skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'd like that lawyer fired and pilloried for making such a gobsmackingly idiotic statement.

Like it or not, ours is an adversarial legal system. To a first approximation, this case is an issue of civil liberties vs security, and as a lawyer representing the side of security, it's his responsibility to stand up for security. I agree with the ACLU's position on this matter 100%, but I don't fault the lawyer for stating that position.

Security is one of the several, contradictory responsibilities in the Constitution[1], along with personal liberties. It's something the government is supposed to ensure, and it's not wrong for a lawyer to mention the potential repercussions of a ruling towards their ability to fulfill that responsibility. Now, if it were a judge making that statement, I'd flip my shit. It's a judge's duty to balance the competing concerns, and it's the lawyers' place to advocate for one or the other. The lawyer did his job, stating the resultant effect on the issue he was advocating. And the judge did his job, deciding that despite that result, other competing concerns were more important.

[1] For a partial list of such responsibilities, check the Preamble to the Constitution, which enumerates at least 6:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
I believe you can only block a site if you click a link and hit back within a certain amount of time.
T-Mobile closing 7 call centers, cutting 1,900 jobs
Having two or three domains with the same content should be OK. After all, many sites have a www and simply a top level domain with the same content. But having more than that should be penalized by the search engine gnomes.
True. I'm honestly surprised they didn't declare daily depreciation, for $1.25 million in assets that are obsoleted by new technology at Moore's pace, I'd expect that could arguably be quite high.
Most 2011 cyberattacks were avoidable, Verizon says
RIM hiring iOS developers for enterprise apps
Remember the photos from apple's icloud datacenters last year? All linux, and linux powered appliances. Like the gigantic TerraData Extreme Appliances.
Grammar and spelling flames are usually content free posts, and so you may find your post attracting downvotes. (Not from me.)

I understand that people hate the phrase "could care less".

I could care less is acceptable[1] US usage. It's been around for a surprising amount of time. "Couldn't care less" is from about 1946; "Could care less" is from 1960s.

(http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ico1.htm)

(http://www.wisegeek.com/what-does-i-could-care-less-mean.htm)

(http://articles.boston.com/2010-10-24/lifestyle/29303907_1_c...)

[1] It is baffling and it's not something I would ever write. While I try (and often fail, with terrible punctuation) try be correct with my English I am very tolerant of what other people write. Especially on a site where many people are not speaking English as a first language.
Something like this?

http://www.hyperink.com/Guide-To-Yc-b1093
Is Prolog a functional language, as it avoids state manipulation but has no first-class functions? I think not. There are some characteristics of functional languages - including first class and higher order functions, relying on immutability, declarativity etc. Choosing just one of them to measure how much a language is "functional" is a mistake IMO.
How Private Are Your Apps? Congress Investigates
Urr what OS do you think powers iCloud?
Gov't sues AT&T over Internet calls
I agree with you. It wasn't professional. Civil, perhaps, but not professional.
Exactly. I shouldn't have to hover my mouse over everything to see all the data. Also those tick marks on the outer edge of the circle signify nothing. I thought perhaps the '6' visitors would be signified by 6 ticks... nope. And why does the dropoffs have to fade out? That just is confusing. It would be nice if the dots on the flowchart arrows were proportionally sized to the traffic flow.

It's like "mystery meat navigation" of statistics. If I care about statistics, I'm probably comfortable looking at a page full of numbers. Give them to me, don't make me hover everything.
I personally have to modes:

1. I already know what I'm looking for: a particular website, post, comment, the lyrics of a song that I know a part of.

2. I have a question, I don't know the answer, but I'll recognize it when I see it.

In my experience Google is getting better at type 1 '(re)discovery/popularity' search and worse at type 2 'exploratory/specificity' search. Depending on the ratio of type 1 vs type 2 in your search habits, Google results will get better/worse for you.

They introduced Verbatim search to solve the specifity problem, but in my experience it hardly ever works :(
The animation of the left sidebar on each page is really annoying.

Aside from that, it looks really clean!
The article makes exactly the right realization: Y Combinator is heading in the direction of scholasticism.

Aren't you just reading into it what you want to read? I don't think that was the point of the article at all.

Anyway, I think that school-like institutions for entrepreneurship with a formal process that you need to go though are destined to fail. They go against everything that entrepreneurship stands for. As soon as they become successful, they will start attracting people, who just go there for credentials, but don't have the actual passion it takes to start a company. The guy in the OP is the best example.
I went to a presentation about this Tuesday.

What became apparent is not just that crowdfunding will open up all sorts of revenue to startups, but that it will also create opportunities for new services dedicated to the crowdfunded startup industry.

Just as now we have startups whose market is startups and their needs, so too crowdfunded companies will need specific guidance and services in terms of how to structure offers, issue press releases and other information packets to deal with hundreds or thousands of small investors, respond to questions from these investors, and perform other duties different from those that are needed by startups who fund from far fewer and more sophisticated investors.

I think if I knew a few financial lawyer friends and had some capital, it might be a good place to be.
I recently discovered something interesting. The requirements gathering we do kinda sucks. How often do we bring in end users and watch them use the system as they do? Why do we not trust user input with our code but do with our ears? I recently got the opportunity to do this for a project that's being rewritten. The information you gather from this is gold.

The reason thousands of people have used it successfully is because most people are not developers, aren't lazy and willingly accept having to do something inefficiently over and over again. If there is some flaw in the way the system works then people will adapt and go around the mountain. They won't even think about this and, if it's so automatic that it's buried in their unconscious, they may never even think to tell you.

The other reason people have used it successfully is because they assumed that the broken output was correct. If it's not tested, how do you know that your report generator is spitting out the correct figures?

Also, kind of related, just as one of the benefits of unit testing is that you write well structured and testable code, one of the benefits of functional testing is that you think about the interface. I'd consider any inefficient interface to be a bug.
If they don't invalidate SW patents, maybe an option would be to limit the protection to say, 3 years?

This would allow for some patents to be relevant, if companies thought it was worth their while. But, given the limited (time of) protection, most would probably decide it was not a great business strategy --such that it would specially make SW Patent Trolls unviable.
Flagged from here. Not HN material and there is no way this thread is going to go well at all if it's allowed to live.
Indie Games not on TIGS / Indiegames: You Can't Possibly Expect Me To Do That 2
By "I don't like git", I mostly meant that git's not my favourite VCS, not that I'd refuse to use it or actively advocate against it or anything. I'll always use what's most convenient for the team as a whole. The point was that when I have a choice, I'd rather use mercurial than git. But really, those two are really close. There's even a plugin that lets you use interact with git repos from mercurial.

And of course I can only agree with your last sentence, a bit of standardization is a good thing.
Panamericano Hotel
Linus doesn't have any experience with microkernels and BSD. Jordan Hubbard was a better hire in retrospect.
I stopped downloading years ago. I use things like grooveshark and pandora.
State of Browser on Geekzone - New Zealand March 2012
That is well written, congratulations!

Here's a bit of personal disclosure. I did a business degree (marketing major) from a mediocre institution. Immediately after graduation, I started a company. It failed miserably, but I learned significantly more about business killing a company over the course of a year than I learned studying business in a university. My business degree armed me with a dubious credential, a less dubious 'network', and ummm, let me check with a recruiter and get back to you...:)

At first, I thought, "I went to a pretty crappy university, of course I didn't learn much." But, through conversations with friends (some of whom went to 'elite' business schools), I came to realize that business schools in general are pretty crappy.

Perhaps this scholastic incubator is the future of business school? If so, it is a welcome development!
The urgency is because Carpathia's lease has run out, they can't stay at the $9k/day facility.

Carpathia has to pay $65k to move the servers, then $37k per month to keep them in a climate controlled facility while powered down. Lost profits are still a relevant consideration. This is a doozy of a damages calculation. What's depreciation on assets that are rendered obselete by (something like) Moore's law?

I'd say Carpathia deletes the data and then supports the petitioners (those with lost data) in the takings clause case against the government. Carpathia claims indemnity against claims by pointing at MegaUpload and the Feds, but probably gets joined in a bunch of messy lawsuits. Real roll of the dice.
I have stopped using Google Search entirely very recently. The main reason is that Google too often misinterprets my search queries, and I got tired of typing quotes around the search terms.

I should stress that like any software developer (or any power user, probably), my queries tend to be very specific. I'm looking for particular information (which may or may not exist) that takes more than a couple of words to describe. It is with these queries that all too often Google simply decides that I meant something else and replaces one or two words with what it has decided are synonyms. Except they aren't.

Unfortunately I have not documented all these queries (I should have). But to give some examples, it would not be the first time that Google misinterprets a specific query about "sqlite" and only returns results related to SQL Server. Or it decides that a "scapegoat tree" is equivalent to an "AVL tree". They aren't synonyms. The results are actually worse than irrelevant.

It's like typing a query such as "honda brake problems" and getting results that are about "toyota brake problems". Yes, both are Japanese car manufacturers, but they are really not equivalent.

Of course correcting typing errors and searching for synonyms is useful. But I'd like to have control over that behaviour, and most of all: I want to understand what the search engine does. The best interfaces are those where a user can develop a mental model that helps them interact with it. It seems I'm no longer able to create a mental model for how Google works.
The point is not that "contrived = bad". The point is that a contrived interface can be optimized, while multiplication tables are a fixed part of understanding multiplication in a positional system.

On the other hand, you could argue that we could optimize our entire number system for learning by switching to a lower base. And in this sense I do agree that optimizing for ease of learning would be a mistake. If we taught base-3, learning multiplication tables would take one tenth of the time, but actually multiplying numbers would a lot longer. Analogously, I would gladly spend 10 times as long to learn a text entry method if it made me 20% faster in the long run.

So I guess what I'm saying is that QWERTY should be replaced not because it's hard to learn, but because it can't possibly be optimally efficient.
> For the longest time I thought the answer would be speech to text, but the more I play with Siri and work around its shortcomings the less and less of a believer I become.

Really? You think Siri's (current) technical shortcomings are the major hurdle for speech-to-text adoption?

Not the fact that no one wants to type out loud in their cubicle or coffee shop?
You simply assume that she is right, but you have only heard her part of the story. Obviously I don't want to defend the right to leer at work, but it seems impossible to accommodate everybody's preferences for a workplace. Therefore just raising one persons preferences above the preferences of all other people seems questionable to me.

For example in other sexism threads the ubiquitous Star Wars posters and stuff like that came up. Should Star Wars posters really be banned in programmers offices, just so that some more women programmers might feel more at home. I don't know...
I believe crowdfunding may become a very powerful trend for startups (even though criticism such as this in the SJ Mercury News is valid http://www.mercurynews.com/chris-obrien/ci_20217467/obrien-i...).

That's the reason why there will be a panel dedicated to discussing crowdfunding at the upcoming startup conference in mountain view (http://thestartupconference.com/).
The best way to build your credentials is to build a company.
Monospaced Free Fonts
ROFL I remember this.

BSD guys make fun of Linux on message boards and Web sites, the gist being that BSD guys are a lot like Linux guys, except they have kissed girls.

Theo de Raadt is a pioneer of the open source software movement and a huge proponent of free software. But he is no fan of the open source Linux operating system.

"It's terrible," De Raadt says. "Everyone is using it, and they don't realize how bad it is. And the Linux people will just stick with it and add to it rather than stepping back and saying, 'This is garbage and we should fix it.'"

http://www.forbes.com/2005/06/16/linux-bsd-unix-cz_dl_0616th...
Device-Agnostic Approach To Responsive Web Design
I use mp3. I have a large library, and I'm not going to transcode it to something else.

The things I buy are usually mp3 too.

Currently on Snow Leopard I use Clementine. I'd like something else. I'd prefer something that was a bit more stable with a large library; that was really easy to "vote" a track up or down (I have a lot of tracks that I won't listen too. I need a way to mark and delete them. Really delete, not just remove from a playlist.)

I'm thinking of someway to improve the naming and tagging of the files.

Really, it's a mess.

Portable use I have an old Sansa Fuze which I really like. Except the scroll wheel has a well known "getting stuck" problem.
If the domain name is invite only, is there any chance that the code will be open source so other people can run their own version of svbtle?
This is very very a long shot project. I have watched colleges trying to get their first accreditation (I guess most likely going to be DETC in that case), but it is really a difficult process which gives them very little room outside of following the existing for-profit college business model. Plus the pricing is another issue. For example via distance CS Master Degrees at state colleges can go for under $10.000 (Columbus State, Dakota State).
The other more important thing is brand building. And developing Top Education brand burns lots of money and time. But it is exciting to watch the new approaches to Education grow. Hopefully one or another are able to break out.
Their other papers are about BigTable or load balancing systems that the researchers developed for an immediate business need of the company, and then published an overview of their work incidentally after the fact. I have seen very little come out that was even analysis that wasn't necessary to do internally if the company was never going to publish anything.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like Google and Amazon follow this model much more than other companies like IBM or Microsoft who more often publish much more theoretical on not-yet-practical work that is only in the direction of their goals rather than already productionized well before it gets published.
Using "QWERTY" as the noun here instead of "typewriter-like keyboards" is confusing everyone. He's arguing against physical keyboards, not a specific keyboard layout.

(Typed in Dvorak)
Plus it was a shameless ripoff of (insert name of flash game with catapults here).
Anything that lets us bypass bullshit, makework and proxies-for-things-we-want and instead go directly for substance, realwork, and the-things-we-want, is a good thing and should be done much more of. Also, instead of a "student" throwing $50k at an institution in order to "learn" and gain credentials I'd much rather that the student be paid $50k by an institution and learn and gain a better sort of credentials: building things rather than passing tests. Though I don't agree with exactly how he did it, I suspect this philosophy is similar to the one behind Peter Thiel's recent "20 Under 20" anti-scholarships.

And yes, ideally it's better to be acqui-hired than hired. For a software engineer with the right talent mix it's the difference between being paid $300k for 3 years work (which is nothing to sneeze at, certainly, but you can't retire with it), vs being paid $3-30m+ -- if the upside scenario happens, of course. And these aren't even mutually exclusive choices.
Wow, those are some impressive numbers. What do you do if you don't mind me asking.
I was scratching my head looking around the code until I saw this huge text in the README:

STATUS: incomplete, prototype, work in progress, non-functional, etc, etc

The rest of the README is aspirational. It's a little confusing.
I think this system is well thought out. It has a beautiful, minimal design that actually let's you focus on the reading, once you're done playing with the kudos button.

The only criticism I have is that it relies on sites like Hacker News and Reddit or email/twitter for discussion. Blog posts may be full of errors, but readers (and maybe authors) may never find out, due to the relatively inaccessible discussion/feedback system.
Are you really saying that there's no middle ground between being actively offensive and being insufferably bland?

The short answer is, yes, there is a middle ground, but it won't stay "middle" for long: the set of "offensive" things expands with time. Many jokes and phrases that were part of the inoffensive "middle ground" twenty or thirty years ago are now considered offensive. To the politically correct, this is mere progress, but to those who oppose political correctness it instead represents cultural and linguistic decline.

I ran into a small example of this recently when discussing the movie "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle". Specifically, I wanted to refer to the ethnic background of Harold. I couldn't remember offhand exactly which country his ancestors came from, so I described him as "Asian". The problem is that, in the modern lexicon, Kumar (being of Indian extraction) is also "Asian". Thirty years ago I could have described Harold as "Oriental" without causing offense, but that changed some time in the mid- to late '80s. (I distinctly remember, some time around 1990, overhearing a high-school teacher instruct one of my Vietnamese classmates not to refer to herself as "Oriental". She was comfortable with the term; he was not. His side won, and we have lost some linguistic precision because of it.)

To cite another example, from 1555 until the 1960's the word "Negro" was a neutral term signifying a person of black sub-Saharan African descent, at which point it was replaced by "black" (or "Black"). This lasted until 1988, when (in a domestic context) "African-American" became the preferred term. Meanwhile, "colored person" was also once a neutral phrase (as evidenced by the NAACP), but now uttering it in the workplace (or in a joke) can get you fired. In contrast, the term "person of color", which is almost semantically identical to "colored person", is not only inoffensive but is the preferred term among the PC cognoscenti. It's an achievement that Orwell himself could hardly have surpassed.
Video from 2012 PyData Workshop: Boosting NumPy with Numbexpr and Cython
There is a bug. My dots would randomly change to a different color shortly after I placed them.
This is great. I've had something like this (probably even simpler) in my mind for a while, but never get around to making it.

Dustin, I just emailed you with a name suggestion.
Am I correct in assuming the post text editor was all custom built? If not, can anyone link to a solution that is as clean as that? I love the idea of just typing on the page versus typing into a special box with a hundred buttons along the top
Oh, I've worked for the military sector, with those huge NATO specification books. Also with JSF, the Java thing that happens to share TLA, but in another job. Honestly, I'm not sure which one was worse.
I'm not sure IBM is adding much to its bottom line with these sales. I don't think profit is their only, or perhaps even primary, motive here.
I'd be interested in running my own single-user version, but I'm sure there'll be a clone by the weekend (if there isn't I'll probably hack one up at my next opportunity).
This is honestly why I use duckduckgo on any of my dev computers. They don't always have best results, but for stuff like java(script) not only do they have the !js/!java syntax for going straight to the docs but they also don't have over-seo'd websites cluttering up their results.

Edit: Also On DDG the same search would have been !js replace and you would have seen this page : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=replace
There are some specialist niches for speech to text. Medical notes are one example.

I'm gently surprised that speech to text isn't better. There's so much weaponisation of sound analysis that I thought the research would be there to help programmers.

Also, I don't know where you drink coffee but there's a total arsehole in one local coffee shop who's happy to bellow into his mobile phone.
It is interesting, but I don't think as implemented, the Wilson system is the best. If an article has over 200 comments, you'll (by default) only see the "best" 200 (max 500), so those will be more likely to receive the most votes. It's their default paging that is the problem.
"This is the blogging platform for creative, intelligent, and witty people. Membership by invitation only."

Am I the only person that laughed out loud at this?
That's actually not a bug, someone wrote a bot that plays in every position that someone else plays.