skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hasn't the whole US adopted "at will" employment? Basically, you can quit for any reason, and they can terminate you for any reason. No employment agreement violation required.
I respectfully disagree. There is also lock-in from Amazon because most people will have no clue how to remove the DRM on the Kindle titles and move them to another e-reader should they decide to do so. So the parent comment is valid.
That's a great link, though a little confusing to me. Here's what I understand, with fake dollar amounts:

CDN services need to be priced at $2.

Netflix used to use Akamai; Netflix paid Akamai $3, Akamai paid Comcast $1, and everyone was happy.

Netflix now moved to Level 3, who they pay $1, and Level 3 demand $1 from Comcast (because L3 makes a loss if they don't charge $2). Netflix saved $2, so is happy. Comcast is unhappy, because they're out that same $2.

So now Comcast is crying foul and looking at ways to recoup that $2. Netflix is engaging in a PR battle, but really caused all this by switching from Akamai to Level 3.

Is that accurate?
I think what publishers miss is that people (if they are anything like me) are buying and reading more books because e-readers are much more convenient. So, whilst Amazon may be pushing down the mean price of books (books that have no production cost or risk of returns/unsold quantities), I think people are buying/reading more.
It occurs to me that as we move towards "dumb pipes", they should be treated more or less as a public utility--if even a metered one--just like actual water and sewer pipes.
Daring Fireball: Google's Open Web
Possibly, but it would also be good if the source code were available for scrutiny by independent scientists.
"Also, downvoting to express disagreement is common on HN, because one may disagree without having the time and/or anything substantive that is worth posting a comment to say."

Really? I don't think that's its purpose though. I think it's meant to be used for comments that detract from the discussion or otherwise don't follow guidelines. Downvoting because you disagree just leads to a form of groupthink (imho).

Case in point: I'd disagree with the quoted comment above but I'm certainly not going to downvote your post because of it.
Waitgroup.js - Go concurrency primitive translated into JavaScript
The very request to sign an NDA assumes the idea could be could and executed upon listening to a 15 minute speech about it. This is a clear litmus test that the idea itself is not worth much. Without intrinsic IP or competitive advantages, the wanna-be-preneur resorts to artificial protection measures like the NDA, secrecy and quickly becomes delusional. Requests to sign NDAs are one of the worsts red flags an early stage entrepreneur can have.
I'm pretty sure that John covered, in his article, the semantics of the word "idea". He drew the line between an idea and your notion of "brainfart" with a 10 page business plan. I guess he was trying to make the point that if the idea is truly going to revolutionise whatever, then at least a 10 page business plan would not be a big ask, and would show that it is more than an in-shower brainfart.
It seems that Netflix stopped using Akamai. The other discussion thread here has some great links: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3845098
The type of people this article talks about don't have any customers yet.
Anatomy of a startup video
Maybe it was free until Level 3 said "hey Comcast, why don't we expand our peering by 500 Gbps so that it can handle Netflix" and Comcast replied "that's gonna cost you".
The lack of a driver. You need at least 5 employees to drive a cab 24/7 year round. Say around 40k a year per once you add in benefits, taxes, and insurance. That's works out to $200K a year.

That's around 10 times the cost of a car, and a quick google search shows that the average taxi in San Francisco uses $20,000 per year in gas (down to only 7k for hybrid taxis).

So in short, the largest cost (other than in places like New York where it cost a million for a taxi license) is labor, which driverless cars remove.
Well, there's no driver, which reduces the labor costs involved.
on the last mile link between the customer and Comcast or the transit link(s) between Comcast and the Internet. Comcast claims that anything coming from a server inside Comcast itself (e.g. Xfinity) should not count against the cap because it causes no congestion;

Can you support Comcast making these claims? The last mile has always been the primary point of congestion on their internet pipes its been this way since @home started doing cable based internet. This justification would be a really tough sell.

I'd have to think that they'd be much more likely to claim its the same TV content and it shouldn't matter if its coming over the IP vs Broadcast network its all pretty much the same infrastructure.
Yes, though there are some differences between being fired for cause and merely having your employment relationship ended; for example, you can't collect unemployment benefits if you're fired for (a legitimate) cause. On the other hand, larger companies tend to make it a practice never to fire anyone for cause except in the most egregious circumstances, because they don't want to bother justifying it.
Lack of lateral thinking skills? Not fully understanding niche segments on a larger market, segments that add up to something substantial? Plenty of reasons.
It may seem wrong, but in practice it isn't. My experience with researcher-written code is that it does things in a roundabout, ugly, inefficient, duplicated-library-function but ultimately correct way.

The programs are not complicated. They are usually just some implementation of an equation or some other method for transforming input into output. Researchers don't have hundreds of hours to invest in learning the nuances of the const keyword in C++ or whatever, so they hack it. It works.
Not only wouldn't I sign an NDA, I've also started getting very careful about when I might contribute my own wisdom and experience. Far too often, I've found those sorts of meetings to be as much about trolling for free advice as anything.

I explain to these people that consulting is one of my services, and the price is on my rate card.
Pedantry isn't so bad, if it's correct... As was stated, the term "source codes" is very common in many communities, particularly scientific computing and associated academic circles. The only credibility lost here is... well let's just move on here, shall we?
Netflix uses all three major CDNs. The client choses the best one.
I see the argument that $9.99 is a bad price point for publishers but is there any real evidence that this price is too low to sustain profits for a publisher? I mean... 10 bucks doesn't seem very low to me. It seems... reasonable for a book. Especially given that there is no cost for storage or printing of ebooks.
http://stopthecap.com/2012/04/02/comcast-changes-language-ov...

I don't necessarily endorse Stop the Cap's analysis, but they have links to the relevant primary sources.
That's not true. Netflix uses all three major CDNs and the client picks the best one.
I've always been a reader. Since I (finally) got a Kindle for xmas I've ordered more books and spent more money than normal. Not so much because it's a new toy (that wore off fast enough), but because it really is convenient.
Light Table's Numbers, And What's Happening Next
Ask HN: Recommendations for tracking freelancer's time
My city has opened its first shared working space for freelancers. They're wondering what the best way to track people's time is, as each freelancer is allocated a certain number of hours to use the office space per month. Is there any open source software that already does this?
From the article: "(although there are generous raises and bonuses based on value to the company, as assessed by peers)".
Comcast never followed net neutrality principles.
Amazon views e-books as cheap software sold to animate device sales, in this case, the Kindle.

This seems like a pretty bizarre assertion, isn't Amazon generally thought to be selling Kindles at, or close to a loss?
No. Semicolons are statement separators. Every other language that uses them as such puts them at the end of every expression, but it's fine if you want to put a semicolon at the beginning of every expression instead, except that that will confuse people coming from other languages.

What's not fine is pretending like javascript has significant whitespace and then...oops! it doesn't work here so we need to add something in this one special case. That is guaranteed confusion. If your only argument is that most of the time it's unnecessary, all you're really trying to accomplish is compression (guess what, JSMin does that!) and you may as well write APL. "You get used to it" is meaningless. You get used to banging your head against a wall too, if you do it long enough. Doesn't mean it's a good idea. It's actually worse than that though, because other people need to get used to it too, so you're wasting their time as well.

Surrounding all expressions (not statements) with parens does make sense, in many languages (because there are cases where you need them, and it pays to be explicit up front). That is something good style guides often dictate (like surrounding all if/else blocks with braces, even if they're only one line). Starting a comment after every line doesn't seem like a good analogy, I have no idea where you're going with that.

Let me be clear, and I've now wasted a bunch of time reading up on this so it's not just opinion: ASI is a crutch added to the language in order to minimize the effect of silly errors. It is not a language feature. Python was designed to have significant newlines, and they resolved the ambiguous cases. Javascript was designed to have semicolons between statements when written correctly. Abusing ASI is error-prone and not future-proof (against programmers, apparently language spec changes are going to maintain current behavior). If you think its abuse is a good idea, you should be quarantined from the rest of the programming community. Or write your own language and design it around this.
英雄杀怎么玩
Show HN: My first startup - So Yummy
after months of baking with my girlfriend, we decided to launch our first startup together: SoYummy.

I got the inspiration when she first got a subscription to Birchbox and i thought, there must be 'bakery/sweets' version of Birchbox. After some research, i discovered that there really isn't anything like this. This wont make me a million dollars overnight, but we wanted to give this a shot and really try to make it work. Let me know if you got any questions!
after months of baking with my girlfriend, we decided to launch our first startup together: SoYummy.
I got the inspiration when she first got a subscription to Birchbox and i thought, there must be 'bakery/sweets' version of Birchbox. After some research, i discovered that there really isn't anything like this. This wont make me a million dollars overnight, but we wanted to give this a shot and really try to make it work. Let me know if you got any questions! would love some feedback!
Both are countries with their own distinctive histories and cultures, tough they share a pretty significant colonial history under an English-speaking power (England, for India, the US for the Philippines), resulting in a population that's largely English-speaking. At least among educated classes. As opposed, say, to most of the rest of Asia. Yes, China was some English dominion, but other than Hong Kong the legacy isn't particularly deep. Japan's largely been independent (though with some US influence post WWII). Vietnam some French/US influence, but it's not a significant tech player.

Australia from my time there is very much a crossroads of Asian and the Pacific. Especially Sydney. But I see stronger cultural ties with these two countries in particular.

So, yes, for countries which are technically relatively forward in its hemisphere, India and the Philippines offer some cultural landmarks offering commonality.
> First mover advantage is probably as overrated as the value of the idea.

If you squander your lead, yes. If you hang on to it it's worth a lot.
Funny, nowhere in the article I see a mention of the widening income gap (more like a canyon these days) that means most of YGens wont be able to afford the same "luxuries" than their parents had.

In fact most will struggle to keep their place in the socio-economic scale, some will go down from middle class, and it's not "the future", it's already happening.

But I guess is far more "positive" to say YGens just "don't like suburbs anymore" rather than admitting that if suburbs were indeed still cool most wouldn't be able to afford a house there anyway.

Let's be honest, even many boomers and XGens had to get into massive debt to buy a house in those places, and some are living under a tarp now.

Not talking about the problem doesn't make it go away...
"A design is not finished when you have nothing left to add. It is finished when you have nothing left to take out."

I'd imagine narrowing the idea down to 4 words took a lot of work.
Lumping everyone together under a "nation" can be deceptive. One should make the distinction between the ruling elite that has the power vs the other 99% that are subject to the power. Nations and governments are too abstract terms. These laws usually come from the same group of people, not even the 1% but the 0.1%, those at the very top and whose position is unchallenged and has be unchallenged for decades or even centuries.

Is it wonder that presidents comes from the same social circle all the time? How come George Bush was president and his father was president too? Is this a coincidence? If becoming president was a democratic process that what are the chances the someone becomes president and his son becomes president too? It's extremely small. This shows that it's not democratic at all, but rather the same group of people put each other into power and look out for the interest of each other. It's a ruling elite which is a very closed social circle that has been at the top of power for centuries. Much like the continuation of ruling dynasties of kingdoms since the middle ages. There is no real democracy here, that's only an appearance to keep the masses appeased.
Favorite part:

This is not to say that clerkships, scholarships, and awards don’t often reflect incredible accomplishment. Where that’s the case, we shouldn’t diminish it. But too often in the race to compete, we learn to confuse what is hard with what is valuable. Intense competition makes things hard because you just beat heads with other people. The intensity of competition becomes a proxy for value.
FWIW, I use Kickstarter solely as a way to fund art projects, a sort of modern art patronage system if you will.

I've never even considered that the consumer electronics projects are art in their own right.
Read their front page. "No servers, no server side code". Of course there are actually servers involved, but they're inaccessible by the developer.

That's the whole point of this post: how much access will devs have to the servers, and how? Until those questions are answered, explicitly explicitly, doubts hang over the whole idea.

You seem to think it can be patched up by turning it into something else. Great, we agree that it doesn't work as is, then.
It seems the entire world is facing erosion of freedom and equality when it comes to accessing the net in an unobstructed and private manner. Great forces are at play, from politicians to capitalists, who own the wires and the antennae. The facts are clear: the internet is going to be controlled and manipulated for power and profit. What do we do about it? What can we do about it? Can we build an information network that is unbiased, universal and fair? A network of information trasmission that can be resilient in the face of such attacks?
Now would be a good time to tackle the Australian VPN market
Or.. you know, just sell it.
I havent claimed that they created an obvious security hole.

I gave the answer why most people dont ask that question while clearly refraining from stating an opinion on the matter, simply because i'm no security expert who can judge if introducing such an api creates additional vulnerabilities even with server side checks(not obvious).
There was a mail client ( or was it the server itself? can't recall ) that did essentially what you are after. This was around a long time ago - pre www web. It would append a paragraph of pretty inflammatory keyword-heavy text at the end of each email. Stuff calculated to false positive any monitoring.

Anyone remember/know what I am talking about?
Yes it bothers me a bit. I think the 'everything to a VM' culture at the moment unfortunately misses doing isolation in a lighter way. (jails,zones,lxc,lguest etc). Some of those are not quite mature but still. Relatedly sometimes license requirements are per cpu, and the license accepts vmware restrictions but not cgroup or resource manager type restrictions.

I hate licensing.
Ouch..

Throw enough shit and some of it may stick..

Someone's really got it in for Amazon, this is the third post in two days.
But you don't need or want a water pipe that delivers 10x as much water every two or three years. Assuming you want bandwidth to follow that curve, someone needs the incentive to pay for it.
Virtual currency site in testing phase
It's just extremely silly how people don't want other people on HN, as if they are any different.
On Demand & CATV set-top boxes never transmitted data over your HSI connection. Streampix does.

Comcast has CDNs on their networks & their own customers can connect with each other, yet those activities will still count against a customer's cap. What makes Streampix different? Maybe there is a good reason, but I don't think Comcast wants to answer or divulge the true costs of bits flowing over it's network.

Comcast playing fair & people getting a better idea on how the caps affect their usage I think are good things. Comcast basically wants people to live in fear of hitting their cap if they use a competitor but don't want to stress it's own customer's over a problem they created.
> "kindly keep this confidential"

Turning down freelancing contracts for such silly reasons is not going to go very far unless you are swimming in work.

Really, as such requests go that's about as nicely put as I've seen it, and even if it wasn't said I would think that you would do that anyway, so where is the loss?

Of course you don't go around disclosing the details of the work you do, that would make you absolutely unemployable as a freelancer.

Confidentiality is assumed by default between an employer and an employee, unless you're flipping burgers. Any serious freelancer should take that to heart and if and when you do decide to talk about what's going on at some employer or business relationship please remember that it is a small world and you only get one reputation to mess up.
what software was used for creating that animation?
> there are plenty of places where I definitely do not want to walk a few blocks during most of the year

The climate issue can easily be addressed with a good coat and maybe a decent pair of snow boots. I really can't express how lazy and decadent this argument sounds to me--if it's not a clear, sunny day, you have to ferry yourself around in a thousand pounds of steel?

Just so you know I'm not talking shit, whenever I could, I'd walk 10, 20, 30 minutes across campus and across town in anywhere from 0 to 100 degree weather, in snow, rain, hail, anything you could name. I had insulated canvas grocery bags so my ice cream wouldn't melt in the summer and my milk wouldn't spoil in the summer. And I'm a pretty lazy and spoiled person when it comes to physical comfort.
Isn't this a sign of moving _away_ from dumb pipes?
I am still in my "academic days" and just like you I try to push code into my public repository from the start of a project and onwards (https://github.com/ninjin/). The only limitation I make is that I generally want either a test-suite to run or a set of experiments to run before I make a push (not breaking the main tree). I also try to have a Wiki page where I write daily updates and results, sometimes correcting claims I made on the very same page earlier.

I think it is good practice and it makes the paper writing much easier since you can back-track the process. The only experience I have had contrary to yours is that all my colleagues have some sort of envy of my idea, but they just can't do it themselves because of stage-fright, lack of time, etc.
The question I routinely ask whenever someone tells me about their amazing business scheme is "what is your plan to stop competitors from copying the basic idea and overtaking you?" or "what is to stop the established player in the market expanding their product to include this idea (probably as a check-box option) and making your company irrelevant?"
Lumping everyone together under a "nation" can be deceptive. One should make the distinction between the ruling elite that has the power vs the other 99% that are subject to the power. Nations and governments are too abstract terms. These laws usually come from the same group of people, not even the 1% but the 0.1%, those at the very top and whose position is unchallenged and has be unchallenged for decades or even centuries.

Is it wonder that presidents comes from the same social circle all the time? How come George Bush was president and his father was president too? Is this a coincidence? If becoming president was a democratic process that what are the chances the someone becomes president and his son becomes president too? It's extremely small. This shows that it's not democratic at all, but rather the same group of people put each other into power and look out for the interest of each other. It's a ruling elite which is a very closed social circle that has been at the top of power for centuries. Much like the continuation of ruling dynasties of kingdoms since the middle ages. There is no real democracy here, that's only an appearance to keep the masses appeased.

p.s. Just like the admins of HackerNews should be accountable for hellbanning users without telling them. Anyone see similarity here?
We're 12% of the way into the 21st Century. Can we really use names like "The Great Migration of the 21st Century" yet?
I don't think many of us on HN want to use email as a ToDo list, but there are other people that we work for or with that tend to use email in this way. For example, my father is a fortune-500-exec-type (and an engineer), and he can't seem to grasp the idea of using a unique subject line (this led me to tell him, "don't email, just call"). There are also people that use the "email this article" function to share articles with you; I immediately delete such emails (I don't do html email), and let them know, but they persist. The issue reminds me of thread-jacking on forums leading to the idea that "forum software is broken."

In other words, there are a myriad of poor choices being made by people that either cause security issues, or inefficiencies using email as a medium that is suboptimal.