of Switzerland.
Yahoo board losing four members, including chairman Roy Bostock
If there are backdoors which would be exposed by viewing the source, then Symantec is using security through obscurity.
>But I think most mathematicians teach and learn math because they think it's cool, not because it's useful

That's exactly the point I'm making. That's math for math's sake - which is perfectly okay if you're actually studying math, because in that case it's what you signed up for in the first place.

The problem is if you study something else (for example, Computer Science, or Physics), and are thrown into the exact same math lectures, with no one telling you how all that fancy math is actually useful for anything but doing even fancier math. Only after the mentioned experiences at my internship, where I had the chance to work and talk with people who actually do applied math did I see the point of it. What I think is that mathematicians - and I don't mean this as an accusation - are often unable to understand that while math for math's sake works fine for themselves, it's not really the best approach for people who want to actually apply math to their own field of science.
I would absolutely recommend getting Photoshop Elements. It's got most of the features of Photoshop you'd ever use, and is much cheaper. You can get it bundled with Premiere Elements for $74 on Amazon right now, in fact. In fact, I bet you'll be surprised how powerful Photoshop Elements is; I could follow many detailed Photoshop tutorials in it with no problem at all.

The only problem you might hit with Photoshop Elements is that you can't group/ungroup layers in it by default. If you need to do that much, you might want to get Elements+ (http://simplephotoshop.com/elementsplus/) as well, which is an addon that unlocks some of the hidden features of Photoshop in Photoshop Elements.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Online_Piracy_Act
The conspiracy theorist in me finds it interesting that the person who wrote this article is a partner at a firm backed by Eduardo Saverin and based in Singapore (where Saverin lives).
Archify Preserves Your Online Browsing And Social Content (Invites Available)
Funny how the RIAA head complains about it being unfair when they didn't bother to invite anyone who opposed the bill during the hearings. Yet when Wikipedia does what it had to do to make a point, it is "unfair" and was "manufactured controversy"

Also, see previous whining here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/opinion/fighting-online-pi...

Really after seeing what the DoJ did to MegaUpload, it raises the question of why they need more powers seeing as how they are able to take down domains regardless.
Perhaps this is naïve, but I’d like to believe that the companies that opposed SOPA and PIPA will now feel some responsibility to help come up with constructive alternatives.

This is exactly wrong. It shouldn't be the responsibility of companies to write laws. On of the big issues that the SOPA/PIPA debacle brought to light is that if companies are allowed to write laws, they will write them in ways that fouces on benefiting them instead of the general public.

Perhaps this is naïve, but I’d like to believe that the companies that proposed SOPA and PIPA will now feel some responsibility to stay away from law making.
By 'tortured definition', do you mean "Perfectly fits section 2c of my linked definition"?
A bit off topic but I think this is nothing link the Path address book issue. I think a lot of the privacy debates in the last few months have been blown out of proportion but when I saw the Path news I immediately closed my account. Path storing details of all my contacts on their servers without my permission is a huge abuse of my trust. This doesn't seem anything like the Path debate in my opinion.

I do agree that TOS language should be simplified. Something like a simple bulleted list explaining each point of the TOS simply.
Google, Apple, Avid, Ableton, almost any HFT trading firm, investment banks. Anyone not doing web software, or with web properties so large they have to write their own web servers. This place in MN was offering $120K to C++ programmers last summer: http://www.makemusic.com/ . Good salary and cool project for that area.
"Do I not have a right to keep that information private?"

Generally no. I mean anyone can put their in law's information on their blog. It's a dick move but not illegal generally (if you're putting the person in danger like an battered spouse or witness protection there may be problems, IANAL).

I get the outrage that they didn't hash everything but the righteous indignation that a social network is trying their best to let people know when their friends sign up seems overblown.

Moral of the story: don't be shocked when social networks don't follow best practices for privacy. Also foxes like chickens.

If they're smart they'll revamp their system to work like this:

edit: (0) we get your permission /edit

(1) we check for your contacts in our database (hashing your contacts).

(2) we let you know if any matches are found.

(3) we throw away all your data afterwords.

They'll generate a few fewer matches this way but since they're going for stronger ties it shouldn't really be an issue.
I think it is hardly alarmist rhetoric. It's not particularly easy for sites to be shut down under the current rules, but it's far from impossible. DaJaz1.com was shut down by the ICE for over a year unjustly, with almost no recourse for the owner and not one was held accountable.

If that kind of abuse can happen now, it is most certainly not hyperbole that we will see a LOT more of these injustices happen by taking due process out of the courts and putting it into the hands of the copyright industry.

Slippery slopes usually are, except when lawyers get involved. I wish I still had the link, but I once read an extremely informative essay on the impact of lawyering on the erosion of civil liberties, especially when corporate law is involved. There is simply too much money supporting the time and effort of corporate law to the benefit of companies and detriment of citizens, civil liberties and the commons. Heck, copyright terms now extend beyond the life of the author. If that's not proof of a slippery slope, I don't know what is.
Colours would be under trademark, not copyright, but in this case they're also ripping off the Flickr logo. Same colours, same font.
Nice. I won't pretend I've been following the project closely, but it really is an interesting and powerful thing they're doing.