skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft Unveils New Plan to Speed Up the Web
Medium matters.
I emailed, thanks so much!
What to do if Your Startup Receives a DMCA Take-Down Notice
> Here is to hoping some of that work out in the valley explodes out to the rest of us.

No kidding! I also wonder how companies will find experienced people without putting newbies into the pipeline, so to speak. There will always be the driven, the self taught, and the clever fakers, but wouldn't it work better to have some well trained hard workers as well?
I've been wondering about this too, and your explanation is interesting - basically, lack of self-knowledge on Google's (and its own founder's) part and trying to be what they're not.

It seems so odd that Google would go this way and even odder that it would do so as a result of a founder taking control. Perhaps it only seems odd because we have extremely incomplete information. On the other hand, sometimes the from-afar view has advantages. From afar, Google+ looks like Google's Bing.

Another interesting question is: will they change course or double down?
I work for a startup in LA. We're looking for a great frontend engineer. Let's talk? Shoot me an email (see profile).
> we found tons of bots that traced to your Amazon affiliate account

This suggest a trivial fix for the problem on Pinterest's side, doesn't it?
Email sent! Thanks for responding.
There are viable alternatives to shared secrets. Check out zero-knowledge proof. The Wikipedia entry is actually quite good (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof).
This is a bit out of scope but I would love to have a similarly crafted version of john snow's classic cholera map.
I relearned a lot of forgotten math using Khan Academy last summer when I was preparing to go back to school. I think Salman Khan's style is significantly better than many of the other videos on the internet.

Showing concepts in animations while explaining them can be helpful, but ultimately the students are learning how to solve problems. Watching the strokes of his pen gives you a fantastic view of how the problems are actually solved on pen and paper.
He certainly has no qualms about calling it spam.
Well as a freelancer, I really liked building and enhancing whole websites for people, bringing to bear my programming, markup, visual design, and online marketing knowledge. I think I could be lots of differein programming or front end jobs.
Yes in the US, the legal system has in the past been innocent until proven guilty, this thinking has at least in spirit extended to innocent of a crime, until action has taken place, this has changed slowly over the years the first to my knowledge was conspiracy to commit murder (in the 1870's IIRC), then others followed like general conspiracy and solicitation etc. But for the most part up until the recent past (1970's on) minor issues required action before you where guilty of a crime. Public speech related offenses are still viewed in the same light, saying we should tear this place down was not inciting a riot until it incited a riot at which point the act of saying it became a criminal offense. So criminalization was retroactively applied to the speech after it created criminal action.
Rethinking server-side scripting
Here's a cool idea if you haven't thought of it already: Find a way to inlay routes on the map. It would be cool to plot a marathon course and give it as a gift to a friend who finishes.
http://pinterest.com/source/amzn.to/ has lots more, and they all have the default Twitter avatar which gives them away. Lots of them have terrible or inaccurate descriptions and are in the wrong category.
Poll: What are the up and down arrows for?
There still seems to be some disagreement over what the arrows are supposed to be used for, and the FAQ is silent.

The topic came up (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3760056) in yesterday's Red Hat article. reitzensteinm submitted the topic as an AskHN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3760275), but it didn't gain much traction. I thought a poll might be more illuminating.

Maybe the FAQ is a purposely ambiguous, but I think it would be helpful if the community came to a consensus.

So, which description is closest to what you think the arrows should be used for?
"I agree/disagree."
"More/less of this content on HN."
"This is constructive/non-constructive."
Some combination of the above, but make it explicit in the FAQ.
Purposefully ambiguous.
Other (leave a comment).
> simply doing it at scale

That's the most abusive part. As a Pinterest user I want to see what other real users are pinning. I don't want to see what 4,000 bots are pinning.
I've seen pg lay out a very clear way for structuring prezos, and if I remember correctly one of the rules is having a hockeystick graph without and labels and then, on the next slide, doing the reveal that it's - tada! - revenue or users or something of that nature.
Emailed! Thanks for replying.
you can't say that without elaborating, lol.
Such a thing has existed since iOS 2.0 (CFUUIDCreate [1]), and Apple's updated docs on UDID specifically recommend using CFUUIDCreate. The problem is that an application-specific UUID doesn't address all current use cases for UDID. Specifically, ad networks that support Cost-Per Install (CPI) need to use an identifier that crosses the application boundary.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/CoreF...
Affiliate links are filtered out of Yahoo Answers, or at least they were 4 or 5 years ago when I posted one.
"And women will fall for it instantly"? WTF
best "tutorial" i've seen indeed.
genius strikes again!
How are they not picking it up as spam? The same affiliate link from multiple accounts... The description also looks like a snippet of one the product reviews on Amazon
Love the idea. Thanks for the back-end info. Would love to read more details if you get time to write something.

Hadn't heard of picloud.com before, sounds like you're pretty happy with them.
as i could on firefox
The Stars as Viewed from the International Space Station
Parlez-vous Python? What about Rails or JavaScript?

It seems interesting to me that Rails (rather than Ruby) is often listed as a language in popular publications. I guess the framework is more highly promoted than the language it's written in. Are there any other examples of cases like this in popular or "near-geek" culture?
is the same as getting a tshirt with it written on and walking on the streets.

In the US that would be legal, there was actually a media uproar about the very issue this week (note: the article has offensive language in it): http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/trayvon-martin/cracker-t...
I don't see this as a trend, people who want to know how to program will learn. It's the same as if cars were just invented 30 years ago and people start learning how to work on cars. The auto mechanic didn't go out of business, in fact I think he got more work as people realized that they don't need to go out and buy a new car every time their old one is broken, they can hire someone to fix it.
"No. Hackers aren't, contrary to media reporting, the people who break into computers. Those are crackers."

Calling hackers crackers when they really do mean 'hackers' needs to be curbed (or maybe not, language evolves). Crackers break open and reverse engineer software. They are not the security system hackers that most people definitely mean to refer to when they use the word. When the warez scene was huge there was a very clear understanding of what the terms meant and you would have never seen a group misusing the term. Maybe this is occurring because people want to be able to apply the latest popular meaning of 'hacker' to themselves but also want to avoid possible negative connotations.

Or perhaps I have everything reversed and it is the old warez scene that turned 'cracker' on its head and used it for their own purposes. (My Carl Sagan-esque reflection on both possibilities.)
The few promoted tweets I have seen were frighteningly targeted.
The Psychology of Tackling Hard Problems
All they'd have to do is add a captcha to the submit. Trivial to implement and it would reduce the spammers.
You're right--I definitely simplified the discussion of handling concurrent writes. Keeping around concurrent versions and using user-specified merge functions are two ways of deciding which versions to store. Riak indeed supports keeping concurrent versions or using an automatic last-writer-wins policy [1]

The question of which versions will be returned depends on the safety properties of the consistency model. My main point isn't that Dynamo or Riak don't provide safety properties, it's that "eventual consistency" isn't a safety property on its own.

[1] http://wiki.basho.com/Vector-Clocks.html
Why are Enterprises looking at BigData?
Perhaps I misunderstood, but CFUUIDCreate doesn't create an application-specific UUID, it just creates a new, arbitrary, UUID that isn't tied to anything. You could then use that to build your own app-specific UUID mechanism, but the API won't do it for you.
I've only seen this show once -- and not the episode with Miso Media -- and I always wondered how many "pitches" a company makes before they come on. Most of the ones I saw seemed woefully unprepared (unlike Miso Media), although that might have been the editor sensationalizing things.
I would add that a second difficulty insolving tough problems is being able to create solutions.
Would it be possible to provide a data format by which one could upload custom inlay layers to produce a design of his choosing? I'm thinking specifically about a silhouette photograph I shot of my son. Is there a way to validate the manufacturability of an arbitrary layer set?
Ask HN: Join a small startup or a medium sized one
Using a throwaway account for this post

Context: Currently working at Google, joined almost 5 years straight out of grad school. Its been a tremendous learning experience working at Google all these years, however, I realized around late last year that the amount I was learning was plateauing. That combined with the slow but sure changes towards a bigger Google made me realize that it was time to move on.

I've narrowed down the offers to two

1) Startup 1: 'A' round funded, 4 engineers total, being offered a Director of Eng position reporting to the CEO. Revenues have been doubling every year with the growth rate increasing. Low single digit millions in revenue. Company is profitable. I'd have to take a ~30% paycut.

Startup 2: Very successful company, close to $500M in revenue, relatively small eng org of about 50 people. Being offered an eng lead position reporting to the CTO. Will be getting a 30% raise (but will require me to move to the Bay area, I'm in Seattle)

Both of the positions involve working on the next generation of Display Ads systems, though in different contexts.

Confused between the two. On one hand I'd certainly have the opportunity to influence the company far more at the smaller startup, but on the other hand the bigger startup certainly has far more resources and a far bigger paycheck to boot.

Any insights into the pro's and con's of either are very welcome :-)
Stacey posted on Twitter: "LOL, fuck Muamba. He's dead." Then some other dumb stuff that could be considered offensive at the worst. On twitter. A dump drunk college kid. And now he's ruined.

The type of morons that would throw someone in jail (for 2 months!) for something like that, are the same type of morons that would ignore this completely if the races were reversed.

This outrage was not about racism; it's about the self-image of the accusers and persecutors who get off on segmenting/separating themselves from others people by pretending those other people are inferior / not as clean as them....

That is, they do the same EXACT thing that they are persecuting the other person for. Except their crime is worse.
I was pretty surprised to learn that pg (partially?) endorsed the agree/disagree meaning, at least 5 years ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

I strongly disagree with him. I tend to think "More/less of this content on HN" is more appropriate than "This is constructive/non-constructive" because the latter seems to support the up-voting of all constructive but off-topic comments. In my opinion, sprawling off-topic discussions of well-trodden issues is a problem for many articles.
Is There any Hope For Desktop Linux?
It seems to me that it's pretty dumb to leave the affiliate ids attached. If anything, I think their initial idea of replacing affiliate links with their own affiliate smart. People don't like it, they can use another site.
I don't think it violates any specific law, but I'm guessing that a prosecutor could come up with some charges if the website hired good enough lawyers. Charges similar to the ones you see for denial of service or computer fraud.
The link doesn't work ?!!
Just wanted to note, I had a chance to read the closed pull request from later and then this post (http://blog.leshill.org/blog/2012/03/25/a-question-of-truth....) and I see the point being made, which is not against the change, but in defence of not making an unneeded one.

So my understanding of the situation was poor. But then I am, admittedly, a bike shedding rookie.

However, and this is just my opinion, I still feel as though calling out everyone (there was a good number of people involved including @tpope) as rookies and accusing them of bike shedding, seemed like, well, poor taste, and unhelpful.
VMware Hosting | Private Cloud Hosting | Disaster Recovery | Virtual Machines
There's definitely that too. But to get at the creative solution, you usually have to wade through tons of wrong options. The key is persistence.
For what it's worth, I filed a bug report for this a while back and it got closed as a duplicate. Hopefully it's something that is coming before they remove the UDID method.
New NASA Video Depicts the Moon’s Fiery History
There is a nice series of YouTube videos on this topic on the C.G.P. Grey Explains channel.

One specifically illustrates why the first-past-the-post system inevitably becomes a two-party system: http://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo

You can then click through to other videos on topics such as alternative voting systems, gerrymandering, and the electoral college.
I'm not sure I entirely follow your argument. I agree that you can use some sort of heartbeat protocol or negative acknowledgments to determine whether writes occurred within a given time window (e.g., I haven't heard from the cluster, so maybe I missed an update in the time since the last heartbeat). However, in general, I don't believe it's possible to guarantee non-trivial convergence for fixed T and unlimited partition durations.

For any given T, if I partition each of your nodes for T+1 seconds, you won't be able to guarantee convergence--your nodes won't communicate. Am I missing something?
tl;dr. "Eventual consistency" is a b.s. marketing term that actually has nearly no meaning.

The easiest way to see just how empty the definition is, is by negating it and seing what undesirable property a system would have to have in order to fail to be eventually consistent. Take the definition from wikipedia:

"Given a sufficiently long period of time over which no changes are sent, all updates can be expected to propagate eventually through the system and all the replicas will be consistent."

Negation:

"No matter how long you wait without sending changes, updates may not propagate through the system, and disagreement may continue to exist between replicas indefinitely."

So basically, saying that something is "eventually consistent" just means "we won't completely ignore you forever". Great.
What I do personally is I reverse contact recruiters, I highlight my front-end and mobile skills while politely reminding them that they are hard skills to fill. I briefly explain my experience integrating with teams remotely and ask if they have any contracts that have been unable to fill a UI/UX position, if they do, I ask if they would consider talking to their client about the possibility of filling the position through a remote engagement. I offer to be onsite for 30 days and to make regular weekly visits every 3 months if they need it to feel comfortable. 9 times out of 10, when you get in the door and start producing they don't really care that you are remote and tell you not to bother wasting the time traveling out. I think the 30 days up front is key, it makes them comfortable with the relationship forming before you are just some person out there in the digital no man's land.
What do isolated red herring examples have to do with the gross dynamics of running the service? I can come up with just as many counterexamples.
There's also FTC disclosures to worry about, although I'm not sure if it covers posting affiliate links to another site.
Check out the slides here: http://www.jenniferturliuk.com/?p=255
Cool I am remote, but I will be in office from time to time, I will shoot you an email when I am heading out that way, I have never been to CO so I am looking forward to it.
beautiful. @gabesmed is the wood sustainable & ethically sourced?
I think he is using URL shorteners or custom URLs that looks like a blog but are a redirect to an affiliate URL. Now they'd have to start examining the URLs in detail, which is a lot harder. Especially if he cloaks for access that looks to be coming from Pinterest themselves.
Creativity Lessons from Charles Dickens and Steve Jobs
Latest new startup feature site.
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Eventual consistency is definitely weak, but it's useful: if we couple eventual convergence with safety properties, then we can describe non-trivial properties.

The problem, which I alluded to in my first footnote, is that it's hard to guarantee anything stronger than eventual in the presence of partitions. If you want to make sure your system behaves "correctly" under arbitrary partitioning, you necessarily have to admit the trivial cases. What you also want to guarantee is that, in the absence of partitions, the system still "does the right thing"; this often gets lost in the definition of eventually consistent systems, which is why you should consider both safety and liveness.
Gauges and Lies
which version? the non-preview 11 didn't worked.
While not a framework per se, .NET is often termed a "language."
Partly true, but they're not unlimited; there's a maximum of 100 per account, and once created they can't be deleted, so it's 100 lifetime.
Great article!

I personally think web apps will soon take over (this may be bias as I'm a web developer), but as mentioned above it easier to develop in HTML5...yes there stuff we can't do that native apps can but only a matter of time till we can I suspect.

As for Apple I could see them push a web app store where they still check the code before they get placed in the store.

The Only thing I'm not sure about is how will Paid apps work? I guess this model would need to change!
Agreed. All of these privacy complaints seem very overstated and melodramatic.
it turns out that writing is hard and i always had other projects taking over.
Carsabi rules! Been using it since it launched. Best of luck to them.
I'd like to have a little more control, so I could fit, say, Yosemite Valley in the 5x16 by rotating the map a little.
sounded very tempting at first, but since spammers are already releasing tools to do automated spamming, they might have realized that their methods wont work forever (otherwise they would be making an irrational decision, since they could make much more money by using them themselves).

there are actually plenty of bots out there already:

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/buy-sell-trade/419...

http://pinblaster.com/
I wasn't directing the laziness comment specifically at Wil Shipley, I'm sure he isn't. It was more of an aside; a widely generalized comment. Most of us know "indie" devs aren't lazy. It was more to the point that it is easier to complain about what you want than to work with what you've got.

To address your counter point: it is all a mater of implementation, implementation, implementation.

1) I don't think it is unreasonable to say that developers should maintain the features they've already been paid for gratis.

2) It require planing from the get-go within your app, you can't tack this on after the fact. Basic features are covered by the initial purchase of the app. Additional features (AKA what one would want to charge for with a major version upgrade) or perhaps feature "packs" are provided via In-App purchases. New users always start out at the same level, requiring purchases for new features. Features already purchased to be restored via the facilites available in StoreKit.
Thanks for clearing that up, I was not aware that PayPal had such a big presence in the UK.

What I meant with the second quote though is that, although I know PayPal is a universal payment provider, it lacks the reputation that brick ´n mortar banks have. Maybe this is different in the UK, but here on the mainland there are some major trust issues with PayPal.
My sense is that there is no such thing for some of those tropical hardwoods. On the plus side, veneer is very thin...
The pay doesn't really matter, as long as you like what you do. The startup is a great choice in my opinion because once it becomes bigger (If it ever does) you have a high chance of being a top position and eventually end up making more money than the bigger company would pay you anyway.

How much more would you say it would cost to live in the Bay Area, because even if you're making more, it's going to cost more to live there.
Start by always using rebase --interactive (or just -i) to help you get a feel for it's behavior.

Learn how to use `git reflog` to recover if you botch it up.

The golden rule is: rebase your own stuff all day long, as much as you want. Don't rebase once you've published.

Rebase is a tool for reasoning about your changes as a collection of logical transformations. It's to help you prepare a patch to share with the team. Interactive rebasing (and squashing, fixups, etc) are there to let you checkpoint your work as you go and to give you the freedom to come back and reason about your patches later.

Once I got comfortable with rebase, I began using it as a tool to help me write code. By that I don't mean putting characters into a text file. I mean teasing out isolated changes without interrupting the flow of bigger tasks.

The fear of rebase comes from people who are used to centralized version control systems. They view their version control system as a tool for backups and accountability. Git provides sha1 hashes for backups/security/accountability. Everything else git does is to help you write, reason about, communicate about, share, separate, combine, and otherwise fiddle with patches as logical changes.

If you don't want people to rewrite history, don't give them push access to your repository. Everyone has their own, right? If you want to prevent people from accidentally rewriting canonical history, disable --force pushes to your team's shared repository using a pre-commit hook. But in reality, that won't be an issue because as soon as some one accidentally force pushes, everyone else will have their pulls broken and know the perpetrator immediately identified for flogging.