skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey bproper -

We're really excited about the new steps we've taken towards bringing trust and reputation to Zaarly. Commerce, identity, and trust simply go together - and we've brought them to the forefront in Zaarly 2.0.

We learned a lot from other marketplaces like eBay where reputation is the key behind all transactions and relationships. Our supply side is "open" - and that's great, because you are never limited. If I request a Spanish Tutor, I want to make sure that anyone can help me, not just a small group.

We're also focused on much more than tasks. For example, in the past week, I've used Zaarly to get a new Mac Charger and new furniture for a new place I just moved into. For me, I love being able to just go to one place and get anything I need :)

Really focused on reputation and trust in our new experience. Let me know anything we can do to make it better.

-Danny at Zaarly
Well, the story concept isn't exactly original. Accidentally self-aware robots on the run from the law (or in this case, soon to be on the run) are a pretty common Sci-Fi staple, and the explanation for how it happens is rarely much more plausible than "oops, someone pushed the 'become sentient' button" or "oops, static electricity reconfigured the circuits to become sentient".

In any case, the specific script employed in the demo is designed to demonstrate a wide range of emotions in a short span of time, including happiness, wonderment, surprise, disappointment, terror, pleading, and gratefulness, so that the game engine can show off its ability to accurately portray all of these emotions in real-time rendering. To get such a wide emotional range in a short time, you pretty much have to throw in something traumatic.

So yes, it's an unrealistic scenario. It's not supposed to be plausible. Any scenario with an accidentally self-aware AI is almost guaranteed to be unrealistic. And yes, it's creepy, especially once she explicitly mentions her sexual submissiveness. But it accomplishes the goal of being a tech demo for rendering human (or human-like) emotions in real-time on current technology. In doing so, it very intentionally employs an unoriginal storyline that more or less recycles the current pop-culture view of artificially intelligent AI's, because the story is really just an excuse to demonstrate real-time rendered emotions. If you're looking for moral and ethical progressiveness, a tech demo may be the wrong place to look.
+1. Dvorak needs to go the way of the dodo. Colemak:Dvorak::Dvorak:Qwerty.

http://colemak.com/
Let them know that they misrepresented their requirements in their request for bids, and halt further work until they renegotiate the contract at an hourly rate. If the 50% milestone is the GUI, make sure your GUI satisfies the requirements they set forth at the beginning, not the moving goalpost they've tried to impose on you.

In the future, save flat-fee contracts for situations where all the details are spelled out before you begin work. Letting the customer exercise discretion over details ramps up hours tenfold.
That seems surprisingly reasonable.
> My guess is the machines could be modified to change the background color behind the scanned person's silhouette.

For a billion dollars, I would have demanded, at minimum, that modifications to make the machines actually work be included. That they weren't just underscores the idiocy at play.

> The quote from the TSA ("Any guidance provided is to caution reporters not to generalize...") is merely saying "don't jump to conclusions on the basis of some activist's blog post/video," which is quite a reasonable "cautionary" statement.

It would be reasonable, if this were a citizen petitioning the media. Except this is the government, funded by the people, telling the media on their behalf what should and should not be discussed. The most charitable analysis is that my hard-earned tax dollars are being flushed on unsolicited media curation. A less charitable (and I believe, more likely) explanation is an attempt to sidestep the first amendment with no repercussions because it's not censorship, just chilling effects which nobody can be held accountable for.

So at best, complete incompetence, and at worst, conspiracy. Either way, I think the outrage is justified.
The state of Chrome OS
I think you're missing the point, If you're in this just to get wealthy there are many other professions that offer a much safer route to get there (Lawyer, Doctor) I don't think you just fall into being an entrepreneur for the money, otherwise you would give up when you're eating ramen noodles pulling 18 hour shifts for months on end without a return. Nope, I think to build a company you need something else driving you rather than the dream of wealth alone. From what I have seen it's clear that SamA has that drive or the company would not have made it as far as it did.
Awesome article! I love this game so much, it's a lot of fun just reading about what could have been. Here's hoping that Portal 2 was NOT the last episode!
Spotify: The best source of music discovery yet
Yah, but my point was that of the $8b estate he left behind, the majority of that wealth was created in his 40s.
Common Lisp on Heroku
"tiny thing -> gigantic idea" + "maybe it’s a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially", could suck us in however to one of PG's 'mistake founders made': "Marginal Niche" (from http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html).

So I guess a question is how to distinguish between marginal niche, and something small in a huge market. I guess it's market size and gut feel of potential.
It wasn't just two things that happened. I think he is saying that through the namelessness experiment, he gained the insight that made him decide not to pitch. It didn't physically stop him, but it was a necessary precursor.
I just fail to see much in these frameworks that isn't either trivial or unnecessary or both. But I didn't mean to single out Play by any means.
> First off, apps: I would expect an increasing number of apps to be released multi-platform, for iOS and and Android and possibly for Windows P.O.S., because hey, why not release it multi-platform? The web is an important special case of multi-platform development and Google is keen on establishing web apps as just apps, too.

Last year's iPad and iPhone run web-apps faster than any other tablet or phone by a large margin, so Google's being "keen on establishing web apps as just apps" isn't going to help them - they (esp now considering the Moto purchase) will need ensure that the browsing experience on their tablets are better than the iPad.

However, the fact is that browsing/webapps experience is merely one of the factors where Apple has a huge lead. Even in media content, Apple is the leader, but if you look at songs vs. apps, the writing is in the cards - apps are by-and-away the big money maker for device content and the gap is growing.
From the initialization text: "I'm entirely at your disposal as a sexual partner".
Yes, but this is a cutscene isn't it?

One of the major points was that they had an actress mimic the facial expressions (and used motion capture for it), and voice actors to "act" the scene.

That doesn't translate to gameplay.
Of course, that's been the #1 use case for Dropbox since they launched.

The point is that they are looking to create 'dropboxes' across the open web, so that you don't have to actually download stuff at your end first. So you could have a folder which you chose to NOT sync with your computer, but instead only used as a web-stuff repo in the cloud, for example. That use case doesn't exist today.
Next was profitable? Do you have a source for that? They raised hundreds of millions of dollars and sold 50,000 units. In '93, Canon plowed a second investment in to keep them afloat. Even with the new $, they laid off 300 of 540 employees. They couldn't sell their hardware operations and went pure software. I'm not saying they toss out all of the tech, but calling NeXT profitable is just plain false. It was a failed company with great leadership. Certainly there was some technical value in the deal, but much of the $429M paid was for Jobs and the people he had working with him.
Thanks for this! Lots of wisdom here. This one particularly rings very true:

"Only way to get a product visionary as the CEO of a company is to start it and not get fired."

From the same part in the article,

"None of the existing players will – not run by product visionaries."

Later elaborated on as: "just have to be better than samsung, hp, motorola – not so hard"

Doesn't this in itself bring an interesting question? Why is that those companies cannot innovate or have visionaries? Surely, they must. Maybe that's another opportunity though. How to find the visionaries in your company and reward them for doing so?
On the subject of ethics, I've been looking into Modafinil (Provigil, etc) lately. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's a drug which eliminates the cognitive effects of sleepiness. Its current approved use is for treatment of narcolepsy. The effects last for around eight hours, and the drug doesn't induce jitters or negatively impact decision making. Quoting off the top of my head, a military test showed sleep-deprived helicopter pilots operating within 17% of their well-rested accuracy after 36 hours of continuous duty. It can be used to stay awake for very long periods, but it's more interesting for its effects in normal waking periods. Not only does it prevent sleepiness, it increases focus and seems to have anti-depressant properties.

I'm pretty well convinced that over the next decade we'll see this and similar drugs proliferate among white collar jobs. Let's face it: our work is boring and the body is not well adapted to it. It's difficult to keep the mind engaged when the body thinks it's a good time to nap or chat with the tribe.

If you look back at photos of the space race, two things are likely to be prominent: coffee and cigarettes. The brilliant engineers who put men on the moon using slide rules also dosed themselves with stimulants in order to maintain focus. These days, cigarettes are on the wane, and something will need to replace and improve upon them.

A common criticism is, "what if everyone is on them?" Well, so what if they are? The automatic assumption is that we'll all be working 16 hour shifts, but I don't see any reason to expect that. If I can maintain focus and do a day's worth of highly productive work in four hours, why not expect the work day to drop to four or six hours (six giving a net benefit to the employer) over time?
Show HN: Tweets counter badge
But that has nothing to do with the instance access control or the database access. Changing the listening interface isn't going to magically fix the default security setup.
I'm keeping most of my roadmap close to the vest for obvious reasons, but repeating events (I like the term "floating tasks") are definitely coming very soon, probably with v1.1. Looking in to various syncing options as well.

Your description of your work flow is very interesting. The concept of a sort of todo "queue" from which items gets dropped into time slots is a really cool pattern. Only problem is, the closer Faraday comes to handling todo items, the hairier things get. Once general todo items are added, then you need projects and tags and ownership and etc etc etc.

That said, it would be impossible to ignore how well Faraday's UX would work with a todo list. Stay tuned.

I have heard before - quite possibly on HN, and quite possibly from you - that old Palm calendar apps are kind of legendary. I'll do some research in to DateBK6 for sure, I saw a YouTube video demoing the interface and it looks like a productivity machine.

Thanks for such an in-depth response, and for all the kind words.
RIP HN. You will be missed.
+1 for Maven
All the byte-code rewriting has been dropped in Play 2.x. In fact Play 2.x is vastly different beast to Play 1.x, and much superior in my opinion. It's very straightforward, non-magic, and gets stuff done.
> Can't we hurry up and get to the point where we pay for one 'pipe' and have all our devices use it?

The problem is that sometimes I may not have the other device with me, or the battery on that device may not be up to the task. With the single device having it's own connection, it's easier to develop, test, sell and for the user to diagnose problems.

What would make sense, is if I had a single "account" with a provider, and all devices would be tethered to the account - maybe this is the logical extension of what Verizon has in mind when they talk about "family data plans"... not just for phones, but data (and voice) devices tied to a provider, each pulling off the same large quota.

AT&T has a good idea with connecting their wifi presence to their accounts, in my experience, 802.11g/n just isn't good enough of a roaming experience - often times I would shut off my wifi so the weak wifi didn't get in the way of the much more reliable 3G (otehrwise my maps/directions would just wig-out while I drove by a starbucks or AT&T store). A new wireless standard that meshed better would be a huge win here.
Actually, on a Teletype, VT went down, not up. (Vertical tab stops were settable only in hardware on most models.) And FF, which went to the top of the next page, is obviously unrelated to going right. So the correspondence was really just suggested by BS and LF; it was apparently some terminal manufacturer's idea to put up and right on the next two keys.
Would it be possible to load the files in Eclipse (or any editor) via USB, then edit and save them, and have AIDE compile and run it? This would save the hassle of maintaining Eclipse and the Android SDK on you development machine.
Wow, the mise-en-scène is almost identical: blurry introduction, hospital-like environment, lots of lens flares, multiple mechanical arms assembling Kara from parts, welding sparks, and Kara being awake during assembly.

If Kara refers to the GitS intro, it does so indirectly, through All is Full of Love.
Based on the common programmer complaint of being on call/working very long hours, I think your conclusion is rather naive.

Everyone doing it will just result in it being the expected behavior to get more work out of 8+ hours on the job.
That's not always an option.
Check out this Article (also on the HN front page)
http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2010/08/vc-insanity-economics...
it's called global warming, if you haven't heard.
A distributed file copy tool that operates without centralized state
Correct. From the XML specification (which is easier to obtain than SGML, more prescriptive than HTML4, and capable of being understood by humans in a way the HTML5 "document IE" specification is unable to support), 2.4 "Character Data and Markup" (note the "may" and "MUST"):

The ampersand character (&) and the left angle bracket (<) MUST NOT appear in their literal form, except when used as markup delimiters, or within a comment, a processing instruction, or a CDATA section. If they are needed elsewhere, they MUST be escaped using either numeric character references or the strings " &amp; " and " &lt; " respectively.

The right angle bracket (>) may be represented using the string " &gt; ", and MUST, for compatibility, be escaped using either " &gt; " or a character reference when it appears in the string " ]]> " in content, when that string is not marking the end of a CDATA section.
The One Page Career Cheat Sheet
The fix you're proposing is innadequate for a lot of instances.

A concurrent hashmap is only safe in regards to its own internals, however if you're operating with keys and values that are not thread-safe, then it can still deadlock on get() or other operations.
This is why this model of threading is hard, because it is not composable.

Also, threadsafe data-structures have terrible performance characteristics, unless the implementation is lockfree, and lockfree implementations are hard to get right. Therefore I don't blame devs that use HashMaps, as sometimes is better to put locks in other places, or to make sure that the variables are local to a thread.

Threading is hard, lets go shopping.
You are of course right! I have a brown, not a blue! Not sure why I was thinking about it in reverse - oops.

Well, mine is quieter than other keyboards I've used, eg a Dell keyboard[1] as long as you don't bottom the keys out, though I do get the occasional loudish click when the keys snap back, usually from the space bar, though if I slow down when typing I can make it almost completely silent (obviously thats not normal typing though).

[1] I did have a Saitek eclipse a few years ago that was quieter.
Breaking down AP testing by gender
Show HN: Airgram - Send iOS/Android notifications, without building an app
Other than more street view locations on Google Maps, Bing Maps is far, far superior (mostly in terms of speed, but after using Bing it's painful to go back to Google).
Another ethical wrinkle:

Given that we have good evidence that this technology is safe and remarkably effective, is it ethical to NOT deploy this technology on those government executives on whose decision-making and information-processing ability American lives depend?
Harvard is Cheaper than Public School, for CA Middle Class Families
LulzSec indictment published
see page 31
The difference between college and the professional world in CS versus basketball are quite different:

> In college basketball, you play basketball. In pro basketball, you play basketball.

> In college CS, you write theoretical solutions to theoretical problems. In the pro world you write real solutions to real problems.

That aside the argument and article are weak at best. I'm having trouble understanding what exactly we're supposed to take away from this aside from "College good! Skipping college bad! In basketball, and therefore CS!".
10/42 HS draftees did make at least 1 all-star game. Take a look at the list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_high_school_draftees

I'd be curious to see the % of drafted players from college ranks that make at least 1 all-star game. HS % is probably higher.
Another reason to use HJKL is that over a 1200bauds line, it is faster to send a single byte than the 3 bytes generated by the arrow keys (^[[D^[[A^[[B^[[C)
You would also have to handle Python2 strings different from Python3 strings, and figure out some way to handle the encoding problem when translating between the two.
I actually rather enjoyed it as a dramatic vignette of an inverse version of the Milgram experiment. Instead of protocol leading the subject to abandon empathy and dehumanize a human being, the opposite happens: Empathy leads the subject to humanize that which is (arguably?) not human, despite protocol.
http://webiphany.com/resume/cv.html
The march to CloudStack's next release begins
Curious point:
> replace universities
> heading down wrong path last couple decades. not fun for students or professors.

Is that (fun part) generally true? I'm in my thirties, and I certainly had lots of fun at my previous job (MSFT, on developer tools), but none of it compared with either my undergraduate or Ph.D. student experiences. That also seems to be true for most of my colleagues and friends --- who have done the startup sold for lots of money, big smash-hit video games, part of the i* device releases from day 1, etc.

All of the faculty I know really love it as well. Certainly, I hear bad things from the assistant (untenured) faculty, but all of the folks I meet who've made it over the hurdle seem to really love their work and have a lot of fun.

Are non top-tier universities really that bad? Or is my circle of friends and programming languages researchers just a bunch of weirdos?
see page 31:
"...An FBI TOR network expert analyzed the data from the Pen/Trap and was able to determine that a significant portion of the traffic from the CHICAGO RESIDENCE to the Internet was TOR-related traffic..."

Guess they did not want to provide too much info on that - otherwise they would have had to acknowledge that they are actually screening all traffic with deep inspection.
I disagree. The Publisher in this case is the programmer - or at least distributor - of the program. Content consumers are the intended user.
"tackling inequality" can be achieved in many ways. One of these ways could, counterintuitively, be creating an effective way to produce more elites. If your training program / intelligence amplification technology created another Norman Borlaug or Henry Ford or Bill Gates, you might have had a greater impact on the lower socioeconomic class than if you had managed to invent a new vaccine yourself.
As a life expectancy is much longer than it was 100 years ago (~30 years difference - http://demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/1918/figure2.html) we will see more and more "older" people doing stuff which was not imaginable just a half century back.
[Regarding Linux's x86 base]
What is going to happen is that they will gradually take over from the 80x86 line. ... I think it is a gross error to design an OS for any specific architecture, since that is not going to be around all that long.

Ouch, history hurts.
Odd, I didn't even catch that part. It might have shaped how I feel about the video if I had heard it but I doubt it. They don't carry on with that motif. As others have said who I've shown the video to, it's more about emotion and compassion -- practically the exact opposite of what some are gleaning from it.
A very interesting look at Play can be found in this presentation: http://spinscale.github.com/play-advanced-concepts.html

The author wrote the Play Framework Cookbook and so it's a presentation from someone that can be considered a bit of an authority on Play (and not someone with an axe to grind). However, the presentation covers a bit of what worries me about Play. Play rewrites the bytecode for things like emulating properties and allowing you to pass whatever you want to the templates and have it automatically name the variables based on their local names in the calling method.

For me, the reason to use Java over Python or Ruby would be to move away from some of the behavior used in those languages that can make debugging and static analysis harder.

I've used Play for some hobby stuff (and kept up on Play 2.0). Play 2.0 seems to remove the former system for passing variables to the templates in favor of a system where templates accept certain parameters with types (a welcome change for me). However, at least the last time I played with it, Eclipse couldn't tell me what variables and types the template was expecting.

I guess Play leaves me feeling like it brings the magic to me without as much ease that Python and Ruby offer (or, at least, without as much familiarity). That might be changing - I think that the changes in the templating for 2.0 show a clear move in that direction. I really wish them well since it's always good to have more good options for development and there's a lot of Java already out there to leverage.
I'm all for experimenting on yourself. Go for it.

However, I'm also a software engineer for a medical device company and I spend a great deal of time assessing and mitigating the safety of various operations. Please take care to understand the failure modes of anything you build and attach to your own body. When you get to the point of using an Arduino (or anything else that uses software), the number of failure points goes up dramatically. Try to consider how anything could fail and what the consequences will be.
Beware, there is a 2 in 933 chance of developing a severe skin rash reaction, and the FDA has rejected modafinil for this reason. From Wikipedia:

"The FDA advisory committee voted 12 to 1 against approval, citing concerns about a number of reported cases of skin rash reactions in a trial that included 933 patients on modafinil, including two severe cases which appeared to be "definite" erythema multiforme or Stevens–Johnson syndrome. One of the two severe cases involved hospitalization."