skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a type of person like this, and I've seen them as the majority of upper management everywhere I've worked. But at Google, upper management is not like this at all. The CEO is the guy who co-invented PageRank. He holds weekly meetings where employees can get a beer and ask him questions. Google makes a lot of money, but it's not run like your average "big company". (When I worked at Bank of America, the yearly "town hall" meetings were invite-only. And if you were invited, the CEO stood outside the doors, spot checking employees to make sure they had Bank of America credit and debit cards. What the fuck!?)

Everyone is waiting for Google to become evil, but the infrastructure is just not in place for that.
Yes you absolutely need to agree to a written contract to the work, laying out what's going to be done, what you're going to pay, when copyright gets transferred, etc. Having a contract protects both parties in the event of a dispute over the scope of the work, the payment you agreed to, and the rights to the final product.

Assuming you're in the US, you're doing business with an individual and not a business, and you pay this person more than $600, you probably need to collect their tax ID number with a Form W9 so that at the end of the year, you can send them and the IRS a Form 1099-MISC to report the non-employee compensation you paid.
Ask HN: Got my Peek today, any one got theirs?
Hi,

Today i got my peek delivered, looks nice small model (http://www.amazon.com/Peek-Pronto-Mobile-Messaging-Device/dp/B001VN2KBM). I switched it on and it was asking for activation. Not sure how to. Any one got theirs and able to start hacking with it, please provide more details here.
Agreed that anonymity brings trolls. What about low-friction sharing that Facebook Auth brings? How did this play into your decision? You said earlier that you used to ask for that authorization AFTER asking for login auth?
Goldman Sachs P.R. Chief's Accidental Exit Interview
This doesn't belong on HN. I'm not smarter for having read this.
I use a combination of IRC(active) and Twitter/Tweetdeck(passive) for most of my online "reading" these days. It tracks the most social things: people, global topics, and "meeting places," rather than "bloggers", "pop news", or "discussion forums", which have a service/task-oriented feel to them. It is addictive, of course, so I do have to turn it off occasionally, but on balance, I get a lot of benefit out of it, since it's low-maintenance and fairly high-signal, albeit a bit prone to "what i ate for dinner" type spam.

I still go on web sites, obviously, but increasingly I see them as less relevant. Forum-style discussion in particular, whether it uses flat or hierarchical threads, encourages a combination of pedantry and the lowest-common-denominator. OTOH real time - or near real time - communication tends to motivate a link to useful long form content instead of a bad attempt to replicate it in context. This post is a great example of such. It should be done up as a full article and then linked around. As a comment, it'll probably be "lost" forever within a few days.
I think you're using RSS very well (unlike what I used to do).

I like Apple products and use/write for them. I used to have MacRumors, 9to5mac, Cult of Mac, TUAW, The Apple Blog, TC, and a dozen more Apple-related feeds in my RSS (among other feeds). When there was a keynote or a new product announcement, all those websites would publish essentially the same thing over and over again, and I had to 'mark all as read'. I was using RSS wrong, and I'm glad I changed my bad habit. You're using it right and I'm sure you derive value from such a diverse collection of blogs!
Stuck at 80 Percent
Customers? No. Fans? You Betcha
What gets me is it's 2012 and we still have to keep solving account management over and over. It's a big bucket of word dealing with multiple signup methods, resetting passwords, profile pictures, etc.

I wish there were an open source project that unified best practices (in various tech stacks).
> ... invalidate my statement by dismissing me as hypersensitive

I wasn't trying to invalidate your statement, just pointing out that, to me, it is hypersensitive. You might disagree.

> Addressing an adult human using a child's label is condescending, period

However, you have to base your argument on something other than "I said so". That makes your comment just a statement rather than an argument.

> I certainly don't appreciate being called a boy ...

The question here is not what person X likes or does not like as a form of address but if such an address can be used in general, in any context.

> comments here have used the words men and girls

On the men vs. girls issue, I wonder what you think of my comments above.
I have found a compromise that works well for me when I'm asked to login with facebook. I have created an account that exists solely for situations like this. That way I can use whatever site or app I want and its not connected to me.
GOOD. Fuck Goldman for being able to sic the FBI on an ex-employee who went to a competitor. If he copied code that's obviously a civil matter. How many tech companies have had the same thing happened to them? How many did the FBI get involved in? Close to zero I'd guess over 40 years.

They get special treatment from law enforcement because they're rich, powerful, and connected. It was a total travesty that the FBI even became involved in the first place.

Not that I'm justifying his actions. He did wrong and there should be consequences -- but Goldman shouldn't get to use the FBI as their enforcers.
The diagram with the red and blue lines is particularly "interesting" for anyone not keeping up with the math.

"I'm not a crank. Here's a diagram of my machine." {Blue and red line everywhere}.
News might entertain us but its chief goal is to sell advertising space. Advertising ultimately pays for almost all news* (esp. newspapers) and so news media focus on getting your attention today, and tomorrow, and using whatever techniques they can to achieve this. Entertainment is just one of these techniques. Disquiet (some might say fear) is another - the sense that things aren't quite right and the associated need to know what isn't quite right.

*BBC (UK taxpayer) and Economist (subscription) are among the exceptions.

Here's a 2008 article pointing out that news' focus on the moment is also a significant failing: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/03/against-news.html

This 2008 article also points out the social function of news: as a common topic for discussion, particularly for determining compatibility with others (whether of belief, intellectual interest, etc)

The HN article makes a great point about how much this info effects you. If news media let their audience know that nothing happening right now was likely to effect their lives in any way for at least a week (at best, more likely never), then audience would only tune in once a week, which drops viewing figures by 86%. Also, only checking news once a week lets the information settle, and often key details emerge which negate previous reports.

Another useful trick, if cold turkey is too much, is to put a one-day or one-week delay on all incoming news (ie waiting a week to read newspapers). If nothing much is lost by a weeks delay, then its easier to go cold turkey.
Thats the typical Oliver Samwer / Rocket Internet style, and thats the culture where those assholes come from. Sad, really, but somehow, this feels very german to me.
GCHQ didn't appear to make any use of Public Key crypto, even though Clifford Cocks created it.

But maybe there's a bunch of documents that are still secret.
So if you are bored.

Go solve this one:
http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtim...
Interesting. Anyone else out there have a second Fb account just to login?
In some cases, mobile apps force you to put shit IN THE WAY of what the user is doing because of a lack of hardware interface for the user.

Game on an iPhone? Sorry, I'm going to need to stick buttons in the way of your visuals. So, you had a 3.5 inch display area, already small enough, and now you have to stick buttons and joysticks and touch menus on it. If not qwerty, at least throw me two or three buttons. Bah.
Thanks for your help.
It's probably going to be around £250 ($400) I live in the UK though so I assume that last bit doesn't apply.
Reminds me of the classic Sherlock Holmes quote:

"His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and
politics he appeared to know next to nothing.
Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired
in the naivest way who he might be and what he
had done. My surprise reached a climax, however,
when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of
the Copernican Theory and of the composition of
the Solar System. That any civilized human being
in this nineteenth century should not be aware that
the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to
me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly
realize it.

“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do
know it I shall do my best to forget it.”

“To forget it!”

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a
man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic,
and you have to stock it with such furniture as
you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every
sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge
which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or
at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so
that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.
Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as
to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have
nothing but the tools which may help him in doing
his work, but of these he has a large assortment,
and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to
think that that little room has elastic walls and can
distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes
a time when for every addition of knowledge you
forget something that you knew before. It is of the
highest importance, therefore, not to have useless
facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

“But the Solar System!” I protested.

“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted
impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun.
If we went round the moon it would not make a
pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”
Of course not; it's all about real identity, innit?
This is the first logo I haven't liked honestly. It looks unbalanced and unfinished.
Ok, that makes 2 of you who have fake Facebook login accounts to login. Anyone else?
Eric Schmidt is the kind of guy that says exactly what he's thinking, because he doesn't think you want to be lied to. This results in a lot of quotable quotes that people overreact to, but you have to moderate the quotes with actions.

A good example is the Target profiling that was on HN yesterday. Google collects your personal information to target ads to you, but they don't hide that fact. They run ads on TV and in the subway to tell you what they do, why, and how it affects you. They let you opt out of targeting. They rewrite their privacy policy to be as readable as possible. They change their privacy policy and notify you, logged in or not, on all their sites. Basically, Google wants you to use information to make an informed decision about whether or not you want to give Google your data. Compare this to Target, where they deliberately hide their targeted ads so you don't realize you're being targeted.

In the end, both Google and Target do the same thing: profile you to make advertising dollars more effective. Google tells you what they do and why. Target lies to you so you don't know you're being profiled. And then people get outraged at Google for becoming evil, even though they're the only ones that don't lie to you!
Rather than "finding nitpick jquery selectors" I use a client side framework (backbone.js) with a lot of Views which makes my development faster vs using server side templating, so I cannot share your opinion.
I think One Note lets you easily¹ import content from websites, documents, etc. into a note, and then lets you store notes in pages, so you could e.g. have a page about a topic you're researching with some articles, a diagram, some handwritten notes, etc.

I just use textfiles and directories, though.

¹ I think it adds a global keyboard shortcut to launch the tool.
Sparrow Coming to Mobile
And I never had the impression that hacker gals actually get paid less for the same position, at least not in the IT industry? Or is it just as common a problem as in other industries?

It's better than in most fields, see http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-251007.html, for instance. From what I remember when I looked into this last, you'll find very different actual numbers from each source, but generally speaking, there is a very real gap (at least amongst older workers), but it's smaller in tech than most places.

The absence of a disproportionate pay gap would seem to cast a bit of doubt on the idea that this field is so much more misogynistic than most, though that certainly doesn't mean there's nothing to be concerned about. Those numbers also don't (I think) account for people moving "up and out" of engineering and into management, and I suspect those stats might make things more lopsided.
Another perspective: people wear hats. We cater the hat to the audience we're addressing. This isn't just a web phenomenon - we've crafted our identities in the real world for thousands of years in order to manipulate the target audience in some fashion or another. For that reason, it's not a smart idea to link a single human to a unified web presence.

Facebook login makes sense in its convenience, but in reality, it grates against something that's pretty important to a lot of people: how they present themselves in front of an audience.
Not if earning the big salary takes so much time that you can't dedicate yourself to something else. Like being in the lab researching cancer.
I like it too.

Here's a nice SVG version that's a lot clearer than the one in the article:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/17/Windows_1.0_lo...
You mentioned PHP and WP so I assumed that's what you were headed. You also mentioned "accounting/bookkeeping" but that's too vague. I couldn't give you anything concrete on that.
I was under the impression that you could turn this off; and that the people who actually care whether they're spamming their friends or not would go to the trouble of doing so.
Open ID tried and failed. What I see now is more developers creating their own registration auth. Even if they lose on signup conversions vs. 1-click Fb or Twitter, they avoid duplicate account mixups.
You may need special means to get these outside the UK.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/podcasts/)

I recommend:-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/maths

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ahow

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/americana

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/analysis

...well, you get the hint. There are very many hours of great quality reporting there.
In our winner-take-all system, the natural constituency for a third party would have to be willing to withdraw their support from the less unfavorable major party candidates, and give elections over to the other side's nutjobs. That's a very high cost just to communicate a trend to politicians, which could have been done by straw poll without the resulting damage to civil rights, the economy, church-centric values, or whatever you're most concerned about. The cure for tactical voting is some other polling system like IRV or approval, where I don't lose all possible effect on outcome just because my favorite doesn't win.
Not that many years ago I worked at a company that had implemented a rules engine for documenting the health and safety information associated with their products, based on rules operating on the chemical formula of the product, with CLIPS [1]. The rules were dynamic. You define the rules and program it in a LISP-like language. It was embedded in a C++ program that generated and fed the rules to CLIPS.

http://clipsrules.sourceforge.net/
Google provides a list of what they do right here:

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/privacy.html
Have you ever submitted this as a post? I don't want to steal your submission, and I think this deserves to see the front page.
Some interesting high-speed pics
"But this post isn’t about politics, it’s about noise."

No! It is about politics. Note that most of the examples given are related to political events.

The OP does have a great point (I waste too much time on HN, perhaps); however, the kind of political aloofness desc/prescribed in the post is what, I think, is the root of the biggest political problem (not just in the US, everywhere): the best people who should be involved in politics are not. It is a common adage that the word idiot was used in Ancient Greek for a person who was not interested in politics (unless of course you were a woman, slave, or farmer).
I use Chromium. That way, I can read the code and still get a really good browser. My analysis is: they only send information back to Google when you explicitly request it.

(But what if Debian ships me a version of gcc that embeds secret tracking code into any version of Chromium I compile? Oh the fear, uncertainty, and doubt!)
Node.JS is bad-ass rock star tech (XtraNormal)
You can get a designer to work for a few days for £250 in the UK?
Save data from your mobile app even when the client is offline
"This story is likely to become something we all see happening at an increasing pace as more enterprises move toward better tracking of customer trends, improved availability of key data, and strategic use of mobile devices."

This guy hasn't set foot in a casino recently. Listen to an interview with the CEO of Harrah's and what they're doing with customer tracking data. Casinos have tracked players for ages, but the data mining is advancing here too:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/11/15/142366953/the-tues...
I think a balance is necessary ...

I budget between one and two hours of my self-directed workday to skimming various tech and business blogs. I save HN for last and scan every new title line. I usually read about 15 - 30 articles during this period.

Furthermore, while I'm waiting for a build, or for a test to reach the point where my interaction is required, I go back to HN and check the page or two of new title lines.

I consider myself a productive Java programmer, writing about 30K lines of code per year for my startup project. I could create more LOC if I did not read the tech news, but I would face two issues: (1) burnout, and (2) the need to stay current with the technology.

My project is heavily leveraged with open source Java /JavaScript libraries, nearly all discovered from tech blogs. For example: Jenkins, JQuery, JSON, JavaCV, OpenChord, Netty, Sesame, the Chrome web browser, Lubuntu, etc. I build my own development & server machines so I need to keep up with hardware.

Additionally, I have steered away from possible infrastructure dead ends by observing trends, such as the move to mobile HTML5 apps.
This is very true. The main difference is that these are not criminal charges - unlike what the professor says in the video, this is something the officer can and and often will let you get away with if you evoke enough empathy.

The important thing to keep in mind of course is that with a speeding ticket, at worse you'll have to pay a few bucks for something you maybe even didn't do. This is as opposed to spending a few years in jail for a crime you did not commit...
"I hope my handwriting, etc. do not give the impression I am just a crank or circle-squarer."

It seems he considered how a handwritten letter might be perceived.
In your list of "choice excerpts," an obituary for Anthony Shadid, one of the greats in journalism. He won 2 Pulitzer prizes and a bullet in the shoulder for his coverage of the Middle East over the last decade. Go read his obit and some of his old work.

There's lots of great journalism out there, and I mostly don't see anything wrong with that list you have there. Maybe little of interest to you, but all still news.
You can now search through Hacker Shelf submissions
> I was under the impression that if you have two or more instances of the same .so/.dll/.dylibs in different processes, and they end up using different virtual addresses then they can't share the same code page. Maybe I'm behind times...

By design, dylibs (i.e. shared dynamic libraries) are allowed to be loaded at different virtual addresses and still have their text/ro sections shared.

Because dylibs are always compiled with -fPIC, they do not have any dependence on their load addresses (branches are pc-relative, data loads go through the GOT, etc). This allows the dyld to map the physical address(es) of a dylib's text/ro section(s) into virtual address spaces of multiple processes with very little relocation.
Smarty pants. This is a good way to think ahead.
Genius Swedish computer program has IQ of 150
I think it's more likely they'll add ever more developer hurdles and effectively ghettoize unsigned apps than ever just flip a switch and announce "App Store only!"

Unless they change gears and hype up OS XI as a game-changing iOS/OS X merger.

They've certainly taken some steps that are perfect to tease out slippery slope paranoia. It would be a bit scary if there weren't easily accessible alternative OSes.
that's not a serious answer.
Yes, asking for FB permissions twice was tripping over our users however. What seems to work right now: login with Twitter or username/password, and add FB auth later when a user wants to share. This apparently doesn't feel the same as allowing FB on signup. Makes sense?
Get gift cards for working out?
Sorry for the late reply... Cheers were designed to be public expressions of love and appreciation, for anyone, anything, anywhere. Sure they get the cheerer some attention because they are public, but that's not the primary motivation driving creation.

As such, the cheering someone elses wedding example is not really a common usecase. Unless you're cheering the couple to wish them well or something.

More common is cheering the stuff in your own life that you appreciate. Cheering your pets, loved ones, favorite apps, beautiful concepts or great design are much more common.

As you cheer things, what happens is that you reveal what you appreciate, and thus a little part of your heart, which makes it easier to connect with you (always along positive lines).

Anyway... I hope you give it a shot and let me know what you think after. Cheers! Farhad - ceo Cheerful, inc.
> I am arguing that democracies can't work due to the impossibility of having informed voters by the way our democracies are organized.

And I am arguing that undemocratic forms of government have been tried repeatedly and found wanting repeatedly.
I manage Facebook's Whitehat program (https://www.facebook.com/whitehat). We have taken an incredibly open stance towards security researchers and welcome the contributions they make towards securing the internet. Our policy towards this research is documented quite succinctly:

"If you give us a reasonable time to respond to your report before making any information public and make a good faith effort to avoid privacy violations, destruction of data and interruption or degradation of our service during your research, we will not bring any lawsuit against you or ask law enforcement to investigate you."

His attempt to access data was outside our whitehat guidelines, had clear malicious intent, and included extensive and destructive efforts to remain undiscovered and anonymous. In addition, he made no effort to contact Facebook with his discoveries, and even denied involvement when initially questioned. His attempt to claim he intended responsible disclosure only after faced with criminal action is false and insulting to the community of responsible security researchers.